Good oil, like good wine, is a gift from the gods. The grape and the olive are among the priceless benefactions of the soil, and were destined, each in its way, to promote the welfare of man. — George Ellwanger

Once I had the cat settled in, safe in the secured hallway with a small dish of water and a few small fish, I turned my attention elsewhere, figuring that I'd done enough exploring for the moment. I was excited to get back to dracolisk territory, but I did want to keep balancing my workload. Hakdrilda hadn't reached back out to me yet, nor did the Redcrests need anything from me, so that left me with some options – either expanding to fill in some awkward gaps in my territory or some archaeology, most productively. Alternatively, I could start building my third floor, as opposed to just expanding my domain, but I did want to clear up a few stray pieces first. The archives were another option, as well; I did still need to look into crystallographic and runic magic; I didn't think I was done with fungalmancy either, though my options seemed a bit limited. I didn't want to give up on my hobbies entirely, but they were still going to need to take a backseat for a while.

I spent most of the late-night hours slowly absorbing surface territory north of the stream, stopping just short of the traditional visitors camping spot by the remains of the old pier. I figured that leaving the campsite outside of the dungeon was probably going to be considered good form, and anyone who wanted to land directly within my domain could tie up to the reconstructed pier on my second floor. No one had, as yet, but I imagined someone would eventually.

I was trying to establish a smooth boundary back to the Aubesan ruins, and I did, in fact, find the remains of a small, but well-constructed road not far below the surface and apparently running from the pier back towards the manor house and its various outbuildings. The progress was a bit slower than one might expect, as I was assimilating not just the surface but also subsurface territory down as far as the first level.

It was, of course, quite dark, so I didn't really make much effort to observe the native creatures fleeing my encroachment. The dungeon aura I was giving off was, apparently, enough to wake birds from their sleep and send them off to safer lands. They might return once my boundaries stabilized, but the active expansion seemed to be concerning for them. Some of the mammals were a bit bolder, or at least more curious, and a few stuck around to actually observe what I was doing. No blueprints, of course, but I did get to identify a couple of creatures for my naturalist quest. The first was a small mustelid, whose name came up as Spotted Polecat, and that looked like a cross between a ferret and a spotted skunk. The second was a small group of feral pigs, or possibly wild boar. They weren't as massive as domestic hogs could get in my old world, but there were still five of them, with a total mass probably approaching half a metric ton of pork on the hoof. 100 kilos is still a pretty big pig, and with their shaggy gray coats and ivory tusks, they'd be a formidable opponent for most natural predators.

They snorted a bit uncomfortably, but moved out of my domain only slowly, as if daring me to send my creatures after them. I had no such plans, of course, though I did briefly ponder letting the Redcrest hunters know where to find them. They had yet to bring back a wild pig, so I was guessing either they didn't care to hunt anything quite so large and dangerous, or they simply hadn't noticed them. Most likely the latter, since their primary hunting style involved spears rained down from above without landing until the prey had fallen. That didn't seem right, though, as the pigs left a quite noticeable trail behind them as they moved through the scrubby woodlands on the fringe of the larger grassland areas, so perhaps the Redcrests simply preferred other game. Still, I suspected even the grizzlies would hesitate to assault the pack of pigs unless they were quite hungry, as the risk of sustaining an injury would be high.

More interesting to me was the variety of archaeological remains I was encountering as I expanded along the north shore of the stream towards the ruins. I'd known that I hadn't found all of the associated buildings of the manor house, and I did run into what seemed to be a few more – I decided to combine this expansion with my archaeological time and took a bit of extra time to do them correctly.

The first structure I encountered was the largest in areal extent, though the physical remains were modest, mostly low footing stones that would have supported a wooden superstructure and that seemed likely to represent storage of some sort – possibly a warehouse for export purposes, but potentially just a convenient storage point for the manor more generally. It, like the barn, showed some signs of having been burnt to the ground during Mayphesselth's initial occupation of the island – possibly later, but I didn't think by very much. The warehouse did seem to have been largely stripped of whatever it had contained, so perhaps she'd simply come along and burned the place down after the people had fled. One could hope, anyways...

