Sandra had already made a much smaller model of the massive War Machine to assist with the process, so Violet dove straight into working on it. Starting with a single lower leg and foot, the Gnome used a variation of Transform, Flex, Movement, and Conform runes in an enchantment sequence made with Natural elemental energy to manipulate the materials used in its construction; at the same time, she interwove a Spirit enchantment comprised of various Activate runes connected to those Natural runes which would trigger the motion the pilot wanted to achieve. On the small model, it was a lot to fit into the small leg section – but Violet was able to somehow connect it all together in a single enchantment sequence.
Of course, that was a gross oversimplification of the entire process which ended up taking a few hours just for that single lower leg. She had to make sure she had the foot joint properly aligned with the enchantment so that it would flex properly – ensuring that the War Machine didn’t stomp around flat-footed and trip itself up – as well as making sure the lower leg portion could bend and absorb the sheer weight of the entire War Machine while it walked.
The upper leg took a little less time even though it encompassed the all-important knee joint, but it was probably because Violet was becoming a little more comfortable with the process. When it was done, there were two different enchantments on the right leg, currently unconnected to anything; despite that, Felbar was able to experiment and independently insert an infinitesimally small amount of Spirit energy into various portions of the leg, making it move how he wanted…sort of. It wasn’t perfect by any means, and there was a section that had a touch too many Natural runes in the sequence – which almost caused the leg to bend in a way that stressed the material and nearly broke it – but once those were fixed, it worked remarkably well.
The major problem with it was that Felbar was forced to devote all of his concentration to the separate enchantments just to have the leg move naturally. Two enchantments seemed to be about the limit for his focus, however, because when Violet finished up the left leg with similar enchantments, he wasn’t able to manipulate both legs at the same time. Instead of a fluid movement with each leg as he tried to make it walk forward, it was more of a jerky stop-and-start motion that caused the model to fall down more often than not. Fortunately, the linking enchantment sequence that would be created after all of the other enchantments were in place would help bring it all together to make it easier to control – or so she hoped.
By the time Violet was done with those two legs and Felbar had experimented with making it walk – and was in general pleased with it, despite the difficulty in trying to manipulate four different enchantments all at once – it was already dark outside. After they went to sleep for the night, Sandra could finally work on some other things.
Not that she had been idle while the Gnomes had been working. Apart from ensuring her Dividing Rolling Forces were maintaining their eradication of roaming Undead, she had been spending her Mana on replacing what she had needed to use from her treasure to create said Forces – and used the rest to help with some crafting. She was finally starting to work with the Titanium she had received from the Elites, and it was turning out to be a little more difficult than she had expected.
The main reason was because Titanium had a higher melting point than even Iron did, so the furnace she was using needed to be turned almost all the way up. When it got that hot, even her Steelclad Ape Warriors were affected by the heat emanating from the furnace, so it made getting whatever she placed in there hard to get out; not only that, but the Iron tools that she had created to take her pieces in and out of the heat would get so hot that they would sometimes fuse to the Titanium itself.
After some frustration, she found that she needed to coat her tools entirely in a thin layer of Dragon Glass – which took a bit of experimentation and even more Mana to execute – to protect them from the heat. The drawback with using the Glass, however, was that it made the tools a bit slippery to hold as well as grip whatever she was working with, and even with creating sharp ridges on the coating it was still difficult – but not impossible – to handle. As for her Apes’ hands and arms warming up and softening because of the extreme heat, she actually had to craft something entirely new – which was exciting and productive in and of itself.
Sandra began with finishing the process of tanning more Raw Bearling Hide she had started a few days before when she had some downtime; she wanted to experiment with a new process using some of the salt she had acquired earlier to see if she could finally make some decent leather. By adding a small amount to the boiling process, it helped to eliminate many of the particulates that caused them to rot and putrefy afterward. Once they were done and stretched over racks to dry, she then used something she recently gained access to but hadn’t been able to use until now: Cedarwood Oil.
She found a use for one of her rooms to create a new workstation, one where she could make a Steam Distillery. First, she crafted a large drum using sheets of Steel, which she had her Ape heat and shape until it was a four-foot-tall, three-foot-wide open-topped vessel; into the drum she had some other constructs place leaves, berries, and some bark from the Cedar tree she had in her growing room, along with enough water to just barely cover the mixture. Then using her ability as a Dungeon Core, she had her Ape place a Steel dome top on the drum and perfectly sealed it so that it was completely air and water-tight – except for a hole leading out from the apex of the dome. From there, she created a simple arched Steel tube made from folding a thin sheet of Steel around a piece of stone she created, before sealing up the ends; using her cheating Core abilities to seal the tube to the top of the drum dome and had it arch over to another – though much smaller – Steel drum.
