While Moriko and the nexus avatars were off training with their friends and family, the two cores had plenty to occupy them.

For the most part, the nexus's inhabitants and contractors could run all the normal day-to-day matters. They had no major events or anything else to trigger surges of visitors, and they had enough territory to keep most delvers occupied, especially with three different directions to explore, each with either a combat or non-combat option, and the downward direction having a third option for the very daring.

Deidre was the most adept of their currently present contractors at handling matters between visitors and the nexus, while Satsuki, who was just as skilled, acted within her role as Kazue's knight. They could be trusted to handle negotiations with traders in a way that favored Azeria.

Satsuki was an especially dangerous negotiator — with just her skills and personality, she could be seductively charming even to those with no direct interest in a woman, if they had not enough experience in guarding themselves against such an assault. Top that with her ability to subtly shift toward a more masculine form over the course of haggling, and only those who were truly oblivious to sexuality had any innate resistance to her charms.

She was careful not to press with her will or use even a hint of magic beyond her shape-changing — such overtly unfair advantages would displease Lady Kazue, after all. Mordecai doubted that she would have anyway, but Satsuki seemed to enjoy making a point of just how good she was being for the sake of pleasing Kazue. The nine-tailed vixen had always been incorrigible.

For all of her seemingly unfair advantages, the nature of the merchant was to pit one's wit, skill, and will against others when haggling or negotiating. This was the challenge they had accepted, and if they came out of negotiations with too thin a margin, they always had the option of delving to make up the difference. Depending on Satsuki's judgement of a given merchant's worthiness, the nexus could even provide rewards beyond the normal amount the merchant would have won, provided the excess was less than the amount of value lost because of Satsuki's skills.

With all their external affairs taken care of by others, Kazue and Mordecai could focus inward.

Kazue's personal interests were mostly centered around writing her books and experimenting with their plants and mushrooms. There was such an interesting and nearly infinite variety she was able to grow, but the ones she particularly wanted fell into one of several categories: food, medicinal, decorative, and scented. That last was going to be particularly interesting when her avatar got back. Given recent activities, she'd nudged her other self with the idea of asking for a sample of the dryad's roses. In addition to its many other uses, Kazue wanted to see if she could grow some on the balcony of their bedroom. She anticipated rather interesting and entertaining responses from Moriko when she smelled them.

In the mean time, she had other interests to keep track of. Under the category of food, she had a particularly tricky design she wanted to create, and she was experimenting with both fruits and mushrooms to see which one would give her the best results. Kazue wanted to create something meat-like enough to satisfy a true carnivore.

One reason for this was that she wanted to have a more complete ecology. Many of their inhabitants had strong cravings for meat, and all inhabitants preferred to eat even though nexus mana could sustain them directly.

Early on, Mordecai had shown her how to use nexus magic to create a container that would produce meat in a way similar to, though less efficient than, the water fountains and springs. Kazue wanted to replace those generic meat generators with real food, which would also be able to be removed from the nexus as they would be grown, not forged directly from their mana.

Her second reason was more personal. Kazue had been having a harder and harder time finding meats she was willing to eat when around their inhabitants. It wouldn't matter while her avatar wasn't here, but it would matter once her avatar returned. So having other options would be a good thing.

At a distant third, there was also the possibility that there would be some interest from people wanting to trade for such a food, but Kazue wasn't expecting a heavy trade in any sort of meat fruit. She suspected there were only a few niche groups who would be truly interested, plus others who would want it just because it would be an exotic new thing to try, unless she managed to make it hearty enough to survive travel as well as jerked meat or other rations did.

So far, she had partially succeeded in different ways with both lines that she was trying to evolve. The mushrooms were better at creating a texture and flavor that would resemble well-cooked meat when prepared properly, but fungi were not good at imitating the sort of juiciness that meat had.

The fruit she had gotten to almost the right fibrousness and juiciness for raw meat, but its internal structure didn't stand up to being cooked the way meat did. Meat didn't squish the way her fruit did unless you pounded it out, and even then, real meat retained some texture.

The fruit was at least enough to take the edge off of the meat craving for the more carnivorous of their inhabitants. Even Danitsa, celestial servant of Mericume and self-invited guest, admitted that it was decent tasting, though she had also amused herself at Kazue's expense. Before tasting the fruit, Danista had taken on her bipedal form, with her moon-pale skin contrasted by dark, long hair and tails, which appeared to be made of the night sky as stars seemed to float through it. Danista then took an enthusiastic bite of the fruit, and allowed the blood-colored juices to paint her lips, then thickly drip down her chin onto her naked body while making sensuous, enthusiastic groans.

