Mordecai had a hell of a job in front of him. Sure, he’d made it souively easy, and nothing he’d said was incorrect, but this also wasn’t the sort of thing usually done in a day. The illusory diagram grew and spread on the floor, lines and symbols shifting as he explored his options and begaing possible base spells and rituals.

  The first option he mao eliminate was any sort of obfuscation of his own core. Transf it; pg it in a pocket dimension; hell he’d even sidered ways of hiding it inside of her body to be smuggled out; but he calcuted and pared the potential results against the magical barriers around him, seeing which wards would block each of these methods. So long as the wards existed, the core couldn’t leave, and if the core couldn’t leave, he would eventually die down here. The same went with his avatar. So in the end, he was going to have to give up both to get his mind and soul out of here, which meant Moriko would have to be able to carry his esse. But then what? He put that in the back of his mind for now, first he o work on the how.

  There were thousands of ways te various bonds between differeies. Priests fed a certain type of e with divine beings; wizards formed bonds with familiars; certain summoning specialists bound themselves to eidolons; patrons and witches formed tracts that included a familiar; and there were rituals to bind two mortals to each other, some as an oath of service, others a more personal bond such as a ceremony of matrimony with more mystical empowerment, amongst others.

  And of course, there were ics that forced some sort of bond, such as various forms of possession or domihe trol aspects were useless, but possession at least had a seed of getting his spirit into her body. Just, not in a way he had any iion of doing.

  While Mordecai had been w on this problem, Moriko had been expl the small room, eventually pausing to examihe purple crystal sittiled on its pedestal before sitting down to begiating. He’d been aware of her the whole time of course, she was after all inside of his territory, which was effectively his body. But he hadn’t focused on her until shortly after she’d started meditating.

  The flow of his energy ged slightly, a very small disturbance, but with so little activity in general it caught his attention, audied her for a moment before speaking. “Moriko,” he started, pausing as the half-elf twitched, then opened her eyes to look at him. “I have a, ummm, request. I’m still w oails, but one way or ahis is going to require a lot of trust on your part. So, I think I should show a little trust in you.” He the crystal core that was the heart of his true self. “Please, hold my core in your p as you meditate.”

  This startled her, as it would ah even a child's knowledge of dungeons. “Um, are you sure about that? That seems kind of, er, intimate.” Her hesitation and slight blush made him smile. He’d seeions like that before, and she wasly wrong. But he had few choices at this point.

  “Yes, I am sure. And the intimacy is part of the point. My options for myself are rather drastid I want to make sure that I give us both every ce possible. To that end, I’m also pnning on using my core to transmute a portion of my energy into chi while you meditate, eling it into you. It’ll still be fvored by my essence, but it will strengthen you. Some of it will be temporary, some will be perma. I won’t be shaping it so it won’t be creating any specifids, but it should make things go easier ter.”

  The look that she gave him was more than a little dubious, but after a moment Moriko nodded and rose to fetch his core. It was, well, both pleasant and slightly nerve-wrag. She was literally holding his true self, the equivalent of his heart, brain, and soul all ed up into oively vulnerable package. And Mordecai could feel it, the soft touch of her skin upon the surface of his crystal, and the rustling brush of silk whetled down with him in her p. Despite the ioughness of the core that had been reinforced over the course of his life, it left him feeling very vulnerable. And for these purposes, that was a good thing, but there were very few people whom he’d ever let touch him this way.

  Once she started meditating, he went back to his work and did his best to not think about the fact that he was basically feeding her his life energy. To him, things like mana, ki, and life force were intergeable aspects of the same basiergy. And if he couldn’t make this work, his st resort would be to just simply have her devour his energy pletely. After all, if he couldn’t leave, he was dead anyway; and it would be the only way to make sure she, at least, could escape. And it wouldn't hurt his soul, he'd simply move on to his afterlife. Which, well, his patroy might still be upset, so maybe it was best to not think about that too much.

  Besides, that was very much a st resort. In the meantime, he still had a lot of possibilities to work out. And it was more than just binding their souls properly, he was going to have to restructure his own mind and potential avatar as well. A dungeon could over its lifetime form several avatars, both of the standard internal type and the slightly rarer ied avatar that could actually leave the dungeon, though only one could exist at a time. It also took a year from retiring one ied avatar to form a new ohough they could operate an internal avatar during that time. But oired, the old avatar’s skills and knowledge fully merged with the cain, and eavested avatar could learn a new set of martial ical skills, living a whole new life different from the avatar before it.

  In his time, Mordecai had explored almost every possible path and practiced a wide variety of skills. Most of them weren’t going to be of any direct help here, and really he’d never be able to reform these exact avatars again. If he mao establish a new dungeon, he wouldn't be able to even call upon them in an emergency the way he had before, at least, not until he was much more powerful. At which point they wouldn't be as useful. So he began sacrifig them, ref his existing internal avatar as he did so and copying that to be his eventual ied avatar as well, tuning his own physical existe was messy and ineffit, gaining maybe a 10% boost, at best, for the price of aire avatar and about a year’s worth of energy to stay alive down here at minimal energy expenditure. Most avatars gave him less. But it gave him the capacity he was going to need very shortly and created a tempte that he was going to save to eventually be his first avatar. He hoped. Not that he knew how he’d get a new core. Well, he had one idea, but it was rather distasteful and he wasn’t even sure how he’d pull it off.

  The work on his avatar and the ritual proceeded apace, though the rework of his avatar was pleted first. It was, after all, aension of his very self. The illusory design of symbols and their eg lines had grown to several square meters on the ground and a good meter of es was drawn upward into the air as well. Finally, the ritual design reached a point where he had to make a decision before doing further work, and it certainly wasn’t a decision he could make alone. “Moriko, I am almost ready to start the final part of drafting the ritual, but I need your input.”

  Zagaroth