Elves weren’t the only creatures that used the ocean as a means of breeding before leaving it behind. Some trees left the ocean with a slimy little passenger. A passenger with will that resembled sheep more than anything, but much more versatile. A dangerous combination. There was still a depth to their will that was lacking, but they were extremely competent in their way. Euri was the first to discover that fact when she walked right into a web of black sticky ropes while patrolling around the army. Ropes that were so thin as to be invisible even without the mist blocking vision. Ropes designed to make walking into them an easy mistake, as the mist dampened all the senses. Or rather, a well formulated trap.
The creature that created the trap slithered through the web with speed and precision that was shocking for such a small being, though small wasn’t entirely accurate. In its hidden state it was almost impossible to detect, as it seemed to add so little to the mass of the tree it was hiding against, but each tentacle was capable of reaching four pedes as it swung between the black ropes. All in all, it had less than half of the mass of a cannibal, but calling it small wasn’t quite right either.
Before Euri had even figured out what she was trapped in she’d had her face blasted with more of the black material, blocking her airways and vision at the same time. The creature wasted no time at all, wrapping two tentacles around each of her limbs as it tried to pull her into a ball around the bulbous head. A strategy that probably worked very well in other situations. It surprised them with a projectile to the face and immediately avoided the guard entirely to fight exactly in the way that favored it most.
Unfortunately for the clever creature, it was far from high enough class to be a threat to Euri. Some of her flesh tore, but her true body was entirely unharmed as she casually ripped the bark off of twelve nearby trees by pulling on the webs with a little bit of her strength. Covered in stringy black ropes, she ripped the obtrusive mask off of her face. All of the planning and all it accomplished was a minor irritant for Euri.
Her reaction after unhurriedly regaining her freedom was shocking for both me and her bulbous “captor”; she started petting the tentacles. “Your flesh is beautiful, slippery one.” She muttered, almost completely to herself. She did have a point. While it had been on the web the creature had appeared like a living portion of the webbed material, slick and black, but now it was a grayish purple. Where Euri pet it, the flesh turned a more reddish shade of purple, the skin becoming smooth under her fingers as a direct contrast against the rough surface visible elsewhere. From the irritation in its will, this was an unconscious reaction. “Perhaps there is a way to gift me such flesh.” The desire ripped through her like a ravenous beast. Her physique used the skin as a shielding method for the flawed circuits, and as such it had no circuitry itself. In aggregate, a lot of empty space. Empty space that had rotted faster than it should, making her appear significantly older than she would have otherwise.
Fixing her circuitry had helped a lot, but her flesh was still lacking circuitry and as such wasn’t even class one. Humans died by her age if they weren’t at least class one. Strangely, healing wasn’t effective. If anything, the regular circuits that could repair a cannibal from paste into their exact replica made her flesh worse than it was before. The more common repair methods were even worse, as they mostly flooded the body with mana designed to multiplicatively increase the body’s ability to repair itself. Those circuits visibly added wrinkles to Euri’s face.
Given the strenuous training and the accumulated damage that that implied, she’d looked disproportionately old in Adrian but now she was more wrinkle than feature. It wasn’t unreasonable to wonder if she was getting close to the point when the flesh would simply slough off her body, leaving the muscle exposed. As far as her functioning was concerned, it would be irrelevant. As far as she was concerned, it couldn’t be more relevant.
Her desire for skin that could reshape and alter itself at the slightest will was extreme, but entirely reasonable. Now that I’d fixed all of the circuitry in Adrian, her lacking leakage was beyond unremarkable. If she took action outside of one of my armies there was the potential for use, but it would be served without needing the flesh layer. Without serving a purpose, her flesh was merely old-looking.
She’d flirted with the idea of skinning other cannibals, but she wasn’t confident in her ability to avoid the rejection her body could have to a foreign skin suit. My reaction had been curiosity, so she assumed I wasn’t sure about my ability to deal with it either. Had her flesh actually fallen off, that probably would have been her first reaction. I would have been able to make it work, though. It may have taken several tries, but it would have worked eventually.
