Over the past month, Vow and her gift had been of great help answering Archimedes’ questions and directing his research. Through her, Archimedes had learned the cause of the strange resurrection phenomenon he had witnessed: souls.

The dungeon was aware that souls existed, but only because he himself remembered being one in between his own death and rebirth. He certainly had never put any thought into what souls were beyond that.

But if matters of the soul affected whether or not Archimedes could wield power over a creature, then they were of paramount importance. Not only because somehow gaining influence over Anther would allow the dungeon to cure him with effortless ease, but because another entity with more proficiency in handling souls could potentially wrestle Archimedes’ control away from him.

Vow helped him work through his concerns by secretively teaching him the basics. Souls operated under one fundamental rule he had to be conscious of: the one-to-one rule. Bodies and souls were designed to exist in perfect pairs and no other state. The natural laws did not allow there to be multiple copies of a single soul, nor for one soul to inhabit multiple bodies, nor for multiple souls to share a body. The only known hole in the system was that multiple identical bodies could exist, as long as only one held the soul.

This apparent loophole risked the world becoming a parade of empty living vessels, Archimedes thought, but Vow assured him it was a self-correcting process. Duplicate vessels were equally capable of bearing offspring, and those children would be new entities born with souls. Excess numbers would cull each other while competing for limited resources. And, since duplicating souls was forbidden, entities which held dominion over souls could not swell their armies using such husks.

The natural laws allowed the recreation of physical things for those reasons. Which implied that those endeavors which were forbidden could not be resolved by any natural process, should they occur. A worrying thought.

As part and parcel of learning about souls, Archimedes got an answer to what a domain was.

According to Vow’s limited communicative ability, a soul’s shape resembled a leash. They weren’t things that dwelled only in the bodies they belonged to, but also rested in the hands of another being. The meaning of that leash depended on the being that held it. In the case of a dungeon, it meant that creatures created by it could not leave it, could not harm it, would be sustained by it, and would open all thoughts to it. It was loyalty as Archimedes understood it.

A domain, then, was the system’s term for the metaphysical sphere of influence of beings who held these leashes. It all meant that a being that belonged to no domain, including any being that had no soul, could be influenced by anything that had the power and desire to do so.

Due to the new understanding he had reached, Archimedes finally had the answer to an old concern of his: what had caused his periphery mana channels to be occupied, causing a tragedy when he encountered scanning magic for the first time.

As part of the one-to-one rule, a soul and a body had to have a way of recognizing each other, so the soul contained data on both mind and body, and they would constantly update to match each other. Usually, the body changed first, as it was the aspect exposed to physical reality, and then the soul would change to match it. But the reverse was also possible.

That was the entire reason it was possible for him to live a second life in a new body while remembering his previous life. Archimedes’ soul had carried over his old memories and personality and imprinted it on his newly born self. His infant core could barely think for itself yet and presented no resistance, so his new self became almost identical to his old self the moment he was reborn.

Naturally, it was burdensome for the physical “brain” of a newborn (his core, in his case) to contain all the information of a being with thousands of years of memories. But a dungeon core was a miracle of nature; their adaptability when it came to information processing was unmatched, and his core had found a way to compensate for its limited capacity.

Mana channels within the dungeon that would normally do nothing, existing only as extra redundancy in the case of severe injury or information overload, had been put to use as additional brain space. In the first place, it was a mistake of the creator of the Guild’s scanning spell to assume that a dungeon’s “empty” periphery mana channels served no use and would always be empty. Few beings had evolved with such extensive inefficiencies, and dungeons would be the very last on that list.

There was a bit of concern around the fact that all of Archimedes’ natural redundancies were already in use. It left him vulnerable to other situations which would demand their deployment. But theoretically, as he grew, his core would become capable of holding more information on its own, and his dungeon body should gradually reduce its burden.

Of course, that wouldn’t happen if he were growing at the same pace as in his previous life. He would just have twice as many memories to store in half the space. But if he continued growing as quickly as now, the problem would gradually resolve itself. At the very least, he eventually shouldn’t need all of his periphery mana channels dedicated to the task.

Archimedes also now had an educated guess on whether he could use this new knowledge to treat Anther.

No.

Or more specifically, yes, probably, but with too many consequences.

Taking the boy into his domain, disregarding the amount of time and training the dungeon would need in order to even become capable of it, would take him away from the Sun and Moon’s domain. Archimedes didn’t want to invite the wrath of gods upon himself.

He had, however, dodged a bullet without knowing it. If, hypothetically, Archimedes had gone with his original plan to treat Anther and meddled with his mind stone directly—an expression of the child’s self that wasn’t connected to his soul—then upon revival, the original soul would no longer match the new body and most likely wouldn’t be able to return to it.

The exact result of that would’ve depended greatly on whatever belonging to the Sun and Moon implied. No matter what, there would be unseen and unpredictable consequences.

It also occurred to Archimedes that he might have jumped into the path of another bullet, equally unaware.

Archimedes had resurrected Lilith by transforming the dead Casanuella’s mind stone into a creature core and using that to revive her. At that moment, her body should have been identical to the original, and thus compatible with the original’s soul.

And she must have been inhabited by that soul, since his experiments indicated that attaching a creature core to a creature served as a beacon, telling the system to attach the matching soul to that vessel in particular.