In any event, the evidence I found suggested that the predominant use of the space was for storing agricultural products, most of which I'd already documented in other contexts. That translated to few new blueprints, but I could feel my Intuitive Reconstruction skill picking up some finer details to use in adjusting my warehouse space on the second floor, so I didn't feel like it was a waste of time. The most interesting find was the remains of a large jar with a restricted mouth that I assumed to be used for shipping liquids. The name suggested it might have been olive oil, but I didn't want to place too much focus on the name itself. That said, between the centuries and the heat of the fire, there wasn't really a good way to verify the former contents. My thermoluminescent dating skill verified that the building was burned down at least roughly contemporaneously with the barn – I'd assumed as much, but since there was no cost involved in checking, I did so happily.

Blueprint Acquired: Olive Jar – Aubesan

As I continued my expansion along the road and the stream back towards the manor house, I had next encountered a series of residential structures. Three of them were quite small, seeming to represent single family homes for rather less well-off individuals – I was guessing farmhands or other staff of the main household. These were effectively small, one-room structures with a stone hearth at one end, and general living space taking up the rest of the room. Two had been nearly entirely stripped of movable goods, but the third had apparently been subjected to dragonfire before the inhabitants had a chance to pack everything up. There wasn't anything particularly valuable looking, so either they'd been quite poor, or they'd managed to secure at least their most prized possessions.

Unfortunately, the fire did mean that pretty much everything organic had been destroyed, though after several hundred years, it's likely not much would have been left in any case. I did pick up a few rusted-out tool pieces and food preparation tools – the first having apparently been stored on the walls or in the eaves from their position, and the second located in two discrete clusters on either side of the hearth.

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Blueprint Acquired: Basalt Mortar and Pestle

Blueprint Acquired: Glazed Terracotta Casserole Dish – Aubesan

Blueprint Acquired: Steel Shovel Blade – Aubesan

Blueprint Acquired: Steel Sickle Blade - Aubesan

A final, larger residence turned out to have a more barracks-like structure, and it might have held up to 20 individuals with largely communal living spaces and a single larger kitchen. I wasn't sure if it was actually a barracks, though, or simply living space for potentially seasonal farm workers or just single men of the household.

It was possible there had been slaves, but I didn't see any particular evidence of that; I was, as yet, unfamiliar with social practices along those lines in the Aubesan Empire, though casting my mind back to some of the first books I'd been given, there had been at least passing mention of slavery in a global survey, though I'd not seen mention of it in the history of Zaipruniel or the dungeon codes of either of the countries I'd been in so far.

Again, there was little to find here aside from the stray lost pieces of everyday life that had happened to preserve. I found several brass buttons, mostly unadorned, but with a few stamped with the profile of a running horse. I wasn't sure if that was specifically heraldic, but it certainly seemed to suit the picture I'd been developing of the ruins as a kind of latifundia-style noble estate, if quite possibly without the slavery.

Blueprint Acquired: Brass Button – Aubesan Cavalry

Those were interesting, if not truly noteworthy. It was the final two structures that I uncovered, in roughly mid-morning, that helped to flesh out some of the remaining aspects of the estate's economic approach. The two similar buildings appeared to represent simple processing locations for olives and grapes, with each including fairly different presses. Not much really remained but the carefully shaped millstones for the olive press and some of the hardware that I interpreted as part of a basket press for the grapes in terms of the presses themselves. That said there were still remnants of the barrel straps used for aging the wine and amphorae for their transport. Similarly, fragments of the jars used to store olive oil also remained, and contrary to the less specialized contexts, enough grape pips and olive pit fragments remained that I was fairly confident in my assessment of the structures.

