Fire and Earth.
As soon as she thought of forming the Dungeon Visitor Bond with him, she felt a draining on her Core, similar to the effect it had when she was creating something permanent like a stone wall or a crafting station. Exactly 1,000 units of Mana and 5,000 units of Raw Materials flowed invisibly out from her Core, until the two resources swirled around the man and became visible for the first time. A bright golden glow started to encompass the man’s entire chest, before fading somewhat and taking on a hue of bright red and deep brown – the colors of the two elements that the man apparently had access to.
The glow became brighter and brighter, which didn’t really affect her constructs, but Sandra had to avert her direct gaze; for the first time since she became a Dungeon Core, her vision caused her a bit of discomfort. It wasn’t pain, per se, but it was uncomfortable enough that she couldn’t keep watching.
The glow started to quickly fade, and whatever the process had been doing sucked the light into the man’s chest. When Sandra could see him clearly again, she saw that a massive hole in his shirt and apron had been either burned away or consumed by the bond, leaving his scarred chest bared to the world. She recognized burn marks from careless blacksmithing work; it was common enough among apprentices to forget to wear an apron while they were working, and when they struck hot metal, they would frequently get burned by the sparks given off.
But those scars weren’t what she was most interested in; spread over the entire front of his torso was a glowing, bronze-colored clockwork gear that appeared like some sort of strange tattoo. As she watched, the glow faded even more until it disappeared completely; however, the gear tattoo still glittered with a shiny polished appearance. She found that if she looked at it the right way, she could see tiny flecks of red and brown here and there.
Non-threat Visitors List
Name
Race
Elemental Access
Winxa Flamerider
Dungeon Fairy
Spirit
Kelerim Bloodskull
Half-Orc/Half-Dwarf
Fire, Earth
She watched as the name Kelerim Bloodskull slowly appeared on the Visitors List, along with his race as a half-Orc and half-Dwarf – just like Winxa had guessed. Also, the Fire and Earth elements were under the Elemental Access heading, which matched up with the two Orbs that were placed on his chest. Speaking of which, the Orbs had disappeared, just the same as the Mana and Raw Materials that were used in the bonding.
“What the—” Winxa was asking something, but Sandra wasn’t listening – another notification grabbed her attention.
Advancement Source Identified!
Sentient Race Bonding
Criteria: Form a new Dungeon Visitor Bond with a member of a sentient race
Point Value: 1 per bonded sentient
Lifetime Points Earned: 1 (Kelerim Bloodskull)
Points Spent: 0
Dungeon Visitor Bond (Core-specific skill)
The Dungeon Visitor Bond is created between the Dungeon Core and an individual, allowing that specific individual certain protections inside the Core’s dungeon. This includes, but is not limited to, immunity to automatic attack from the Core’s Dungeon Monsters. Requirements: Mana, Raw Material, and specific Elemental Orbs. (Skills are permanent and remain even after a Classification change)
“—idea what that was, but I’ve never seen anything like that before—”
Winxa!
“—and…what?” Winxa cut off what she was saying at Sandra’s mental shout.
I unlocked another Advancement Source and another skill! The Dungeon Core excitedly told the Fairy about it, and Winxa smiled in satisfaction.
“I knew it! This means that the plan the Creator has for you—” Winxa started, before she collapsed to the ground in another choking fit, which lasted longer than the other ones lately. “Never…mind,” she gasped out when she could breathe again.
You should just keep your theories to yourself – I don’t want you to die because you’re trying to help me. I appreciate your excitement, but I’d rather figure it out on my own.
The Dungeon Fairy was on the ground now, gulping in breaths one after another; when she heard Sandra, all she did was nod in agreement.
While she was distracted by the notification and Winxa’s choking fit, her Repair Drone had hovered over to the man – Kelerim, he has a name now – and its two arms with metal pads emerged from its cylindrical body. She briefly thought about stopping her construct, but something in her told her to leave it alone and just observe.
The Drone’s metal pad-hands were gently placed on Kelerim’s forehead, and Sandra could see Mana streaming down its arms and into the unconscious man. The difference, however, was that only the red of Fire and the brown of Earth were represented, instead of every single element. Regardless of the change, the result was the same; a large bruise that Sandra only now realized existed on Kelerim’s side started to fade as it was repaired, as well as the dark bruise mark on his head, where he had blindly run into her Basher Totem when he entered.
Going even further, the burn scars on his chest and on his arms slowly faded, only to be replaced by healthy skin. There might’ve been other wounds that she couldn’t see, because the Repair Drone kept going for another minute once all the outer wounds and scars were healed. Eventually, her construct pulled its pads away and pulled its arms back into its body; all done with its work, the Drone retreated to the corner of the room and hovered there.
Sandra was hoping that being healed would wake Kelerim up, but he stayed unconscious for some reason. She waited for about an hour, to see if he would show any other signs of alertness, but he appeared to be just the same as he was before.
