I was finally done conversing with the elf, no longer needing to tediously think up and draw out little pictures to get my point across. It was a long and frustrating experience that ultimately ended with me feeding and watering her before she returned to resting. It was a little frustrating to see her return to her slab in the farm, but I understood that it was helping her heal and she wasn’t exactly in the right mind frame, or physical state, to be doing much more than sitting still. I’d have to make something for her to do so she could occupy her mind while in bed. But, with her returning to rest I had something else on my mind that had been interrupted just as it had appeared. A slime mutation.

I was just moving to check it out when I had felt one of my monsters trying to get my attention, an odd sensation but one I was now glad I understood. Now I knew what it would feel like when a monster wanted to get a hold of me. Those thoughts cleared as I entered the area I'd set up for my slime experiments, only to be met with disappointment. The only slimes in sight were the two I'd set to order spawning slimes into each others pools and a pair of slimes making their way steadily towards their opposing pools. The damned fool commander of the pool my mutant had spawned from must have sent the new jelly boy to be recycled.

I was about a half step away from picking up one of the slimes and chucking it in to be recycled as well when a thought occurred to me and I summoned up my information on the slime spawning pools.

Slime spawner.

Spawns available:

Slime 10 biomatter. 5.3% mutation rate.

Ember slime 50 biomatter. .01% mutation rate.

Ember slime.

A slime that has taken on aspects of the fire element, ember being the lowest designation of the fire elemental line of slimes.

This was awesome. I’d managed a mutation and it was damned useful, at least for now. I’d be able to use a slime like that to provide heat and possibly produce water. I almost wanted to shout for my success but I noticed something else as well. The mutation rate was only at five percent meaning it had dropped, though I didn't think it had dropped completely to zero as I hadn't been conversing with the elf for all that long. There might have been a milestone requirement for getting the slime, or I'd just hit the lottery and it knocked me back some. So I wouldn't be able to achieve a new slime with every spawn. Another sad thing to notice was that mutations didn’t go off of biomatter input but rather spawn input. Each lost monster would only scratch the surface of the mutation pool, and even then I wasn't guaranteed something I'd need or want at that moment.

All that said, I had a new spawn available and a new way to exploit resources I'd like to gain. I made the pools stop their automation and ordered my two commander slimes to not give any more orders, I'd set up a system later so they could flush out my farms. Then I finally set my eyes on one of the pools and made my very first, or second, ember slime.

The pool roiled for a few moments, turning a slightly red color, before spitting out one of my new ember slimes. It was honestly a touch underwhelming. I’d expected fire, or sparks, maybe something fantastically magical, instead I got a red slime that seemed to be boiling slowly. It was neat in its own way but disappointing to see when I'd let my imagination get ahead of me. Perhaps I should have listened when the information I got described it as the lowest of the fire slimes.

Disappointed or not, this little slime just made my hopes for water into a reality, though I did decide to do some quick tests with it as I summoned another nine, assuming one wouldn’t be adequate for what I wanted. A quick measurement proved the slime was of similar size to its green brothers. A speed test did surprise me, showing the ember slime could move fairly quickly, for a slime, maxing out at one meter a second. The last test, resource mining, showed disappointing results as the slime harvested at half the efficiency of the regular slimes.

All together the slime was a faster monster that likely had more combat utility over crafting or harvesting ability. It was a lucky find for a young dungeon in need of more flexible monsters as I had the spiders for pursuit and general combat, the hoppers for swarming or acting as glass cannons and the ramp bugs for tanks. The ember slime seemed to fit the role of Combat utility, adding a new form of damage while being able to better keep pace with my mainline fighters, the spiders. But now I'd use them for something likely unintended, assuming they had the heat for it.

Pulling the slimes into my spawn inventory I moved down to my water test chamber, still full of sap despite using some to test how water tight my elfs taps would be. I hadn’t meant to leave the sap there, it was an oversight on my part, but now I'd have something to clean the glowing liquid out, if this proved successful. I spawned one slime in and quickly ordered it not to absorb the sap, leaving it to float in the murky green liquid.