It was all very interesting from an archaeological and culinary perspective, but not terribly useful in any direct fashion. As a dungeon, it was always going to be simpler to simply obtain blueprints of things like olive oil and wine and produce them directly. I'd already secured a few samples of different wines from the Redcrests, though theirs were mostly homemade and relatively rough, as I understood it. They did trade for a few bottles from more settled peoples, but luxuries had been pretty far down on their list for the past year or two.

I briefly considered expanding the second floor to include rooms reflective of these economic endeavors, but realistically, I needed to start the third floor instead. Plus, I didn't really want to start making olive oil-based slip and fall traps or crushing people in wine presses – it seemed a bit too silly, really. I was already a bit wary of that with some of my existing traps but still felt that themed rooms should probably have themed traps.

By the time the afternoon had rolled around, I had made good progress in trying to expand towards the earlier excavations, though I still had some distance to go. Still, another session along these lines would likely have me connecting the two parts together and going a long way towards making the surface part of my domain more coherent and roughly symmetrical around my core, and I could already feel my dungeon instincts receding a bit. They still weren't happy with the way I was splitting off from the main dungeon to expand towards the core, but the backfilling was helping.

Archaeologically speaking, I wasn't finding any evidence of earlier occupations on the surface, but I'd been slowly adding bits of potsherds and that was helping me fill out my knowledge of their ceramic assemblage. With the ability to control the matrix and excavations at a fine level, I was actually building a nice set of battleship curves - that is, seriation of the remains that would help assess which pottery styles were popular at a given moment, and that could be used for relative dating. Several of the residences had been used for extended periods, as evidenced by resurfacing of floors and the relatively deep midden deposits I was finding in adjoining areas.

That, actually, was one of the richest and most informative sets of deposits, as generally speaking, it was a convenient place to dispose of all kinds of waste. Being a dungeon made excavating them much safer and more pleasant than when I'd been a living being with a sense of smell and a concern for health hazards. To be honest, these were old enough and mostly trash heaps rather than latrines, so it likely would have been fine in any event. Enough organic material had persisted in one form or another that I could get a pretty good sense of the local diet – which had apparently been heavy on grains and red meat, and a bit light on poultry and seafood. Indications suggested a lot of stewed dishes (mostly through polishing of the bones), which is pretty normal for anyone who needed to work outside of the home for long periods – it enabled you to simmer things all day, taking advantage of cheaper pieces of meat and grains and being less time sensitive. The standard "peasant" diet involved lots of stewed grains and vegetables and coarse breads, with occasional meat and dairy. These people may have gotten a bit more meat than your standard medieval peasant, but I wasn't sure what that meant for their social organization or social status. The scarce skeletal remains I'd encountered (and left alone) showed no nutritional deficiencies, though the array of healed breaks suggested a fairly rough-and-tumble lifestyle.

In any event, I paused work on the expansion of my domain and the archaeological investigations in the mid-afternoon, opting to first return my focus to my core library. I was still waiting, obviously, on the industrial reader, so I was limited in the books I could borrow at the moment. Still, nothing prevented me from drawing up a reading list of titles, and I spent a pleasant hour or two weeding through titles looking for books that might contain useful information about crystallographic magic, runic magic, fungalmancy, dracolisks, and other sky islands. Searches for extraplanar void dwarves, unsurprisingly, returned no immediate results; whatever they'd done here, that knowledge didn't seem to have been passed down to the current day even as a legend.

After that, I'd checked in on the now fully recovered wizard's cat; it wasn't best pleased with the way its last exploration had ended, nor was it particularly eager to revisit the room full of psychoactive mushrooms and cave alligators. Practically speaking, I could understand where it was coming from, even if I was likely to force it back into exploration mode soon enough.

Opting not to force it for the time being, we'd just settled into a round of negotiations, mostly focused on what treats I could provide in exchange for its services when we were interrupted by a quite literal knock at the door.

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