“I assume the priest arrived because you wanted to alter the rules for how a dungeon works,” Mordecai asked.
Norumi nodded, “Yes, but give me a moment.” She turned to Kazue, who had put her head back on the table with her eyes closed. “Kazue, why don’t you come over to this side? That will eliminate your issue, yes?”
Kazue lifted her head and blinked, then eagerly stood up and grabbed her chair before hurrying across to the Kuiccihan side of the table. “Oh, that’s so much better.” She plopped her chair down next to Norumi’s. “Looks like I have a wise and benevolent stepdaughter.” She grinned up at the dryad-kitsune, and then Mordecai got to watch her briefly struggle with a sense of panic as she remembered that she was talking to the forest spirit.
“I should have thought of that myself.” He said, smiling at Kazue as she regained her mental balance. “I’m sorry about that love.” It was good for her to get used to the much thinner connection to her core anyway.
“This is even worse for me in some ways.” Kazue’s core groused. “I don’t like not having a body. At least when my invested avatar is here, there is some physical feedback.”
“You’ll get used to it love,” he replied. “This is a normal part of dungeon life. And the experiences of your avatar will add to the growth of your personal self and our dungeon.” While Kazue’s avatar couldn’t obtain the detailed information the dungeon could, her memories and sensory experiences would add to the data for the dungeon, which can be very helpful when trying to replicate something that the dungeon doesn’t have actual examples of.
Norumi continued her narrative while the dungeon cores were talking to each other. “What had become the outlines of a ritual to expand what Kuiccihan could do became a negotiation. Eventually, the priests of other gods got involved as well, each offering a blessing to become part of this experiment. I’ll let Kuiccihan explain what this entailed for her, but for myself and Haolong, this entailed us becoming the founders of the ruling family, as well as my founding the Azeria clan to act as the counterbalance. Haolong’s strength of arms and faith was not the sort of power that would extend his life much, and I didn’t want to found the clan’s matriarchy without him, so the negotiation grew to include him becoming a forest guardian after the passing of his mortal life.”
She smiled slightly. “One that could take human form for long enough spans to help me found the clan. It also bound me to become a forest spirit to be with him, but my transformation was slower and my ability to change shape enabled me to keep the changes invisible for a long while. The changes to the Azeria clan on the other hand,” she sighed, “that was all my own doing, a ritual I designed and performed later, when I founded the clan. I wanted to help all my kin, adoptive and blood-related, live longer lives without having to focus on a path of power that enables it, or having to worry as much about their lovers passing so much earlier if they did.” She made a vaguely helpless gesture. “The balance of having fewer children I should have foreseen, but I still have no idea why the imbalance between men and women. I’ve never heard of another kitsune clan having this happen.”
Kuiccihan nodded. “I saw the ritual, I thought she knew about the change to fertility rates, but that boy/girl thing seems like a glitch. Nothing in the ritual should have caused it that I could figure out. But for me, while those two got entwined into all the political stuff, my part of the deal was much different.” She shook her head. “I could have refused, but honestly it sounded interesting. So, I have two types of territories: My dungeon proper and the kingdom territory. The dungeon proper is where I have normal full control of the environment. What I don’t have anymore is any ability to generate loot, claim inhabitants, evolve bosses, create traps, etc., though I at least got to keep my original inhabitants. The purpose of my dungeon levels is an emergency shelter for any needs, which ties to another thing I’ll get to later.”
The idea of being without those abilities made Mordecai flinch, and Kuiccihan grinned at him. “I know, right? But I was being offered a lot too. While I can’t make them inhabitants, I can provide mana and an evolutionary push to any animals inside my territory. If I do this behind the lines of an invading force, well, it seriously disrupts supply chains, lowers morale, creates casualties, increases fatigue, etc. Invading the kingdom is not an easy proposition. The other special trick I can do for active defenses is a little bit like a contractor. But the conditions are different, and I can have a lot more of them, and they get special powers that work outside of my territory instead of my being able to respawn them daily.” She paused, waiting to see if they could figure it out.
