I didn’t really agonize over whether or not I should indulge Ansae and let her take a piece of my core as long as I might have. If nothing else I had a redundant Core now, just on the off-chance this went badly, and if Ansae could fix my inability to communicate or use magic...well. That would absolutely be a massive improvement. I figured Ansae was more or less trustworthy since she so desperately needed the Purification only I could provide, even though I wasn’t there yet. It was in her own interests to keep me healthy and powerful.

For the first time I let a non-Companion into my Core room, where I’d put both of the Cores for now. Shayma actually seemed more nervous about it than I was, escorting Ansae through the teleport and onto the landing in front of the cottage. The dragon looked about the room appraisingly, though surely she’d seen it before with whatever she used to look straight through my walls, and followed Shayma into the cottage. She had to duck to make it through the door, but it was Shayma’s home, so I felt it wasn’t quite right to alter it to fit Ansae’s frame.

“Amazing.” Ansae studied my core with a little more hunger than I was comfortable with. In fact she had a downright acquisitive gleam in her eye as she stepped closer, stretching out her hand. She stopped just short of the surface of the crystal, while Shayma hovered nearby. “May I?”

“Go ahead. I can’t feel anything through it, I’m afraid.”

She put her hand flat against one of the facets of the Core crystal, slitted eyes narrowing. “That is an enormous amount of mana. Even I would want to be careful dealing with this.”

“Oh.” Shayma looked down at her bandaged arms. “I guess throwing at myself at the Red Core wasn’t the best idea.”

“Don’t knock it, it worked. Probably wouldn’t have managed to win that if you hadn’t, so don’t feel like you were an idiot. You were desperate, and you were right.”

Ansae just chuckled wordlessly, tapping the crystal with her claws. “I’ll just cut out a small piece. There may be some mana leakage but I can handle that. Ready?”

“Go ahead.” I braced myself, though I wasn’t sure how this would work. The best case was I wouldn’t even notice. The worst case was I’d lose a Core and who knew what that would cause. Just as an extra caution I was letting her take from the one I’d just acquired, though as far as I could tell they were identical and each one was as much me as the other. According to Shayma, the formerly Red Core had actually grown since she last saw it, as well as shifting its shape slightly, in order to duplicate mine.

Ansae’s claws blurred, and suddenly she was holding a faceted chunk of glowing blue crystal. The pain hit a moment later, a deep wrenching agony that compounded on all the aches I still had from the battle and more or less rendered me insensate for a few minutes. It wasn’t quite the fugue, but it was close. Apparently cutting a chunk of Core out did result in mana leakage Ansae dealt with that by the simple expedient of absorbing it herself, so that by the time I had recovered myself it had died away to nothing.

“Ow.”

“Are you okay?” Shayma brushed bandage-wrapped fingers against one of the core facets.

“Yeah I think so.” According to the overlay, doing that had dropped the Core’s HP by one, so now they were both at three of eight. The fact that I hadn’t recovered any yet was a little concerning, so I’d have to figure out what was needed to bring myself back to full.

“He’s fine,” she reported to Ansae, who simply nodded, still entranced by the chunk of crystal in her hands.

“Good,” she said absently. “This piece is still alive too, so it should be quite informative.” I could actually see the draconic glee in her eyes as she turned the chunk of blue-glowing crystal in her hands.

“Was there anything else?” Her obvious relish in having a piece of me was a little disturbing, and I was perfectly happy to let her go off and do whatever so long as I didn’t have to pay attention.

“No, this will do for now.”

Shayma ushered Ansae back to the teleport, but I stopped her from going through herself. “You’re taking today off.” I told her.

“Oh, I am?” She smiled in the direction of the core, clearly more relaxed now that Ansae was gone. Watching that surgery must have been just as disturbing to her as to me.

“Yup. And I’ve got enough mana now to set up a regeneration field for you, too. So I’m going to keep you stuck here until you’re feeling better.” I felt really bad about her doing as much as she had. Her Status said her hit points weren’t full, still seventy points under her maximum, and they probably wouldn’t go up until the “Affliction: Severe Burns” went away.

She settled into the heated pool, all but her arms, which she rested in some cool water I separated out by way of special armrests, populated with the healing moss just to provide some extra oomph. The little bit of extra temperature manipulation was enough to finally, finally level it after ages being stuck at nine.

[Temperature Control] advances to 10.

[Temperature Control] evolves to [Temperature Finesse]. Rank set to 5.

[Temperature Finesse] upgrades [Genius Loci].

[Temperature Finesse]: The dungeon has extreme control over temperature.

