I’m so close to being done with this project, just another long day of this constant mild discomfort that won’t go away and it will be over.

There have been changes I’m sure, but the obvious ones are all more of the same. More control over the emotions I receive, more depth to those emotions, more soul energy production and all of that stuff. I have no doubt that there have been some rather large changes that aren’t so obvious yet, but naturally, I don’t know what they are yet. Someone might wake up tomorrow to discover that they turned into a giant snake in their sleep, I would be surprised if it was related to this but it happens.

Par took a city today, I found out through my hivemind as it was happening. Our army marched up to the city and the city threw open its gates and let them inside, courtesy of the people we have inside. The city teleporter was intact, and more importantly, whatever it is that was keeping up the barrier was also intact. Now, that is mostly irrelevant now that I can just move my plants into their territory, but they didn’t know that I could do so, and I want to keep it that way. But I also want to expand my plants above ground as well as below, which I can’t do without revealing that their barriers do nothing to me. This gives us a good excuse to be able to expand into their territory slowly without causing them to divert resources away from maintaining these barriers.

I have to do it carefully though, maybe if I build some kind of device that supposedly lets me stretch the barrier inwards? I don’t need to actually do that, I just need to build something complicated enough that no one else on the continent would actually be able to figure out what it does. Maybe something using Lace designed to confuse anyone looking at it? I’m not sure how to pull that off, but it is theoretically possible. I should definitely give it strict limits, or at least make it appear that way. Hopefully, with that I can bait in some of their troops to try and take a shot at me and then set my paladins on them.

I wonder how my dad is doing. It is kind of hard to communicate with him over such a long distance and without a city teleporter, I can get the broad strokes pretty clearly from the people connected to my hivemind, and his death or dismemberment would definitely be a broad stroke, so he is alive and well at least. And his current lover is also there with him, so he isn’t exactly lonely. But still, I worry about how he and Askos are getting by over there, with a potentially rebellious city under their probably loose control.

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Speaking of my apprentices, I hung out with Junior today at her hospital. I wanted to do so earlier, but with the recent bombings she got really busy. She is one of the very few trained surgeons that we have so her work was in high demand from some very rich and powerful people.

She is doing really well for herself. Most of the grunt work at her hospital is handled by some undead that she created, and I definitely see what Azrezel said about her work in that field being rough. The raw materials she has to work with are really good, but she obviously doesn’t have a lot of talent in the field. Her tendency towards a single-minded focus allows her to make up for that somewhat, but it is far from perfect. But still, she has earned the recognition she receives as one of the best necromancers in our empire. Even if it isn’t strictly true, her skill with healing more than makes up for that.

I enjoyed hanging out with her, and I’m glad that she is as light as she is because otherwise, I would have fallen a lot worse when she gave me a flying bear hug when I walked into her hospital. The figurative bear hug turned literal when an undead bear picked both of us up.

We talked for a while. She complained quite a bit about how many people are constantly trying to gain her affections, to put it kindly. Everyone from wandering adventurers, to pretty much every single draconic in the city, and many of the not so single ones, to a good chunk of the foreign powers that she had to treat recently, and so many in between. I mean, yeah she is definitely pretty, and an incredibly skilled and successful healer, but this goes way beyond that. It is quite possible that she was exaggerating a bit, but with the ability to easily share memories it is obvious that it isn’t by a whole lot. I mean, I’ve only ever had two people try to proposition me, and one of them got sent to their death by my father and the other one was my girlfriend for quite a while. I mean there is also Azrezel, but we were already dating before he asked me out, so I wouldn’t really count that.

It’s weird, honestly. I mean, I’m certainly not a stranger to stories of someone seducing a lot of people, but the reverse is more than a little weird to me.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.