Questions, questions.

Every day that passed, I found myself wondering whether it was the right choice to take Cheshire’s offer—not as far being his personal supplier of tea, but rather to lock myself into taking coin for the first shipment. At first, I’d almost considered his offer to take knowledge as payment instead as something of a joke, but now…

Even just getting three answers felt like too little.

Sure, I might be able to get some clues out of him by carefully navigating the conversation, but with him it was an uphill battle—and on top of that, we didn’t exactly interact often.

The standoff between the goblins and the adventurers we’d stumbled upon was still occurring while Ephi made a break for it and vanished into the forest, taking a wide detour around the groups and hurrying her way back to the roadside outpost.

The crow.

After all this time, I’d almost put it out of my head entirely—but there it had been. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that it was there, that they had chosen that specific crow as some kind of living effigy.

But why?

Saving it had been out of the question in the moment. Everyone had already been on edge, and with nothing but a single mouse on my side of this potential three-sided conflict, we wouldn’t even classify as a contender.

And even if we had, did I really want to save it? Everything I knew so far pointed to the fact that having a monster lord—or as the tooltips so dryly referred to it, an ‘assistant manager’—wasn’t exactly something in my best interests.

Still, seeing an animal suffering like that and doing nothing to help sat uncomfortably. Blind heroism didn’t have a place here though. For as much as my ideals were worth, all I’d accomplish by trying to mount some rescue would be to put Ephilia in danger. Even leaving out the emotional side of losing a companion, from a strictly-rational side taking a risk like that with my only employee was an insane play to make.

If the crow had survived this long, all I could do was hope that it would survive long enough for me to gather some more information and power. Information on whether it made sense for me to save it at all, and if so, the power to actually follow through.

“So that was it? You’re sure of it?”, Ephi asked as she made her way down the hall toward the ‘home’ cluster of the dungeon.

I already felt a little bad about not having a proper method of transportation set-up yet. Still, I had metal now so more options were opening up on that front.

“Yeah, positive. It had a ‘Monster Lord’ skill, and it was categorized as an ‘Assistant Manager’. It’s him,” I explained, idly continuing to work on extracting more metal from the earth below, “I’m not really sure how long they’ve had him there for, but I’m guessing he’s not in immediate danger. With how long he’s been missing for, I think it’s safe to assume they’ve had him this whole time, and that means they’ve been feeding him at the very least. He’s not in great shape though.”

“What do you think they’re using him for? It was weird that they had him strung up to the big one’s stick, right?”, she questioned.

“Definitely weird—and I think it was more of a staff or a scepter than a stick. Think of a stick but meant for magic. My guess is that he’s either a trophy or they’re able to use him for some kind of magic. Having another dungeon’s lord captured might be… I dunno, a challenge towards us or something. It also makes it pretty clear that our presence isn’t entirely unknown, if their core knows about this.”

“So… we’re still hiding, right? And not doing anything stupid?”

“Right. As much as we could use more employees, this isn’t the way. Too risky.”

The garden had been progressing nicely on its own without much babysitting from me. Sure, I kept an eye on it, but a watched pot never boils and there’s nothing quite as uninteresting as watching plants grow, even at the accelerated pace we were operating on.

And Ephi was starting to really get creative with her foraging—in a good way, honestly.

Though I wasn’t quite sure what I’d be able to do with some of it.

❖ Foxwhisker Mushroom ❖

Category: Fungus A white stalked mushroom with a broad orange cap. Highly prized for its alchemical uses such as vision and reflex enhancement, this fungus relies on stealing nutrients from a host organism to survive--typically, from the roots of trees. Resynthesize:

Cost: 10 MP

❖ Vigilbloom ❖

Category: Plant A broad, blue-leafed flower that favors cold, rocky biomes. Produces a sticky nectar that dulls the senses and numbs pain, but has addictive properties. Resynthesize:

Cost: 5 MP

The flower seemed simple enough, but fungi were something I hadn’t messed with in the slightest. Growing them would be far different than any other crop, I imagined—so as useful as they seemed, I put them aside for now, taking care to keep them separated from the rest of the stockpile.

Still, the presence of that human settlement down the road meant that the possibility of trade was now entirely within our grasp, if we could only just puzzle out how to actually go through with it. Humans were needy things, and I imagined that the other species were just as well. We had fabric growing to potentially sell clothing, blankets, tents or bags. We had staple crops and those hardly needed any extra effort to sell. We had tea and mint, both of which were hugely-popular commodities that would fetch a good price.

Hell, if we somehow managed to secure a friendly relationship, even our non-packageable resources could earn money. Shelter, hot water, transportation—all of these had potential.

If there was to be a war between that other core and these adventurers, well… what was wrong with a little war profiteering? Hell, I even had metal to work with; if I could get decent at working it, I might be able to sell armor and weapons even.

Each of these things required work though: capital investment to get up and running, either in the form of time or resources.

And if I was to be doing any amount of exporting of food and drink, I’d need a way to store it in the long term.

An ice box.

