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Chapter 3 - The Eyeless Basilisk

Itry to increase the overall size of the male lizard until it reaches the limit, or I reach mine. It grows and grows, and I stop. It took a vast majority of my mana to make it grow from a couple inches to a 6 meter long lizard, though it seems quite weak? Maybe not enough nutrients? I tried to feed it with mana instead of food, and it worked; it seemed rejuvenated.

I'll increase the size of all the lizards and experiment with them. I want them to be cold-blooded killing machines for any unwanted intruder that wanders into my territory. I intend to make them chase any unfortunate soul through the labyrinthian hallways of the fortress

. Though I can't give them the sense of sight, I can alter their sense of sound so they can hear from a mile away. If I can alter their brains, perhaps I can alter their instincts. Perhaps I can make them like bats and give them echolocation, and then alter their brain so they can process the sound of their hissing and sense where sound bounces off of from.

That should replace its sense of sight. Though they still look fairly weak, their pale translucent scales don't look that durable, and their teeth don't look sharp, so I try to reinforce them, and it works, though it did take a large amount of mana. Perhaps I should've altered them when they were smaller and then increased the size to have saved more mana. But I am done; now I have to do the same for the rest of the lizards. But I'm out of mana, so I should wait. I look at my creation; it's teeth long and sharp; its translucent white scales are hard and tough as steel; and its eyes seem to have been sewn shut.

This might be a bit too powerful for the first floor; maybe I should assign this male as the boss of this floor. Perhaps I should give this creature a name; I dub thee Caecus, Latin for blind. And I dub your species the eyeless basilisk. As I let my mana regenerate, I turned my gaze over to the purple mana that dots the fortress; it seemed to ooze out from the corpses. How odd the death of the lizards didn't seem to produce such mana. I'll call it death mana, for lack of a better term. It's about time to take a look at the relics left behind here.

As I look towards the dead king and his relics, I notice the brown mana that surrounded the staff. I tried to interact with it; it seemed sturdy. Yes, the mana felt strong and durable yet slow and stubborn. Normal mana didn't seem to possess these qualities. I tried to use the staff and infused it with regular mana, and it seemed to convert to the brown mana, and the runes engraved upon it glowed, and ten shards of stone formed, each of different make, and blasted through the throne room walls shattering into a million pieces. I'll have to fix that. The mechanism behind the staff seemed to turn regular mana into brown mana, and then after the runes were activated the brown mana formed stone projectiles. It implies that brown mana was needed to form or conjure stone, so I'll call it earth mana. Perhaps other forms of mana exist water, air, and maybe fire as well?

Pondering the nature of magic, my mana seemed to have fully regenerated so I worked on the female lizards since there are four of them, I wouldn't want to make them as large as the male as that would take too much mana, so I made the females smaller than the males in stature 4 meters wide and 1 meter tall. Growing creatures seemed to take an exponential amount of mana, which was good to know. As I turned to Caucus, I tried to manipulate the earth mana from the staff and imbued it into his core. And after twenty minutes or so, it seemed his core changed in color and turned brown. Caecus seems to be earth mana aligned now. I order him to go outside the fortress and I create an earthen wall, and then I order him to destroy the wall using earth magic. And thus, he gathers earth mana onto his head and forms a helmet out of condensed earth, and rams into the wall, smashing it into pieces. That's a creative use of earth magic.

As I look closely at the rubble, I see earth aligned mana in it. Perhaps due to the fact of being hit with a earth mana infused attack however that may not be the case as I stare closely at an untouched piece of cave wall. It seems there was earth mana in it, though not alot of it seems pretty spread out and overshadowed by the regular mana in the atmosphere. Perhaps you will find earth mana residing within earth, water mana in water, and fire mana in fire? Maybe, but it has not yet been proven, so I'll simply assume it can be the case.

As I look upon the throne room the walls destroyed by the staff, I try to fix the wall by piecing the rubble back into the wall and using earth mana to fuse it back together. There fixed as I look upon the skeletons it seems I should move them somewhere else for safer keeping.