The creature didn’t know any of that, though. It panicked instead. The first reaction was to jab its beak at Euri’s back, but that was another fruitless endeavor. The flesh was pierced, but it barely even bled. In addition, it tasted horrible. Based on the reaction of the creature, Euri’s flesh was absolutely rancid.
Next, it tried to flee. An endeavor that turned out to be much more successful than either myself or Euri had thought possible. Given the chasm in power between Euri and the creature, she assumed it would be incapable of putting up any sort of resistance. In a way, she was right. At the same time as being absolutely wrong.
She was beyond fast enough to catch it, but every time she got a grip the thing would deform and slither away. It definitely didn’t help that the thing could excrete the webbing with all of its flesh, seemingly able to control the adhesive properties from so sticky it had irritated a class five creature to so slippery that said class five creature was incapable of catching it alive. Even when she lost patience and stabbed one tentacle against a tree, the thing continued as if she hadn’t done anything. It ripped the tentacle in half with barely a wince, continuing its flight.
It was entertaining to watch Euri struggle to catch the significantly weaker creature, but a unique creature was in front of me. I couldn’t allow it to keep the secrets of its construction to itself. The black material in and of itself was a necessary acquisition.
It couldn’t escape my grip as easily as it could Euri’s. Mostly because I didn’t try to use hands. I severed all of the webbing near the creature and activated a circuit to stop it from getting rejected by the air. It floated helplessly for a few seconds before it started flailing with a pattern. Amazingly, it was moving. Not quickly, swimming was much less efficient in air than water, but I had never considered applying water mobility techniques to the air. That changed everything.
Without the rejection from the air, the weakness of the monsters’ flesh in the ocean wouldn’t be a problem. They’d still be very vulnerable in comparison to creatures of similar class that reinforced their flesh properly, but there were benefits to being massive that existed without needing the corresponding durability. Merely their use as massive stores for mana available to the army below them could prove to be invaluable. Having too much mana available was never a problem.
I wasn’t the only one to notice the renewed viability of oceanic creatures. “Master, can we think about investigating the ocean again?” Euri had been completely diverted from thinking about skin. What was a mere cosmetic against the chance to explore a new world? Connecting the two ideas, however, gave me an idea about what to do with her skin. A purpose that wouldn’t be served outside of an ocean. It also wasn’t good to have a biome immune to the investigation of my forces. Euri may be the only cannibal sent into an ocean, but having a viable method known was half the battle. “If there is a region outside of your exploration, you can never control nor understand the whole world.”
A very valid point. Having received her answer, Euri whooped and danced as she rushed back towards the ocean. She may not have cared that she was still carrying the bulbous creature, but I did. At least, I cared that she was rushing off without converting it. Once she calmed down enough to remember, it was a quick fix. Coercion was a skill that was being very quickly developed in my forces, not that it was an underdeveloped area of cannibal research before my intervention. Few areas of research received as much attention from the Cannibal Conclave as forcing acquiescence.
Lulpodlnl was a very interestingly built creature. It was the most uneven of developments I’d ever come across. It had developed the excretory system to class three while the rest of the system wasn’t even class one yet. I understood the appeal, that a class three inherent ability could hinder a class five was amazing in and of itself. Most interestingly of all was that this was deliberate. Lulpodlnl understood that he had limited future prospects, having left the water. Why he didn’t return was a much more complicated issue, mostly based around the cannibalistic tendencies of his race. If he ever came across a female, a vicious fight would ensue that saw only one leaving intact, having taken the reproductive organs of the other in order to leave a trail of offspring in their wake. Offspring that were similarly nutritious and delicious.
