《A Lonely Dungeon》Chapter 6: An intelligent dungeon
Advertisement
Never underestimate the intelligence and cunning of an old dungeon. Too many beginner adventurers cut their teeth on young dungeons, only to get too used to their predictable patterns and small monster pools then fall prey to a concealed trap or unusual monster on the very first floor of an older dungeon. As a general rule, a dungeon that has reached twenty floors will be a match for the wit of a human, although whether there is a direct causal link between a dungeons depth and its intelligence is not known.
- An excerpt from the entry on dungeons, from Adventuring for Dummies
The dungeon pondered a name for itself. It glanced at Blobby who was now blobbing around happily on the sixth floor and admitted that it did not, in fact, have a great naming sense. But admitting there is a problem is the first step to recovery! And besides, it had way higher mana density now and wasn't quite so infantile. So, it should definitely be capable of coming up with a decent name. No, not Mr Dungeon, that would be silly. What was special about this dungeon? Its slimes? Slimy was also a poor choice of name. Maybe the errant tag; the dungeon decided to wear that as a badge of honour. Erryn then? Yes, that was a good name. "System, my name is Erryn."
Dungeon name registered successfully.
The freshly christened Erryn surveyed its expanding territory for anything of interest. No other signs of habitation as of yet, but there was the remains of a wagon on what was presumably a dirt track before Erryn had eaten it. Skeletons of horses lay in front of the wagon, with the remains of the driver still sitting at the front. A few more skeletons wrapped in rusted armour surrounded it. The wagon held some rotted wooden crates but whatever they used to contain had become nothing but dust. This was probably a merchant transporting goods, with a few hired guards. There was nothing to be scavenged from the wagon itself. One of the guards had a dagger that still seemed in good condition and the driver had a couple of pieces of jewellery, but nothing in sufficient quantity to trigger an unlock. He was also carrying a bag of coins, which did contain a sufficient quantity of gold.
New loot unlocked: Gold coin
Erryn abused a mass summoning to generate a gold nugget.
New loot unlocked: Gold nugget
Incongruity detected: Gold materials not available for purchase until dungeon has fifteen floors. Higher level mythril materials already unlocked. Ignoring.
Did gold coins not count as gold materials? Or did coins get special exceptions? Either way, that explains why the system was happy with silver coins back when Erryn only had one floor. Not that it pushed the level up much; the system was happy with a silver nugget with three floors. Erryn summoned a few more coins and nuggets, and watched the mana flows. In retrospect, it should have started the manual summoning experiments with nuggets rather than slimes; they were considerably simpler. Coins on the other hand were surprisingly complex, more so than could be explained by a coin having a well defined shape whereas the nuggets were just lumps. Some of the mana got caught up into the coin as it materialized, and could be still be seen as a detailed imprinted pattern after the summoning was complete. It would be impossible to produce coins from a mould and have this pattern of ingrained mana, but were there other ways to produce it? Erryn hadn't found any other types of coin in the area. It made for a good anti-counterfeiting measure, but having all coins come from dungeons didn't really seem practical. This world was full of mysteries... Erryn couldn't help but feel excited. Just how small was the corner of the world it had explored so far? What new discoveries and puzzles still lay ahead?
Advertisement
While continuing the surface expansion, Erryn returned its attention to nugget experiments. Trying to flood a gold nugget with mana in the same way as the silver did not produce anything, yet the gold did soak up the mana in the same way as silver so it would be worth trying again at higher mana concentrations. Summoning experiments went better: With experience from manual summoning of slimes, it was easy enough to grasp how to produce a lump of a solid material. Mostly.
New material unlocked: Copper
New material unlocked: Silver
New material unlocked: Gold
The amount of mana required for gold was enough that it was only practical on the lower floors, and mythril couldn't be summoned via the system in the first place; whatever the mana cost was, it was higher than 20. Without that there was nothing for Erryn to copy.