It did not help that the celestial fox's toothy grin had flashed fangs.

Kazue's reaction was mixed. Part of her was appalled at the macabre display, but another part of her took note of the impact of intense, almost gory, red juice against the monochrome background of pale skin and midnight-sky hair. That part was also beginning to formulate an idea for a new horror-romance story, though she would probably want a separate pen name for those sorts of books.

It also made her wonder how pale Mordecai's avatar could make his skin. For that matter, just how pale could Kazue's own shape-shifting make her? Though Mordecai was the only one who could grow the right sort of fangs.

Maybe she should set those thoughts aside for later. As she’d learned previously, only frustration lay in this line of thinking till her body came home.

With the dubious assistance of Danitsa, Kazue was satisfied that the fruit was mostly ready for use to replace their meat-producing containers, though not all of her inhabitants were entirely satisfied. Well, nothing was perfect, and Kazue could keep trying to improve it, including introducing varieties with different textures and flavors, and maybe alter the skin as well. A peach like fuzz could make it feel more like biting into prey. The mushroom line was at least well suited for things like stew, so it just needed some more variety in flavors.

In both cases, ensuring that they readily took up iron from the soil helped with the flavor, though it certainly wasn't everything they needed.

There was an unintended side effect of having created this fruit. Bunbees that harvested nectar from the meat fruit's flowers had that portion of their honey turn almost blood red. One of the hives decided to specialize in those flowers, carefully mixing crimson nectar with nectar harvested from the crystal flowers. This was going to give the nexus a new line of sparkling red honey to work with.

The benefits of the honey didn't change with the color, though the red honey had a bit of a tang — a rich, slightly metallic undertone and a somewhat overly sweet scent — that their normal honey did not. They would have to figure out the best way to market it; there was surely a group of people who would like it more just because it was red. Kazue was also certain that Bellona would be able to find interesting ways to bring out the subtle flavors, once she returned. If Bellona and Dairell, the head chef of the bunkin clan, competed over it, she was certain that they would come up with a few recipes that showed off the crimson honey well. Then Kazue should be able to tempt the merchants with the new wares.

Although, if Danitsa ate the honey in front of the merchants the same way she ate that fruit, the nexus would never be able to keep it in stock. But as amusing as that thought was, Kazue shelved it. Aside from not wanting rumors about a pale-skinned, sky-haired woman running around naked and bathing in blood, the nexus would have difficulty in repaying her proportionally to the increased sales.

Outside of trying to produce fake meats, Kazue's experiments were not terribly focused on any particular results. She was trying a more whimsical approach to encouraging crossbreeds and similar changes. These often produced unexpected results, but that was also what she wanted. It was a good way to create something new and different enough to draw attention and excitement.

It turned out that this was also a good way to create some nasty stink bombs. Kazue had to apologize to the bunkin druids more than once for such mistakes.

At least her mistakes were just stinky or mildly noxious. Mordecai's experiments were much more energetic when they went wrong.

He had become fascinated with the new possibilities of all these metals and compounds that he hadn't been so motivated to experiment with so thoroughly in the past. With their core having grown again after they had claimed their most recent zone, Mordecai had enough room to carefully browse his stored memories and search for and unfold prior data, though he limited himself to a single layer of description, rather than the detailed results. This browsing had verified that he had previously been aware of many of these metals, but only as components of various crystals. Not as metals in and of themselves.

This caused him to start looking at the components of other crystals to see what he might be able to separate out. It was hard to know what was going to turn out to be metallic when purified until after he had created a pure version of it.

One particular crystal proved quite surprising. In its 'perfect' state, it was colorless and clear, but naturally occurring samples were usually colored. It could come in almost any color, but far more interesting was that it combined calcium with the catalyst that the body used to maintain the enamel on teeth.

It also turned out that when one tried to create a pure version of that catalytic substance, it tended to reject that state with sudden heat and possibly an explosion as soon as it came into contact with just about anything. And if it didn't set something on fire on contact, adding a spark of electricity would fix that.

