My forest has reached the nearest city today, one that was already under our control. There were cheers as their city went from an island surrounded by hostile lands to a part of the main bulk of our empire. Some loyalists to the angelic council tried to stir up trouble, but they were kicked out of the city in a massive impromptu manhunt. That was a surprise to everyone involved, I never would have expected anything like that to occur.

I checked up on Dulcian's progress today and was pleasantly surprised. He has managed to reliably create a small bomb that makes use of nuclear fire without leaving behind any nuclear waste, something that will be important if we are ever going to make use of his talents. And we will be making use of his talents.

The bomb is only as powerful as the most powerful alchemical bomb that Tiddol is capable of making. It can do a lot of damage, but nothing on the scale of what I have seen other nuclear fire wielders do. It won't level a building on its own. The good news is that it is tiny, about the size of the palm of my hand, though Dulcian thinks that he can make it smaller.

He is, unfortunately, not yet capable of making anything bigger with the same level of efficiency. That bomb might be good enough for killing soldiers, but not so much for anything else. And I really don't want to take the risk that would result from using it against common soldiers.

Other than that I spent my downtime helping Tiddol modify her body. She is still having some problems with her clockwork parts, but she has compensated for most of the physical problems. The mental problems, the anger, the lack of focus, are all still present, as is the twitching. She can compensate for the twitching through several methods, but she isn't able to do so indefinitely, and she can't do it over her entire body at a time for longer than a minute.

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I was helping her bind some of the wooden pieces to some of her few remaining flesh pieces so that she could mount something new to it. Her explanations as to what it is went over my head, but it seems to be something relating to alchemy. I think it is supposed to allow her to produce alchemical potions inside of herself more or less at will, assuming she set it up properly first.

She is absolutely ready to evolve, but there is nothing to evolve into, and that likely will not change. The same problems exist, and we haven't done anything that has had an impact on them. The only real solutions that might work are teaching me everything there is to know about clockwork so that I might be able to evolve her manually, or to somehow evolve an undead to have clockwork parts. That last one is, to my knowledge, more or less impossible due to the way the trees of evolution work, for much the same reasons that plants cannot become undead. Meaning I have no idea why, it's just the way it is.

The first one would be difficult, but not impossible. The only one with enough skill in the subject to teach me is Tiddol herself, but she doesn't have the mental prowess to teach in the method that would be needed. Her issues already caused some problems when making the alchemy book, issues we were able to compensate for, true, and that is a simpler task than teaching. Plus Tiddol understands Alchemy way better than she understands clockwork, allowing her to be even better at correcting for mistakes. On top of all of that I have no talent for clockwork, even constantly observing it for months, sometimes even actively, and working with Tiddol on multiple occasions to help her out with clockwork related stuff I have learned almost nothing about the subject. It's just kind of mind-numbing to me.

I don't think that it would be impossible to pull off, just long and hard.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.