This morning I went to Pearlhold to greet Par as he arrived with his troops. He’s taller now by about half a head. He grew a pair of horns too, and I can see obvious stumps where he must have filed down some tusks. His skin is also a brilliant scarlet.

It seems the ugly little goblin has evolved into something called an Oni. And he’s hot, I mean that both in regards to appearance and actual body temperature. Tiddol is going to love cuddling with him during the winter, and hate it during the summer.

Obviously, he is better at everything, but his physical body received the brunt of those boons. He is physically just as strong as Thes was while enraged, or at least he is pulling off similar feats of strength. If the two of them were to fight I’m not entirely sure who would win. I’m not even going to try to list how else his body was improved, just that everything was vastly improved, and, taking Tiddol’s word for it, I really do mean everything.

In addition to that, he is smarter. He was smart before but now I think he might be able to rival many of the scholars. Unfortunately, he is still mostly incompetent at magic, the best he can do is some basic self-healing. But really that’s all he needs, any more would be a waste.

After the small impromptu parade that was our valiant soldiers returning home from combat, I got to work on the next step of my current project. Namely building the thing. It is incredibly complicated, partially because the backbone is Spellwood, partially because it has to replicate itself on demand, and partially because of so many other small issues. It is so much harder to manipulate plants through Spellwood than it is to do it directly, I had to go through maybe a thousand iterations before I even started to understand what was going on. Even then I had to go through thousands of iterations to get it right for a small piece of the overall puzzle.

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I have to get it to trigger an evolution, which I have no idea how to actually do yet. I need it to direct the world to enhance the brain, which is theoretically pretty easy, but in order to even try I would need the first step. I need it to produce Solar Energy during, and only during, an evolution. I need it to join a hivemind and dedicate a portion of the subjects mental prowess to me. And I need it to be able to be spread from one person to another without any action from me.

It is going to take a couple days to finish this step, possibly even a week, but once I’m done there is much else I have to do. Now if only I could figure out how to make it trigger an evolution. Something to do with my soul maybe? Worth looking into.

During my downtime I got everyone together so we can play board games. We ended up playing that civilization builder game again, only this time I actually managed to win. I went for a religious victory right from the start, ignoring everything else. I only had one city, almost nothing in terms of a standing army, and pitiful magic. I only survived because I kept bribing Par to declare war on anyone that attacked me. One more turn and Tiddol would have won a magic victory, two more turns and my dad would have won a cultural victory. Par ended up ruling the world, as expected, but Kaire and Lulem ended up the economic centers of the world.

By the time everyone paid enough attention to me to realize what was going on I was already on the fast track to victory. So what if Par took my only city before I actually won? I still won, and his people revolted for sacking their holy city so I got my revenge.

It was fun, and I look forward to playing with everyone again sometime.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.