***Theoria’s POV***

She bounded down the mountain with wide, graceful leaps, her friend from the outside clinging to her mane and cheering brightly. This felt like an adventure. It made her fur bristle and her heart bump.

Still, the longer she ran, the more she felt fear. This place was vast and endless. There were no walls, no boundaries, and there was no omnipresent creator watching and guiding her. When they arrived at the entrance to the boy’s village, Theoria deposited him and hung her head from the weight of loneliness. Thankfully, she still had a comrade on her back who felt safe and wise in her serenity.

Or perhaps Theoria simply couldn’t detect any tension because of the gelatinous constitution of a slime’s body.

“Can you sense anything?” Theoria asked.

Thesia, the purple king slime on her back jiggled, but that was all that she could understand. Perhaps they both realized it at about the same time, but without their creator echoing their thoughts as he listened, they had no medium through which to communicate.

Theoria huffed a sigh and shook her head. Thesia started pointing in a certain direction with a bouncy tentacle extended from her spherical body, and Theoria took it as a sign to run that way. They continued like this for minutes and then hours, Thesia occasionally pointing again to get them back on course. It was nearly nightfall when they were close enough for Theoria to pick up on a cluster of familiar smells.

The sun sat quickly on this side of the mountain, and the humidity, mixed with the sudden cold of night, led to an eerie fog settling over the ground. There, on the side of the mountain, nestled securely between several trees, was a crudely made hunting outpost. The trees Theoria had seen from the edge of Anther’s village had been raised from seedlings into hollow, structured things, but this outpost looked rushed. At best, three trees had been manipulated to grow spiraling around each other and provide a little shelter from wind and rain.

The Black Wolf lept through the entrance and skidded to a halt inside the small space. Nobody was here, and the place looked far from frequently used. Yet it reeked of the bastards who had killed so many of her brothers and sisters.

Thesia got down off of her back and they searched the place carefully. Theoria even used her claws to tear up a cluster of roots that could have been used as a hiding place. What they were looking for wasn’t there.

Theoria scooped up her companion and ran off again, having picked up the isolated scent of the gloomy elf who had been left behind to deal with the aftermath of the group’s revenge spree. They followed that for many more hours, and the dungeon monster, powerful steed though she was, had to rest.

Dungeon monsters needed neither food nor water, but at the very least they required a steady supply of mana or ether to survive. The presence of Archimedes gathered those natural resources as low altitudes pooled water. This place was dry of magic, and it made the dungeon monsters thirsty.

Thanks to the creature cores they had been implanted with, they could gather mana from the atmosphere for themselves, but the efficiency was lower than what a dungeon could manage. They required rest that hadn’t been necessary before.

It wasn’t until the sun was rising again that Theoria felt strong enough to continue. She ran through the mountains with Thesia on her back; leaping over bushes, weaving between ancient trees, closely following the one familiar smell within the forest. Finally, they came upon their destination.

It was a clearing made on the side of the neighboring mountain. The greenery had all been cut away, and conical structures had been pitched upon the bald earth. Many beastmen, as well as a few demons, marched boldly in that clearing, but Thesia wiggled excitedly. She too had noticed their target’s presence.

There were many people here, and only a modicum amount of mana would be gathered in the monsters’ creature cores if they killed them. Compared to the rewards, the risk of taking on such numbers was far greater. Theoria lowered her stance and tried to hide herself in the undergrowth, unhappily resolving herself to wait until nightfall to sneak into the camp. Unexpectedly, Thesia rolled off her back, offered a reassuring jiggle, and slunk off toward the encampment. Slimes could move very quietly and hide in tight spaces, so maybe she could get in and out without causing a fuss. Theoria watched closely for any signs of alarm so she could rush in and help her friend escape if necessary.

Time dragged on. An hour, two hours, finally Thesia returned with ten blue stones floating inside the mass of her body.

Theoria jumped up out of pure excitement and started licking the slime all over. Thesia wiggled shyly and pushed her snout back, climbing back up onto her perch. Theoria ran with all of her strength back to the dungeon, stopping to rest only when she had no other choice.

When they returned, it was like slipping accidentally into a wellspring of life. Precious energy, nutrients, knowledge, flowed into the returning dungeon monsters. Their strained bodies and minds were given everything they needed to thrive, and they regained the sense of connection to a whole that they had lost.

“Yikes! That was terrible!” Thesia flopped off of Theoria’s back at the entrance, rolling on the grass and moaning.

”Home! Home! We’re returned, father!” Theoria found a tree within the boundary and dug her claws into it, desperate to mark the territory and make her return a reality.

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The elf watchman stared at the spectacle with wide eyes and a funny face.

Finally, they were home.

***Archimedes’ POV***

Archimedes couldn’t know what his monsters were going through outside of the dungeon. He would know if they died, but that was the most the creature cores communicated to him. They were life support tools, not anything greater than that. But it started to trouble him when they had gone three days without returning. Were they being detained somewhere?

