After her experiment, Lori didn't feel any worse off than she usually did after expanding her demesne, which… wasn't bad, but neither was it good. Purely from the perspective of efficiency, it meant altering the concentration didn't affect the difficulty of the expansion process, but that wouldn't matter if there wasn't any sort of substantial positive effect on the rate of her demesne's expansion.

To her, the demesne was a massive half sphere of earthwisps at the bottom, another half-sphere of airwisps at the top, a layer of waterwisps in between, and a moving stream of waterwisps passing through it. For her experiment, Lori had increased the concentration of wisps in a single area along her demesne's borders, specifically at the river near where she had placed her markers, where water flowed into her demesne. In a roughly circular area at the mouth of the river, she had positioned a substantially greater amount of wisps than she had anywhere else. She'd chosen the area purely because it was the easiest to identify with her awareness of wisps, at least without placing bindings there to mark it out for her. This way, it would be easy to repeat the procedure to minimize the variable of placement.

Without actually having her eyes there, she couldn't really tell how many she placed—while she could theoretically count the number of wisps in her control, in practice it was a laughable idea—but she could still tell by comparison that she had placed at least seven times as many wisps for claiming in that one spot. It was relatively miniscule compared to the full expanse of her demesne, but this was an experiment. Depending on what results Rian brought back after breakfast, she could considering increasing the concentration.

And she'd have to do this for a week at least so that she'd have a sufficient sample size to draw conclusions from. If she was being strict, she should do this for thirteen days, as she did with the control, without changing the altered variable, to have an equal amount of samples. If she were doing this properly, she'd have far larger sample sizes, at least a red month's worth, before she started drawing any sort of conclusions. However, she didn't have the convenience of unlimited time. She had a limited amount of time, and even though it was still early winter, that wouldn't last. Soon it would be mid-winter, then late winter, then it would be spring and raining again.

So Lori needed to find the variables that produced usable results. If drastically changing the concentration didn't offer any substantial difference from how she did it normally in the next four days, she'd need to drop it and move on—

"So, you said you'd explain?"

Lori was knocked out of her musings by cheerful voice of her lord. For a man who clearly hated having to wake up in the mornings, he was surprisingly energetic once he was. "Explain what?"

"Concentration!" he said. "Exactly what sort of concentration did you change? Does it have to do with how hard you're focusing on what you're doing? Trying to see if you can be less tired at the end of it, or maybe keep working for longer?" He had his plank with him, poised to write. Next to him, Mikon seemed gladdened that Lori had brought down the chatrang board instead of the sunk board, and was cheerfully putting the pieces into position for a game. Lori didn't know how someone could enjoy always losing, thought admittedly the weaver was getting better. She was able to take down a lot of Lori's militia in their games, and Lori needed to be watchful lest she lose any of her wizards that she didn't intend to lose.

Lori sighed. "Fine, fine." She didn't remember promising any such explanation to Rian, but on the other hand, the full hypothesis needed to be recorded. And perhaps he had some ideas she could try. Quickly and concisely, she exposited to him the variables she identified, and what she believed to be the possible effects of increasing concentration—both of wisps and her attention—on a singular point. With more wisps gathered, could she perhaps claim more and thereby expand the demesne more?

"I suspect," Lori said as Rian wrote while Riz and Umu arrived with food and water, "that while my demesne might expand more at that point, any gains will be flattened and averaged across the whole of the demesne's borders." Mikon made to move aside so one of them could sit down next to Rian, but Riz just sat down on Mikon's other side. The weaver gave her a bright smile and a quick peck on the cheek,

"So… the demesne's borders are elastic?" Rian said, tilting his head thoughtfully.

"Of course. We have an abundance of historical evidence of the borders of demesnes warping and flattening when pressed against another demesne. Bloody war would usually follow, of course, but sometimes the demesne and Dungeon Binders involved would briefly continue expanding their demesnes against each other. It's been recorded that in such instances, the borders of demesne would flatten like two round bladders pressing against each other. In some truly rare instances, one demesne's size remained stagnant while its neighbor continued to grow. To continue the allegory of bladders, it acted like a finger pushing the bladder inward. When the lesser demesne tried to expand, it wasn't able to push back the greater demesne's borders, and the lesser demesne was only able to expand directly away from the greater, all the while hemmed in by the greater demesne's continued expansion."

"And then bloody war followed?" Rian said dryly.

"And then bloody war followed. Though such incidents are, as I said, truly rare. It's not considered desirable for one demesne to enfold another demesne so completely before the two join in conflict for each other's core."

Rian raised an eyebrow. "Why? I'd have thought it would assure the enfolding one a tactical advantage. It gives them more directions to attack from, wouldn't it?"

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"The lesser demesne would be equally capable of raising defensive fortifications to defend against such," Lori said as she reached out and picked a bowl of food and a cup. "No, it is undesirable because if one demesne were sufficiently larger than the other, when the Dungeon Binder of the lesser demesne fell, the greater demesne would expand and in so doing destroy the lesser core."

Rian paused. "That's a thing that happens?"

