IWUAaDNW: Initiative 6.6

"Which… reminds me; our tamed minions basically subsist themselves from our mana, right?"

"Fresh Dungeon-born ones, yes."

Karjn paused.

"…Okay, now I have another, more pressing question. There's a way to tell if a monster has been born on the surface, or if it comes from a dungeon?"

Fuck. If we spread my minions around, but it was obvious that they came from me in the first place, we would be throwing away all the effort put into keeping me a secret.

"Only for the first season or so," Thogra replied. "Dungeon monsters aren't 'real', per-se, so if its master dies or releases it, then the monster will disappear, just like a regular dungeon monster inside its birthplace. After spending long enough on the surface, though, they become real enough to leave a partial or complete corpse." She shrugged.

That wouldn't do, then. We couldn't exactly tell the Shade to wait here until the minions he tamed stopped being potential question bombs. How had this never come up, though? Was it just not common knowledge?

"You could ask Lilua and Samel," Thogra continued, "Their mana can make a dungeon animal real, but there's only two of them, and I'm pretty sure they ran themselves raw getting the mats you needed for that fancy torch over there."

[...]

Kamella nodded in understanding. "We've probably just never seen a freshly tamed dungeon monster die." She hummed and tapped her chin for a moment. "I believe I've heard something to that effect––a pearl of Velthian wisdom. 'If you're taming a monster to kill it for its parts, then you should thank it by letting it live in comfort and happiness for a year, otherwise it will punish you in the afterlife'. I believe this may be related to that?"

[...]

If there was a way to solve this, it was to postpone the sale––have Thogra and Horzel tame the minions we wanted to sell, distribute them among the villagers and wait an entire year, then hand them over to The Shade.