He was also intimately aware of my observation, able to see through it into the vast mana at my disposal. As such, he immediately unlocked the potential of the rest of his circuitry. Beyond communication via intent, Lulpodlnl was perfectly aware of his own will, and capable of using it. After I’d investigated him, at least. It seemed that his species learned infinitely faster via observation than any other method.
His will was every bit as slippery as his body, after a few seconds of learning from me how to move will at all, moving in ways that surprised even me. He hadn’t even advanced into class one by the time he was using will to sense the world around him for the first time.
Apparently, he’d learned that from me. Prior to our meeting, he hadn’t even known what will was. His learning curve was astounding, though there was still that lacking depth to his will. The feeling was very similar to my own will early on in my development.
The circuit that gave him the ability to learn so quickly via observation was a strange one. It didn’t seem like circuitry, the structure was completely wrong. The core rune was also far too simple, even for a flat circuit. It was built with something that tasted like faith, but that also felt wrong. The closest I could think of would be an entirely foreign will, but that was impossible. Unless there was some way for Lulpodlnl to incorporate foreign wills without assimilation that I couldn’t see. And allow said foreign will to interact with both his will and mine without any form of rejection. All while ignorant to the nature of will.
As I investigated the circuit, I noticed a megalith react. One of the megaliths that had the power to crush gods while retaining an identity of their own. Even among the same type, it was something else. It was so massive it felt like it was the border of the entirety of the mana ocean simultaneously, but I quickly realized that being at the edge of your vision was actually the binding principle of the megalith. Unless it was the megalith of megaliths, being so massive Earth looked smaller than a newborn cannibal in comparison to itself. It could actually be so massive that it actually was the border of the entirety of the mana ocean, if that was the case. As its attention turned to me, I could see the euphoria that ripped through it. Whatever it saw in me, it really liked. “Only one with a reflection as beautiful as yourself need not fear looking into my depths.” The intent to communicate slammed into me with such force I felt like I was in danger of being broken. It didn’t help that the intent was laden with so much infused information it nearly broke my will to try and process it. All the information I could possibly want about the octopi and that ritual circuit, a circuit built with the will of another that allowed the identity of the other into the caster. It wasn’t a rune at the center of the circuit, but the identity of the other entity; Abyss, Lord of Terror and Father of Demons. How such an identity ended up as an inherent circuit at the core of Lulpodlnl’s brain was another question entirely. One Abyss wasn’t sharing. If it even knew the answer.
My first contact with a non-god megalith and I lived to remember it! Abyss even seemed to like me, being perfectly capable of destroying me and choosing not to. On the other hand, perhaps I was too insignificant to warrant destruction or consumption and I’d just drawn attention that would get me consumed when I’d grown to that point. I didn’t think so, but it was possible. I could see Abyss forming a will-core, something it had learned from me. Octopi were amateurs when it came to learning via observation. Abyss was primarily a creature that learned by being observed, using the intent to observe as a window into the depths of the will of the observer. With such an ancient creature…how much of me had it learned?
Abyss may like me, but it could also be the worst megalith to have the attention of. Fear was a complex basis, much more complicated than cohesion. If Earth didn’t destroy me, I could be confident that it wouldn’t. Abyss leaving me alive could have meant any number of things. I’d definitely drawn attention, though. The other megaliths didn’t miss that Abyss was making a significant change after who knows how long immediately after contact with me. At least, I assumed they’d noticed. Abyss was far from insignificant, if they weren’t watching Abyss…did the megaliths even notice they were in the mana ocean? Could I survive purely because they were inattentive or blind to their surroundings? Abyss definitely noticed me, but it may have gained the ability to see within the mana ocean from me. It was beyond difficult to understand exactly what and how much Abyss had learned by being given the chance to see into my will.
Regardless, the flesh of an octopus was exactly the inspiration needed to develop Euri’s flesh. It would require her to steal the flesh of an octopus, but she was holding one already and I would ensure it wasn’t fatal. Fusing the leaf circuits that converted mana into every resource required for the body and the porous qualities of the flesh would allow her to create air from the mana absorbed by her skin while improving the ability of the skin to mimic surroundings at the same time. It would also harmonize well with her stomach circuitry, which converted unnecessary nutrients into mana, and allow me to work with her lungs more than the basic durability and repair circuits that were there now.