Given how cold the outside world was, it almost felt silly to consider building one, but I needed a safe and sheltered place away from the elements that could consistently maintain a low temperature without being too cold. With our position already submerged in the ground, I was in an excellent place to construct such a thing: we could harvest or create ice during the winter, then keep it stored almost year-round in a dedicated, insulated area where it wouldn’t melt.

The theory behind making one wouldn’t even be all that difficult—just a highly-insulated ‘box’ I could store below the earth, along with an airlock.

Easy enough.

Using the western branch from the greenhouse, I took the skeleton of the hallway I’d dug there and began to carve out a space adjacent to it, scooping out swathes of rock to form a square-shaped hollow, leaving the walls several meters thick and forming a similarly-thick ceiling and floor over the rest of the day. Next came the airlock.

Making it perfectly airtight might be trouble, but I could get close.

A pair of heavy stone doors followed, though I didn’t bother attaching any sort of mechanism to them just yet. It wasn’t as if they would block me out from the room in any ways, and I didn’t have anything to store in there just yet. Still, having the framework in place to build off of once the time came would help.

Next came an expansion to the reservoir’s water capacity, along with some slight rerouting of the water going through the boiler. With the copper pipes I’d installed, I no longer had to fear the pipes shattering due to sharp changes in heat, but they conducted heat almost too well. The resulting water was coming out significantly hotter, but I managed to kill two birds with one stone by routing these pipes through a brief detour through the main reservoir. It was a bit circuitous, but that was the point.

I was going to use the reservoir as a heat sink, at least a little bit.

After all, I’d had a concern of sorts: with the temperature dropping further and further, there was the potential of disruptions to the water supply. I doubted the stream would freeze over entirely, unless it reached truly abysmal depths of cold here. Still, if it did, what then? No water coming in would mean no warm water to keep the plants alive. Even then, I still risked the reservoir freezing given that it was mostly just sitting still.

I couldn’t very well make a reservoir big enough to keep the dungeon supplied for a full season, but I could try to hold enough to tide us over, and the warmth in the reservoir would help keep it from freezing over. If it came down to it, I might be able to work out ways to reduce water consumption or send it back through the system rather than dumping it out to sea.

If only I’d been a dungeon in a tropical area instead. Instead, I got to try to overengineer myself to survive the coming winter—not that the cold was much danger to me, but I could very easily lose a great deal of progress.

Besides, the work gave me something to do.

Next, I began to work on prototyping a method of fast transportation in the hallway leading to the outpost. It didn’t need to be anything too elegant, but it needed to be safe enough for Ephilia to use, reusable, able to move in either direction. This limited a few options, but helped me establish some working parameters in my head.

I briefly experimented with creating a free-standing wheeled contraption a bit like an remote-controlled toy car, but the moment I cut the contraption free to test it, the axle I’d set to use as my controlled mechanism vanished from my senses entirely. No cars—or at least free-standing ones. I was able to get wheels working as long as they were anchored to another part of my dungeon somehow, like by an axle; otherwise, they were useless.

This would work well enough though—I didn’t need wheels anchored to an object to move it… but I’d need a significant amount of plant fiber to make this work the way I was thinking, and this involved carefully cutting away at the grasses and underbrush on the surface, never taking too much from one area in order to not leave ‘dead zones’ that might seem out of place.

Once I’d gathered enough from the surrounding area, I constructed a pair of hanging pulley wheels, one on each end of the hall. Then came the task of constructing a loop of rope fiber pulled as tight as I could make it between the two. One small but amusing consequence is that, thanks to the manamites abilities, there was no knot tying these two strands together—simply an endless loop, seamless.

Hanging from this strand, I began to construct a cable car of sorts—a simple wooden box suspended from a set of loops, tightly bound around the rope. Taking full control over one of the wheels, I gave it a brief test pull and was pleasantly surprised to find the cart actually moving… although it was a bit unsteady, swaying around slightly as it travelled.

It took a second wheel and several adjustments to the chassis of the car for it to become steady enough that I was satisfied with it. Not perfect, but a damn bit faster than walking, and likely more comfortable too. I padded the inside of the cable car with as much extra material as I could and added a ramp up to it at each end, then called Ephi over to test it.

“I really don’t see what the big deal is, Boss. It’s just walking, I walk everywhere,” she remarked, staring up at the machine I’d built, “Is it faster, at least?”

“I think so. And it’ll let you rest while you travel which is the big one—plus, it’s a good proof of concept for later. I might be able to make one of these able to transport some goods around.”

We gave it a few tries, with it only taking about twenty minutes to move from one end of the tunnel to the other, a vast improvement over the two hours or so it took otherwise. Ephi seemed to find more value in it as a source of entertainment than as a method of travel though, and I had to remind her a few times to not poke her head up and out of the vehicle.

I was certain there were better ways to accomplish this, but overall I was satisfied with the work I’d put into it.

I had been doing some window shopping for potential new employees to ‘interview’ recently as well. Ascension, unlike leveling, required them to be within a certain range of my core—as such, it wasn’t simply something I could spring on someone by surprise.