Having a material unlocked allowed for free-form summoning. Not really something Erryn had much use for; it had used stone pedestals from time to time, but that was just to keep stuff off the floor and the material really didn't matter. Erryn had no desire for golden walls or copper floors. Maybe at some point if it felt the need for some decoration it could trace some patterns in gold.
There was another category of dungeon features that Erryn had not touched in a long time; traps. With nothing to catch, placing traps had become pointless, and even the original traps on the first floor were now gone after the... incident. Was it worth experimenting there? Erryn had no interest in the traps themselves, but it did want to know if they contained any useful materials to poach. The pit just made a half meter hole in the floor, using no materials beyond what the floor was made from. The tripwire was a piece of thin cord strung between a pair of wooden stakes. The spikes appeared to be iron. Erryn watched the mana flows and rather than recreating them completely, extracted out only the parts of interest. Iron was easy. Wood had a more complex structure, and was harder, but it was not impossible.
New material unlocked: Iron
New material unlocked: Pine
Apparently the system differentiated between types of wood. The cord was more interesting; it was no harder to work out than the pine wood, but on producing it Erryn didn't get any further unlocks. It seemed that cord was not a purchasable building material.
With wood and iron available, it occurred to Erryn that it could now conduct some fairly extensive repairs to the ruined village. There was no reason to but... why not? Rotten wood bulged and flowed and the black, brown and green rot shrunk away into the lighter browns of fresh wood. It wasn't long until houses were standing strong once more, albeit rather roofless. The roofs were probably straw, given the lack of remains. That was not something Erryn could reproduce. So... thin copper sheeting then. A fairly ridiculous building material normally, but being a dungeon had its advantages. On the inside, Erryn could reproduce tables and chairs but not soft furnishings: Those solid wood beds would be very uncomfortable if anyone was around to actually try one. It was all good practise for material creation anyway.
Advertisement
What if Erryn wanted to make something from gold? It could only be reproduced in the high mana environment of the labyrinth. Erryn could surround the village with slimes until the mana density increased enough, but there had to be a more practical solution. Monsters could carry smaller items out from the dungeon, but that wouldn't work for larger items or if a small amount of gold was required as a part of a larger object. The system could take the mana from the core and instantly send it anywhere in order to produce something. The rules about summoning on the wrong floors didn't have anything to do with actually getting the mana there, as Erryn had proven when forcing an illegal summon through. That seemed to be a useful trick to learn next.
Careful inspection showed that the system was not moving mana through the air. Instead it flowed out of the core into the dungeon stone, and travelled to where it was needed through the stone and other materials that had been assimilated into the dungeon. Erryn tried pushing the ambient mana from the sixth floor into the compressed dungeon stone and firing it towards the village, but failed to produce anything from it at the other end. The mana had been diffuse to start with and was ejected slowly enough that the first part had dissipated before it had finished coming through. Then the mana needed to be compressed before sending. Erryn started coalescing some ambient mana into a gold nugget, but before anything physical was spun out, pushed it through the dungeon stone and out into the village. The mana immediately tried to burst apart in the lower ambient pressure, but a few attempts was all it took for Erryn to learn how to keep it contained. Experiment successful.
The act of moving an almost formed nugget gave Erryn another idea. It grasped at the mana around the nugget, but this time it pulled. The nugget broke apart in a burst of mana.
New skill unlocked: [Reclamation]. You may now destroy an object to provide a temporary increase in ambient mana.
That was a nice added bonus. It wasn't really useful for anything right now, but Erryn hadn't been trying to unlock anything there in the first place; it just wanted to see if it was possible. And even more, reclamation wasn't even the end goal of what it was trying to do. Erryn repeated the trick but this time instead of letting the mana dissipate, it pushed it to another location and forced it to reform.
New skill unlocked: [Relocation]. You may now move dungeon features to different locations within the dungeon.
