Getting TFO

After passing through the fourteen-foot wide tunnel into the waste removal chambers I spawned more golems to fill the tunnel behind us and set up camp at the far side of the first third floor cavern. The serpents were sent to sleep first while I sent Shade ahead to the second floor in search of some cave rats.

Their time limit was eight hours until they were expected back.

My wisps did not need explicit orders for intelligence reasons like one would think, instead of being dumb and simple, I had to limit their permissions to keep them from just phasing through walls and exploring as they pleased. They needed specific goals, restrictions, and a set length of time. They were devilish little bastards.

They were also relatively familiar with how much food it took to feed these serpents which would help with efficiency.

The serpents themselves had spent all of their energy and needed to rest as well as eat to be in a properly fit condition. However, because the bodies had been blessed, I held some reservations against feeding the serpents their dead comrades. For that reason, I brought Sili to the opposite end of the cavern by the waste tunnels two hours after the serpents went to sleep.

An hour after that was when I finally fed her two of the smaller water terror bodies that were skinned, gutted, and purified of toxins. The skins alone from these fallen serpents would sell to tanners at a basic value of at least ten gold per yard. To a magic armor the value would be no less than doubled and their commemorative skins could help fund the farming and cattle rearing of Templeton for the next couple years.

A dairy cow alone cost around one gold coin if it was still young. With a 'ten-yard' rock terror, that was a lot of young cattle. But that was beside the point, their meat and bones were better spent as 'ingredients' in the cauldron that was Sili's body.

Four hours after the serpents went to sleep was when Sili started sleeping off her meal in the center of the cavern under Grimm's protection. I myself planted two collapsible poles into the rocky floor with magic and stretched out my hammock near the second floor tunnel. My hope was to take a quick nap and wake up to a potion when Shade arrives as my alarm.

The potion I went to sleep holding in my hammock was emptied with my eyes closed when Shade finally arrived and unceremoniously began his psionic report. Apparently, the rodents already had a dozen or so bodies patrolling the tunnels in and out of the first chamber of the rat warrens.

This was also accompanied by a detailed report of various sediment deposits along the way and then throughout the cave systemS.

At least half of 'the warrens' were already mapped out in the spare hours provided to my ghostly elemental. The bodies, sadly, were basically as old as the time limit when I began cleaning, skinning, blessing and processing the numerous patrolling rodents that had been piled and dragged through the caves. Two of them had actually been ground half of the way away and trailed from the warrens to the hive.

They were immediately trashed as carbon material and transmuted away.

The serpents were slowly fed large cuts of meat one at a time again and again for a few hours to stretch out their digesting. After another hour to let them settle, I let my wisps return to my body and gave Sili the lead. It was time to seal up the tunnels leading from the third to the second floors while following behind the serpents.

With a steady pace it only took us a few hours to get back up to the 'first' floor of the dungeon. For good measure, I stopped here and used wild stones to make three mana concentration arrays. Into these small mana concentration arrays I poured almost pure death energy from the amethyst geode I had been filling with ambient energies.

It only took a few hours of steadily emptying the geode before dark elemental wisps were spawned and then instant consumed and converted by my familiars. If I wanted to give them another layer to their cores, now would be a good time to do it, but I had decided a while back to let them grow the natural forms they had chosen. It was time for my first familiars to finally evolve.

Even though my wisps reflexively withheld the powder they would normally convert into their bodies, my goal was instead the spawning of echoes. Once an echo finally spawned I condensed it with sheer Willpower and restricted over a dozen spasms before it finally settled. It was then converted into the core of a stone golem to create a 'cursed' golem.

These bad boys were self-sustainable on both ambient energies and the deaths of curious creatures.

Once they were networked into a barricade not only would they be able to impale enemies with stone stakes and feed one another but they would also require myself or an anointed figure of some sort to subdue and bypass. However, when the communal levels were above half-life they were restricted to allow rats passage. They even had a side task of specifically killing insects and entrapping rats.

Sili, an anointed figure, and the surrounding blessed serpents would naturally have hunting rights even without the traps.

Humans, however, needed some form of restriction.

After four echoes had spawned I fed the arrays to my dark elemental wisps and then destroyed them before blessing the caverns with several hopeful prayers and magic. After sending Sili and the wisps to lead the serpents out, I sealed the tunnel with fifty feet of random stone webbing from the echo controlled golem cores. A possible side benefit of this was that I now had several undead familiars.

Who, in the future, would be ready to burst at the seams for an evolution if they did not already evolve into a self-aware golem.

Once were were back in the immense river cavern, I was at first struck with and instinctive sense of relief at being in sight of the surface and then a sudden thought brought instinctive chill down my spine. This waterway tunneling was big enough to accommodate the big boss. I inwardly cursed in English and started the long walk back to the outside steppe following the others.

The serpents we left behind had not been lazy and idle, they even appeared to be well fed as they welcomed their companions. Even as social animals the disappearance of a few individuals did not seem to be noticed after their previous experiences. This made me happy about the inevitable parting of breeding stock while leaving the others in Sili's care.

For now, I immediately sent the wisps out hunting for the night with two lesser golem cores to use on their own. These cores produced weak but long-lasting golems from transmuted grass and leaves with a primary use in transport. As the container.

In a one-to-one fight, the grass golems would last about two minutes against a basic drone. However, if such cores were used by Gryn and his team or my mischievous wisps they could be used to make a strengthening outer body of temporary power armor. They would boost the average person's physical stats by twenty for about a day.

Shade and Grimm had just been given twelve hours with temporary bodies to hunt animals for several hundred serpents as well as seeking out 'healthy and yucky' magical plants with permission to eat common dark elemental herbs and exotics poisons.

As much food as they wanted for themselves was as much herbs they were likely to find while burdened with their collective kills. If they were smarter, I could allow them to operate voided bags for the sake of prolonged errands. That would, of course, also require a tremendous amount of trust. And maturity.

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