My lessons are starting to cover so much information that it is hard to properly summarize what I am learning, so I think I’ll stick to the most important pieces.

I learned today why older dungeons want people to come into their territory, and it mostly has to do with the soul. After a certain point a dungeon will be producing so much soul stuff from their own creatures that they don’t need to get some from divers to keep expanding their domains. But the soul is a very large part of your personality, for a dungeon without a brain this is especially true as the soul has to take care of all of the things that would normally be alleviated by the brain on its own. The shell of your soul in most people is only a small portion of that, as it is a relatively small portion of a person’s soul. Older dungeons, on the other hand, always have very large shells relative to their cores, which increases the importance of the shell drastically. Suddenly it is the major driver in things like personality despite it’s rather inefficient impact.

Dungeon creatures are formed from cast-off bits of the shell of the dungeon’s soul, and often end up forming large parts of the core as souls are often damaged from dying and the whole process of reincarnation. So even in the best of cases dungeon creatures take after their parent dungeon quite heavily. So the bits of their shells that flake off reinforce the personality of the dungeon that made them, making change difficult.

Divers shake this up a bit by introducing new stuff to this cycle. It is nowhere near enough to overpower or force the old dungeon to change, but if the dungeon wants to it can use those bits to change and improve itself. It takes time and effort, but without divers they would stagnate entirely.

I should be fine despite the massive numbers of what to any other dungeon would be considered ‘divers’. My teacher has done experiments on situations similar to mine, as it is pretty much the polar opposite of most dungeons, and has discovered that the contrasting ideas dramatically decrease how much of an effect the shell of my soul has on my personality. But he did mention that any common themes among those ideas would likely be reinforced even further than normal, as there are so many different and unique things reinforcing it, as opposed to the singular source enforcing the personality of most other dungeons. Those ideas are likely to be simple and revolve around core ideas of the culture of my people.

There are very few things that significantly influence our culture, I am good friends with most of them.

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I feel like I should be more concerned by this, but I already knew my emotions were being impacted by the people. The idea really isn’t foreign to me, and it is something I have already come to accept, just in a different form. Besides, the only thing that will let me escape from this is death, and I’m still keen on getting around that.

Though if it ever gets unbearable I will likely be able to keep my memories and everything else intact when I die thanks to fate and my much more durable soul.

My father has turned up, along with Askos and his soldiers. Unfortunately they are in the middle of enemy territory and are pinned down by a group of soldiers. There is nothing we can do to help them right now. We don’t have anyone who can move fast enough to get there in time to make a difference who is also capable of making a difference. We have a couple teleporters that can move that far, but none that can take our non-existent reinforcements. And I don’t have enough combatants in my hive mind in the area to make a difference without also losing my grip on multiple cities.

I doubt the worst will happen, my dad has gotten out of much worse and survived to tell the tale. The question is whether or not his soldiers will make it.

In somewhat good news it seems like the enemy has started to focus their efforts on purging my people from their midst. The bad is that I will likely lose my grip on a couple cities, the good is that they will be focusing their efforts there instead of on us, and they killed several scholars yesterday. About twenty five of them by my count, pretty important ones too. Their order is not going to like this, especially since their inquisition failed to find anything more than circumstantial evidence connecting them to the recent curse outbreak, and they did find a lot of circumstantial evidence. They were already under suspicion of creating potentially disastrous outbreaks, and their order has crushed civilizations for less. Admittedly few of this scale, but they have been weakened recently, it would take less effort to destroy them now.

The fact that I seem to be well-liked among the order can only help my position here.

I spent most of my day in much the same way as yesterday, building homes for people whose homes were destroyed. At this point, everyone has a warm bed and a roof over their head, though an uncomfortable number of people have to share rooms still. That issue should be fixed by tomorrow even without my help, unless something undoes all of our hard work again.

I know it’s unhealthy but I haven’t been taking much in the way of downtime recently. I would rather deal with a bit of stress than see my people starve or sleep out in the cold.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.