Everything was ready to go, and Obu looked at the finished product with pride. It had been hard to get the Slimeling Framework to work with her plan, but the end result was just about what she wanted. The Sapient Framework she had been gifted had provided the majority of what she needed, but it was only that.

  It was the scaffolding that allowed her to build something new. She quickly discovered that Slimelings would never have become sapient without her intervention. They had little to no brain or anything resembling it. Their impulses were driven by their Aether Conduits, and thus, they were more like funnels through which their particular aspect or affinity affected the world at large.

  Her Pure-Touched Slimelings would hunger for corruption or a similar substance, such as disease or infection. Without such sustenance, they wouldn’t grow, only subsisting off of the Aether in the atmosphere. Other slimelings would hunt for whatever their conduits hungered for. Such were the limits of their ‘brains.’

  Thus, slimelings were little more than pests and free Experience to those able to hunt them. From the way the System referred to them, they weren’t terribly effective. Obu, therefore, sought to change that opinion in true Gobbo fashion. She had started her self-imposed goal because she had wanted to make use of the Pure Aspect of her Slimelings. Now, she wanted to finish it to show the System that even small slimelings could rise to the occasion if given the chance.

  She started by creating a core of incredibly detailed crystalline latticework. Her children would be similar to her in that regard. The crystal would act as a brain, heart, and Aetheric center all in one. The latter ingredient made everything work. It was the same reason she was able to be sapient herself, after all.

  Aether. The Maker’s Breath. The new sapient slime would be able to breathe via its Aether Conduits, drawing in the life-giving substance and housing it within its core where the Aether would be purified by its aspect. After, the Aether would be drawn into separate chambers, one for the mind and one for the heart.

  The mind would house all of the Aether necessary for cognitive function, and it was robust enough, in theory, to house the System and its workings. The heart held the outgoing Aether Conduits needed to direct Aether outward into the sapient slimes' bodies. The body was where the majority of the difficulty came into play. Slimelings had no bone structure or musculature.

  Strictly speaking, they didn’t need any. They moved via a sort of oozing motion, where they sludged part of their body forward in whatever direction they wanted to go and then sucked the rest of their body into following. It all worked off of Aether or rather relaxing and firming their Conduits. That wouldn’t work if Obu wanted true defenders for her dungeon.

  The solution was hardly simple. Creating anatomy from scratch, no matter how simple, was an exercise in futility. If Obu had been any other entity, she probably would have given up. She wasn’t any other entity, however. She was a Dungeon Core and one blessed by a System that gave enough hints that she got a working anatomy in time. However, quite a bit came from her memories of life with her father before becoming sapient herself.

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  Essentially, she borrowed inspiration from her father’s conversations with elementals and other such spirits. By melding her slime sapient’s Spark with its very body, using the core as a focus, she could give it full control of every part of itself. The default appearance of her children would be that of a small child-like body wrapped around the core, but it would be capable of shifting its shape at will. The core itself would be a major weak point since it contained the entirety of the slime’s life, but there was very little she could do to change that.

  Her children would need to adapt in order to survive. Providentially, the System would provide the means like it had with her brother. Then again, there was also the small matter of whether the Maker would even approve of what she had created. Gazing at the Framework, she didn’t think there was much to disapprove of, but she wasn’t the supreme creator of all there was and would ever be.

  Obu hummed to herself. Sitting around worrying wasn’t getting her any closer to having another set of sapient defenders. It took her a few moments to still her mind before she activated the ritual. When she unleashed the ritual, she didn’t have a specific specimen in mind; there was only the Framework of her new sapient and the heady mix of excitement and anxiety that came with it.

  Unlike her father’s ritual, where he had been seeking to transform a high-rank entity and raise it to sapience, Obu sought to create something new. Her slimelings didn’t have a core, and their Sparks weren’t developed enough to embody the concepts she was trying to bring to life. She was truly attempting the improbable.

  A presence descended even as she funneled yet more Aether into the ritual. It was fatherly in one way but ancient and unknowable in another. The voice that spoke was great and terrible, but there was no denying its warmth or the love that bled forth from each word spoken.

  “Ah, Daughter of Flame, this is a good attempt. I accept this first creation in the spirit with which it was created. No longer simply touched by Purity, these creatures shall embody it. Pure of purpose, they shall be as inflexible with their pursuit of knowledge and belief as they are flexible with their bodies. Fiercely loyal, fiercely dependant on their guiding light, I entrust this new race into your hands. Give them a Name.”

  Obu had to force herself to speak as the presence waited patiently. It was just about too much to take in, but luckily, she had already prepared a name, and she thought it was rather good. “Slymenentals as a race, Purons as a people.”

  “So let it be,” The Maker intoned, and the ritual ended in a blaze of glorious light that left Obu gasping for Aether.

  She came out of the ritual with the innate understanding that it had taken longer to complete than her perception of the event would lead her to believe. As she reacclimated to sensing the entirety of her Dungeon body, there were multiple dings that accompanied System messages. As if playing catch up after the ritual, several messages were now ready for her to peruse.

  Obu ignored them for now, noticing that her father had returned from his foray into the wilderness. Not only that, but her brother Razum was with him, showing off three creatures that were very clearly fungal in nature. As much as she wanted to dive into a conversation with her family, she had yet to actually go over, much less summon, her newest creations.

  Therefore, she turned to the System messages, which were awaiting her opening. Bracing herself, she did just that.