The next day, I saw Pyl off. He departed westward with more than two hundred shambling zombie beasts and promises to return for more. It was a little under a fifth of what the moat contained, so I wasn’t concerned in the least. Two hundred quickly made zombies might test a village’s defenses, but certainly no threat to any town.

I experienced three glorious days of uninterrupted experimentation after that. The wolves were doing well with the earth mana infusion. The boar pit I had split into two smaller pits, one enchanted with the latest version of my longevity spell. I expected it to fail. I wasn’t looking for complete success. I was looking for a single success. An outlier that I could then investigate to determine what made it different. The second boar pit, I did no experimentation on yet, as I wanted to keep them breeding to repeat the testing of the other, should it fail to produce results.

The snake pit was split into three, running different experiments. Tond identified the beasts as local monsters that bred once a year creating nests with hundreds of eggs. In one of the three pits, I placed poison enchantments. I hoped to have the snakes evolve into a poison variant that I could dissect to determine if poison was truly a subelement of nature. I hypothesize there was once a type of dragon that had poisonous breath, and if so, then that meant an entire plane of poison elementals with their own king or queen. I had yet to see a poison elemental, but perhaps that was related to a lack of the specific type of gemstone in our geography. In the second pit, I had cast the longevity spell on the serpents. Unlike the boars, I wasn’t looking for a survivor, but watching what occurred to the growths when they molted. If molting affected the growths, I am not certain what I would do with that knowledge. The idea of humans molting revolted me.

On the fourth day after my pupils had departed to Lark, I discovered something unexpected. I began the day with a plan to install the tower crystal. Like other artifacts from before the war with the seafolk, no one alive knew how to create a building crystal. Just another remnant of a bygone age, this one from the Age of Elves. I held several theories, but my interests lay in different directions of study. That didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to use it to my fullest advantage.

A building crystal was a linking device, something that somehow managed to attach a building to a person’s soul scroll. I’d seen them used before and personally used one for the Arcanum when I first established it. I turned the Arcanum’s crystal link over to an [Administrator] later, after being accused of not giving it the attention it needed by other staff. Certainly, it was helpful for obtaining counts of students and such at a glance, but how relevant is that when I was working on pushing the boundaries of magic?

But where I lack interest in using such a device at the Arcanum, a tower crystal would allow me to monitor my experiments or manage the defenses from any part of the building. So, I began where any reasonable wizard should, by using [Earth Manipulation] to excavate the foundation underneath the basement’s oven. The elemental above would deter any curious eyes until I finished, and I would seal the crystal within magical defenses few could penetrate when I was finished. There, in a circular space maybe four feet around, I mounted the crystal on a pedestal of stone.

With some trepidation, I slowly began to feed my mana into the crystal. It wasn’t long before I felt the complex lattices from within the crystal awaken. Like a mana crystal, the building crystal began to fill as it drained me. When more than half my mana was taken, a thread of mana left the crystal and touched my forehead. There, I felt a connection made. Much like the results of an [Analyze] spell, a translucent scroll appeared and unrolled before me. The words, forming on the page like drops of ink.

[Tower Building Crystal activated. Linking process engaged.]

[Link completed. Existing structure identified. Connect?]

I mentally confirmed the connection by projecting my will, not all that different from summoning elementals.

[Adapting to current structure. Please choose tower type.]

[Governance]

[Military]

[Economic]

[Social]

[Knowledge]

I chose knowledge, of course. I had little desire for any of the other types.

[Knowledge selected. Please choose subtype.]

[Repository]

[Education]

[Research]

[Containment]

Immediately, I knew I wanted a tower focused on research. That was without question. I did take a moment to consider the implications of the other options. A repository, I imagined would be a library. Education, a school. Containment, though, made me wonder. That the high elves possessed knowledge of such danger they needed a facility to contain it wasn’t in question. They enslaved gods, who knew what other secrets they held? That they possessed dangerous knowledge in such amounts that it was a standard option for their towers, what did that say? How many of those towers were still in existence? How many adventurers would stumble upon one and unleash some unspeakable horror? Is there a way to find any towers first? If I could, then the knowledge within could advance my craft by unknown amounts.

Questions for another day. I resolved myself to look into it further another day and selected [Research].

[Research Tower requested. Analyzing user. Elven Heritage detected. Authority confirmed. Elementalist class detected. Authorization of subtype confirmed. Existing structure detected. Connection confirmed. Energy source detected. Possible upgrade available. Connect?

