Turns out that having a dragon over the entrance to the dungeon blocks all egress, which ends the Orc’s attempt to siege us, without ever reaching us. The other thing was that my father was wrong about how elves were hermaphrodites, as he thought it was a fleshwarping or shapeshifting effect. In short he thought that they could have multiple templates and that their flesh matched it, of which he was correct about the multiple templates, but wrong about how it worked behind the scenes. It’s all superficial and assumes that no-one is going to need to or want to check that elves should be physically able to do what they do. Also, it turns out that a basic high school education on basic human biology, either stabilizes their forms into something that works way better (in the form of a man with pointy ears), or it destabilizes it so badly that the elf in question looks like a force of nature.
Apocynum ended up as one of the latter and revealed something very important about their forms, in that pretending to be a person can make them weaker. Turns out that he’s now a tank, and not in the particularly high amounts of health sort of way, but in the being massive with a set of magical powers that approximate a cannon sort of way. It takes me a couple of tries to explain why the lower level elven troops are being used for screening instead of letting the elder sit on the front line, eventually I end up using ‘is it harder to cast while there are flies around you’ so that makes it harder for you to work toward the objective. All this to say Apocynum isn’t all that sold on combined arms tactics, and I, realizing that I’m not being very convincing, drop it with him.
All this to say that as things have been progressing down here, by expanding the area around the main path, and by increasing my spatial affinity, the area above has expanded slowly and is a lot more verdant due to me asking for common lichens, mosses, and weeds. To the point that getting the plants to be more common gave me access to a material called orasilith, which is better known as glowstone. Unfortunately I don’t have enough light affinity to set them up in areas I control, unless I’m okay with making everything dark. Eventually the elves notice that they have access to any spell I have, or more accurately they have access to the one healing spell I have and to test that they give me a basic light spell. Given that I have a light spell not and everyone either has access to it, or is Jerome and is a totally prepared delver.
This brings us into two minor problems, the first is the gid, which we quickly discover is more active in the dark. Not scared of the light, just has an exotic sense, and a better shot at getting an ambush in the dark. The slimes are similar in that they have an exotic set of senses, but it is the lack of a standard set of senses that makes them so unaware. The gid surprisingly has been selectively giving essence to select components that makes my realm much more interesting; Most have gone to environmental damage multipliers, and it’s still not a lot while a smidge of death affinity which regulates both monster spawning and trap placement. I think every mechanical trap in my realm was set up by the gid.
The other problem was the undead realized that I am here and have been slowly trickling in. I only noticed because Arthur asked why he got undead essence, and when I checked I found out that all of his territories deal trace amounts of holy damage to villains, demons, and monsters. This finally revealed to me that while, my spatial configuration was designed to me mostly dungeon; Arthur’s claims probably were the opposite. So I permitted all of the divid present in my realm access to my surface area outside of my main circular claim, and soon enough most of Arthur’s claim was on the surface. After a bit of hemming and hawing I break Arthur’s direct access to my codes as he really wasn’t interested in it and let him control access to the surface.
After a bit Timothy is pulled up to the surface as well. Well less pulled and more Arthur is much better at manipulating the surface areas so Timothy was enticed up to the surface. Then they discover that they still do not have enough food. They grab a bit of potionweed from my surface area and sell it for some food, and mostly get meat like some dumbasses. I ask for the apple they receive, and the paladin looks at me confused before he asks “Why?”
“To be honest I just want at least one of their cores,” Then I hastily added, “ I’d like them in card form if at all possible.”
“Oh, sure, give Colic your knife and that will be that.” Colic arrives moments later after Jerome’s reply, and Arthur’s nod.
Colic Is read into the current situation and looks at me funny. “You want crabs?”
“Yeah, mashed into a drink.” So for those following along at home, apples are grown as a graft onto another apple tree, or are clones. So the only thing I can do with them is make them into apple cider which is one of the things you can do with crabapples. My father also mentioned that replacing the water with a spirit or other type of alcoholic beverage and mixing in the slime and potionweed extract as normal makes a tincture instead of a more standard potion. Tinctures are much more potent than the more standard at-tier potions but end up being more wasteful as you do not tend to need all the overflow.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Their deal caused an alchemist to show up like he owned the place, claiming that all the potionweed belonged to his guild and that while there will be a retrieval fee for the collection here it is theirs and he wanted to let us know that. Apocynum noted, “He’s not welcome in our village.”
