Vey spent the next several hours clearing out the old alchemy lab, having the remaining undead ferry the contents to the old storeroom. Once emptied, Vey spent several more hours organizing the old storeroom, and it finally got around to separating the corpse-room’s corpse pile from its namesake. Vey did this by having the undead move the potentially usable corpses up to the old alchemy room, which Vey is beginning to consider using as a ‘necromancy room’, and burning the unusable bits with its [Firebolt] spell. Vey’s ultimate goal is to turn the corpse-room into something to the effect of ‘Vey’s Lab’, a place where it can practice and research freely.

It also wants to move more around things in Sera’s living chambers and the ritual room, namely removing the ritual altar from the ritual room. It is not lost on Vey that the altar makes Sera incredibly uncomfortable, in addition to being a piece of desecrated stone in an otherwise unaligned dungeon. Having what is probably considered a church to the God of Undeath right next to the living chambers of its pet- Of Sera is probably not a good thing. Actually, Vey remembers that it should check the altar with [Detect Magic] to see if it really is desecrated, or if Sera just feels that way around it for purely mundane reasons.

It takes a few more hours of work, probably enough to consider it another day if Vey had actually been counting, before the new lab, necromancy room, and storeroom are in states Vey could consider ‘complete’, at least for now. Vey muses that it doesn’t actually have any necromancy spells, or even any plans to try and develop more just yet. It had been focusing on transmutation and evocation, and probably focusing on them a bit much in honesty. Its illusion spells [Mirror Image] and [False Aura] are both pretty promising from a combat perspective, and [Detect Magic] is quintessential divination, but it has zero abjuration, enchantment, or necromancy spells, and only have barebones concepts for how it might develop more of them.

Another problem for the next time it feels motivated to sit down and spellcraft for a bit. A bigger and more pressing problem is the defenses of the dungeon. Vey knows that it is stronger than it was in the fight with the adventurers(it has finally managed to accept that adventurer is the correct term, not invader), and that it probably went a little too far with the sorcerer girl. Ideally it should have kept her, for studying how her magic works, to see if it could utilize that for its research, but instead… Vey shakes its head at that, chiding itself for its rage-induced impromptu sexual dissection. Not just at the lost potential research subject, but also because the damage to the girl’s pelvic bone and the deep gouges along her entire chest(upper and lower) mean that her corpse wouldn’t even be usable as an undead, even if Vey was capable of raising her as one.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Vey decides to separate its various notebooks, as well as the notebook serving as its spellbook, into multiple different notebooks, and it steals one of the few structurally sound pieces of woodwork from the storeroom for usage as a bookshelf. It takes a surprisingly short amount of time to organize its entire collection of books, notebooks, and assorted papers into an orderly display. The ‘mundane’ books, such as the book on flora, the book on basic dungeoneering, and the book on basic religious knowledge go on the bottom of the shelf by the floor. The ‘useful mundane’ books, like the book on types of undead, common monsters, and dark rituals go on the second shelf from the bottom. All of its assorted notebooks go on the third shelf, since that one is the closest to an easily accessible height for Vey. The top shelf contains the miscellaneous remainders, since that is were most of the stuff Vey is unlikely to go through at any given time.

Bookshelf organization complete, Vey sets on acquiring a new target dummy for its lab, since removing the corpse-pile also meant removing the rats(which it found were managing to get in due to a breeding nest behind a crack in the wall, promptly sealed after tossing a [Firebolt] in). The best it can find is a half-destroyed stone statue from the abandoned chapel, but that feels slightly wrong to use as a test subject for magic, even if Vey has no attachment to whatever god it represented once upon a time. The second best is to string up individual corpses, but Vey decides against this on the grounds that its primary motivation for removing the corpses was to…

If Vey could blink, it would have been doing so constantly for the near full minute it stands still, stunned by the realization that the entire reason it moved the corpses was that it thought Sera might spend more time with Vey in the lab that way. Vey shakes its head, and immediately ceases the activity of searching for a target dummy, and returns to its lab. Vey knows it is running almost entirely out of paper for spellcraft, it knows its plan to turn wood from the outside into paper and more defenses inside the dungeon won’t be coming along for a while, and that it knows that the recent incident has left a significant dent in the number of defenders between Vey and death by adventurer.

Its conclusion is that it needs another breakthrough in its studies, a change in the status quo, or to find some way to acquire supplies from the village nearby, or figure out how to commit banditry without tying said banditry to the presence of a dungeon full of undead. Actually, that might work, if I do it alone and use my magic… Vey thinks to itself, but soon comes across the conclusion that it would be a complete gamble to get any of the things it needs that way, not all wagons carry the same stuff, after all. So lost in thought as it tries to come up with solutions, new problems, and new solutions to the new problems, that it doesn’t even notice Sera when she walks into the room.