Author’s Corner: Before I start this chapter, I want to throw a thank you to the anonymous donor that proved to me that the button works. I will not assume whether or not they want to be named, but you know who you are!

Building the temple this time was a rather simple procedure. The building itself came up pretty quickly, and the only part that actually took some effort was the creation of the three statues. There was only one god in Celeste’s data that actually looked like a Ha’vosh, and that was Krom, the god of the Ha’vosh. But… we needed three, so two other gods were also represented.

The second god l chose to depict was the god of psychics. This one was… interesting. I had never even heard of a race like this. According to Celeste, they were called the Balorul, and are very rare among most inhabited worlds because they require a vastly different atmosphere in order to live. The ones that do co-exist with others do so with the use of large glass tanks that they move around with. Anyways, Krylor was a creature that looked like a giant brain, with tentacles coming out of the bottom. At the bottom of the brain, between the left and right hemispheres, it was able to open up and reveal a large mouth full of teeth. From Celeste’s information, the Balorul were a parasitic race that latched on to the heads of other creatures and devoured their brains.

The last god for this temple was Narlom, the god of time. Celeste didn’t actually know what race he belonged to, as there were not many references to his origins in NeoLife. However, his appearance seemed mostly human, aside from having only three fingers and a thumb on each hand. A popular theory with this god was that he was from a long extinct race, thus it was impossible to trace what he was.

Out of all three of them, Krylor undoubtedly took the longest to complete. Not only because of his unusual shape, but because I had to try to get his tentacles arranged in such a way that they would support the weight of his body. I probably could have done a spell array to make him perpetually float…. But I wasn’t confident in taking that cheat method.

You have my thanks, druid. Also, Malthan says to pray more often.

I wasn’t quite sure who that came from, but from the positioning of the window, I will assume it came from Krom. I gave a slight nod to the statue, and then walked out of the building. Outside, Sharon had the perimeter surrounded. I had somehow thought that the twenty cultivator rabbits she showed earlier were all of the ones that she had from that species, but now I saw over sixty surrounding the temple, each with their own little bubble repelling the fog.

“Ah, you’re done now, John?” Sharon looked back at me with a smile.

“Yeah… take it you had quite the reserve of rabbits left.” I took a glance around and the fluffy defensive line.

Sharon giggled, nodding her head. “I had Priscilla mobilize her forces, and promised her a juicy carrot once we got back to the ship.”

“Uh huh.. And which one is Priscilla?” I looked at the rabbits, expecting to find a demi among them.

“Ah, she didn’t come out herself, but if you want to meet her…” Sharon closed her eyes for a moment, and before I could say anything, a blue and white light was shining from her chest. The light then gathered together in front of her, and formed into a young girl. She seemed to be in her late teens, with a petite chest and wide red eyes. Atop her head was a pair of long, fluffy rabbit ears, and an eight inch horn was sprouting from her forehead. However, what surprised me the most was that she was actually wearing maid clothes.

Priscilla gave a light bow, smiling to me. “Pleasure to meet you. I’m Priscilla. Mistress has put me in charge of her magic rabbit squadrons.”

I raised an eyebrow curiously at that, and looked to Sharon, who gave a tired sigh. “Don’t look at me, she refuses to call me anything else. Then again, Yang does call you Master, after all. Maybe it’s a companion thing?”

“True… but where did you get the maid uniform?”

“Ah…” Sharon smiled, looking away slightly. “I… kinda made it myself? I couldn’t help it, they are all so fluffy and cute. I picked up the Fur Affinity, and have been using it to make different outfits for them…”

I couldn’t help but chuckle at that. I had expected that she would simply ask one of the crew members to make the outfits. Turns out that Sharon’s been making costumes out of rabbit and wolf fur. “Well, it was nice to finally meet you, Priscilla. I’m John. And thank you for looking after Sharon’s rabbits until now.”

“Of course.” The rabbit girl gave another small bow, smiling a little wider. “It is my pleasure to care for my brothers and sisters.” She then turned back to look at Sharon. “Mistress, if that is all..?”