When that was set up, she then created a dual-element trap for the process; Fire Mana was used to heat up the outside of the larger Steel drum, while Water Mana was used to add nearly frozen water to the outside of the Steel tube and surrounding the outside of the small drum. She tied the entire trap to the Steelclad Ape Warrior she had working in there, so that it would activate when it was close enough to the crude – but serviceable – Steam Distillery. Before she finished, she also created a much smaller version of the entire contraption for use after the initial step was complete.
When her Ape activated the trap, the heat from the Fire Mana caused the water/Cedar mixture to boil, creating steam laden with Cedarwood Oil to flow upwards through the Steel tube up above. The nearly frozen water caused the steam to rapidly condense, falling as a liquid down the other side of the tube into the smaller drum. The liquid was a mixture of water and Cedarwood Oil, so once enough of it was produced she unsealed the smaller drum, had her Ape take it to the smaller Steam Distillery contraption and pour it into the larger of the two drums there.
This was where she had to alter the traps a bit, because she needed to have the temperature be just high enough to boil the water away, while leaving the Oil behind. After a few unsuccessful attempts, she finally found the correct heat temperature to get the job done; after all – or at least most – of the water was boiled away, she was left with some Crude Cedarwood Oil.
New Origination Material found!
Crude Cedarwood Oil
While Crude Cedarwood Oil cannot be directly used as a Monster Seed, it can be used as a material for use in the dungeon or other purposes.
It was a lot of work for just Cedarwood Oil – and Crude one at that – but she didn’t think she needed to refine it any more, especially for what she was going to use it for. Creating some of her new Oil, she had some other constructs near her tanning room use it on the hides stretched across the racks. The substance had two major benefits: one, it would moisturize the hide during the drying process, preventing cracking – especially with her earlier use of salt during the boiling process; and two, it would make the final Leather she made softer and more pliable.
The Leather she had been using up to that point was relatively stiff and would rot after a while if not taken c
are of, but with the Oil to seal the moisture inside while protecting it at the same time, she was hoping this Leather would qualify as “finished”. Fortunately for all her hard work, she was rewarded with long-sought-after success.
New Monster Seed and Origination Material found!
Basic Bearling Leather
While Basic Bearling Leather can be directly used as a Monster Seed, it can also be used as a material for use in the dungeon or other purposes.
You now have access to:
Basic Bearling Leather Scrap
Origination Raw Material Cost: 75
Origination Mana Cost: 25
Monster Min. Mana: 25
Monster Max. Mana: 125
Finally! The Leather she created was classified as “Basic” and that was fine with her; she knew there were other ways to finish off the material that would make it even softer and supple, or even change it so that it could defend someone wearing it even more – but she was happy with what she made. All of those things could come later; the important point was that she could now use Leather as a material – which she used to help protect her Steelclad Ape from slowly melting when it got too close to the furnace with the Titanium warming up inside of it.
Using a basic glove pattern she knew from memory, she cut out a pair of gloves from her new available Leather that would fit her construct; however, she also added more Leather to the normal hand opening, creating long sleeves that would go all the way up to her Ape’s shoulders. When it was finished, she hoped it would protect the hands and arms – the most important parts she needed for crafting – of the construct, but she knew that she was going to need something even more.
To protect it from even more heat, Sandra created a shallow stone bowl that was long enough to contain the entire glove. In that stone bowl, the Dungeon Core turned to the boiling vats used to boil the hides used in the making of the Leather. One of the byproducts of that process left behind in the vats was a sticky “glue” that was made from the prolonged boiling of the hides, from the random connective tissue that was removed from the actual skins. It was a little difficult to remove from the vats – because it was very sticky – but once she collected enough of it, she managed to fill the shallow stone bowl with the substance. Before it could dry, she had her Ape stick the gloves into it, coating the outside of them well and good.
Then, in another shallow bowl of the same size, she created very tiny granules of Dragon Glass – almost powdered, in fact – and then dipped the glue-covered gloves inside the bowl. Soon enough, when the pair of gloves were completely covered in the black Dragon Glass, she had them laid aside and allowed to cure. A few hours later, the glue had bonded to both the Glass and the Leather, creating an outer covering that would hopefully protect anything wearing them from the intense heat created by the forge.
Sandra controlled her Ape and tested out her new creation cautiously; after just under a minute of the glove being near the forge, it showed absolutely no ill effects from the heat. A less cautious test had her actually placing her Ape’s entire hand inside the blazing hot forge and was rewarded for a similar result – though its body started to soften from being that close. The only drawback to the gloves that she could see was that they were a little stiff from the added glue and Dragon Glass, but the strength of her construct made that almost a non-issue.
After she was done and happy with her crafting of a brand-new unique pair of gloves, Sandra belatedly realized that she could’ve just done what Human Blacksmiths who worked with Titanium did, which was use enchanted clothing that would absorb the heat of anything over a certain temperature it came into contact with. She even thought she knew how to make the simple enchantment sequence and with a little practice could probably duplicate it…but that just wasn’t quite as fulfilling as creating something new like she just did. It could be that she was too used to not having access to enchantments for her crafting purposes to rely on them or because she wasn’t quite confident in her Enchanting abilities yet; regardless of the reason, she was much happier finding a more mundane way of achieving the same result – and it gave her some ideas for future uses of some of her materials.
