I built the imp summoning experiment underground in the centermost ring of the city , where our important infrastructure sits. I''d asked Zeb for permission to start work on an area for testing there, and he''d given me the go ahead. I didn''t ask him to send any construction teams to help me, but he sent a team anyway after I''d been working for a few days on my own, so the area was completed in just under nine total days. In that time, my maximum mana recovered a single point that had been missing due to the previous incident. Meaning I still had 77 missing points of max mana, and it''ll take over a year to fully heal at the current rate.


    There was still a few months until winter when the dwarves would be leaving, so I decided to take a little time to directly oversee the imp summoning experiments. It''s unfortunate that I''m being prevented from having imps summoned in an isolated environment, because it would''ve been a good data point to compare the different environments to. Instead, I''ll only have two types of data points, the fight pits which are similar to the cave, and the new summoning chambers.


    Over the course of just over two months, I kept track of data related to the imps and resulting goblins. For this study, I''m treating the fight pit goblins as our control, since it''s essentially how our entire population was already summoned. For this particular study, I''ve set it up so that a maximum of twelve imps will be summoned in each environment each day if available. So, we''ll summon twelve in the twelve rooms we made, and also twelve in the fight pits. If the rooms are still occupied, then we won''t summon any there, but we''ll still summon up to the maximum amount. If, somehow, the fight pit also still has a remaining imp in it, then the same rules would apply.


    The study is going to have to go for a few years, and keep track of the performance of the various demons as they live their lives in our city. The reason being that if we summon three times as many demons, but they only work one quarter as much as the fight pit demons, then it''s actually more beneficial to summon the fight pit demons, since they''re more motivated over their lifetime. I thus needed to put that extra work onto someone, and I chose the goblin who has been managing the job academy. However, I did tell them they could hire up to two assistants to help them, since this is a decently larger work load.


    As for the actual resultant numbers of new citizens that were summoned from each environment over the seventy days I watched over the experiment, we had 85 goblins from the fight pits and 115 goblins from the experimental summoning style. While the numbers were close, there were two very easy to identify differences about the resultant goblins from the two styles.


    First, the goblins that came from the fight pits evolved fairly regularly within the same period of time. The only reason we didn''t end up with exactly 70 was because a small portion of the summoning events would end up with two goblins, rather than just one. By comparison, the other goblins would occur at fairly random intervals. Some would evolve within about a day, but we had one individual that stayed an imp for 37 days, holding up one of the cells for a very long time, preventing any more summoning there.


    Second, the mindset of the goblins that came from the fight pit was pretty uniform, they were obedient to those they perceived as more powerful than themselves. While the experimental style had more individuals that had varying personalities. The ones that evolved quickly exhibited the same obedience as the fight pit goblins, but the ones that waited to evolve had more varied personalities, and they were usually more entitled, demanding food and other things be done for them.This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.


    I have two hypotheses for why that might be the case, that would require further testing to identify. The first hypothesis is that the strength respecting imps are simply the most likely to win the battle royale in the fight pit, while unlikely, it is an option. The second hypothesis is that the format of the new summoning option instills a sort of belief of the rights to food and service, because that''s essentially how we''re treating them in the new area.


    For the time being while I go see off the dwarves, I''m going to tell Zaka to only use his old summoning method. I want to make sure that we actually know what the long term impacts of this new method might be on our citizenry before we continue using it. After a year or two, I''ll look over the longitudinal data we''ll have collected on the various goblins that we now have, and I''ll make some modifications to the experiment if it seems worth it to continue pursuing it.


    There is at least one merit to this new summoning method though. If we were to build out more areas for them to be summoned in, we actually could be creating many, many more goblins, since a large reason that we didn''t create more was because the area was at capacity a lot of the time. With the old method, only a little over 1 in 8 summonings would actually result in a goblin, where as every summoning with the new method does. Though the new method is more labor intensive. As I said before, if their personalities end up difficult to deal with though, it''s actually bad to have more.


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    The send off for the dwarves was quite extravagant. They kept enough money on hand to throw a huge banquet in their gambling hall on the night before they began the trek to the other side of the island where their ship was built. Over the last month or so, they took it on trial trips around our island, being sure to stay close enough to shore, just in case any leviathans actually showed up.


    I went with them to the other side of the island to see them off. I gently reminded them that there wouldn''t be a return trip, since we were going to be taking the crystal down after winter, or whenever we get a message that they made it back. This was more of a warning to any military higher-ups on the mainland that the trip would still be dangerous and trying to invade us would be foolhardy.


    I also wanted to evaluate the tunnel progress, and see just how much stone we''d stockpiled on this side of the island. The answer was that they''d stockpiled a lot of stone. When they were digging the other half of the tunnel, the stone wouldn''t last very long, as it''d get picked up for construction projects. Here, I can get a pretty good scope of the actual volume being extracted.


    A large amount of the extracted stone is in the form of cut blocks, so it''s piled up into a few different triangular prisms. Some are very regular in size and comprise a single prism, which I assume was cut using the dwarven stone cutting magic. The others aren''t quite as regular, and as such, aren''t quite as naturally stable, leading to portions that look a bit weird. There is a final pile that is comprised of odds and ends which would take a lot more effort to build nice buildings from, but if we have need for another jetty, it would make good material for it.


    As for the tunnel, the scouting tunnel is almost to the midpoint now. I shouldn''t be surprised, given they didn''t run into any detours on this side to mine anything. However, I still did some basic checks with tectonic sense over the course of 15 days. Technically, the dwarf that had access to that kind of magic should have been doing it as well, but I can never be too sure that they didn''t miss something. We''ve been out of quartz for quite a while now, and I actually do have projects that could use the mana insulative properties.


    Unfortunately, I didn''t find anything along this side of the island with my own checks. As an upshot from that, it does mean we''ll probably get the tunnel completed sooner than later. I expect that they''ll reach the midpoint area sometime next year, and at that point I''ll be using tectonic sense to help link the two tunnels together. In the meantime, I''m going to spend some time around the city this winter while I await a message from Kao as to how the dwarves'' trip went.