Lori nodded. "It's rare and undesirable, hence why demesne tend not to continue expanding their demesne in that manner. Even if the greater demesne would technically be subsuming the territory of the lesser demesne, having multiple cores is desirable because it means multiple points of growth. It makes for more efficient expansion."

"That part I understand, but… so, a demesne expanding over a dungeon's core… destroys the core?"

"Expanding over an unclaimed core, yes," Lori confirmed. She'd never really questioned why when she read about it, but now that she had a core of her own… well, it made sense, didn't it? "Why do you think all those nonsense, stupid stories about random nobodies finding cores and accidentally claiming them happen outside a demesne, deep in the Iridescence? An unclaimed core can't exist in the bounds of another demesne. It would cease to be."

"Huh. You learn something new every day," Rian said thoughtfully. "But back to what you were telling me—"

"Eat," Lori said, pointing.

Rian stared. "What?"

"Eat breakfast, Rian," Lori repeated as she moved one of her militia on the chatrang board, determined to get as much enjoyment as she could over breakfast.

"Oh! Right! Thank you Umu, Riz," Rian said, turning to either side of him to thank the two women and leaning forward to look around Mikon.

"I'm glad to do this for you, Rian," Umu said, leaning against him briefly.

Riz, for her part, just reached around Mikon and patted him on the shoulder. "Eat up, you'll need the warmth for when we go out to the edge later."

Rian sighed. "So cold…" he muttered.

There was relative silence for a moment as they ate, Lori and Mikon playing chatrang as they did so. She really had to get around to challenging Rian to a game soon…

Around them, the dining hall seemed louder than usual as people talked, played their own board games, and ate. Thankfully no one seemed to be arguing. She supposed people were managing to keep themselves constructively occupied instead of stewing in their own (idiotic) thoughts and getting into trouble as a result…

"All right," Rian eventually said, setting aside his spoon for a moment and picking up his plank again. "So, you decided to concentrate your efforts at a single spot. Do you have any idea how far out you were able to reach by concentrating there? If we assume that your reach in previous efforts corresponded to the amount that the demesne expanded, how much farther were you able to reach out by concentrating on that spot? Could you tell?"

Lori frowned, but… "No," she said. "I can't give an exact measure. I know I reached out farther in that spot, but how much that is, I cannot quantify."

Rian nodded, writing something on his plank. He frowned, cupped his hand around something on the plank and blew lightly. "All right. Not exactly the kind of hard data we'd want, but we can do better next time. It might not amount to much but that just means we need to reach farther out."

"'We'?"

"Sorry, 'you'." Rian picked up his bowl with his left hand and raised it to his lips, sipping directly from the thing. Lori thought it was a bit early for that, but he was clearly trying to eat and work at the same time. "What would happen if you tried to expand from only one spot? Just keeping pushing out at one point and simply have the rest of the demesne catch up? It's probably a lot easier to concentrate on a distinct point than it is to try and push outwards in all directions at once. Though I don't know how far out over how large a point you'd need to be able to equal our current expansion."

Lori had considered that. "I had considered that," she said. "However, I decided that retaining the assured expansion of the demesne was more important. The current methodology works. Experimenting with other variables must not come at its expense. While altering them might lead to producing a superior method of expansion… it also might not. If we dedicate our time to only experiments, that will be time the demesne is not properly growing at the optimum rate it currently can. "

Rian frowned, considering that as Lori turned and countered Mikon's Whisperer with her Mentalist. It was a calculated risk, since Mikon might attack with her Horotract, but there were some militia in the way, and Mikon sometimes forgot her Horotract didn't need to go through the occupied spaces.

Eventually Rian nodded. "All right… I suppose that's the priority. Still, we might not get any discernible results like this."

"So I suspect," Lori said. "However, that means that any variable sufficiently capable of affecting the growth rate would also be more obvious."

"Somehow I doubt the world contains such a convenient solution," Rian said dryly, and Lori had to agree. "However, I think trying to test this variable to the extreme in isolation would at least reveal a less taxing method."

"If expanding a demesne quickly were easy," Lori said, equally dryly, "the demesnes around Covehold would have managed to grow much greater."

"True… but that implies you did something significantly different from what they did, to have our demesne come out so large," Rian mused. "It's not like any of them are touching each other, so that isn't what's constraining their growth. Though it could be something as simple as all of them being too busy with everyday life to have much time to expand, especially with so much active competition around them for resources like water, wood, agricultural land… "

"Yes," Lori said flatly. "It's almost like the dead ones and myself actually put thought into the idea of traveling so far away before setting up a demesne."

"I never said you didn't," Rian said quickly. "Though you'd think that at some point someone there would have tried to focus on expansion first to the exclusion of all else."

"Given how much effort was needed to establish the support infrastructure of this place, anyone so foolishly shortsighted probably starved to death or was killed when they were weak," she pointed out. "Many of them did not have the convenience of having a steady source of fresh water as we do, and given how many people must be using it, the underground water must be drained dry at some points of the year."

"Not to mention food, shelter, warmth, and trying to get even a local economy started," Rian contemplated. "Even one of those failing would be devastating."

Lori tried not to think of the fact that for all intents and purposes, her demesne didn't even HAVE an economy worth mentioning.