“Right.” Sharon nodded, sending Priscilla back into the grove, followed by the other rabbits. “She’s maturing pretty well, the other evolved are all helping each other learn. Back when I first saw she had turned into a humanoid, I called her out to chat and she wouldn’t stop cuddling for over an hour.”

“And she’s a druid now, right?” I asked curious. since Sharon had said previously that she is trying to lead most of her animal companions down that path.

“Right. She was one of the first druid animals I trained. I don’t let them form their own grove until after they are able to take on a humanoid shape. That way, they can keep helping my grove expand to make space for the others. Also, by that time they don’t find it very difficult to create element seeds and merge them like we did.”

I nodded at that. It made sense, because by that time they would have considerably more practice with the elements than we had when we made our own groves. “So, back to the ship, or do you want to do some more stuff down here first?”

She seemed to be thinking about that for a little while. “Well… they said there was a dungeon on this planet. Want to go see what type it is before we head back up?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Okay. They know where we are putting the temple, so they can find it when they want to. Tomorrow we can give them some more necessary information, and see if there are any other problems that we can help out with.” I put my hand on my ear, activating my comm. “Celeste, Yin, Yo, feel like going for a dungeon dive together?”

“I’m still busy working on this ship. I want to salvage any parts from it I can before we have to go. Will save some materials from future projects.” Celeste quickly replied, surprising me by denying the invitation.

However, both Yin and Yo gladly accepted. They went to get in their own clone bodies, while the two of us were teleported to the dungeon entrance. Well… where the entrance will be. It appeared that this dungeon did not have a tunnel connecting to its surface yet.

“Captain, be advised. The boss monster appears to be in one of the upper floors of the dungeon. Due to interference from the dungeon’s mana, we can’t pinpoint its exact location.” My handy dandy scanning officer on duty sent me a warning, to which I nodded.

“Thanks. Now… I want to see what a dungeon is like!” I grinned broadly, and crouched down to put my hand on the ground. Instantly, I began absorbing all of the dirt and stone around me, making a slanted tunnel that should lead down to some part of the dungeon below.

By the time I was done, and my makeshift tunnel connected to an opening, Yin and Yo were already standing behind us. Yin had already changed into her stormbird form, ready for battle, while Yo’s outer layer of slime had formed into a set of leather armor, a large skull helmet covering her face.

“Let’s go, daddy!” She said as she charged first into the dungeon. In her right hand, a spear began forming out of slime. I knew what that spear represented, as it was something I had made for her after my own experiment with slime weapons. This was her evolving weapon, one which she would never lose. Unlike my bokken, her spear started off with the water element. The initial power was a simple water blast, but she may have upgraded it by now.

Sharon and Yin also had intelligent weapons, but they kept them on their main bodies, as we did not have the resources needed to bind the weapons to them in a similar manner as Yo’s spear or my bokken. According to Celeste, it would take a special ritual to do so, and cost quite a lot of mana.

Welcome to the Shadow Realm Dungeon of Alkrax!

After Yo charged into the dungeon, the rest of us quickly followed behind. I was a bit worried that this would turn out to be another undead dungeon, where the creatures posed an actual danger to us even if we were in our clone bodies. However, I felt like I didn’t have to really worry about that once I saw the actual monsters inside the dungeon.

In the first room, we were completely unable to see anything with normal vision methods. Thankfully, none of us really relied on normal vision methods. Activating my Cybernetic Eye to look at the cave in night vision mode, I still failed to see anything in the room.

“Get down here!” Yo called out unhappily, pointing her staff up at the ceiling. Confused, I turned my gaze up as well, and saw two glowing dots. Then four, then six, then twelve… more and more pairs of eyes opened up, before a dreadful screech attacked our ears. They were bats. Hundreds of bats.

Now, bats are not an uncommon enemy in most games. And most games agree upon the same strategy for fighting them. Area attacks, always use area attacks. Bats are notorious for fighting in swarms, unless they are weird, giant bats. And this held true here as well, as dozens of bats descended on us all at once. I felt a few of the scratching at me as I began summoning fire to burn at them.

Next to me, Yin opened her mouth and shot a bolt of lightning at the ceiling, frying several bats in a single breath. Yo was… not able to do much. Unlike the rest of us, she did not really have any area attacks. Even Sharon could summon fire, or summon other creatures that could.