Erryn's mana control wasn't sufficient to pull that stunt with anything more complex than a nugget, but the system acquired equivalent was amazing. Erryn found it could happily shove around any items, and back in the village even entire houses for very low mana cost. The only thing it couldn't move was monsters. It almost seemed like cheating. If normal dungeons could simply buy skills like that with no effort on their own part, what reason would they have to experiment on their own? Errant dungeons were obviously a thing the system catered for, but they probably came about in a very different way to Erryn. In Erryn's case it was to work around a lack of dungeon points, but for a regular dungeon the temptation would be to abuse their abilities to earn more dungeon points. Something like putting horribly overpowered monsters on the top floor to slaughter unsuspecting adventurers, killing far more invaders than would normally be possible. In that case locking out the dungeon from the dungeon point store would be likely to get them to very quickly repent. Erryn wondered if the tag would be removed after a period of good behaviour or something. Nevertheless, it was becoming more and more apparent that the system did nothing that Erryn could not theoretically do manually, given sufficient time and practise.
Then why did it unlock these skills for free after Erryn had performed a poor version of its own just once? When so much of the system seemed geared to prevent experimentation, that reward seemed to go against the grain. Or did it... Moving a nugget was easy, but moving a house looked mind numbingly difficult. How much practise would it take for Erryn to replicate that manually? Given that the system had conveniently given an option that required no effort on Erryn's part at all, what reason was left to expend all that effort practising? For the first time Erryn began to view the system not as a helper but as a leash, existing to limit what dungeons could do, keeping them under strict control. Given that Erryn had now assimilated out to a radius of almost fifteen kilometres and was still growing, it could see why someone might want to place a restriction on dungeons. Although how it would have gotten going without the system summoning the first monsters it had no idea.
Speaking of the surface, from a vantage point of the top of a hill Erryn could see another, larger settlement. More discoveries awaited!
Advertisement
Xianxia: My Junior Sisters Are Freaks!
Su Xing traveled through ten years in time and secretly checked in for ten years at Tianquan Peak. He thought he could continue to develop, but he suddenly got three junior sisters.His first junior sister was seemingly the reincarnation of a female emperor who had fought bloody battles to the edge of the world in her previous life. Her second junior sister seemed to have royal blood as well, but due to unforeseen events in the dynasty, she had no choice but to leave her hometown and bear the hatred of her family and country. His third Junior Sister seemingly transformed from an ancient beast. Her origin was a mystery, and her bloodline was exceptionally powerful.Originally, he thought that as their senior brother, he could take care of his juniors, but instead, his powerful junior sisters had him covered everywhere. Three junior sisters, «Who dares to bully my senior brother?» Su Xing, «As the senior brother of three freakish junior sisters, I am under too much pressure!»When the Emperor’s Secret Realm appeared, his three junior sisters fell into danger at the same time. For the sake of his junior sisters, Su Xing decided to longer slack around. Coming out from seclusion, «Who dares to bully my junior sisters? I will destroy your orthodoxy!»
