Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) by Alex Oakchest (book suggestions txt) 📕

The sun was already blinding a mere hour after sunrise. Either that, or it was just especially bright to me, given I lived mostly in darkness. I didn’t enjoy leaving my dungeon to go to the surface just to be roasted alive by that big, yellow idiot in the sky, but I had no choice. I did, however, appreciate the novelty of being able to float up there myself, rather than relying on Wylie or Shadow to carry me around.

While the outdoor laborers of Yondersun had already been up for hours, taking advantage of the colder temperatures before sunrise, Cynthia the tinker was still wearing her ragged bedclothes when she admitted me into her tent.

“Come in,” she croaked, leading me into the tent while scratching her bum. “I’d apologize for the mess, but you’re a dungeon core so it’s not as if you’re much better.”

I floated in after her, doing my best to appear amicable and friendly that morning. If I was going to get leverage on Reginal then I needed information, and people are much more likely to divulge sensitive things to a pal.

“Don’t worry about airs and graces. They’re boring. What fun is a tidy house?”

“Exactly.”

Cynthia was the only ratbrid I had ever met, so I had no idea whether others of her kind shared her shrewd eyes and her whiskered snout. What I did know was that her goggles and her scorched leather chest piece were typical attire for a tinker-alchemist-artificer. If you were going to spend all your time fiddling with dangerous chemicals, it made sense to be prepared. It seemed that Cynthia slept in her goggles.

“Always nice to see you, Beno,” she said, putting a pipe in her mouth. She took two puffs and then strolled across her tent. Bottles clinked as she disturbed them from their resting places on the floor.

“Nice to see you too. Business good?”

“Good? Never bloody better! I have orders coming out of my ears, nose, and all kinds of places I won’t mention. In fact, I’ve been thinking for a while that I need a couple more apprentices. Any of your little kobold fellas fancy learning a trade?”

My instinct was to dismiss that out of hand. I had grown used to being asked if people could borrow my dungeon workforce, and although I granted it where possible in order to build relations, I had to say no quite a lot.

But this was an interesting offer.

“You’ll teach one of my kobolds to be a tinker?”

“I’ll give ‘em the basics in tinkering, artificery, and alchemy. I need an extra set of hands,” she said. She nodded to a glass jar on the ground, near a stack of wooden crates. A scaly hand floated inside it, submerged in some kind of goop. “Hands still attached to a body, I mean. Don’t get alarmed, Beno. That hand there is for alchemy stuff. Already dead when I bought it.”

“Let me think about this. I have a few kobolds who might be interested.”

“Sure thing.”

She leaned on her tinker’s workbench, which took up most of the room and was bigger than her bed. A metal tube was fixed to it, and this stretched upwards and out of a hole in the top of the tent so that dangerous gases could be vented out.

“Now, what’s it to be? You need something that explodes? A toxin, perhaps?”

“I had a question, actually.”

“A question! Rather boring. Questions can’t explode or anything. I don’t have time for them, Beno. Reginal wants me to make a batch of alchemic fertilizer by tomorrow. Sorry.”

“You know,” I said. “We’ve been sending you all our surplus ores from our mining exploits, haven’t we? I know you need them for your alchemy.”

“Metallurgy, actually. Though I suppose alchemy does come into it.”

“There’s a problem, though, Cynthia. I think the supplies might be drying up.”

She puffed on her pipe and stared at me for a second. “And people say dungeon cores are crafty. I don’t know where they could get that idea! Fine, go on, then. I’m on edge waiting to answer your questions, you nitwit.”

“Thank you, you overgrown rat.”

Cynthia grinned making her snout whiskers twitch. “Let’s not fritter away the morning complimenting each other. What do you want to know?”

“Chief Reginal’s son, Devry. What exactly is his illness called?”

“A strange thing to ask, if you don’t mind me sayin’.”

“I like the boy, and I’ve had it in mind for a while now to see if there’s anything I can do to help him. But I realized I don’t know the first thing about his illness.”

“Ventriculus Ictas is a real bitch of a disease, let me tell you. Know what they call it in the east? Mother’s Woe, on account of its predilection for latching onto the young ‘uns. It begins with a little seed in the belly, but not just any seed. One that can grow with no sunlight, taking nourishment from stomach juices and growing larger, spreading roots. Slithering through veins, organs, spreading into cavities, slowly invading its host.”

“Remarkable,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“A tragedy, I mean. And the glass orb thing that floats around Devry? What is it?”

“Ah. An artificed vitality orb. It can’t do anything about the roots that have already grown inside Devry, but it can zap any new ones before they spread. What’s lost is lost, for the poor lad.”

“Meaning his inability to walk.”

“He’ll never get out of his chair, but the lad is sharper than a rogue’s blade, only lacking the poisoned tip. He would make a good ruler one day if only he could develop a nasty edge.”

“Yep,” I agreed. “The apple fell far away from Reginal’s tree, in Devry’s case. I assume he takes after his mother.”

“Never met her.”

“This seed…did someone feed it to him?”

“Ah.