The most interesting stuff we went over today involved connections, mostly because I already knew quite a bit about them. Not everything I learned overlapped with what the older dungeon was teaching me, much of it did but not everything. Some of what I was taught disagreed with or expanded on what I had learned from Fate, while some of it wasn’t quite as expansive as what I learned. There were some subjects that the older dungeon didn’t even mention and approaches that the older dungeon hadn’t considered. We ended up talking for quite a while just discussing this. It was honestly pretty fun to talk to someone like this, it isn’t something I get to do often. Most people don’t have the same level of understanding as I do in the fields I am interested in.

We had Ednar’s funeral today. It was a small, simple event limited just to those that knew him personally. He wasn’t exactly the most outgoing person. He was young, when he died. Yeah in the grand scheme of things humans tend to age pretty quickly and die relatively young, though not nearly to the scale of a goblin, but even then he was young.

It rained, during the funeral, and it felt appropriate.

I wonder what he will reincarnate into, I hope it’s something nice. I hope he remembers us.

In lighter news, the physical rebuilding is mostly done, there is a sense of pride going around right now. Pride and a whole lot of spite. I get the feeling that if I were to order everyone to march on their capital they would be willing to die in droves just for a chance to spit in the eye of our enemy.

Naturally, this means that when I started recruiting for my Paladins we got tens of thousands of volunteers in the first hour. A measurable percentage of our population volunteered, and still more are coming. I don’t care to count the numbers at this point, but it is a lot.

According to Parius, there is no reason not to train everyone that volunteered. In other countries, we might have had an issue with farmers abandoning their farms leading to famine, but every single farmer in our empire could abandon their fields and we would have no issues with food. With nearly everyone being able to manipulate plants we have a functionally endless supply of any kind of plant-based food we could want.

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On top of that, I have a group of highly skilled veterans that are willing and able to dedicate themselves to teaching new recruits day and night. And most people are pretty good with plant manipulation anyway.

But still, I don’t want to manually integrate all of my plants into so many new paladins. That takes time and effort that I would rather spend elsewhere. I could theoretically build something to do it for me, but part of the weight behind my paladins is that I personally blessed them. That somehow gives them the idea that I will guide them through battle and other pursuits, an idea strong enough to cause magic. Having been inducted into my paladins be something that can be done automatically will weaken that. It’s suddenly just one of my tools, easily mass-produced and replicated. Mundane.

So we are going to need to figure out which ones are going to be inducted into my paladins and which ones will not be. We will train all of them, no reason not to after all, but not all of them will pass. The question is how should we decide. I don’t want there to be too many, it is a rather time-intensive process after all.

Devotion, that should be the answer. It is the core of the power behind my paladins, everything I’ve done with them has been to promote that power. And not just a little bit either, most of the people volunteering have achieved something similar to what my paladins have, though to a much lesser degree. So people able to trigger that magic to an exceptional degree. That would be people that are truly devoted to me or people that otherwise truly believe that I am guiding them. That should cut it down to a manageable number.

I ended up spending much of my time today teaching people plant manipulation in much the same way that the older dungeon is teaching me. Only instead of teaching one person with a lot of mental resources, I am teaching a lot of people with much more restricted mental resources. It took a while to get the hang of it, but it was honestly pretty fun. I enjoyed seeing people thrive under my tutelage. It should also serve as a good way to properly gauge which people I should induct into my paladins. I think I’ll do it as a spontaneous thing, not warn them or anything just start the process in the middle of the crowd. Make it really visible and flashy too so everyone knows what’s happening. I’m sure it’ll have an effect, but I’m not sure what kind of effect that will be. I’m curious to find out.

Downtime was spent with Azrezel. We mostly just worked side by side silently, me producing bodies and him turning them into undead. He’s only able to produce so many of them before he can’t carve off more flakes of his soul, but he’s not there yet.

I did get a chance to teach him those soul exercises today, he’s been doing them constantly ever since. It might not have much of an effect in the short term, but it will have an effect.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.