However, the bats’ attacks did not really seem to focus on those small attacks they inflicted on us. Within moments, they had completely vanished. I quickly turned around, still with a ball of flame hovering above my head. However, all I could see around me was the thick shadow cast by the flames.

“Did they… fly out of the dungeon?” I asked curiously, unable to tell where they went.

“No, daddy, they’re under your feet.” Yo says with a light smile, before stabbing her spear at her own shadow. There was a loud shriek as several bats flew out of her shadow, slashing ineffectively at her body.

Great, so these bats have shadow powers. Well, that makes this easy--man, I hate it when I take too long to think.

Is that a spike in your leg, or are you just happy to see me?-100 HP

“Gaah!” I shouted out as I felt like multiple lances were stabbed into my legs. Looking down, I saw spikes coming out of my shadow, piercing straight through my lower body. What’s worse, my feet were starting to become cold, gradually being pulled into the shadow.

I felt a chill down my back as I remembered what had happened when I had done the darkness breath attack on the pair of giant bugs. I really did not want to experience what that kind of shadow prison would be like. Hastily, I called up my Light Manipulation, and pushed bright beams of light into and through the shadow spikes, hoping to cancel them out.

Another pained scream came from my shadows, as the spikes actually turned into the bats and flew off. Of course, this led to me screaming more because a few of the bats materialized inside the holes through my legs, and I felt them wriggling and clawing their way out so they could fly away.

Nearby, Sharon looked at me, and her face paled slightly. She had been able to deal with her own infested shadow easily somehow, but seeing what happened to me made her scowl. Clapping her hands together, I watched as she summoned up two creatures from her grove. No… these weren’t creatures. One was an overly muscular man with grey hair, wearing a martial art’s robe. The other was a lean woman with black hair, wearing a dark robe.

“Kill the bats.” She told the two, venom in her voice.

“Yes, Mistress.” They spoke in unison, before changing their bodies. The man had light flashing around him, before he turned into a three foot tall rabbit with two horns and a sparkling body. The woman had darkness swirl around her, before she turned into a large black wolf, inky shadows dripping down her body.

The rabbit was the first to act, jumping into the air and seeming to fly around however it pleased. My eyes, even using my Spatial Comprehension and removing my limiter, could just barely follow along. With each step, a platform of solid light appeared below the rabbit’s feet, which it would use to propel itself further in the direction it wanted to go. With each jump, it would pierce through at least one bat on its horns, before shaking them off and moving on to the next.

The shadow wolf, and that was really all I could describe it as, was the exact opposite. It didn’t seem to move at all, but the air around as grew darker. The light from my fireball seemed to dim, and even the bats began moving more sluggishly. The only one that did not seem affected by this was the light rabbit.

After the air seemed to thicken, tendrils began rising up from the ground, each one wrapping around a bat. Once a tendril latched on, it squeezed tight until the bat exploded in a cloud of gore. The bats’ own darkness powers seemed entirely suppressed by this pair of beasts from Sharon’s grove, and she had no problems letting the two of them massacre the former occupants of this room.

Most likely, these were two of Sharon’s strongest fully evolved creatures. Or at least, the two most suited for fighting here. In under a minute, all of the hundreds of bats had become bodies on the ground, not even a single one being spared. When their work was done, the two beasts returned to Sharon in their human form and knelt in front of her.

“Thank you.” She said simply, before sending the two back to her grove. Then, turning to me, she hastily ran over and looked at my leg. “Are you alright, John? Can you heal it? Does it still hurt?” She asked, obviously worried about me. I knew Yin was too, but she was just staring open-mouthed… or well, open-beaked at Sharon.

I chuckled lightly, nodding my head. My legs still hurt like hell, but it was not the worst injury I’ve had. “I’ll be fine.” As I said that, I began applying healing spells to myself, in order to fix my legs.

“That… was… awesome!” Yo spoke out happily and skipped over to Sharon. “Who were those two?! How did they do that?! Can I meet them?” As she spoke, her eyes had literally turned into star shapes, as if to show how impressed she was. I had a feeling Celeste was to blame for teaching her how to do that.