[Dungeon Ecology] and [Temperature Finesse] create new Category: [Dungeon Climate]. Rank set to 5.

[Dungeon Climate]: Unlocks Climate Category

Oh, Skills! And Categories! It had been a while since I’d gotten any of those. There was no good reason I hadn’t been pursuing them, really, save for a lack of any particular direction. I didn’t let myself get too distracted though, since Shayma was more important than shiny new toys. “Aside from the arms, how are you feeling? That battle sounded pretty awful and I wasn’t actually there to help.”

“Still a little shaken,” she admitted, settling more comfortably into the warm water as I molded the wooden seat to better fit her curves. “I’d only ever seen a mage-king from a distance, but Vok Nal…” She sighed. “If he were as good as a fourth-tier Classer, or even a third-tier, he would have killed us in seconds.”

“Sounds like we need to avoid actually trying to confront Tor Kot directly.”

“That means I’m going to have to go find that last cube,” Shayma said, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. “Not sure I’m ready for that.”

“Well don’t worry about it right now. There’ll be plenty of time to worry later.” I refrained from mentioning the three-month-ish time limit before Tor Kot moved. Assuming that still held now that Vok Nal had fallen. It might be something she’d need to do immediately, once she’d finished healing, but she didn’t need that worry.

Instead I distracted her with small talk as she rested in the healing waters, and at the same time considered the state of...me.

I could now sense temperature through [Genius Loci], but it wasn’t so much hot or cold as something like thermal sight. Absolute, rather than relative. That would certainly take time to get used to, but at least it didn’t throw me the way gaining Mana Sight had. It also meant I could really fine-tune certain things in my various chambers, especially with the brand new [Dungeon Climate].

Dungeon Climate 5: Climate is more resistant to disruption.

• Grassland

• Temperate Forest

• Rainforest

• Swamp

• Desert

• Volcano

• Glacier

• Conservatory

Before I started fiddling with the living chambers, I figured I would finish fixing them. Now that the dynamos were mostly back in operation, I was comfortable with expending the mana. I went to restore all their functions, such as the false sky or the growth Fields, and found out that I had been an idiot.

Using [Customization] to imitate the outside for four separate ceilings produced a heck of a mental strain, not to mention the manual balancing I had to do for Growth and Fertilizer. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do it, but it slowed me down. Made me stupid. I hadn’t much noticed it because I’d slowly increased the area that I’d been dealing with, but trying to take it up all at once made me realize it was a bad idea.

I dropped it all. They’d have to be content with faux blue sky and a painted-on sun. The farmer’s crops hadn’t been harmed when all my stuff withered, likely because it wasn’t actually tied into me, so they were about ready for another harvest. The Growth Field would have to wait until I had some way to automate the Fertilizer production. For the moment I abandoned worrying about the now-functional living and farming chambers and considered the basics.

I now had forty thousand mana, so maybe it was time to try once again something that had worked in the past. I shaped a cube of Stonesteel, and then after some consideration, ordinary steel, and an empty storage crystal. I wanted to try this with my metallurgy set but I didn’t quite have the resources for a second one yet, so it’d have to wait.

I applied [Customization] and mana, trying to crunch each of the things down. I didn’t bother to be restrained, just pouring all the mana into them as fast as I could. All three got me results.

Adamant Stone unlocked.

• • Temperature Immunity

• Extreme physical resistance

• Mana Conductance

Cultivated Steel unlocked.

Affinity Storage Crystal unlocked. Stores mana of a specific Affinity.

All three were monstrously expensive, too. Adamant Stone, once I figured out the conversions, sucked down a thousand stone and thirty thousand mana per unit. The sad part was, I recognized it. The base of the Status Sigil had been made of it. Which meant I was just now breaking into what the Great Dungeons did.

Cultivated Steel looked like regular steel but with an odd sort of translucence, but since it took two regular steel to make one Cultivated, not to mention five thousand mana, I didn’t have enough metal to really make a lot of it. The Affinity Storage didn’t actually take mana, but it did take two Adamant Stone and ten gold to build, along with a Source of the appropriate Affinity. The cost made me suspicious, but maybe if I hadn’t unlocked Adamant Stone the equivalent price would have been paid in Stonesteel.

Either way, I was absolutely going to play with one. Unlike the Adamant Stone and Cultivated Steel, I didn’t actually get a version from the unlock, so it was going to take me some time to build up my reserves to make enough of the Adamant Stone to build one. Just as well, since I didn’t really know how I was going to use it yet. [Tempered Wisdom] told me I still wouldn’t be able to cast spells with it, which left...well, [Dungeon Ecology], mostly. That and [Metallurgy].