“I don’t think that potion cartel is welcome anywhere.” Apocynum nods at my comment knowingly. My father said that they have ‘potions other than their own, do not work on this person’ laced into their standard potions. It is possible to get it out but it is real work, as all healing treats the debuff as a buff and is immune to being cleansed by normal means. While I wasn’t paying attention the snake oil salesman attempted to set up anchors to attempt to control part of my realm. It’s fairly annoying so I localize my protection from dragons to those I know the names of and generate a moderately sized infurite crystal while waiting.
“To one individual that goes by Lord Walker, what is your plan here? Do you really think that I’m just going to destroy that fuckwit just because you let me?” I cause the gyration to become vertical and isolate the fraudster from inside the walls and then enable my claims and protection once he is outside of it. Soon enough he is ejected and his clam is already moving away from us. “Well, for you insolence, sand.” and the earth dragon just drops a bunch of sand on the surface of my claim. I end up pulling the four of them into my entrance and watch myself get access to a lot of sand, and some ammogen. I also extracted some earth affinity, which means that my earthworks became cheaper.
Arthur has had a pretty bad day so far, having just been betrayed by his first visitor and undermined by me, so he sets about hunting down the undead, I got from the card. As it wasn’t stronger than him this took about an hour, before it was good and dead. Its death gave the wild effect of increasing everyone's mana reservoir by one. The elves looking at it went, we can do that too, and proceeded to work through their flat bonuses. They work on giving themselves minor bonuses, until they decide to dump it all on double mana. I shake my head at that knowing that now that they will have to invest much more heavily in magical capabilities to take advantage of their gambit, which can leave them exposed when it falls through.
I get messaged by Colic, and come up to see the entryway beginning to bisect, as the entrance and the gate room, while they are both supposed to be safe rooms, were not conceived as being the same room. “So what seems to be the problem?”
“What is the deal with the safe zones? The slime isn’t excluded from the boundary.” A slime has wandered into the buffer zone, and is trying to look pretty menacing. I inspect the slime, and discover that it is level 2. It looks up at me and then proceeds to wander off.
I look back up at the four people present, and reply “I assumed that since the yellow gate would end up on a lower floor, and that to find it the path would cross inhabited rooms as such a safe area in such circumstances would have been foolish. So I set up the safe area boundary to be a fifth smaller than expected.
“Wait what was black then?” That gets me to sigh.
I start looking for why my black ‘challenge is increasing’ demarcations haven’t shown up. Eventually I find it and things start to shift rapidly. They all shift to the stairs and the first floor is reset. “Well that answers my question,” Jerome sighs, before he whistles as he feels the expanded area. Then the gate shifts down a floor and now there is a whole extra floor of space for things to take up residence.
“Arthur, sand is cleared,” and with my comment he goes back up.
Then he comes back down saying, “Knife.” Colic, who still has my knife, goes up with him and comes back down with a couple sand slime cards. I then begin to incorporate those card’s essence into my system to obtain this new slime variant. I then notice that I set no rule to block them from being generated on the surface, so now they are filtering out the ammogen the dragon is generating out of the air. And getting killed by the dragon firing his sand at them very quickly.
Then the dragon tires of dealing with the slimes and starts to reshape the entire planet. Arthur ducks back into the dungeon when the dragon lifts my entire territory, so he’s safe when the dragon drops it back down. I get more of the physical resistances in response, and even more when the dragon lifts and drops my realm again. Realizing that the dropping wasn’t working the dragon switched to a spatial attack that I’m now gaining resistance to. It takes three rounds for the dragon to give up that method. Then the dragon attempts to turn my entire realm into a desert, this surprisingly succeeds for all of ten seconds as the elves soon moved their forest biome into the correct spot as well and ended that specific attempt. The dragon attempted wasteland and desolation soon after before summarily dropping me a final time and moving on in a fit of rage.
I do end up getting the crabapples for growing in my elven forest, as the tree doesn’t really go anywhere else. Arthur pokes his head up and discovers that most of his buildings were smashed. He came back down “I’m beginning to get a sense for why you were not so invested in getting more people.”
“Calling was never the problem; binding is the problem. What is the point of having all of those people if it only makes me a bigger target.” Little did I know how auspicious those words were.