With nothing else should could do, having bonded him to the dungeon to save him from her own Dungeon Monsters, and with extra healing as well, Sandra turned her attention to other matters – like repairing her entrance and the first room, as well as other projects.
But she split her concentration just enough to keep an eye on the bonded man still unconscious in her dungeon.
Chapter 29
The repair to the front entrance was fairly easy, so Sandra split her mind in two and had that “boring” task handled by one half – as well as fixing the floor where her Ironclad Ape had broken it. When that was done, she had it work on another major project, which was fairly straightforward yet time-consuming.
Using her awareness of her Area of Influence, Sandra looked at her dungeon as a whole. When she looked at it from far away, she realized that the separate rooms spiraled upwards in a consistent curve, leaving a fairly sizable column that was completely unutilized in the center of her dungeon that spanned from the top to the bottom near her first few rooms. It was a waste of space, as far as she was concerned, and could easily be utilized for something else.
To that end, Sandra decided to make a trap-based fast-transportation system. She was tired of creating a Dungeon Monster and having it traverse her entire dungeon just to get to the top; even though they were “aware” of the traps she had placed in the upper rooms, there were a few times they had been activated and damaged her Basher Totems on the way up. It wasn’t enough to destroy them, but they had needed to be fixed by her Repair Drone once they had arrived. And just recently, she had to have her Sentinel bring all of those Elemental Orbs to the second room, which seemed to take forever when she was anxious for it to arrive.
Starting from the small tunnel connecting her Home room to the Forge room, she gave plans to one half of her mind to intersect that tunnel with another that would continue towards the center “column” of her dungeon. Once it got there, it would hollow out a cylindrical room that was about 45 feet tall and 30 feet wide; in the ceiling, two short-but-wide tunnels 5 feet wide were to be made leading upwards, where another room of similar size would be made. From there, more tunnels would be made in the ceiling, though at a different placement, so that there wasn’t a straight tunnel leading all
the way up – or all the way down.
Each room would tunnel out to the dungeon, leading to a specific dungeon room. All told, she planned for there to be seven of these unique rooms total, place on top of each other, until they ended near the tunnel connecting the second and third rooms above. The top room didn’t need to be as tall, so it only ended up being about 15 feet high.
There were other things she was planning on doing there, but it needed to wait until everything was built – which was going to take a while. In fact, with the amount being done, it might take almost as much time as the original dungeon, though it wasn’t nearly as complicated. Fortunately, she had the time, and the resources supplied by hollowing out the large rooms were going to fund her next project.
With the future transportation system being worked on by one half of her mind, the other half worked on another project. Since she now had access to Raw Bearling Meat, she wanted a place where she could do some cooking. Again, she wasn’t expecting to make any superior cuisine, but if Kelerim ever woke up, he was bound to be hungry.
Sandra wanted to make a kitchen/dining room, but the problem with that was she couldn’t do two things at once. She wanted to be able to cook, which needed fire, but she would also need access to water if he was to stay hydrated. She could always make a trap in the next room which would provide some ice-cold water to drink, but it defeated the purpose of having a kitchen; besides, if she ever got other ingredients, it would be a pain to fill up a pot with water from the next room and then bring it back to the kitchen just so she could make a stew.
No, she needed them in the same place, but how was she going to do that? She hadn’t experimented with combining two different elements together yet; even her boiling water vats for the tanning/clothmaking process were just changing the temperature of the Water trap inside them – same as up above when she made icicle spikes shoot up from the pool of water in the third defensive room. Therefore, combining two different elements together would be an obstacle; fortunately, she had the time and inclination to overcome that challenge.
First, she created a stone table and a bench for Kelerim to eat at for a simple “dining room”, which was easy enough, but then she moved on to the kitchen. She created a simple stone platform that was low to the ground – about a foot and a half high, two feet wide and six feet long. It was short because she expected to have one of her Small Armored Sentinels doing the cooking, mainly because most of the preparation needed for cooking didn’t need the advanced dexterity that her newer Ironclad Apes possessed.
For the rest of the kitchen, she needed two things: an oven/cooking surface, and water of some sort. Both by themselves were fairly easy – it was combining them both into one trap that was going to be the hardest part.
For the oven cooking surface, she pictured the different ways she had seen people cooking before; the best-kept secret she had learned through the years was from a little town called Copper Hollow, who was near a dungeon that had an over-abundance of Copper dungeon loot. The residents used it for a lot of things, but the best use of it was in their cooking – and their ovens. Copper was an excellent conductor of heat and did wonders for cooking meals quickly and evenly.
To get started, she first created a hollow stone box that was two feet long on each side, and then lined the entire inside with Copper, leaving a slot six inches wide and the same tall on the bottom of the box that would allow access to the inside. On top of the stone box, she placed a thicker sheet of Copper so that it covered the entire surface.
Next to her new oven and cooking surface, Sandra made a solid stone pedestal a foot-and-a-half tall, and then hollowed out the top so that it created a concave bowl shape on the top of the small column. From there, she placed a stone spigot attached to the back of the pedestal that was similar to a well pump she had seen before, and had it arch over the back of the new reservoir until it was pointing down.
