[SPOILER] Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*

[FromTheSidelines]

That was my thought at first, but then I re-played DD and according to the original setting - there never was enough blood for Shadow to completely shrug it off. Daniel killed many, many people and to what cause? Shadow still followed him at the beginning of the game.

So - no, there is no consistent and strong (in-universe, canon-wise) explanation why Shadow is not following Mandus. At all.

To be fair, you don't actually see that much blood in TDD, while Mandus spilled A SHIT TON OF BLOOD.

As seen in the tripery.

A SHIT TON!!!!

This.
Also, it was Alexander who said that torturing people would keep back the Shadow. I believe dick-all what Alexander told Daniel about the Orb, frankly. My thought was always that the vitae tainted blood was needed to open the portal back to Alexander's home dimension, and he gave not a wit about the Shadow and whether it would eventually kill Daniel.

I like what Lazoriss said about different Orbs having different deities within with different guardians. The Orb from TDD was found in the tomb of a deity called 'Tin Hanan, mother of us all'. With that in mind, the slime left behind by the Shadow always reminded me of a kind of poisonous cosmic afterbirth. If the consequences of the Shadow's procession (or even the Shadow's existence itself) were specific to the deity in Tin Hanan's Orb, then the Guardian of Mandus's egg could be specific to it and not attack in the same way.

I also wonder if Mandus ever actually directly uses his Orb. It's very heavily implied that it showed him visions of the future that gave him the motivation and the knowledge needed to build his machine. However, I'm not sure he'd have to use the thing to receive visions like that. Daniel saw 'alien memories of spiraling towers, endless deserts, and impossible geometry' upon merely touching the Orb. And I don't know if that would count as use, as the Shadow doesn't seem to be chasing Daniel himself down until he runs into Alexander and, for their experiments, actually starts directly using the Orb.

To sum the last paragraph up, the way I see it, the Orb's power is like the wind, and there is a big difference between building a windmill and feeling the wind on your face. I think Mandus just felt the wind on his face, and didn't actually build a windmill to power his machine.