Mordecai shook his head as he put it together, mostly from having the perspective of being an outsider who hadn’t grown up with it as a part of his life. “Kuiccihan’s marked, are your marked.”
“Correct!” She said with a giggle while Moriko’s and Kazue’s eyes widened with surprise. “The requirement is their loyalty to Kuiccihan, and Kuiccihan is me. Oh, right, I hadn’t gotten to that. My territory is limited to the territory of the kingdom, but it is not defined solely by politics and paper. It’s defined by the people of the kingdom. Like with Riverbridge, legally Kuiccihan’s territory ends in the middle of the river even though both kingdoms have joint jurisdiction, but my territory extends to the full extent of Riverbridge. Similarly, it expands to almost the other side of the river elsewhere, and comes further up the hills than the maps say the kingdom does, because the people of Kuiccihan think of it as part of Kuiccihan, and that border grew slightly toward you as more of them traveled to you.”
“Which is why our borders stopped early!” Kazue interjected.
Kuiccihan nodded. “Yep. Dungeons can fight for territory, but adjacent dungeons are rather rare, and we wouldn’t be adjacent if it wasn’t for my territory being an entire kingdom.”
Mordecai frowned. “Does that make your territory faith-based?”
Kuiccihan shrugged. “Sort of. I mean, its potential is faith-based, but the territory is claimed by my mana. On the other hand, since I have no inhabitants, I have a constant influx of mana from all the ‘guests’ and ‘delvers’ that fill my territory.”
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“Wait,” Moriko was the one with a puzzled expression now, “If you have all that territory and mana from the kingdom, why do you also have normal dungeon levels if you don’t have any inhabitants? Also, why does the kingdom still get random monster spawns the same as other regions do?”
“Well, a couple of reasons. One of them is that in an emergency, I can teleport people into my dungeon levels for evacuation. I can’t do it for just anyone, they have to be a citizen or ally of Kuiccihan, but I can teleport the entire populace of the kingdom if I really had to,” She sighed then, “but it really has to be an emergency. I am supposed to remain a secret and have some rules on when I can intervene. I haven’t had to do a big evacuation yet, and obviously, if I teleport people into my dungeon levels, they find out. But I have had to save a few royal members from assassination this way, and that’s usually the only reason people not of the Secret Keepers branch get to know the truth.” Kuiccihan grinned at Mordecai. “You figured out enough on your own to let me talk to you about the rest, in the ideal of convincing you to keep it a secret, rather than your limited discovery being spread. As for monster spawns, that's also part of the balance, I can't absorb all the flow of mana when I cover this much territory, and natural fluctuations happen. And,” she shrugged, "my borders haven't expanded in any significant amount in over two hundred years, and my dungeon levels could hold the entire population of the kingdom three times over and still have room for everyone to lay down. When I was still spending mana, there were a lot fewer spawns, and there are fewer than in most regions, but they still happen in a natural pattern."
Mordecai nodded thoughtfully. “This ties a lot together. So Kuiccihan’s allies who are beholden to the kingdom and agree to train Marked, I assume the agreement is what allows you to make a Mark resonate with a particular clan? We did agree to that provision, but I am not sure what abilities they could gain?”
Kuiccihan tapped her lips. “I’m not sure either. I kind of wish I had delayed marking Bellona, but I didn’t know that you were going to be pulled into an official alliance. The main branch and I have no direct interaction, so none of that was my doing. And even the secret keepers only hear from me when needed. Like, if I find out about an assassination attempt in time, I usually use them or do something to draw attention to the assassin. The few times I have had to teleport someone it was because the assassin had been perfectly in character and contactless the entire time they were here, until the last moment.” She shrugged slightly. “I have enough focuses to keep track of every royal family member.”
Kazue blinked. “What, a core can have more than one focus point?”
