It takes a week after the incident with Jan for things to calm down again. Not that it fully settles, of course. The only thing settled are the few hundred new people as it is amazing how quick magically enhanced crafting is when you aren’t trying to make the best of the best. So while the less than thirty core members of the settlement are still working on their houses, everyone else is already proud owners of what pre-system would have been considered high quality, if rustic, two-story houses.

Just regular everyday houses that admittedly will likely last a good bit longer than any pre-system untreated wood structure. Though that would be a bit of an unfair comparison. While the people in charge of woodcrafts had found that wood unchanged by manipulation magic would create better results, that isn’t what they went for with these houses. Instead, they had those capable of wood shaping magic went over all the pieces and did a quick treatment.

It wasn’t anything too complex. They expelled any foreign matter from the wood, straightened the grain, balanced how dry the wood was, and then sealed the outer layer. The wood would never be good for true crafts, but Ace wasn’t exactly up for giving the new people something that valuable.

When Doyle had noticed the difference between how the wood for the core area and the outer area was treated, he had asked Ally. However, instead of just rattling off the equivalent of an encyclopedia page, she encouraged him to take a closer look and try to find out the difference himself. Though she did point him towards looking at the flow of world energy through the materials.

With that hint, it still took him a couple days to figure out the difference. Every extra step of magical treatment, the flow would slow and become stifled. As he looked closer, the reasoning became obvious. Just like wood has natural channels for water and nutrients to flow, it also has qualities that allow the world energy to smoothly flow through it as well.

Each new treatment would leave behind the very thing Doyle ate, the magical cruft left behind by the touch of a sapient being. So while the step to straighten the grain might have increased the physical strength, it left a jagged flow as the world energy would be disrupted. The more processed the wood was, the more clogged it became.

This also allowed Doyle to realize what made a masterwork and why everything a dungeon makes, no matter how low quality, is a masterwork. It was all about having as little of that cruft inside the final product. Because while they didn’t do all the processing on the wood for their houses, just the act of crafting the planks left behind some cruft. However, the higher the skill, the less there was and what was there acted more like a speed bump instead of a boulder.

So of course everything made by a dungeon would be a masterwork. There isn’t any cruft to begin with. Besides that, though, Doyle was most amused by having proved a number of pre-system bits of magical knowledge. All the various things such as adder stones had new meaning when you realized that natural materials would more easily conduct world energy.

Though just because a stick didn’t have a craftsman cruft in it, didn’t mean it was a masterwork. As long as a universe had sapients in it, the cruft would get everywhere, like sand at a beach. Part of what a crafter does is smooth out the roughness as only dungeon produced goods completely lack the stuff.

Question answered, Doyle reports back what he found to Ally. With a smile, she congratulated him before adding a few things. For instance, the much vaunted “natural treasures” people find out in the wild are the result of special plants and situations that filter out the cruft. Even something as impossible as a stone sword floating in the center of a giant geode is entirely possible. And the sword, even unrefined, is a high quality artifact. Such occurrences are just a universe’s unthinking reaction to souls.

And while Doyle found this all interesting and would have liked to ask for more information, he controls himself. Ally has been doing good so far but it has only been about a month. While it would be nice if everything could just heal, he can still feel the distance between them. So instead he turns back to the town above as drama runs rampant.

There is no overt violence, especially once the newcomers realized how powerful even the weakest of the town’s core was. But still there is unrest. While Jan and her fighting force had all died, there were still people who believed Jan was the better leader and so they fought back against the town from the shadows. About the only thing safe ironically ended up being the one place that could be said was the true target, the inner circle itself.

The town’s core might not have 24/7 surveillance, but as if by magic, anyone attempting to get into the inner area of the town would be met with a guard. And by “as if” what Doyle means is, through actual magic. It was a bit of a combo system. Kellinger had dabbled in fortune telling, which, while very inaccurate even with magic behind it, had a low enough number of false negatives to be worth checking once a day.

