After finishing the fields I brought my attention to the expansion of my Domain. The seabed area I had claimed in the last few days was quite big, but I feel I can still claim more before the mana cost gets too high for me. Afterall, with all the people living in me, I have astronomical amounts of mana.

The plan here is to grow a reef able to stop any ship from reaching my island without my sayso. Unfortunately, I don’t think that sinking their ships would stop the pirates from reaching land. I may be able to take care of the normal crew with simple water manipulation and marine creatures. But the Seconds and more importantly the Third will not simply succumb in front of such a small obstacle.

One should also not forget the fact that drowning the crew would deprive me of numerous precious test subjects and that the pirates are supposed to come back with a shipment of slaves and other life forms, such as animals or plants, foreign to my remote island and that my birds can’t bring back. And I don’t want to pass the chance to acquire such valuable goods. So, maybe I’ll leave a way in through the reef.

But I can’t elaborate more on this plan. There is something I must focus my attention on immediately. The squirrel is about to give birth to its part-bat child. I was expecting this to happen in the next days, but not today.

Therefore, I have to put my whole focus on this event.

It seems the process is quite painful to the mother, as I’m receiving a stream of tasty mana. The animal’s pain is tasty by itself, but it is quite bland when compared to the pain of a sapient being that I am used to by now. It is like eating something sweet, it is good, but you can also do without it. Anyway, this is the birth of the creature I expect to be able to become my first real monster.

I summon the rats near the squirrel’s nest. They had made an exemplary job of taking care of the mothers from my last experiment on rats’ pregnancy and I want them to take care of the squirrel and its child. At least for the first hours of its life, after that, the mother will have to take care of its progeny alone. Of course, I will still look after it. As long as I only have one.

The rats arrive quickly, having kept the cloths they used last time, they are able to respond fast to my summons. The moment they get there they start their work, taking good care of the squirrel. On its side, the future mother starts to panic seeing a dozen of rats coming its way. I send it waves of soothing mana to calm it down.

As for me, I’m pretty excited to see the result of my experiment coming to life. I can look at it inside its mother’s womb, of course. But it is not the same as seeing it in the open.

After a few minutes in the process, I notice that there is a lot more blood than for a normal squirrel or bat birth. I don’t want the mother to die of blood loss before she can give birth to the child, so I infuse mana in the squirrel to heal it and keep it alive.

About ten minutes later the hybrid is born. It’s hairless as expected, just like newborn bats, squirrel and lots of other mammals actually. The parts that interest me more are the head, the legs and its tail. The head of the hybrid - I need to find a name for this new race - looks mainly like a squirrel with sharper teeth and more convoluted ears, maybe it will be able to use the bat’s ability to locate stuff and navigate by sound. I also hope that it will be able to develop a more powerful and perforating bite.

Next are the legs and the body, once again it looks more like a squirrel than a bat based on its body proportions. But there is one major difference there. Like a bat, it has a skin membrane linking its front and back legs together. In time, it should hopefully be able to fly or at least to glide. It also possesses a tail, which is thinner than its mother’s. Bats don’t have such big tails and they are usually linked to the wings, I wonder how having one like that will affect its flight abilities. Will it obstruct its movements or will it allow it to have better control over its trajectory, like a rudder?

While looking at the first of its kind I notice something strange. While the exterior of its body seems fine, at least as far as I can tell with its heavily wrinkled skin, the interior does not seem as good. Focusing my attention on its internal organs I notice that almost all of them have some problems. It has a lot of malformations. I can say that this is the case and that they are not just simply somewhere between bat and squirrel organs, as some of them have protrusions or cracks that should not be here in any of the two parent species. Or in any species at all.

The severity of those malformations varies between organs. I can’t find anything wrong with its brain, but I don’t have the faintest idea of how the brains of other creatures I own really work. The liver and kidneys are in an especially bad shape and the heart also looks really bad. It’s going to die soon if I don’t do something, I quickly channel mana in the newborn in the hope of healing it.

I can see that some of the malformations are rectifying themselves, but not all. And they’re doing so at an alarmingly slow pace. Life is exiting the hybrid faster than I’m able to heal it. I try to counter this fact by infusing even more mana into it and for a time it seems that it is enough.

I fight for my creation's life with all the finesse and power that I have, but after half an hour of battle, I fail.

It is dead.

It’s a failure.

I must admit, the fact that my last experiments were so successful and that more and more of the former slaves are willing to become Citizens, may have led me to overestimate my abilities. Everything was going my way and I thought this was going to be a success too.

But no.

I miserably failed.

The failure sends me back to my early days as a Dungeon. When I killed dozens of creatures, learning how to claim them. At that time I tried, again and again, refining the process until success. This time I will have to do the same.

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Trial and error. That’s the way to success.

But I don’t want to wait so long until I see the results of the next experiment. Unfortunately, I’m not strong enough to bend the natural laws of nature past a certain point. At least, not yet. I have to wait for a pregnancy to reach its end, I can somewhat accelerate it, but I don’t want to take the risk. Plus, even if I don’t want to wait, I should still have a lot of time to accomplish this goal.

The solution to speed up the road to success is in numbers. Instead of only having two mammals of different species cross-breed in an attempt to create one hybrid, I will make a lot of different cross-breeding experiments. But before that, I release the midwife rats and the traumatized female squirrel and they go back to their previous activities.