Or Fields. Now that I considered it, I was pretty sure I’d been dealing with Fields wrong, or at least, stupidly. Things like Regeneration and Murk were dynamic things, constantly consuming mana as they spread their effects. Forcing the full flow of mana from a dynamo into them was a brute-force sort of affair, and while it certainly had netted results there was no real control to it. Spatial Fields were set once and done, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t try and give them Affinity mana while they were still growing.

Since I was going to be doing some experimenting I made a series of tiny chambers for fields, large enough to hold a patch of grass and a few chrystheniums, and started by setting up [Regeneration], [Murk], and [Growth]. Since I’d maximized the Fields Category I could put two Fields in an area, but so far that hadn’t seemed very useful aside from being able to put an active field in a Spatially-expanded space.

Probably I’d been doing it wrong, like most things. Just because the two Fields were on top of each other didn’t mean they interacted. No, for that they needed to be linked...like with the skill that explicitly was meant for linking mana, [Mana Logic]. Thus far, I’d only used it to forge light switches, connecting tiny, [Customize]-altered doors to light panels. It was intensely difficult to do, and I was pretty sure it ate up a little bit of my mental ability when they were used, just like the false skies, so I hadn’t fixed the links that had been broken yet.

As a test I filled one of the tiny chambers with [Regeneration] and [Murk], trying to forge a connection between the shifting mana constructs. It took me a lot longer than it probably should have, possibly because I still had half my attention on Shayma, but eventually I managed a link. Unfortunately, it clearly wasn’t enough. I could see that it needed another one to actually bind the fields together, and quick, before the first link broke.

[Restful Night] discovered. Provides Regeneration. Aids sleep. Aids mental recovery.

[Mana Manipulation] advances to 8.

“Oh, hey. I think I have something that can help, Shayma. Let me know if it feels at all weird though.”

Even with the monstrous mana regeneration I had, my reserves were pretty low at that point. Fortunately the derived Field didn’t take all that much mana - more than one of the Fields, but less than two. I wrapped it around the heated pool, replacing the regeneration field, and Shayma sighed in pleasure.

“Oh, that is nice. It smells like...summer nights when I was little.” She yawned. “Even the stars look like I remember.” I didn’t see any stars inside the Field myself, so there was some illusory component even if the description didn’t say that. “Do you mind if I try to nap? I didn’t get much sleep due to...well, arms.”

“I figured that might be the case. This Field is supposed to help you sleep, so don’t worry. I’ll keep an eye on you.”

“Thank you, Blue,” Shayma said with a smile, yawning again as I pillowed her head on a created cushion.

I watched Shayma until she was definitely asleep, by which time I had enough mana for more experiments.

[Lost Woods] discovered. Speeds flora growth. Generates Illusory Light. Flora actively impedes enemies.

[Rampant Growth] discovered. Massively increases growth of flora. Massively increases mutation of flora.

Unfortunately the new fields seemed to count as two, and I couldn’t layer another one on top of them to try any further combinations. Which emphasized that I really needed to work on getting more base Fields. Even if it was just in pairs of two, combinatorial explosion would be amazing. Despite not mentioning it in the status, both [Restful Night] and [Lost Woods] inherited the darkness of [Murk], though not the physical weight and density that Field had, which made me wonder if some weird combination might net me a new Affinity. There were, at least, certainly new effects.

While I waited for mana and stone stores to replenish enough to try the new crystal, I tested the idea the stupid-dungeon-self had given me and mixed metals with the magicite. Oddly it didn’t give me magical variants on copper and iron, but new metals entirely. Or at least, the overlay named it something different, and when I put it through the hardening crystal the resulting bars looked more chalky than metallic.

Red Calamite discovered.

White Calamite discovered.

As usual, there was no explanation of what it actually was or what it was used for. The claim about [Genius Loci] improving my ability to appraise things was absolutely a lie. Even if I could get an identification on things like “A bar of Promise” the fact that it told me nothing about it was not much help at all. I’d have to ask Shayma if she knew what these new metals were.

I cast about for more things to put into the metallurgy apparatus without resorting to just mixing everything and realized I’d neglected one of my earliest staples. The tayantan tree. I’d really never done anything with it, but Ansae and that [Herbalist] had both been interested in the wood so surely there was something there.