The real kicker to the system of alarms however is a clever bit of work.While they don’t have the money nor skill to make a masterwork wall, that didn’t stop them from using a cloth string to channel a simple spell someone picked up in the tutorial. The spell was easy enough to understand. Just have a specific marker around a parameter and the spell will warn you when someone crosses it.

Scale it up and use a few mages to charge it, boom, a city scale warning system that even the weakest user of any supernatural power will notice from a good distance away. Though what do you expect when you’re jamming an absolute ton of power into a string? The good news is that none of Jan’s cultish followers were of the magical bent.

What would be worrying to the rest of the newcomers is how those caught trying to sneak into the center area would get a one-way trip into the dungeon. For a group of people who avoided magic, this was a quick way to die. Not that the Barrais left any of this up to chance. So, while they didn’t kill them, they stuck around to make sure they didn’t live. Though being careful such that they wouldn’t have to lie about anything if asked.

But through this all, Ace could tell things weren’t getting better. Even if they had managed to weed out many of the craziest, it wasn’t just Jan’s teachings that caused trouble. The very fact he had separated the new people from the town’s core members did exactly what he expected. It caused them to feel like second-class citizens. With good reason, they were, after all, exactly that.

Ace wasn’t going to change it either. He had originally planned to let some others into the inner circle. And while hard on the few hundred new members of the town, they had just been on foot for weeks and so were grumpy. But Ace doesn’t want people who react like they do. Sure, it was hard, but Ace is of the theory that how you act in the hard times shows more of a person than how they act during the good times.

Doyle is perfectly fine with how Ace is handling things. Though that might just be with how they kept feeding him the undesirables. Morally questionable? Sure. But Doyle doesn’t really have much of a foot to stand on when he is literally a murder hole. Plus, he is killing enough of the newcomers just from them being forced to enter his dungeon for food or leave.

There are, of course enough people who choose to leave, ironically most of the people that leave were those that had originally been from the settlement. Even so, as time passes even the dungeon newbs have gotten their feet under them. While Doyle hadn’t kept an exact count, it was easy to tell that only around two hundred of the newcomers were left after another month had passed.

Some of them had left, but enough of them had died in the dungeon that Doyle was just a smidge away from being able to create his next floor despite how little the unleveled and unskilled gave him. But with things settled and the discovery of the fact that the first floor suddenly had more instances meant deaths had dropped off to pre-Jan’s return levels.

Sure, the people in the outer ring still had to send people into the dungeon to hunt. But they had figured out a system so that only the people who want to fight would have to do it. Though even those people aren’t advancing quick enough to start exploring deeper floors and are overall unwilling to truly risk it. As Ally put it, they’re just another type of farmer. The crop might be monster meat, but at this point with their skill the goats are only about as dangerous as a pre-system goat would be to a pre-system person.

But Doyle had a feeling he wouldn’t have to wait long for his seventh floor. While Ace hadn’t been the most regular in visiting the dungeon. Jim had been grinding away at the boss floor. And even though his team hasn’t gotten much further, they are more than able to handle the first patrol that comes by and a significant part of the response before they have to retreat.

Of course, Doyle doesn’t want them to beat the fifth floor quite yet. But every time the team puts in so much effort and fails, he definitely gets quite the payday. So even if no one else tries to delve, Doyle estimates it will only take two to three more attempts on the boss floor before he has enough.

For now, however, Doyle forces himself to keep his attention on other things. If only to keep his head on straight. Still, it did mean that he got sufficiently filled in on what they planned to do over the coming year. Biggest on the list though wasn’t even related to the dungeon. Instead, they wanted to focus on perfecting the inner ring. Because while that early warning line looks secure enough, the town needed proper magical defenses. Anyone with even a smidge of power would be able to walk right in. though it would take considerably more power to do so and remain completely unnoticed.

Though for that to really start, Ace would need to force everyone in the inner ring to just leave well enough alone. Every single building could have been finished just over a week ago if that was the case. Instead of being stuck with that new building, everyone was having a fun time altering most things about it. Never before had any of them been allowed to build an entire house, let alone one they are expected to live in.