Shizoku's sudden arrival earned her a round of lectures once she'd been talked down from hunting out Erryn. True, her magic skill in general should suffice for the weather and the shape-shifting spell she'd used was rather specifically useful, but if anything had happened, a slender, thirteen-year-old girl would fare poorly in weather this cold. Especially given how deep into the night she'd chosen to travel.
Fuyuko's cold resilience was innate at least, Shizo needed to actively use magic to compensate for poor weather beyond what her furrier form could handle.
The lectures took place at a table with hot drinks and food, which she clearly needed despite her use of the transformation spell. Once she was settled, Mordecai went to talk with Erryn.
The young usagisune man was easy to draw into a conversation while they enjoyed some hot mulled mead. Mordecai found a spot to casually drop, "Oh, by the way, did you hear? The Azeria clan matriarch is pregnant. It turns out she's having triplets, a rare treat for the clan given their birthrate issues."
"Oh?" Erryn replied, "That sounds like good... news..." His voice trailed off as he started working out why Mordecai might be telling him this news about Aia. He had visible trouble speaking for a few moments before he slammed back the rest of his warm mead.
Once he recovered his equilibrium, Erryn asked, "So, I can guess why you are telling me. Um, well, what is expected of me?"
"A lot different than having babies as just a rabbit without a care and barely a thought, isn't it?" Mordecai replied with amusement.
He took a sip of his mead while he contemplated what to tell Erryn. "Well, Aia has had at least a few children and I believe she's never been married, so I suspect that she will not have a lot of demands on you. The news was passed on via Shizoku who was practically bloodthirsty out of teen angst and embarrassment, so we do not have any official communications yet."
Erryn groaned at the mental image of the irate little kitsune. "That girl is insane."
"It seems to run in the family," Mordecai agreed. "Anyway, I suggest that you send a message back with the next group of kitsune congratulating Aia and saying that you intend to visit in, mm, two months from now. That would be two weeks before the start of the new year." Which was also the spring equinox and Zero Day. "This visit would probably only be for a few days, and then you could come back when the triplets are due so you can meet your daughters on the day they are born."
"That sounds like a good start," Erryn said, "but I'm not sure where to go from there."
"Well," Mordecai replied, "first keep in mind that this might not be how things work out. Aia may want to have you stay for the rest of her pregnancy and maybe sometime after. I don't think that's her style, but I don't know her well enough to be sure. After that, the future is simply too uncertain right now. The two of you will need to figure it out by talking when you visit. Mind, I wouldn't be surprised if she has a rough schedule for the next ten or more years already laid out, but don't agree to anything you are not comfortable with. If you need advice, Moriko and Kazue can travel there."
An option Mordecai wouldn't have until sometime after the tournament.
"Alright," Erryn said after a moment of silence, "I guess that works. I was kind of hoping for something more detailed, but I think you are right. Um, what about suggestions for how to be a good father?"
Mordecai shrugged and said, "I have a ton of those, but most of them start with how involved in their lives you are going to be, so they still depend on your conversation with Aia. They all have the same roots however; love your children, be kind, be available, and be supportive. Do not presume to know who they will be as adults; instead, learn who they are with them and help guide them into the best version of themselves. Oh, and a military motto can apply here as well, once they are old enough: praise in public, reprimand in private. There are exceptions, but it's a good general rule once they become adolescents."
"Why is this so much harder and scarier than when I was a rabbit?" Erryn asked with a sigh. "I mean, it should be easier now, they are going to be so much safer and I have so much more ability to help."
"You weren't a sapient person yet, nor did you bear the responsibility of helping to raise sapient people."
The two of them talked for about an hour more as Mordecai tried to set Erryn's mind at ease regarding his impending fatherhood. He really didn't think Erryn had much to worry about, there was little doubt that Aia would have had a plan in place before she announced her pregnancy over the midwinter festival. But she couldn't have chosen a more dramatic time than during a major holiday.
Once he was done there, Mordecai checked in with Kazue and Moriko. As Shizoku was here alone, she and Fuyuko were encouraged to share Fuyuko's room for now. Part of the reason Kazue had softly pushed for this was concern for Shizoku's health after having strained herself with her nighttime flight after a three-day festival.
That same three-day festival made it the perfect time for Mordecai to begin working on their 'ocean' zone. Although the dungeon had expended mana on ensuring everyone had food and drink aplenty, the nature of a dungeon's ecosystem made such expenditures nearly net-zero cost in the long run, and that turns into a net profit of mana when the people eating and drinking expend a lot of effort and energy. Which most do while celebrating with song and dance.
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It would be better in some ways to wait even longer for the water to warm more, but this would suffice.
The first thing he did was create a zone-wide enchantment. This would be their actual last resort to prevent drowning, and would not be announced. It was a weakened version of a normal water-breathing enchantment, with one significant difference: it did nothing to alter the feeling of having water in your lungs, it just enabled air-breathers to use the water. So it would still feel like drowning to most people.