To my slight surprise, nothing happened, the slime bubbled away while the liquid around it remained calm. I had thought I'd gained a temperature measuring ability, but wasn’t sure. I cursed at myself and made a mental note to write down my abilities somewhere where I could go back and remind myself of the mundane or overspecialized things I'd acquired. Whatever the case I was unable to, currently take a measurement of the pool's temperature, and was too impatient to wait for results.

“Slime, can you intensify your heat? I want to see just how hot you can get.” I thought for a moment as I felt the confirmation from the slime. “Without hurting yourself, I don't want to waste you pointlessly.” Another confirming feeling came as the slow boiling slime started to roil slightly. It was impressive to see it bubbling and churning as the little slime gave all it had to turn up the heat. I even felt a little pride in my small dungeon creature, along with happiness, as I started to notice a slight haze of steam start building. This I could work with.

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Another thought hit me as I watched the slime work, and I decided to voice it. “Can you do this indefinitely, or will you start to get tired and need a rest?” Another feeling, or several at once. Confidence felt the most powerful, then maybe duty or pride, but a feeling of doubt was hidden under all of that. I knew I'd be wasting water but I had biomass to burn so I started to time the slime. “Go until you feel that you cannot any more, you’ve already made me proud and there’s no need to feel shame if you cannot continue at that pace.” I swore I saw the roiling intensify slightly as I felt another note of confidence and confirmation from the slime.

The time rolled by and the room started filling slightly with steam but I could see the slime gradually slowing down, growing weaker and weaker until I ordered it to stop. It was bubbling only a little more than normally when I gave the order and it slowed significantly after that, only barely bubbling now. It seemed it took my order from earlier to heart and meant to exhaust itself completely before throwing in the towel. I had no idea what an exhausted slime would look like but the little ember seemed to be floating in the sap now rather than standing in it. I almost imagined it turning into a barely coherent pool if it fell to that level. “Good job buddy, rest up and let me know when you’re good to go again.” Tired affirmation was the response I felt, tinged with pride.

Two minutes of hard boiling seemed to be the limit for the little burner, an admirable effort from one of the least of my creatures. I couldn’t imagine pushing myself to the utter max in my old body for even half that long so I was pleased enough, even if the number seemed low. The slime did have the sheer mass of the pool to contend with as well so I didn't expect it to boil the entire thing down. Now was time for more tests though. I’d been hasty with my first test, one hot slime dumped in a stone cold pond would do little to heat it, so I'd have to start with something a touch more standardized.

I moved to the floor above, filled with my other friction tests, and started to construct barrels. I had no idea what a good testing amount would be so I'd have to just go by the units I was given. Even though I'd tried to measure by gallons in the ship, it was an approximation judging by the size of the ship's tank, reminding me of rv’s I'd once worked on. However the closest to standard size I had was one slime worth in size, which measured out to one unit. If that same measurement applied to liquids I figured that would just have to do for me.

In one barrel I dumped a single unit of sap, glad I had absorbed some earlier for the tests, then I added five into the next, ten to the third, twenty to the fourth, and finally, after enlarging the barrel enough to contain more, I added fifty. This seemed, to me, a good test pool for how long it would take a single slime to heat a liquid to steaming or boiling, so I'd know how many to add to a pool in order to make water. Then, starting five new timers, I set a slime in each barrel and started to wait. I wanted to rush off and start making the room I'd need to harvest the water but I couldn't think of a good way to have the slimes report to me. I could plonk a slime down and have it call out to me as i worked if it saw steam rising from the barrel and i’d pause the timer at each, but it wouldn’t be able to tell me if the sap was boiling, and i didn’t want to rest them on the edge of the barrel for fear of having them fall in and get boiled as well, or just spoil the test for adding in a new temperature variance.