Doing all of that took most of the day and partially into the night, but now that she could work Titanium without worrying about her Ape’s hands and arms melting, Sandra bent her efforts to practicing with the new metal. She had only seen small amounts of Titanium worked while she was learning all she could about Blacksmithing, mainly because it was a rare material; despite not seeing it being handled very often, she had learned that it was relatively easy to work with.
She found that it was similar to working Steel in some ways, while the heating properties of it was more like Iron, but it was also more malleable than either of them when it was soft from the heat. She almost felt like she could shape it with her own hands…so she did – or at least with her Ape’s hands. With the extreme strength of the Steelclad Ape, she was able to pinch, bend, and even fold the metal. Now this is something you can’t do with enchanted clothing like the Human Blacksmiths use; the enchantment on those would cool the metal so quickly with only a touch that they would be useless in something like what she was doing.
When the metal was hot enough – nearly to its melting point – it almost acted like clay, where she could literally shape it into anything she wanted; however, the size and stiffness in her new gloves prevented her from doing anything that required detail, and anything more than basic shapes was hard to accomplish. Still, the heat-proof gloves did allow one thing she wasn’t expecting when she created them – she didn’t have to rely as much on the Dragon Glass-coated tools to handle the metal. Her Ape could actually physically hold it now, and she didn’t have to worry about it slipping out of its grip.
Sandra spent the next few hours crafting weapons from Titanium, starting with some smaller knives and working her way up to a longsword; what she really wanted to do was to make a warhammer for her Steelclad Ape Warriors to use, because she could already tell that the new metal was definitely stronger and weighed slightly less – meaning they could swing them faster and harder. They wouldn’t have as much weight behind them, but she didn’t think that would matter too much; most of the damage they inflicted on their targets was due to the strength of the Apes themselves wielding the weapons.
She wasn’t able to test that quite yet, however, because the day was just starting – and there was a lot of work to be done.
Chapter 15
The first day of “learning” how to manipulate elemental energy didn’t quite go as well as Sandra had hoped it would. She used the term loosely because it was just so foreign to her that it was hard to comprehend what she was supposed to be doing, so not much “learning” was done. It wasn’t that Echo was a bad teacher or anything, but she apparently assumed that Sandra had a knowledge of some basic concepts that she actually didn’t – like how to hold energy outside of her Shapeshifter’s body when it wasn’t being used in an enchantment.
Normally, all she had to do to use the elemental energy inside of her shapeshifting Dungeon Monster was to pull it out and immediately feed it into the enchantment she was creating; she never pulled more or less than she wanted – even if it was a mistake to use so much in an enchantment – because it was practically natural to her at that point. She likened it to what she did when she created almost anything inside her dungeon: Dungeon Monsters, Monster Seeds, and even traps automatically pulled out what was needed to create them, and she didn’t have to measure it out.
In fact, the only experience she had in handling raw Mana like that was when she was creating her Elemental Orbs and Cubes. Thinking that would be a good place to start…she immediately found that it wasn’t anything similar to what needed to be done. There were a multitude of reasons, from a different way she needed to pull it out from her body to how she needed to concentrate on it to keep control of it rather than letting it dissipate, but the end result was that she was unable to do much of anything that first day.
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To be fair, though, she was making progress.
At the end of the first day of alternating between her Unstable Shapeshifters because of their tendency to only keep their form for an hour at a time, Echo was nearly pulling her hair out trying to understand why Sandra couldn’t do something so simple. Then, just minutes before the Dungeon Core could tell the Elf was about to give up for the day, she was finally able to look deep inside her Shapeshifter and yank out a large chunk of just over 500 Holy energy. Ecstatic and self-congratulatory, Sandra almost immediately lost control of it; floating untethered to anything, the bright white blob of energy floating in front of her Shapeshifter ignited in an even brighter light – which blinded everyone in the workshop and caused some seriously intense pain, at least she assumed so by their screaming.
Sandra immediately left her Shapeshifter – which was also blind but was fine when it lost its “Echo” shape and returned to its amorphous form – and threw out a huge blanket of over 5,000 Nether Mana, surrounding and smothering the bright light emanating from the Holy energy. She was momentarily worried when it didn’t appear that even that much Mana would be enough because the floating energy/Mana combination started to expand; after a few seconds, however, it shrunk back down and settled into a more stable floating form.
The screaming had fortunately stopped, and three of Sandra’s Repair Drones were nearby to heal them of their blindness; she had them stationed in the workshop at all times, for just such a reason – or something equally destructive. A few minutes later they were all healed up from their temporary blindness and Sandra apologized for the accident – but she was also encouraged because she had made progress.
The Crafter's Dilemma: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 3) Page 17