I furrowed my brows. What energy source? I knew we were near a ley line, but I doubted we were close enough to connect to it. I also knew I had a number of arcane items both within my bag of holding and hidden away in various trunks and crates. Items I needed for research purposes. I didn’t want the tower draining mana from one of those to power itself. I pushed my confusion out to the crystal.

[Energy source detected in subterranean floor three.]

I was shocked. I couldn’t help but look down. There’s something beneath the tower? I previously had sent my [Earth Manipulation] pretty deep to ensure the foundation would hold. That meant that whatever energy source was there was deeper than I investigated earlier. I wasn’t sure what exactly the tower crystal would identify as a power source, but I began fantasizing about a dragon scale or a drop of godblood. Things that only the oldest of scrolls referenced as legendary. Powers beyond power. With those to propel my craft, I wouldn’t need the research into spellcraft beforehand. I could simply bend the magic to my will and analyze the results. Forcibly, I calmed myself. Delusions of power were the bane to many mages, and I knew it was a pit easy to trip into.

Calming myself didn’t stop me from investigating, though. I spent the rest of the day making a rough circular stairway spiraling down through the edges of the foundation. When I reached my goal, it must have been late afternoon. My stomach growled with hunger, my legs ached from the multitude of stairs, and my mind felt worn from the constant use of both [Earth Manipulation] to build and [Wind Manipulation] to keep the air from going bad. I sensed on the other side of the wall a chamber, though I couldn’t make out the insides. I knew the energy source detected by the tower crystal lay within.

I rested for a few minutes at the bottom of the stairwell. I’d read epics of adventurers that found similar places when exploring unknown caves and crevasses, and in them, those adventurers burst through the walls to defeat whatever unspeakable evil existed with nothing more than their sheer determination and sense of adventure. Maybe aided by a magic sword of some legend or other.

I was not one of those adventurers.

Once rested, the first thing I did was to set a barrier spell in place so that nothing could escape the chamber. Then warded the walls to collapse should I perish. Then I reinforced my shielding and defensive magics. Finally, I pulled on my [Wind Manipulation], forcing one final enchantment should the chamber be filled with bad air. Then I rested again.

When I finally felt prepared, I opened the way. At first, I could only stare, letting my illumination spell fade away. Inside was a cavern full of life and mana. Small toadstools glowed with an eerie pale green or blue, their spores floating in the air like little bits of stardust. Mana crystals dotted the walls, some glowing softly and others simply reflecting the light already within. Tiny, low-level monsters scurried about, yellow-dotted centipedes up and down the walls and orange-striped beetles darting between mushrooms. A small puddle, maybe an inch deep and two feet around lay to one side as water trickled down the wall. Moist-looking stalactites and stalagmites dotted the edges like a rim of dull fangs.

At the center of it all, a crystal hovered a handspan above a single solitary stalagmite, as if a lord surveying its land. And, after a fashion, it was. I was looking at the beginnings of a dungeon, and the crystal before me a nascent dungeon core. Oddly, it didn’t look much different than the tower crystal above, its coloration the same. Only the tower crystal was perfectly shaped. This one possessed a rougher form with smaller crystals growing from it.

I tilted my head in consideration. I would need samples from within. This presented an excellent opportunity to study the growth of a dungeon core. The thick mana also seemed a perfect place to plant my Asrid Flowers, as they required mana as sustenance and not sunlight. They could live with sunlight and water; they just wouldn’t grow or retain their calming effect. I loathed the idea of disturbing the environment.

Still, my tower came first. I would send Lilly and Walker down here later to record the types of creatures and mushrooms when they return. Drawing a depiction of the wildlife and writing the descriptions would do well to further her education, and Walker defending her against the very minor threats while not disturbing it would be an exercise in fine control for him. While I would like to say nothing could dampen my enthusiasm, the vast stairwell, at least six floors worth of steps, back up did an admirable job of it.

I took a quick dinner of cheese and biscuits with two roast hares Tond captured while feeding my beast pens. Afterward, I returned to my Tower Crystal to confirm the connection to the energy source. With this, I would be able to enact permanent barriers and enchantments at no cost to my own mana. I knew my own soul scroll would now contain the details of my tower. I was eager to look at it, no matter how unlikely it was to show me something I was unaware of, but I hadn’t yet finished my own preparations.