So, I sat and waited, until I remembered my blueprint ability. I could make the room simple, resembling a solar water collector survivalists used, a mushroom shape with the sap sitting in the ‘stem’ where the head would act to collect condensation, which would roll down and collect in a ring around the stem. However this idea seemed slow and inefficient. The stone would only be able to collect so much at a time, likely dripping back down in the boiling pool if condensation built up too quickly. I saved the idea as a backup, something simple that would work if a more elaborate plan didn’t.

It had been three minutes when I noticed the first barrel steaming slightly and I marked it in the stone of the barrel, though the water hadn’t started to boil just yet, proving the slimes could generate heat at an idle.

My next idea started with the collection system. While I wanted to keep it simple I knew staying too simple would lead to serious inefficiencies, so I started with the reliable tube system of my farms. This time I stacked them close and at a forty five degree angle downwards. I thought about it for a minute and went with a wheel design, a ten high stack of tubes surrounding a central pillar that would allow the steam to rise up into the tubes. The tubes would increase the surface area, allowing for more heat dissipation and giving more room for condensation to collect. This time though I made a y junction on the column, the short side leading off to the boiling chamber and the other leading straight down to a collection chamber.

The plan seemed dead simple, steam goes up at an angle, condenses on the stone, then drips straight down. There shouldn’t be any risk of cross contamination and it could be scaled up, either by increasing the size of the boiling chamber or by increasing the height and number of the tubes. All I would need now is an extra room for pressing more sap, not directly over the boiling chamber, as it would give an extra avenue of steam escape, but possibly off to the side. I could add pipes that ran from the sap collection chamber straight into the boiling chamber as well to speed that process along. I added an s-bend to the pipe so steam wouldn’t easily escape back up the pipe. Though that did add another concern for me.

I made new marks on the barrels, noting that the first had started to boil at seven minutes and the second had just started releasing steam. Steam was the problem. This would be a completely closed system and steam was well known for being a serious pressure problem. I had no way to test pressure tolerances on the stone room, nor any way to release excess pressure once it began to build up. All I'd currently made was a pressure bomb, and one of likely exceptional size. While setting off explosions would be a fantastic way to pass the time, and likely a spectacular view, it wouldn’t really help me in my resource collection mission. So now I had to find a way to release pressure without just piping the excess to the surface and occasionally venting the room.

I figured I could somewhat compensate for pressure irregularities, my moss didn’t produce pressure until the doors blew off, so I had some kind of regulating abilities that made my dungeon livable. But it didn’t mean I could just eat the pressure difference when I was actively making it worse. I could try having a slime absorb the atmosphere, and wondered for a moment if I'd start collecting units of steam, but decided that would be a last effort in my tests. Technically i wouldn’t be over pressuring the room too much, steam would be condensing into water and I'd have a slime collecting that water as it fell, so I'd have a net negative in pressure. But I was bad enough at math not to try depending on that idea. Another idea was to make an emergency seal, just a plate of general metal connecting the room to floor three. If the pressure became too much it would blow the seal, rather than detonate the moon, and flood floor three with steam. Not an ideal solution but probably a safer bet than nothing.

I sighed and started up new marks. forty minutes of thinking had achieved very little in terms of a safe way to harvest the water. I didn’t even have a safe way to stop the boiling process, save for making some ramps that slimes could be ordered to climb if the seal broke open. I was just making doodles now, having decided to make the boiling room into another farm. It copied the top collection layer, having long tubes that I'd fill with moss and see if it could grow under water and give my new slimes something to do other than just sit and soak.

Finally, after sitting and mentally marking off ideas that I thought would fail, I just decided to go with the seal and bank on the third floor being able to take the heat, should my water farm fail. I had half convinced myself it would be fine, it was a large enough space and it wouldn’t entirely fill with steam. I made marks as the last barrel had started to boil and read each off. Seven minutes to boil for one unit, forty for five, a hundred and twenty for ten and each of the successive barrels had failed to boil, though twenty had started to steam up at the third hour. I’d spent five hours planning and had a fairly good design and solid testing data. Now I'd just have to put it into practice.