If she wasn’t headed toward an elf city, I probably would have used her lungs as the testing ground for seeing if poison worked in water. Instead I decided to try mixing forces that didn’t fit together, incorporating runes of fire into a water-based circuit. She’d be the first cannibal to breathe fire, it would merely be flaming water. Just as soon as I’d figured out how to make flaming water.
In the two weeks it took her to rush back from where she’d met Lulpodlnl to the ocean was plenty of time to finish the new set of circuits and fill out her new flesh, though she barely seemed to notice. Lulpodlnl also barely noticed, but that was probably due to him being fifty pedes long, his tentacles dragging along behind Euri as she ran. He was too consumed with learning how to sense via will to care about a tiny patch of his flesh being sloughed off. An ability that wouldn’t be useful where Euri was taking him, not until he had survived the initial backlash of trying to understand the entire ocean at once.
As he found out when Euri leapt directly into the wall of water and he was inundated with more information than he’d be able to process in several months. Possibly years. None of the cannibals that had tried to investigate the ocean had woken up yet, at least. There was one that was getting close to stability, but he was still weeks away from regaining consciousness. The type of will an octopus had would probably allow him to wake up much sooner, though. Or die much faster, but I wouldn’t let that happen.
Instead of being a burden, Lulpodlnl’s body turned out to be a boon for Euri, becoming her weapon. She had never tried fighting underwater before, and it turned out that a lot of her methods were not viable in the least. Whipping Lulpodlnl around was far from an elegant fighting method, but it was effective. He was growing longer and larger with every day that passed, and she was getting more competent.
She’d even developed a method to use faith that I hadn’t considered before; she injected it into Lulpodlnl and controlled his body with it. He was unconscious anyways, so her turning him into a weaponized puppet wasn’t a problem. For them. It was a massive problem for the hybrids, trees, grass, and other oceanic creatures that thought an unconscious octopi was perfect prey.
Euri rushed through the ocean with purpose and determination, growing her own set of constructs the whole way. I was waiting until she’d established herself in the elven city before I activated the brood constructs, but they were growing quite efficiently.
Her path didn’t deviate a step from what she wanted, which was very commendable. She’d planned out her route a hundred times in her head, asking the elves that had abandoned their city endless questions in order to flesh out a plan she thought would never bear fruit. Her fervor had scared many of the elves until they got close enough to the rest of the force to learn that she’d had an unreasonable level of enthusiasm toward the ocean since she saw it the first time. They didn’t look at her with disdain, unlike the cannibals, they looked at her with jealousy.
Many of the elves that had abandoned their city were ashamed of that fact, deeply so. They were extremely jealous of her seemingly infinite drive that allowed her to face death multiple times per day and come out on the other side only more enthusiastic. Of the ability to care so much about something that the prospect of death could be made to be insignificant. They’d learn. Fear of death was something that was trained out of Angie’s forces quite competently, second only to Trgl’s.
Even I couldn’t fully understand her infatuation with the ocean, despite having a perspective that allowed me to know her better than she knew herself. I was shocked when her first breath inside the ocean had her becoming a cardinal. I’d thought her reaction would be disappointment, not an exponential increase in excitement.
I was intimately aware of the justifications she used to explain the infatuation to herself, the infinite possibilities offered by such a foreign biome being one among many of the causes of her awe, but the same thoughts were common in the army. A few even had more justifications that they believed in more heartily than her. Against all reason, she was utterly enamored while the others were barely curious enough to drown five times at most. It was almost like her obsession was growing with each time she drowned.
