We had a discussion about whether we needed to move the crystal back underground or not, given the destructiveness of the leviathans waging war on each other. Ultimately, we decided we'd wait to see. Despite the amount of destruction, the artificial tide pools still seem to be at above normal production. If they seem like they are getting depleted, then we'll move the crystal immediately.

So, while we took 20 days getting a bunch of items repaired, not one, but two leviathan corpses washed up on the shore. Well, washed up is a bad description. It's more like they have formed large piles of flesh off the coast a short distance. The first was a massive eel like creature which got lodged between our two valleys. Seeing a leviathan up close was quite terrifying. At a distance, it's hard to tell exactly how large they are, but once it was this close, it was much easier to get a gauge for their size.

A whale would easily fit within the mouth of the beast. During low tide, it's still more than half submerged, but I'd estimate the eel's diameter at it's head to be about 100 feet. Though that is mostly speculation, because the head is half missing, either crushed or devoured by another leviathan which resulted in its death. The length, despite being curled and bunched up on the rocks is still horrific, it's probably a half-mile long.

Around half of it still isn't really caught on the rocks, and floats in and out with the tides. Even with it's gigantic stature, it seems nature still treats this similarly to a whale fall. Every day we'd look at it, more of its flesh, and eventually meat, began to be eaten by smaller fishes. Though small in this case is a relative term.

It's only eel like though, and not really an eel. There were dozens of paddle like fins down the length of the body, which were the first parts to be eaten from the corpse. Interestingly, there didn't seem to be bones inside those fins, or if there were, they were also eaten. In fact, as the creature was slowly devoured, it's body seemed to be segmented similar to a centipede, with a subdermal exoskeleton. I know biology on this world has some differences with earth, but that'd make this thing closer to an arthropod, rather than a vertebrate, despite it's initial appearance.

The second leviathan that washed up ended up part of the way along the craggy side of the island that had the original road. This leviathan was shaped like a crab, and unlike the eel-like leviathan that only resembled an eel on the surface, this really did seem to be crab-like all the way down. There really is just something special about carcinization and crab-like shapes. Well, it's probably more to do with being an efficient and easy to evolve into design, but none-the-less it's impressive.

This leviathan was equally impressive, though in a somewhat different manner. The crab leviathan had one claw that was larger than the other, with the larger of the two being over 200 feet from edge to edge. In theory, it could probably snap through the eel's body if magic weren't involved. The rest of the crab's body was only slightly larger than the large claw itself. Unlike the eel which had a fleshy cover, the crab was covered in chitinous armor, though it seems to be missing a large portion of its lower half, along with whatever legs it would have.

On one hand, having these leviathans dead should mean less fighting between the leviathans themselves, making it less dangerous for us. It also is providing an ample food source for fish closer to shore, which might offset the damage that the fights are doing. On the other hand, I know that when one of these leviathans die, surely another is gaining a ton of levels, and becoming even more dangerous than before. It's also possible that many more leviathans have died, and they just didn't wash to shore, getting caught deeper underwater.

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I talked big in the past about using radioactive artillery shells to kill leviathans, but honestly, given their size, I'm not so sure it would kill them. It might rot the nearby area, and it could even permanently scar them, but killing them might not happen. Cancer tends to be less dangerous to large creatures for various reasons, so even that might not kill them with long term exposure.

Further, any leviathans we kill that way would end up being a nuclear death zone for any other living creature trying to approach them. Though we might get lucky in that the radioactivity might slowly break down the crystal itself over time, reducing it's effectiveness, and rendering it harmless over a few decades time. It's an option to consider using as a last resort after most of the leviathans kill each other off, if we can't come up with any other way to kill them, or if other options fail.

I've been talking with Tiberius about ideas for handling them. He favors the idea of attempting to poison them. It's not an awful idea, but we'd need an absolutely massive amount of poison to kill something of that size, or it'd need to be a very toxic poison, likely both. Another issue we just don't have any data on is the healing capabilities of leviathans. The dead ones we've seen have suffered catastrophic physical injuries that likely killed them instantly. We've seen that evolution for demons can heal very deadly wounds, so it would be entirely possible that leviathans have that kind of capability.

Though it could entirely depend on the leviathan. They're really only called that due to their size. It's very clear that they're different species from each other, and that there are multiples of each species present. We might need to try to handle things on a case by case basis. At some point, I also expect eagles to start showing up. When that happens, we'll have our hands even more full than they currently are.

After a lot of heated discussion, we determined that poisoning a single leviathan would be nearly impossible, at least, by normal means. Getting them to ingest a poison would be easy, given their proclivity to crush entire ships in their mouths, viewing them as food. The issue is procuring enough poison to actually kill them. Even chemically produced poisons would require such a huge volume of production that it'd be nearly impossible.

However, just because poison likely wouldn't work doesn't mean other baited methods won't. Tiberius first recommended growing a larger silver fluorite crystal, and keeping it in a lead container on a large barge. Then, we just hope that a leviathan swallows it whole, and is capable of breaking the lead seal around the crystal. In theory, it could work, but again, I want to save that for a last resort.

That did give me the idea that we didn't need to necessarily use poison. High explosives could work. We're not far from being able to produce nitroglycerin. Managing the nitroglycerin to deliver it to a leviathan without it detonating early might be a little tricky, but I'd expect that the impact of having it's container suddenly jostled and crushed would detonate it.

Tiberius was very excited by the idea of the explosive power of nitroglycerin, which I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by. The production process is actually fairly straightforward. We need to make glycerol, which means we need a strong base, and liquid fats, which will also give us soap as a byproduct. We've made small amounts of soap in the past, but to produce this at an industrial scale, I think it's time to produce sodium hydroxide from sea water, and by extension also produce hydrochloric acid as a byproduct.

By mixing the sodium hydroxide with rendered fish fats, we'll produce the glycerol we need. Then, we can slowly add that to a mixture of concentrated nitric acid and sulfuric acid to produce liquid nitroglycerin. Liquid nitroglycerin is far too sensitive to use on it's own, and would likely detonate prematurely. Instead, we'll be forming it into dynamite using thick paper as an absorbent material to hold the nitroglycerin. We'll then have smaller detonator vials of liquid nitroglycerin stored in containers full of shock absorbent material. When the containers are destroyed and move about inside either the mouth or stomach of a leviathan, they should detonate, and set off the rest of the dynamite.

To truly deal a killing blow to something that size though, we'll likely need literal tons of dynamite. Meaning I'll probably need to ramp up nitric acid production to produce enough material. I've gotten approval for the plan with Zeb and Zaka, so I should be able to get production online quite fast.

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