He had been steadily hoarding mana so that he could rank Theoria up the moment she returned, but it was getting to the point where he couldn’t contain anymore without using it. Feeling somewhat at a loss with both of his sturdiest monsters missing, he turned to the monster with the third highest combat power in his dungeon. Unfortunately, that was only Zemnes, the Red Bat.

Archimedes looked the creature over and decided to cut his losses. If nothing else, the boost to intelligence should prove useful.

And thus, Zemnes had a massive amount of mana forced into him and evolved into a C rank Man-Eating Bat. He grew even larger, such that he was the size of an adult human, and his feet and hands became slightly more developed with even sharper claws at the ends of them. His red color didn’t fade one bit, and his fangs looked downright deadly. But more importantly, his mouth had developed enough that he could now talk. Of course, for the moment, all he was doing was gasping and writhing in pain on the floor.

And because luck was something Archimedes fundamentally didn’t possess, the monsters he’d sent outside returned less than an hour later. They flooded him with cries of joy and relief upon return, and Archimedes gladly confirmed the presence of the mind stones in Thesia’s body.

He was about to take them when the watchman spoke up.

“Hold on, those are mind stones! Whose are they?” Unfortunately, he was a sharp fellow and counted their numbers. “That’s… the same as the number of people who entered here illegally. You sent your monsters out to find them?”

Archimedes could sense anxious righteousness, and the elf straightened his spine. “I’ll have to ask you to hand those over. Destroying them would be no different than killing the owners, and we give people proper trials for their crimes.”

Thesia and Theoria stopped their joyful celebrations and looked tensely between the dungeon entrance and the watchman. Archimedes released a deep sigh.

“… Give him the mind stones.”

“Papa, are you sure?” Thesia wiggled uncomfortably.

“Yes. It doesn’t matter all that much. We’ll sell the guild a favor.”

Thesia reluctantly spit out the stones and watched the elf gather them up.

“It really doesn’t matter,” Archimedes thought to himself. “Now that I’ve seen them, I can make as many copies as I want.”

He disliked the idea that they might be revived to walk the world again—he strongly disliked it—but being too emotional wasn’t good. The guild was an entity that would help him greatly in the future. Following their customs and staying on their good side would be invaluable when considering his future growth…

Hell, he couldn’t go through with this. He’d already forgiven a rapist for this organization. Archimedes didn’t possess a neck that could bend any lower.

In the watchman’s arms, all but one stone disintegrated to dust, to the elf’s shock and horror. The only one Archimedes spared was the mind stone he’d determined to belong to the great-great-granddaughter of this so-called demon sage—and he did that for himself, not for the guild.

Archimedes spawned a sign in front of the stunned elf’s eyes:

“Considering you possess magic like mind stones, maybe you’ve forgotten how serious an offense it is to make someone fear for their very life. I have been more than generous enough already. You people must meet me halfway.”

He had incurred the wrath of a god to kill these people, and by god they would stay dead! He would not give such heavy concessions freely.

“Th-th-th-this…” with a shaky hand, the watchman held up the remaining stone. “This one belongs to…?”

Archimedes mercifully explained on the signboard: “The so-called great-great-granddaughter of the so-called demon sage. Go and deliver it before I change my mind.”

“Yes, right away!”

The watchman quickly stepped outside of the dungeon boundary, and Archimedes watched him send the stone off via a little green and blue bird through Theoria’s eyes. Once the elf was back at his post, Archimedes ordered his monsters inside.

He was somewhat worn out emotionally at this point, and he didn’t want to deal with the data for the ten mind stones he had just gathered right this moment. Instead, he searched the minds of his monsters to see how their journey had gone, what the outside world was like, and why it had taken them so long. He found Theoria’s viewpoint particularly enthralling.

She was alone in a wide and foreign world, running as fast as her legs could carry her, feeling the sun and the wind on her fur.

An impossibly heavy longing settled over Archimedes’ core. It’s what I wanted. What he wanted and what he could not have were one and the same. Experiencing it through the memories of one of his creations was better than nothing, but paltry compared to the actual thing. Archimedes would never have firsthand knowledge of anything out there. His being was an isolated world that could only accept visitors and never be the one visiting.

How dreary.

It made him think back to the times when he’d had this same feeling in his last life. Those were the times he built grand structures to imitate the outside world. He’d made mountains, skies, rivers, and forests—he would mimic any grand feat of nature that might communicate how small he felt. To the outsiders who viewed them, it was the kind of thing they would see everyday, and it left no impact. Seeing that had only deepened the sense of aloneness he felt. Had it been worth expressing his feelings in the first place when nobody else would empathize?

There wasn’t any point to it, he decided. But that ache was there, and it would never go away, and what else could a dungeon do but build? Archimedes was much too small right now to make something grand, but he could make something honest.

Without disturbing the moss and the bugs that lived there too much, he beveled the main cavern’s walls on the first floor, embossing a pattern of mountains and forests that circled all the way around the room. He made the walls weep with rainwater and carved a forlorn message above the path leading to the next floor: ‘No wind nor rain born of earth has ever escaped the sky. Yet still, I yearn for their freedom.’

Archimedes looked upon his work and, as expected, it had made him no happier.