If Archimedes didn’t know what he did, or if he had simply been experimenting without any of Vow’s advice, he would have assumed that the creature core created a new soul matching the dungeon-made body. But now he knew that being dungeon-made was only a matter of domain, and that even bodies across domains still could only share one soul.

He had stolen Casanuella’s soul from Bath’s domain, effortlessly and without being aware of it. After that, Archimedes had made countless changes to Lilith’s mind and body, which her soul should have long since acclimated to by now, which meant that her soul could no longer return to her original body even if he wanted to give it back.

Perhaps the only reason he hadn’t received any retaliation or communication from Bath was because he had gone mad. It was possible the Endless Storm wasn’t even aware his domain had been robbed.

So finally Archimedes figured he understood what the Guild was afraid of: through learning how to correlate creature cores to mine stones, dungeons had the power to steal the souls of outsiders into duplicate bodies of their own creation. It didn’t matter if the soul had to be untethered at that moment or if this would only be safe to employ against demons among the races; eventually, even a mad god would notice if he was consistently being robbed. Was there any chance his reaction would be gentle at that point? His moniker was “the Endless Storm” for system’s sake.

Either way, it was done already. Lilith was one of Archimedes’ inhabitants, and the Casanuella resurrected outside would forever be without a soul, whatever that implied.

And although all of this was very concerning, it brought the dungeon no closer to curing Anther. He shifted his research focus as soon as he understood that.

Time had effectively proven that ether had no effect on things that were already dead, but it could sustain existing life in almost any condition. Archimedes was able to cut the beetle suspended in ether into pieces and it still moved about in a lively (very confused) way. Even more lively than usual, perhaps, as its body still recognized that many nerves were disconnected and continually sent pain signals to the brain.

The severed pieces did not bleed, and they would reattach if held close enough together. Interestingly, the limbs refused to reattach in the wrong places.

He performed truly inhumane mutagenic experiments on some beetle test subjects using Alter Creature, but as long as they were put back into a livable state before being removed from the ether, they would survive.

He of course didn’t forget to test for volume. He used Alter Creature to grow a beetle to Anther’s size and put it in a much larger Mananite tank. Instead of the issues he expected to see, he was faced with very different ones.

The healing power of liquid ether had no problem penetrating as deep as it needed to go into a larger body. It still, ultimately, wasn’t a physical liquid, after all. However, the effectiveness of the ether as a healing agent was more intense. Wounds would close almost instantly after opening, and severed body parts taken away too quickly to reattach would begin to regenerate from the main body instead.

It may not sound like a problem at first glance, but healing that was too effective would make any form of surgery impossible.

Archimedes tested again with a smaller beetle in the larger tank, but he saw exactly the same results. The problem was the volume of the tank relative to its internal surface area. Ether was made liquid due to the particles bouncing against the Mananite’s mana field and slowing their spin. When a larger volume was involved, each particle had fewer opportunities to come into contact with the mana field. Thus, their spin was faster than the spin of the particles in the smaller tank. They were more energized, and so their healing was more intense.

Archimedes had hoped to submerse Anther in liquid ether, perform brain surgery on him physically with no risk of death, and applaud a job well done, but this was going to be an issue.

The tank had to be large because it had to be completely enclosed to not allow the ether to escape. Anther and his surgeon had to be able to fit inside together.

Why was a surgeon necessary? Because the dungeon couldn’t use Alter Creature on a being who belonged to another domain; a being whose soul belonged to someone besides the dungeon. And if he tried to perform the surgery physically himself, say by creating and altering metal instruments, it would almost certainly be considered a direct attack by the dungeon and open up a dungeon leak; retaliation from the gods… or greater spirits. It would not be acceptable to have such a crisis interrupt his friend’s important surgery, so he couldn’t risk it.

The only solution Archimedes could think of was to have an individual perform the surgery. Best would be for one of his monsters to do it. He could feed them real-time scans and instructions, so long as the monster was adroit enough to follow those guidelines.

The dungeon’s primary surgeon candidate was Minute. The Clockwork Golem had the most precise hands of any of his monsters, and it was generally a calm monster that was good under pressure. If the strength and dexterity of its hands could be increased a bit more, the dungeon thought brain surgery would be manageable for it.

So Archimedes raised Minute’s rank from D to C, and it became a Greater Clockwork Golem. But after testing out its fine motor functions, Archimedes was still unsatisfied, so he saved up more mana and raised Minute, and thus himself, to Rank B.

Minute became a Superior Clockwork Golem. It grew in stature and resilience, becoming theoretically capable of combat. And to ensure it was still fully capable of delicate tasks, it grew a second pair of mechanical arms, smaller and more delicate than its main two, which it could use for finer manipulations.

The golem’s motor functions in general had improved significantly.

Archimedes had Minute practice delicate bladework on fruits and insects. Then on recreated corpses, using silvery surgery tools the dungeon made specifically for that task. Though designed as a tinkerer the golem clearly had natural talent for surgery and was progressing quickly.

While Minute was doing that, Archimedes was experimenting with ways to further slow down the spin of ether: through attempts at direct manipulation of ether particles and mana fields and through incorporating more Mananite structures into the tank.

As Minute was about to graduate from its training, Archimedes finally got things balanced and working on his end, and he sent notice to the Guild that he would be closed for the next week to create his fourth floor.

And he would use that event for cover and privacy while curing Anther.