Initially, I had thought that her deriving an extreme level of arousal from drowning was the cause, but now I was thinking it was another hidden effect of things too small to see. After all, she’d become a cardinal after entering the ocean in a way that wouldn’t allow her to drown again. If her love of drowning was the cause behind her infatuation with the ocean it should have been a negative reaction to becoming incapable of drowning.
The only source I could think of would be her physique, as it was the only thing that was unique to her in the army…but I understood the physique. The wizards had developed it entirely on their own, with rigorous records. If I understood any physique, hers would be one that I understood completely. I knew all of the effects of her physique, and water wasn’t in a single circuit.
Then again, she’d managed to maintain a state of arousal for the entirety of her week-long swim from the border of the ocean to the city the elves had abandoned. To a lesser degree than the moment she drowned, but still a significant deviation from what she experienced walking through air. An unknown side effect of the skin directly providing nutrients to the blood was that her lungs were completely full of water. I hadn’t thought she’d feel like she was being suffocated the entire time, but apparently it was good enough. Maybe if she’d held her breath it would have become a breath she never needed to exhale, but that would require her to leave the ocean again for me to test. A test that was unnecessary as she was loving the feeling of suffocation that came without the consequence of dying afterwards more with every water-filled “breath” she took.
She also enjoyed the blast of steam that erupted from her lips every time. I was disappointed with the lacking damage potential, but she liked how it looked and felt. And the threatening nature of her breath. She usually didn’t even project her breath, merely using the steam to create a boiling cloud around her own head. She’d occasionally mime her own drowning, letting loose a string of steam bubbles as if she was losing her grip on her last breath. Sometimes as a tactic to convince an enemy that she’d died, more often confusing her enemies rather than making them consider her as dead, but most times it was purely entertainment. Entertainment that I didn’t understand and could have been the result of yet another hidden effect of unseen circuitry.
Another indication that there was more going on than her unique fetish would be the fact that her will was tainted with far less lust than brood priests, and she was a cardinal. Nobody devoted to the brood constructs had become a cardinal, and they were far more devoted to their fetishes than she was. Her retaining the entirety of her functionality was yet another. What she really proved was that I had yet to gain a full understanding of how cannibals functioned.
Outside of her oddity, she was extremely functional within the ocean. She’d been effective in Angie’s army, but on her own she was a completely different person. Much less efficient, but the effectiveness was on a completely different level. Despite the communication barrier that had stymied cannibals for millennia being completely intact in her case, I didn’t even need to convert insurgent forces into the functioning elven society before she’d converted them on her own. I still did, but they turned out to be unnecessary.
The elves were desperate for any advantage they could manage to get their hands on. Forming a contract they didn’t understand with an assassin-type rogue class five monster dragging an unconscious class six charybdis a full two hundred pedes long fit that description very well. The war against the hybrids had been continuous for millennia and the prevailing emotion about it was utter exhaustion, on the elven side of things. Both sides had long forgotten why they fought, but so many had died that it became impossible to contemplate any form of ceasefire.
Unlike the war between the spawn and the cannibals, they had intimate knowledge of the location of the enemy. The elves could look out of their tunnels and see the massive creatures the hybrids called home. Look at them and know that any attack against any of the massive creatures would fail. Thousands of enemy cities, always in full view any time they left the claustrophobic tunnels. The pressure of being able to look up and see the full breadth of the enemy probably had a lot to do with the flagging morale that led to the formation of a city behind the ocean filled with those too exhausted to continue the fight.
A similar situation, if completely wrong in scale, to my vision in the mana ocean. Krakens and leviathans were nowhere near as threatening as megaliths, but in comparison to the weakness of elves it actually was quite similar. Not completely, as they weren’t growing at an explosive rate nor were the megaliths actively trying to kill me yet. Not yet.