Unfortunately it turned out that trying to crunch it like I had everything else resulted in dead trees. Even when I was being extremely careful, and watching extremely closely, the pressure generated by my mana and my dungeon biology just crushed them. Watching that closely made me realize that yes, I was actually threaded into my trees and my plants, even if it was the thinnest and faintest of tendrils. There were probably microscopic filaments I couldn’t even see, wound into the blades of grass.

I had kind of vaguely known it before, but now that I saw it I realized exactly why I had certain limitations. Other things I was less clear on, like how I managed to direct the boring beetles when they were clearly not physically connected. Their spawner was, which gave me hints at how maybe the monster path worked, but that was about it. I would have liked to study the Red Core versions of things from Meil, but it seemed that my dungeon-self had melted them all.

At least my dungeon-self hadn’t decided to melt the extra core.

It would only take another hour or so to reach full mana, but I could spend that time making good on the agreement I’d made with Iniri. It’d take more than that hour to finish the job though, because Meil was a complete wreck. More than it even seemed from the surface, since both myself and the Red Core had spread out underground and the foundations of the city itself were compromised. Without repairs, I would bet that if left alone one good rainstorm would drop everything into a muddy pit.

Fortunately I had more than a passing knowledge of architecture, mostly because I was architecture. I had an immense temptation to repair the shattered and crumbled buildings into something more along my tastes, but suppressed it. Barely.

The archeological remnants of Meil past were interesting to me, where they’d been unearthed by the previous dungeon digging into the ground. The same dungeon had brutalized the remnants beyond recognition in most cases, leaving only a few slabs that had been clearly welded together by earth magic. It made me wonder why modern Meil was mostly brick.

Even though I didn’t know all the details of Tarnil’s history, the picture that was slowly revealing itself was of a kingdom in decline. The Great Northern Waste, a young queen inheriting a throne. Only five cities and no important ports. A fourth-tier, true, but he was gone now and a sizeable number of the third-tiers Iniri had with her weren’t from Tarnil. Wildwood Retreat was holding strong, but in hindsight its independence seemed born from the weakness of the kingdom than the strength of the mana spring.

In all, it was not a very encouraging picture. Tarnil was most likely a minor power as it stood, and even without the mage-kings it might have been absorbed into something larger soon enough. Which actually made me wonder if that was why the kingdom had been targeted. If the mage-kings weren’t quite as powerful as they seemed, or had certain political sensitivities that kept them from assaulting a more hale kingdom.

Politics weren’t exactly my thing but I was already Core-deep in the Tarnil kingdom’s affairs, mostly by accident. Part of it was simple geography, as I was located in the northern part of the Tarnil kingdom, somewhat south of the Waste. Pragmatically, I’d carved off a chunk of it for myself already, though it wasn’t like they were using the mountain. Part of it was our mutual enemies, in the form of the mage kings, which pushed us together. The final part, of course, was the Bargain with Shayma.

I didn’t regret it at all, but it was becoming clear how deeply it had involved me in things. Technically I only needed to shelter Iniri and her companions, but obviously there was no way to do that without taking an active role against the ones who had usurped her kingdom. Even if my aid stopped at kicking out Tor Kot and the mage-kings didn’t return, it wasn’t likely that any of the other governments around would view me as anything other than an ally.

I liked Iniri well enough, but having my wagon hitched to a small, broken, and possibly already fading kingdom was not really the best situation. Maybe it didn’t matter, especially in the long term, but I was pretty sure there’d be some issues I had no idea how to address. Shayma was my voice, but she was also her own person and I didn’t think she relished the idea of dealing with foreign dignitaries any more than I did.

Apparently one of the downsides of being able to think clearly again was worrying over things I couldn’t change.

Not only did I have to dip into my stone stocks to fix Meil’s foundations, I had to dig down to bedrock to shore up patches where clay and mud were no longer stable from the river leaking into the subterranean passages opened up by the previous dungeon. With that as a base, I could leave the remnants of older buildings I found alone, enclosing them in their own chambers and running proper halls into nearby basements so they could be properly accessed in the future. It wasn’t strictly necessary to do that, and was a bit above and beyond in the task of simply repairing Meil, but it appealed to me for some reason.

It was only when I had properly stabilized the ground under the whole city that I started fixing buildings. Actually one of the first things I did was use [Customization] to return everything to the proper sandstone color, getting rid of the ugly brown color of the Red Core’s stone. Then I started restoring buildings. It was actually pretty fun to watch the reactions of Meil’s inhabitants as the buildings started to regrow themselves. People stopped, gawked, or ran, probably to go complain to Iniri through whatever channels.

I wished her luck with that.