Mordecai responded. “Yes, but those are slow to develop, though once you have a second one, it is something you can choose to develop faster, though as always such things mean you aren’t developing something else, just like any skill or talent a human might have.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That sounds like a pain.”
“Well, it’d be nice to have a second place to be able to ‘look’ again, but that also seems like a lot to take in without my avatar processing it.”
Mordecai smiled. “Your other self seems to agree. But I promise, the wait for getting a second focus is because the core needs to grow enough first, so by the time you get it, you will be able to handle it.”
“Anyway,” Kuiccihan said, “that covers most of what I can do, oh! Right. As you may have guessed from the fact that I haven’t walked in, I do not have an invested avatar. I mean, most people don’t visit all of a kingdom in a lifetime, so I still have lots of places to visit and see and interact with and experience, just, well, only within the kingdom. And I have to admit, that does limit things, and I do get bored, even though I have a lot of avatars. That’s different too: I get to create a new avatar each year, and each just simply lives out a normal life. But if they die, I don’t get to recreate that one. And that is one of my tools to help defend the kingdom, I can use my avatars so long as I maintain the facade of a normal citizen, and a lot of my avatars have some very interesting skills. And can do coordinated strikes. I am my own elite squad of specialists. But since they can’t leave, it’s a purely defensive thing.”
“Hmm,” Mordecai mulled that over, “It would be hard to abuse your abilities offensively, but if you baited a nation into spending their forces at you, it would leave them vulnerable to counterattack.”
Norumi replied, “You are correct Father, but please remember that most of my family does not know of Kuiccihan, and thus do not know of that possibility. Plus the other line of my descendants are there to keep such ambitions in check. Which is not to say we didn’t have plenty of wars at first, we didn’t look strong, and neighboring city-states were eager to take on the new upstart. While Haolong and I reigned, we defeated five other small nations who attacked us, and once we proved our stability and strength, we had more than a few who wanted to join the kingdom. That was complicated at times, some were not willing to let go of their own power as completely as they needed to in order to become part of our charter, and sometimes that caused internal strife, but we were always very careful to do our best to lead the way toward peaceful coexistence. And since then, well, our stability led to other nations forming from multiple city-states, and sometimes they formed as a coalition to stand against us. We let them be so long as we were not attacked, but some people get paranoid.” She shrugged, her leaves and vines rustling softly. “I witnessed more than a few wars even after I was no longer queen and had founded the clan. It was a few more centuries until Azeria forest was entirely within the borders of Kuiccihan, but we were an allied force the entire time.” She gave a toothy grin. “And nations that sent forces into the forest generally found out what it was to be hunted. While the younger ones would need to be whisked off to safety, the rest of us would stalk through the forest shadows. Once that forest was claimed as clan territory, we never lost any of it.”
That wrapped up most of what Kuiccihan had come to say, and Norumi had been more interested in seeing her father, so the rest of the evening turned toward more casual conversation and socialization. But eventually, Norumi had to go. “Though we are not far from the forest, we are still outside of it, and it is a drain on me. I must return.” She stepped back across the border long enough to give her father a hug, and took the time to hug both Moriko and Kazue as well. “I do look forward to getting to know the both of you more personally. I know Kazue well, as I watch over all of our clan, but she does not know me the same way. So whenever you have the time, please come and visit, and you can meet my husband as well. Unfortunately, we can not both leave the forest at the same time, and it’s much harder for him to begin with, as he was reborn into a guardian, while I transitioned without having to die first.”
Promises to visit were made, and before she followed Norumi, Kuiccihan made an invite as well. “When all three of you have a chance to visit the capital, make sure to meet with the other branch of the royal family. They can guide you to the entrance to my inner dungeon, and we can have a proper dinner party there. Oh, one last thing: I do not believe being marked by me will prevent Bellona from becoming a contractor to you, should everyone wish it. And her training is going well, she is becoming part of the genie-kin clan quite quickly.”