The crystal was known as fluorite, so Mordecai decided to call this excitable substance fluorine. Its explosive power was incredible, but it was also unusable in this state. The stuff was so unstable that it could never be incorporated into a trap. It would also be difficult to manifest enough fluorine to be a threat to a target, given how far away the nexus would have to manifest it when dealing with anyone strong enough to be worth the trouble.

It was also costly in an unusual way. It was so eager to combust that the mana-forged particles readily intermingled with normal air and other substances. This made it difficult to recycle the mana used in these experiments quickly or efficiently, given how strong the bonds were. So he decided to set those experiments aside for now; maybe if he didn't have any other projects sometime in the future he could revisit this and set up a chamber where there were only other mana-forged substances for it to interact with.

In his original nexus, by the time Mordecai had been able to analyze and recombine substances to this degree, there had seemed little point. He already had access to all the exotic mystical metals and other such materials he could ask for, as well as plenty of energy to spend on any magical effect he desired.

After a quick perusal of the first layer raw data he'd found in his stored memories, Mordecai extracted his techniques and taught those to Kazue, and left the detailed records in their compact state. Combining those techniques with the their new awareness of how varied metal types truly were, they would be able to examine existing samples more deeply, and they should be able to find more new metals.

Fortunately, most of his experiments were less energetic than his ones with fluorine.

One of his favorites was discovering that with the right alloys, he could create solid metals that were entirely non-crystalline. This made the alloy much stronger and harder than one would otherwise expect, and because it didn't deform readily, it made for an incredibly efficient surface if one wanted something to bounce other objects off of it, even, or maybe especially, if that object didn't normally bounce well.

This could be a very useful property for something like a tower shield, if it had been properly and solidly set in place. If the shield couldn't move, all the energy of the bounce would be applied to the object that hit it. That effect would be less useful or even detrimental for a lighter shield or weapon, as the bounce of any impacts would affect both parties.

However, this amorphous structure was glass-like, which came with the weakness of glass: brittleness.

While a considerable number of these non-crystalline alloys could be several times stronger than most other metals, the complete lack of give meant that they shattered instead of giving or bending, and they gave no warning before they shattered. Still, they could be used in some of the same places as glass while being less fragile. Glass styluses were beautiful and efficient, but could break easily. Replacing glass with one of these glass-like metals made for a different sort of beauty and a much less fragile writing instrument. They became part of the rewards for the library zone, including the combat path.

Hmm.

Mordecai made a mental note to make sure Orchid learned of these, he was certain she would want entire sets. And he would not ask questions when some of them needed replacing. It would be best to assume she'd given them away as gifts.

His experiments did not end with having determined the nature of this amorphous metal. Mordecai was trying to find a way to blend the amorphous structure into a gradually more crystalline structure, to provide a more flexible backing that could absorb some energy, but so far he hadn't managed to find the right combination of alloys to blend into each other. He was certain it was going to take at least five distinct alloys to step between the brittle metal and a more flexible metal in the correct manner.

Alternatively, he could work on making a unique form of mystic metal that incorporated one of these alloys. A quick check of the labels on his stored memories found no hints that he might have tried this before, or at least had never put enough effort into it to make it worth labeling.

Copying the way mana was embedded into the material of mithral or adamantine was one thing. Manually forging mana into particle-like forms to experiment with was significantly harder. The particles were only stable when they were part of a pattern, but only if the pattern was the right sort of pattern, such as one of the known mystic metals.

By themselves, or when in an incompatible or incomplete pattern, they immediately began to decompose into normal mana.

So far, Mordecai had not been able to discern a set of rules for what made up a compatible pattern, which made this a game of blind guessing until he could figure out what the rules were.

When his experiments became too frustrating, Mordecai turned his attention to another project. He was sifting through the structure of his stored memories to find more that might be relevant sometime soon. Seshadri had been a pleasant surprise, but that meant there was a chance for an unpleasant surprise encounter with someone who knew him.

This required comparing maps of the current cities and countries to the maps of the world he had known, and then looking for memories labeled with the corresponding locations for where they would be traveling soon. These memories could be synchronized when his avatar returned to the nexus briefly, before the journey north.

The process also required unlocking a lot of 'useless' memories, relative to their current needs, but Mordecai didn't entirely mind that. It was a touch inefficient, but they were also his memories. It was disconcerting to realize that he didn't always know why he knew something, such as the three purses lesson and Seshadri. He'd kept his knowledge of that little test, but hadn't kept the associated memories active.

He couldn't prepare for every eventuality, but he could at least try to be prepared for more.