All around my Domain I force different species of animals to cross-breed. I still have to take personal care of the fertilization part making the process quite slow but at least I will soon have a large number of subjects to analyze. Furthermore, they will be a more varied bunch, as I’m also making hybridization attempt outside of the mammal species.

For now, I keep on cross-breeding creatures in their own animal orders. Mammals with mammals, reptiles with reptiles, birds with birds. The same also applies to fishes, crustaceans and bugs. I think I will see the results sooner for the last ones, especially the smallest ones, based on their fast live cycles.

Finally, I summon some female foxes in heat to Bertrand’s body’s living space. There I force it to cross-breed with the biggest non-sapient mammals in my Domain. Taking time to enjoy the feeling of Bertrand cumming in the hot furry females’ wombs, I find that it is a pleasant feeling, stronger than pain, but not as death from my claimed creatures.

I end up with five foxes impregnated by a Human. I do not know what will be the result there. Will I finally have monsters? Will the union bring about sapient creatures? Sapient foxes? A new branch of Beastkin? Will I create Gnolls? That leads to so many questions on the origin of species. Did some dungeons make hybridizations like that in the past? Or could they even have created new species out of nothing? I kind of want to try that now, but it will be a slow and costly process.

That made me recall the question the Gnome called Helgyra asked when I bothered Franziska enough to address the crowd. She was asking about the difference between animals, monsters and sapient beings. More precisely, she was asking if I knew what the difference is between them. I may soon have an element of answer to give her.

Also, I saw her examine some of the fetuses after helping their mothers to abort them. It was a gruesome task, but just like the abortion themselves, she carried those out without batting an eyelid. I think I may be able to interest her in some of my experiments. Who knows, in time she could perform those experiments for me?

But I’m going to wait before talking to her about that. For now, she hasn’t shown the slightest intent in becoming one of my Citizens. I may be able to tempt her in the future, but I need to learn what she is like first.

Speaking of Citizens. It is now early morning and I can see that Laura is already meditating in the gymnasium. Since I saved her life she’s using every second of her free time to meditate in order to become a Citizen, and she has a lot of free time. In fact, she even tries to do it when she’s doing other things like eating mana-infused fruits or bathing in mana-infused water, raising, again and again, the amount of my mana inside of her body and lowering the strength of her mana bubble.

She may not have the training Franziska had or the head-start of Grundy, but she is so dedicated in becoming a Citizen that she already is ready to be claimed.

Like Franziska before her, I gather a big amount of my purest mana around her whole body, focusing on her head, then slowly and delicately I push it into her. With my high sensibility to mana, I can see that it is continuously entering her and steadily concentrates in her hara. I keep on pushing mana onto and into her as she’s taking it in and makes it circulate in her body.

Two hours into her meditation session, the link has established itself and I manage to claim my second adult sapient being.

“Hello, Laura.” I say in her mind.

Suddenly I’m assaulted by a big amount of sensations coming from her. The new capacities of her senses are overwhelming her mind, throwing her on the ground as her brain needs to adjust to the new flow of information. Having her own natural mana being finally attuned to mine is quite a shock to her body too, it is not painful, on the contrary, I can sense through our connection that it is quite a pleasant situation. Actually, it reminds me of the time I become a Second as a Dungeon.

Last time, I hadn’t been able to see it as I was overcome by a memory from my previous life. But this time that is not the case. I wonder when I’ll have my next memory given back to me, I’d like to know what happened to me back then.

Being overwhelmed by the claiming has almost made her faint. She’s lying on the ground, while other people look worried at her after being interrupted in their meditation. I hear them muttering that I may have harmed her. Fortunately, she regains full control of her body and sits up.

She looks around clear awe written on her face. She takes two minutes to regain more of her bearings, oblivious to the worried looks of the people around her.

“I did it!” She exclaims with all the strength of her lungs, making the small crowd take a step back. “I did it.” She repeats at a normal volume and, after noticing the people looking at her, furiously blush. Hiding her face behind her hands, she starts to explain the situation to the people in the room. “I managed to become a Citizen! Me! It’s the best day of my life! And it felt so good I almost fainted right then and there!”

The ecstasy on her face and voice clearly reveals her happiness, as she explains to the people around her that she’s more than fine, and serve as the best proof for her words. I can see the other Citizen candidates being relieved by Laura’s antics.

On my side, I can hear her shooting her joy about finally becoming a Citizen in her mind. She has absolutely no control over the strength of thought-stream yet, so it’s terribly deafening.

“Laura, I need you to calm down a little. Please.” I project my thoughts into her mind.

“Ah, yes. Sorry.” She meekly says out loud.

“You’re sure you’re fine?” Asks one of the women near Laura.

“Yes, I’m fine. It’s just… The Dungeon! He talked to me!” Laura excitedly squeals not fully realizing yet how her current behaviour is at odds with her usual quiet and discreet self.

“Really? How does it feel?”

“Laura, I would like to talk to you in private. Can you go somewhere else, please?”

“Yes! Sorry, I have to go. He wants to talk to me in private!” Laura jumps to her feet and runs out of the room. “It feels really good! But it will be even better with a nice hot bath!” She calls back to the perplexed people still sitting inside the room, just before she crosses through the door.

After seeing her leave, the other people talk for a bit, some of them a bit frightened by what they saw and some others envious of Laura’s evident bliss.