The wars between cannibals and spawn were much less comparable. The human wars seemed almost incidental, as if the spawn were growing into cannibal territory and the cannibals were just trying to survive in their hostile environment. The war between hybrids and elves was far from incidental. They took great pleasure in getting as personal as possible in how they harmed each other, knowing that the other side would be able to notice and feel the pain. The elves also liked creating tableaus when they managed to kill leviathans. Arranging the dead hybrids and their living cities into beautiful spectacles that drew attention for leagues around was a special pastime for the elite of elven warriors. They made sure to revel in every victory they managed to eke out to the maximum degree possible. Compensating for rarity with viciousness.
Much more common, however, were tunnels turning green with the blood of the elves that had built a city at the far end of the tunnel. Elves were far less mobile than the hybrids, so they rarely got word out of destroyed cities, instead being greeted with years of silence that ended in tunnels circulating their green message far and wide. A half-pacified enemy in the bowels of their cities probably helped, in that regard.
Another large difference was that no city was completely eradicated without survivors to become refugees that spread the word of more reason to continue fighting. Most of the losses experienced by the Cannibal Conclave were so fast that the tower hadn’t even been able to report. Or the spawn had carried radiant shards that turned the tower from an asset to a liability. A shadowy, non-personal, and mostly passive war. The only real similarities were the visceral reaction cannibals had to fighting spawn and how closely that matched elves when fighting hybrids.
Elves couldn’t even investigate their fallen cities because nearly every time an elven city was destroyed it welcomed into existence a new charybdis. The leaders understood that charybdi were the higher classes of the octopi that they used to dig the tunnels that were their cities, but for the citizens they were merely extremely deadly lurkers that occupied dead cities. A necessary deception, as the elven population wouldn’t be willing to have such dangerous foes at the bottom of their cities otherwise. Elves were extremely poor diggers, whereas octopi seemed to be built to create their own caves.
They did become a problem when panicked elves tried to rush past them, proving that the city had fallen. Feeding the fleeing population to the octopi was what led to them advancing to charybdi, far more often than naturally occurring charybdi. Octopi were hunted with extreme prejudice, as nothing could coexist with a charybdis. Even the hybrids thought long and hard before venturing into a charybdis’ lair. A necessary risk for hybrids, as charybdi lairs were tumors in the ocean, only growing more dangerous and spreading their influence wider the longer the charybdis was left alone.
As necessary as their destruction was, the few elven victories could almost always be attributed to the losses sustained when a hybrid colony tried to kill a charybdis. The black threads were even more effective in the ocean than outside and charybdi were much better at stealth than octopi could ever hope to be. It didn’t help that they often flooded their lairs with whatever octopi could escape their mother’s ravenous beak and low class demons, which were creatures entirely made of will. I imagined many demons would be torn apart by the immense backlash upon entering the ocean, but those that survived would be all the stronger. The longer a charybdis was left alone, the more octopi and demons spread into the surrounding ocean. There was also the threat of octopi digging deeper and creating a hidden charybdis lair beneath the first. Demon Fountains, as they were called by the hybrids.
Demons were curious beings, infinitely valuable as research materials. Unfortunately, they all retreated into Abyss at the slightest hint of my presence. Few things were as difficult as tying down a will-based creature. Especially one that had as safe a place to retreat to as Abyss. As far as I could tell, they functioned almost exactly like nightmares. Played out on the scale of the entire world and numbering in the billions, but very similar in function. They were the core of spawn fear of golem-craft, as the earliest instances of demons recorded had been summoned into golem bodies. To devastating effect. They’d also been used to become the unseen killer of entire cities, forcing the spawn to crown every city with a radiant shard.
The elves didn’t have a confrontational stance toward demons, however. They took power wherever they could find it, and demons definitely provided power. The Matriarch had had a few demons at her side before they’d noticed me and fled. Her unreliable servants leaving probably played a large part in how quickly she accepted Euri’s offer. Regardless, I gained a lot by obtaining the Matriarch alive, so the benefits outweighed any consideration of the losses I’d incurred by missing the demons. The elves liked to keep information where it was necessary and nowhere else. That meant that the Matriarch had a massive trove of information locked in her will-core. Including the location, materials, and runes necessary to create an elven brood construct. Mixed into incomprehensibility by their method of passing information from matriarch to matriarch, but perfectly available to me. It never ceased to amaze me, the amount of information wasted in records left to rot in the hidden corners of civilizations. Known to few if any, but utterly wasted nonetheless.