He also saved a bit of cost by not having any way of disabling the enchantment. It shouldn't matter as any invaders would presumably have been routed into the sewers by this point, and the enchantment did not extend that far.
The next step was to start growing their 'flora', though most of it was not actually plant life. Corals, kelp, sponges, and more created the oceanscape and became the start of their ecosystem, along with the endless flow of invisibly small creatures and plants. After that came the clams, shellfish, snails, worms, and other 'cleaners' to populate the ocean floor.
Fish were next, and were quite abundant. There was a lot of variety to be had here, and Mordecai was being creative with their designs.
Growing and evolving all of these creatures was much more expensive than most of their other ecosystems. The biggest problem was that they didn't have a lot of live samples from the oceans when compared to the breadth of land creatures they had access to, which meant that Mordecai was stuck finding the closest matches he could and speeding them through a guided evolution process that sometimes required drastic changes to basic biology.
Naturally, Mordecai sought advantage in the prolonged, iterative process. From the tiniest creatures that grew glass shells to the rigid, multi-layered structures of clams and their kin, he had a living laboratory to work with.
Iron was the easiest to incorporate. It was cheap and easy to produce in ingestible format and most life forms already had the biology to work with the metal in some form.
Adding in the new metals was more difficult. Most of them turned out to be passively toxic without fine-tuning the metabolism of the creatures ingesting them. With a dungeon's resources, this simply took time and experimentation.
Based on the elements Mordecai could test with, it seemed that carbon could form compounds with anything, though some substances required the assistance of other mediators, such as the part of air needed to maintain life or another gas that can be several times as reactive.
This meant that with sufficient iterative experimentation, he could incorporate any material into a metabolism without it being toxic to that organism and from there find a way to bind it into shells, scales, bones, teeth, and claws.
Of course, he could only go so fast. Mordecai was working with life forms with too little self-awareness to be considered inhabitants and he was spending mana to manipulate their evolution and speed up their growth rate, but they still had to live and reproduce. It wasn't like designing inhabitant bodies.
When he realized he wouldn't have the final results he wanted before the first parties re-cleared their way down here, Mordecai withdrew most of his attention from the ecological tier creatures and focused on getting ready with what he had.
Iron-hardened coral made for wonderful 'walls' to construct rooms out of, even if they weren't as strong as what he intended to eventually replace them with. Mordecai also wasn't creating 'strict' rooms and corridors, they were simply strong suggestions. The coral was also not quite as hard as it could be; while Mordecai could tune the composition to be even harder, this came at the price of brittleness.
He further enchanted the pathways with the same 'airy water' magic his avatar had engraved into stone manually. These overlapping magics created a visible contrast with the normal water a little outside of the boundaries Mordecai had laid out. If you venture off the path, you are entering harder, more dangerous territory.
At this stage, the small coral reefs were fairly bland in appearance, but that could be altered by simply decorating them with the rest of the creatures he'd been encouraging to grow and populate. Anemones could make for wonderfully colorful underwater 'flowers'.
Then it was time to wind in tendrils of living crystal and Sarcomaag's mycelium. It wasn't the dense matrix that it often was in other zones, Mordecai just wanted a loose weave to reinforce what was already here.
That crystal could also channel light from the world above to down here on the sea floor. The way water absorbed light muted the effect some which created an eerie sort of illumination filled with flickering shadows as creatures and plants swayed in the motion of the ocean water.
Mordecai's work was somewhat hampered by frequently needing to adjust the metabolisms of almost all the sea creatures, even if they were not the targets of his experiments. In order for the creatures to ingest and metabolize odd metals, there needed to be enough environmental presence of the metals.
This meant that there were toxic levels of metal present in their ocean zone now.
All of this work meant that Mordecai only had a single, slightly meandering 'path' built underwater for now. He would have to come back to that on a later day and start creating more options and crisscrossing paths.
While Mordecai's core had been working on the oceanscape, his avatar had been trading off with Kazue's avatar and Moriko to guide the construction of the towns at each end. Their various inhabitants had become swift and efficient builders, there just needed to be a guiding hand to make sure that everyone was working toward the same visual themes and that all the basic needs of the delvers were met.
The slightly toxic nature of the seawater and the creatures therein necessitated adding signage on both the shoreside town and 'volcanic' island town. Not that they had ever guaranteed that everything would be safe to eat, but the toxicity of metal could be subtle and slow to show itself and it seemed best to ensure no one died from it after they had left the dungeon.
Of course, this meant that their seafood was going to be extra exotic. Certainly, combat groups that made it this far were going to have access to the appropriate magic to deal with anything that could be poisonous, they just needed a bit of forewarning.
Alright, the basic set dressing was complete, though he wasn't entirely happy about his progress.
Now it was time to make things dangerous.