With the basic structures in place, she started experimenting with getting the traps to work. She used just the barest amount of Mana in her tests, so that she wouldn’t end up wasting more than she wanted to spend on the kitchen.
First, she made examples of each trap she wanted to place in there. For her oven, she first hollowed out eight large channels in the stone on the top of the box, in between the top Copper cooking surface and the oven’s top portion of its Copper lining. Then, she carved even more lines in the stone underneath the lining, so that there were channels on every single side – including the bottom.
To create the trap that would heat the entire contraption, she imagined small lines of condensed flame that would run down those channels, heating up the Copper lining the inside. Each flame wasn’t hot enough to negatively affect the stone box, but just in case she spent a significant amount of resources to thinly line the channels with Dragon Glass. It took a few hours to accumulate enough Mana to do that, but it was worth it to make sure the entire thing didn’t fall apart when it was used. The channels lining the top portion of the oven lining would also heat up the Copper cooking surface.
To help regulate the temperature inside and out of the box – since if it was on full all the time, the heat might end up cooking things too quickly, thereby ruining the food – she placed trap triggers along the bottom right side of the box. These triggers only required something to be placed on it – like a piece of stone – and depending on which one was activated, that many channels would turn on. She numbered them 1 through 8, and they would start activating from the center and alternately turn on more channels as they made their way to the edges.
It took about 100 Mana to do a test of the oven, which worked perfectly when she had her Small Armored Sentinel come back down from the second room where Kelerim was still lying unconscious with no signs of waking up. With that small amount of Mana, though, the heat was just barely noticeable when she created a small a little hunk of Raw Bearling Meat and placed it on the surface even on full heat. Fortunately, it was just a test, and the meat didn’t even cost that much in terms of resources; since she didn’t want to use it as a Monster Seed, it was much less expensive than the Seed version.
Everything she could create cost much less than the Monster Seed version, of course – which was thoroughly demonstrated by the fact that she could convert stone to Dragon Glass at all. The only thing that didn’t work as another material, unfortunately, was her Elemental Orbs; she had thought to use them in her blacksmith crafting somehow, but whenever she tried to combine the metal and the Orbs, it did a whole lot of nothing. She couldn’t even create a non-Monster Seed version of it; her skill that allowed her to create them negated that possibility from the get-go.
So, now that she knew that the trap for her oven/cooking surface was working, she got rid of that Fire-based one and toyed with a Water-based trap. With her pedestal and reservoir, she placed a trigger on the top of the spigot-looking protrusion, which would cause fresh, ice-cold water to spill from the end, falling the short distance to the reservoir below. It would continue to run until the trigger was activated again; to prevent the hollowed-out top of the pedestal from overflowing from the spilling water, the stone automatically absorbed the water after a few seconds. When the spigot was deactivated, there was another trigger on the side of the reservoir that could be activated to get rid of any other water left inside.
As each of them tested perfectly, she now had to figure out how to combine the two so that they both counted as just one. She first struggled to visualize them both at the same time, keeping them separate from each other and yet together – which was much harder than it sounded. Eventually, she thought she achieved success when 500 Mana flowed out of her – which was actually not a large amount, because she was still trying to experiment with the weakest traps as possible.
She was glad that she had kept them weak, because nothing went right when she attempted to turn them on. The spigot started spitting out boiling water interspersed with flames, almost as if it was trying to burn the water away before it hit the re
servoir. It didn’t really do any damage to anything, but it was essentially unusable.
The oven/cooking surface was an entirely different story. If you’ve ever thrown cold water on super-heated stone, or vice-versa, you can imagine what happened to the stone of the oven box. The Dragon Glass helped to mitigate the damage a little, but the entire thing was left with cracks and the copper had actually warped in a few places. Fortunately, it only took about 10 minutes to repair the damage, but it was also frustrating to say the least.
Before she tried anything else, and risk destroying her hard work that went into creating the two contraptions, she stepped back and tried to think it through a little more. Obviously, she was missing some key component; she knew that it should work, but she wasn’t exactly sure how to go about it.
Sandra looked around her dungeon after she gazed at her non-working kitchen for a while – looking for inspiration somewhere – but nothing sprung out to her as a solution. She eventually gravitated to Kelerim again, and she vacantly stared at him while the other half of her mind toiled away at its task to hollow out the large middle column of her dungeon. The flecks of red and brown on his gear “tattoo” stirred a memory in her mind.
Sandra and her father had been in one of the larger towns – Vardifil, if she remembered correctly – where she was learning from an Enchanter that had access to two different elements. That wasn’t unusual, as most of the people who employed Enchanting as their primary profession tended to have more than one element; what made this particular one prevalent in her mind was the similarity to Kelerim’s elements – Fire and Earth.
The Crafter's Dungeon: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 1) Page 23