Chapter 26 – Clean coal

Day 31

Neo immediately decided to give his new furnace a test run. With his high mana regeneration and the low cost for creating iron, he was able to create almost a kilo of it every second. After gathering nine tons of iron he thought about the issue of creating carbon. He could build an additional coke oven and then use wood to create charcoal, but he didn’t really want to spend plant material for this task.

First he used some magic to create a little charcoal sample himself. But he wasn’t able to create the coal from magic after he absorbed it. Probably this was because it still was plant material after all. Next he thought about how to separate the carbon from the rest of the charcoal. He decided that he only needed a little sample and didn’t care about the efficiency. So he just burned to coal and collected the soot. It was working, after he absorbed it, he got the possibility to create carbon with magic. With a cost of 25 mana for each gram, it was a little more expensive than iron, but that didn’t really matter. He didn’t nearly need as much of it. He immediately got to work and it only took an hour to create enough of it to run the first batch of his iron production. Neo created some shovels and wheel barrels and he ordered 20 of the black goblins from the ninth floor to start to fill the oven. He should probably create some kind of magically powered conveyor belt later on.

While his goblins starting their work, he shifted his concentration back to his first dungeon level. By now, the goblins finished the first part of operation greenkeeper. In addition, Biff and the other shamans arrived back at the dungeon. They went back to work immediately and started to use their nature magic on the newly planted grass around the dungeon. He decided to give the nature a few days to revive. Later, he would send out Luna and Mr Floppy to check to former trail to the goblin hideout. Neo hoped the level of camouflage was enough to hide his activities. Otherwise he’d had to use some wide scale weather magic to wash away the rest of the traces with rain. After checking the first floor, he started to fill up the room he’d created to grow the grass again.

When this was done, Neo decided to have a little bit of downtime. When he thought about it, he’d always been busy with work since he became a dungeon. He earned a break, even if he didn’t need one as a dungeon core, so he decided to watch Luna at her training a little bit.

His focus switched to Luna’s little boot camp, he was greeted by a funny sight. He saw Wolfgang running on the obstacle course. In each hand he carried a rabbit and flying behind him was Mr Floppy, who from time to time breathed fire behind Wolfgang. If he would’ve been a little slower, he would be hit and his fur set on fire.

“Faster you slow dog! Don’t you dare to drop the rabbits! You’re a lot slower on the course than Mr Floppy! Don’t you have any pride?”

“But rabbit can fly, doesn’t need to carry other rabbits!”

“No excuses, this means ten extra rounds for you!”

Seeing his little fairy working as a drill sergeant, improved his mood a lot. He felt a little bit sorry for Wolfgang, but it was still a lot fun to watch.

Two hour later, Neo decided that his break had been long enough and he started to think about what to do next. After contemplating the issue, he started to create a gravel pathway from the entrance of the ninth floor to the goblin fortress. In the rest of the cave he put some dirt on the ground and then he began to grow the grass. He only stopped, after the grass on his new meadow, reached a height of 1.2 meters. Then he created ten of his one meter sized squirrellings and let them roam the outside of the fortress. He equipped them with two daggers each and ordered them to attack any visitor that left the gravel path. Later, he would probably distribute some loot in the grass, so that the adventurers would have to decide between using the safe gravel path, or risk walking into the grassland for the chance of some extra coins.

On his tenth floor, he would let Wolfgang fight alone in the boss room for now. If this was too easy for the adventurers, he could create some more weregoblins as support later on and make it a group fight.

After this, there were no more urgent tasks. Sure, he could start creating loot or placing traps, but that could wait for now. It would still be ten more days before Mike would come back and at least another five for the adventurers to arrive, more than enough time to do this later. No, Neo wanted to do something that would increase his options later, after thinking about this for a moment, he decided to start a mining operation. But, before he started, he ordered Biff to report for duty at the obstacle course after he finished the camouflage operation. Then it was mining time!

Neo started with a long tunnel from his large cave on the eleventh floor to the edge of his possible influence. After finishing the main tunnel, he started to create branch tunnels every 20 meter in both directions. If he didn’t find any ore veins or other special materials in a tunnel, he closed it off again.

This went on for the next days. He only made a pause, when the research in his library was finished. Neo then started to have a look at his technology tree again. He wasn’t exactly sure what to research next. Smelting Tier 1 looked nice, but so was Improved Mana distribution Tier 1. The better mana distribution would allow him to create another entrance to his dungeon, without disturbing the mana flow. The downside was its cost. Event with the reductions he got, it was still at 800 research points and would block his newly expanded research facility for almost 30 days. After browsing through his other options a little more, he selected another focus:

One way safety doors

FP 0/100

One way doors allow dungeons to create shortcuts or exits from and to specific dungeon floors. The research focuses on creating different blueprints for this kind of doors.

In his opinion it was essential for being a worthwhile dungeon, to allow his visitors to exit without walking all the way back through the whole dungeon. Later he would probably replace the doors by teleportation formations, but for now he didn’t have the resources to do so. Neo wanted to create an entrance and an exit on every boss and mining floor he created. The only thing he wasn’t sure about yet, was how he organized the entry. After thinking about it for a little, he came up witch a specific coin for every floor. The problem was if he should use the coin as a one way ticket, or if it should be valid forever. Both approaches had their appeal. If he dropped the coins every time a floor boss was killed, a one way ticket would force the visitors into the boss fight more often, but it would probably create a trading of coins between the adventurers. This way it would be possible, for an external attack team, to directly go to the last levels of his dungeon. In this case, he could become the victim of a surprise attack. The other approach, only to drop the coins on a first kill, had its issues too. While no real adventurer would give away his coin if he could never get another one, it would make his mining floors a little too easy to access.

He thought about the issue for a moment and came up with a solution. He would make his entry point at the start of these levels, but the exit was only accessible if one killed the boss. This way, miners had to decide if they wanted to risk it, or fight their way back through the last four floors until they arrived at the next weaker boss level.