The assumption seemed to be that, once a core had a monster lord, the lord would… ‘collect’ subjects for the core to ascend and, presumably, enthrall.

I was more into the ‘carrot’ method than the ‘stick’ method, though.

I’d just need a way to entice potential hires to my doorstep.

Sure, there was some wildlife in my neck of the woods, but most everything that lived in this forest was skittish and hardy. Small herbivores and scavengers were plentiful, but the lack of large herbivores meant that large predators were few and far between. Even things like the ripper cat I’d only seen once or twice near the absolute furthest points we’d explored inland—they seemed to prefer the mountainous areas.

Aside from that? A bear would be a powerhouse to have around, but they weren’t common and I doubted I’d be able to satisfy the dietary needs of one. Birds? Well, there were plenty of those around from blackbirds to blue jays. While they lacked the ‘oomph’ of something bigger, and more ferocious, flight was an incredible thing to potentially have on my side. Hell, even just being able to get an aerial lay of the land and scout more easily would free up Ephilia to work more on other tasks. Aside from that, there were the herbivores and scavengers, from deer to squirrels and everything in between. A larger one might work well for hauling, though a smaller one felt like it might be encroaching on Ephi’s territory a bit.

Either way, the choice I made would determine the bait that I opted for.

It wasn’t as if I could ask Ephi to drag them here kicking and screaming.

I had Ephi test my ascension range as best as we could, and from what I could tell it still didn’t reach beyond the core room, which would be a problem—without a way to control or restrain any ‘visitors’ into the vault, I ran a great risk towards myself by opening up an entrance into there.

So a containment system, as well as a way to get these potential employees into the core room at all, where I could ascend them to approach with an offer.

What came next was fairly simple in make, though not particularly elegant: a floor raised and lowered via a piston, which would rest either at the surface level beneath a layer of dirt or down in a section of the core room contained behind stone bars, as well as a hatch to closer over the top when the ‘elevator’ was down. If I managed to get anything in there, I could ensure they were fed, comfortable, and able to leave if they chose to. This would work great for terrestrial animals, though I doubted it would prove effective against birds unless there happened to be some kind of arctic cassowary lurking out there that I hadn’t seen yet.

If I wanted to catch something with wings, I’d need to add a far more robust trap than just a simple pitfall.

Getting something I could ascend onto this plate for long enough that I could drop it down seemed to be the other tricky part, but bait wasn’t exactly in short supply: between the mogo bush and other plants around the area, I could assemble a vegetarian’s feast with just a little while to move things around.

Or, if we were feeling particularly daring, maybe Ephi would be willing to volunteer as bait.

Maybe not. That didn’t seem like a good idea.

I spent the better part of the afternoon scraping around the forest, looking wherever I could to try and mark out whatever animals I could spot nearby that were eligible for ascension—and thanks to the wide net I was casting, it didn’t take me long to put together a list of the best candidates nearby to start with. Not everything had the option available to ascend, and thus far my biggest hunch was that past a certain age, things essentially ‘locked’ into place, so to speak.

But there were some I could resynthesize.

PINE MARTEN LVL: 2 NAME: undefined

Skills:

[Agility I]

[Foraging I]

[Swimming I]

HP: 11 / 11 CATEGORY: Animal MP: 0 / 0 SPECIES: Marten SP: 7 / 7 SIZE: Small XP: 45% GENDER: ♂ STR VIT DEX INT WIS PER 4 5 6 3 3 6

A flexible weasel with an omnivorous appetite. A surprisingly-effective hunter, though its small size limits its choice of quarry. Force Level-Up Cost: 15 MP Resynthesize:

Cost: 25 MP FOX KIT LVL: 1 NAME: undefined

Skills:

[Stealth I]

[Evasion I]

HP: 9 / 9 CATEGORY: Animal MP: 0 / 0 SPECIES: Fox SP: 5 / 5 SIZE: Small XP: 44% GENDER: ♀ STR VIT DEX INT WIS PER 3 3 4 4 4 7

A common red fox. A creature revered for its cunning and stealth. Paradoxically, it is also a symbol of deceit in many folk tales. Force Level-Up Cost: 15 MP Resynthesize:

Cost: 30 MP FROST SPARROW LVL: 1 NAME: undefined

Skills:

[Acrobatic Flight I]

HP: 6 / 6 CATEGORY: Animal MP: 0 / 0 SPECIES: Sparrow SP: 9 / 9 SIZE: Tiny XP: 75% GENDER: ♂ STR VIT DEX INT WIS PER 2 3 3 3 4 7

A brown-and-gold feathered sparrow native to the rocky forests north of Boltha. Its nests are constructed into hollows high up in trees. Force Level-Up Cost: 15 MP Resynthesize:

Cost: 20 MP

I was fairly certain that I could lure at least one of them here if I put in the effort. The marten and the fox were certainly omnivores, so baiting them over wouldn’t be too tricky I figured. The sparrow, on the other hand, might even be easier. Maybe a makeshift bird feeder filled with leftover, rejected seeds from the farm might work to convince it to stop by.

Either way, I began to make my preparations to try and begin our first real recruitment drive.