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 so hot mulled ad. 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 monts before he slamd back the rest of his warm ad.
Once he recovered his equilibrium, Erryn asked, "So, I can guess why you are telling . Um, well, what is expected of ?"
"A lot different than having babies as just a rabbit without a care and barely a thought, isn't it?" Mordecai replied with amusent.
He took a sip of his ad 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 embarrassnt, so we do not have any official communications yet."
Erryn groaned at the ntal 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 ssage 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 co back when the triplets are due so you can et 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 soti 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 soti after the tournant.
"Alright," Erryn said after a mont of silence, "I guess that works. I was kind of hoping for sothing 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 sa roots however; love your children, be kind, be available, and be supportive. Do not presu 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 beco adolescents."
"Why is this so much harder and scarier than when I was a rabbit?" Erryn asked with a sigh. "I an, 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 ti 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 nightti flight after a three-day festival.
That sa three-day festival made it the perfect ti 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.
It would be better in so 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 enchantnt. 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 enchantnt, 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 enchantnt. It shouldn't matter as any invaders would presumably have been routed into the sewers by this point, and the enchantnt 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 beca the start of their ecosystem, along with the endless flow of invisibly small creatures and plants. After that ca 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 ant that Mordecai was stuck finding the closest matches he could and speeding them through a guided evolution process that sotis 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 tal in so form.
Adding in the new tals was more difficult. Most of them turned out to be passively toxic without fine-tuning the tabolism of the creatures ingesting them. With a dungeon's resources, this simply took ti and experintation.
Based on the elents Mordecai could test with, it seed that carbon could form compounds with anything, though so substances required the assistance of other diators, such as the part of air needed to maintain life or another gas that can be several tis as reactive.
This ant that with sufficient iterative experintation, he could incorporate any material into a tabolism 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 ca at the price of brittleness.
He further enchanted the pathways with the sa '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 ti 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 so 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 sowhat hampered by frequently needing to adjust the tabolisms of almost all the sea creatures, even if they were not the targets of his experints. In order for the creatures to ingest and tabolize odd tals, there needed to be enough environntal presence of the tals.
This ant that there were toxic levels of tal present in their ocean zone now.
All of this work ant that Mordecai only had a single, slightly andering 'path' built underwater for now. He would have to co 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 beco swift and efficient builders, there just needed to be a guiding hand to make sure that everyone was working toward the sa visual thes and that all the basic needs of the delvers were t.
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 tal could be subtle and slow to show itself and it seed best to ensure no one died from it after they had left the dungeon.
Of course, this ant 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 ti to make things dangerous.
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