8 1011Howling
Tila Leo woke up in an unfamiliar setting where her life is thrown upside down. She is cast into the future in a body that she never expected to ever believed even existed: a werewolf body. From this new life, she is given things that she never expected to get. An annoying werewolf spirit that constantly annoys her, and a jackass of an Alpha that is supposed to be her so called ‘Soulmate’, who rejected the former body tenant Kimberly Li. Even still Tila doesn’t care. She wants nothing to do with this ‘mate’ business, and instead she’s glad that he did. This is her adventure, where she’ll pave her own future and her destiny. (Short Novel 36 chapters plus conclusion. Not a series) My name is Jane Christian. Original author of Drezo Regalia, Black Moon, Valkyrie's Lament, Mind Linker. (expect grammar mistakes.) Orignial Novel: http://enlightendragons.com
8 105Falling in Love : I love you, Today and Forever
Aria and Ivy are twin sisters whose father has gone missing for three years. They have left no stone unturned to find him, but all in vain.In an unusual encounter, a business tycoon, Noah Allen Carter, falls in love with Aria. Meanwhile, Ivy approaches Joshua Martin, who is a friend of Noah, to help find her father and in the process falls for his charms. What happens when the sisters find that the people they love are the ones behind their misery?............................................................................................"Ivy, sweetheart. Please come back. I love you." Joshua cried holding her hand. However, there was no response from her. "Ivy, please say something. Don't be like this."Joshua kissed her hand, but Ivy had long made up her mind. Only a miracle could make her come back to him............................................................................................."I hate you, Noah," she shouted."I love you, Aria," he replied, pulling her towards him."No, you don't.""Yes, I do. Falling in love with you is the best thing that ever happened to me. I will always love you; today and forever." Readers can join my discord server to know more about the book.Discord: https://discord.gg/HU4xe96Disclaimer: The cover picture does not belong to me.
8 473Gallinus
I have no idea how to describe my story, because I just became a Rooster. Besides, I have no idea where I am... What should i do? Ps: The meaning of the colors were chosen by me, so there is no study behind them. Ps2: My english is very poor, so sorry for any mistakes. Ps3: This is the translation of my story on Wattpad.
8 99the adventures of john in monster musume.
John Harrell: a visitor from America moved to japan, but when he meets kuroko Smith his life gets flipped upside down, his main goal is to start a family but when it comes to a bunch of monster girls, things might get a little wierd.
8 64Lure O' War (The Old Realms)
Lure O' War starts where Touch O' Luck ends. It is a direct sequel and follows the story of Glen, the thief from Shroudcoast, now impersonating the grandson of the elderly Lord of Altarin and his colorfull companions. It tells of Lord Storm Nattas struggles, as he tries desperately to prevent the realm from falling into the pits of war, or failing that, make certain he escapes it unscathed. It will sing of gallant Sir Lucius Alden, 'Bloody tiger of the South' and his journey to the distant lands of Fetya, and the faraway 'true' North. A journey of hardships, danger, a desperate search for redemption and the road back to his beloved Regia. It will whisper of a Princess woes and triumphs, in the exotic continent of Eplas. It will speak of a 'demi-goddess' wanting what was promised and Dar Eherdir, the father of all assassins. [Royal Writathon April 2022 winner] [Royal Writathon October 2021 winner] The Old Realms series: Touch O' Luck (Finished) Hint O' Magic (Finished) Lure O' War (Finished) Wings O' Fate (Ongoing) There will be updates every 3 days. 3 chapters per week. or 2 chapters minimum at Fridays and Saturdays/Sundays 12:00 UK time + 1 chapter on Wednesday I) Chapter releases come twice a week, on weekends (Friday-Sunday). An extra chapter drop on Wednesdays/Thursday. I post around 10am normally, but for the summer when it may be a couple of hours later. So 3 chapters per week unless its a multi-part chapter II) multi-part chapters come usually within 48 hours for continuity (and because they are written as one chapter for the novel's original form), without being limited from the above schedule. Cover artwork by @IntheBlackveil Maps of the Old Realms are available here Greater Map of the Realms this is a very large image (thrice reduced in size from original, but still it might not load immediately) The Old Realms - Chapter specific maps The Old Realms All tags are relevant but most chapters are not too extreme. Fair warning dear reader, this is an 'unfiltered' story, sometimes sweet, others bitter, touching some heavy subjects or problems, like crime, war, betrayal, pride, politics, revenge etc set in a Epic Fantasy backdrop with shades of Grimdark. In its heart of hearts though, it is an adventure. The Old Realms saga is only published on RR for free. It is in the author's plans to publish it on Amazon and other platforms at some point. If you see it offered anywhere else, or someone tries to charge you for it, please report him. It is illegal to sell, or take advantage of intellectual work without the author's permission.
8 128