Their basic method of reproduction was the closest to a brood construct that I’d found so far. They had a pool that contained all of the reproductive materials for elves and merely waited for combinations to arise. From the pool a steady flow of grass, trees, and elves crawled free. The elves had never been able to learn how the pool functioned entirely, far too scared of disrupting it and ending their city to test out how it worked, but I understood immediately after creating the construct. Had they had access to brood constructs, the elves could have conquered the ocean on their own with the sheer breeding capability of their race.
Elves were created when a tree gained access to enough mana while in the breeding pool. If they didn’t fracture into the constituent pieces of trees that were elves, at least ten elves being born by the self-shredding of a single tree, then they formed into a single entity and left the pool as trees, destined to follow an entirely different developmental path. The male elves followed the opposite trajectory, even being incapable of combining into elves while in the pool.
There was also a reason the elves knew it as breeding mulch and Matriarchs kept the details of creating a mulch pit to themselves; living grass and trees were shredded and mixed in order to create the pit. Specifically, they required conscious trees and wads of grass to be shredded into an array that kept the will intact in the mulch of its former body to interact with the shreds, mixing them together and flooding the mixture with mana until it grew into another entity. They only needed one tree and wad per million elves, but it was still a ruthless reproduction method that required the parents to watch as their children consumed their bodies and wills one bit at a time until another set of parents were added into the mulch pit and their wills became the dominant force.
Had they understood the process, elves could have fed multiplicatively more creatures into the mulch pit. The pace of their reproduction could have had them overwhelming everything else in the ocean, turning the entire ocean into a giant mulch pit. They’d probably fall to infighting before they could consider conquering the entire world, but the constant flood of population would ensure they never had to worry about running out. Their biggest enemy would be allowing the growth of chickens, probably. An ocean sized mulch pit could feed millions of class seven chickens.
With me at the helm, I solved a lot of their problems. The first solution I offered was the end of trees and grass. As a result, the population of elves once this generation grew up would more than quadruple. The other primary benefit would be that I didn’t need additional sacrifices. Will generation was my specialty now and that was the only resource that ran dry in the mulch pit. My mulch will would probably gain a core and produce elves by itself after a bit of advancement. It may even grow to the extent it could function outside of an ocean.
Regardless of the outside benefits of having an army of elves that reproduced more quickly than anything else, the benefits to Euri were obvious. I wasn’t going to make an ocean-sized mulch pit, the hybrids had lots of circuitry to teach me that would be wasted if they were eradicated. Perhaps when I converted their civilizations to swim through the sky instead of the ocean, but until that point an ocean-sized mulch pit wasn’t what this ocean would become.
That fit Euri’s ambition perfectly. She hadn’t considered an ocean-sized mulch pit, but her plans wouldn’t have changed if she knew it was possible. She was too filled with wonder at the world available only in the ocean. A world so utterly foreign to everything she understood that exploring it was a fascinating discovery every second. Every creature she met seemed to be a completely new kind of beast, utterly different than the goblins, hounds, and bears that she’d spent two hundred years of hunting until it became so utterly boring that she chose to become a paper pusher to escape the tedium. Paper pushing that took significantly less time to become tedious, forcing her into hunting cannibals to provide some form of excitement.
She’d finally found a place that awakened the old spirit of adventure that had had her getting close to death on a daily basis to collect ears as proof of her kills. A place that was filled with life to be slaughtered for the measly coins a trophy was worth to other people. A place with beasts so large she would only be able to carry one ear at a time. A place with boundless chances for excitement.
