The Crafter's Darkness: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 4) by Jonathan Brooks (e book reading free txt) 📕

“—Elimination.  I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about that earlier, I thought you were using it based on how quickly you were excavating the nearest rooms.”

Fair enough – but what is it?  I need to get moving, otherwise this will take days or weeks to accomplish.

Winxa still seemed upset, but she got herself together enough to explain.  “Okay, well, you know how you apply Mana to eliminate the dirt and stone around your dungeon, clearing space to make rooms and tunnels? This process converts all of what you get rid of into Raw Materials, so that you can use them later.  This can be time-consuming and inefficient when you need to clear out a lot at once; for instance, those massive tunnels you’ve seen the other Cores possess.  By using the Bulk Elimination method, you can clear out large areas of your underground world here with just an application of a little bit more Mana than it would normally cost to do the same amount.”

Okay…what’s the catch?  Why wouldn’t you have told me about this at the beginning, when I was struggling to build my dungeon?  It should’ve been obvious at that point.

“The catch?  Oh, like, what’s the downside?  There are a few, actually, which is why most Cores don’t apply the technique unless they are creating a massive tunnel like you’re contemplating.  First, the amount of Mana to do a section costs approximately 5 times what you would normally spend to do it slower.  That’s not that big of a deal, because at this point – with your absorption in your dungeon and from your Dungeon Monsters outside, you could probably do it every few minutes and wouldn’t see too much effect on your reserves.

“Second, you can only eliminate a fixed amount, which equates to a cube with 50-foot-long sides – no more, no less.  It will also be perfectly square, so if you want to create any type of arched or natural effect on the walls, you’ll have to do that yourself afterwards.  In addition, you can’t rotate the Bulk Elimination in any direction, so trying to angle it upwards will be impossible; again, you’ll have to smooth it out manually after you’re done.”

That all seems reasonable.

“True – that’s not so bad.  The third, and most important downside, is that eliminating anything in this manner will not provide any Raw Materials.  Again, though, this really wouldn’t affect you all that much because Materials aren’t something that you’re short of, but most dungeons don’t have your condensed Gravitational Sphere, or your aptitude for keeping materials in a handy form which you can access for material at any time.  Most dungeons need to constantly expand to have enough Raw Materials ‘on hand’ to create their Seeds, and spending Mana to expand without getting those Materials is problematic to them.”

I guess I’m lucky in that respect.  Thank you, Winxa; if you remember anything else that you think I should know, no matter how mundane, please don’t hesitate to tell me.

Now that she had a technique that would assist in the excavation of her new tunnel, Sandra got to work.  After a brief training session with Winxa on how to do the Bulk Elimination – which was easier than she thought it would be – she concentrated on a large block of solid dirt and stone along the eastern side of her Home room, located halfway above and below the floor there, and then pictured making an invisible box around it.  Normally, it was her Mana sort of infusing the earthen substances and then converting it to Raw Materials; now, though, she wasn’t converting it so much as cutting it out.

She felt approximately 300 Mana leave her Core and flow into the box she was imagining, and within moments the contents inside of the box started to break up and…well, dematerialize was probably the best word to describe it.  In a matter of 10 seconds, and at the cost of 300 Mana as opposed to the 60 it normally would have cost (not to mention no Raw Materials gained from the process), Sandra had made a 50X50X50 empty space.  Based on past projects, she estimated that, done normally, that would’ve taken her at least 2 hours or perhaps closer to 3 to finish something like that.

It was certainly a timesaver, despite the higher mana cost.  She progressed her Bulk Eliminations downwards at first, essentially making a giant-sized staircase as she systematically dropped the elevation of where she was eliminating the stone and dirt.  In each section, she stacked two of the Eliminations on top of each other, making a tunnel that was 50 feet wide and 100 feet tall.  That was plenty wide enough, though she might have to make it higher when she tried to have her Aerie Roc walk through it.  She wouldn’t use her new technique for that, though – she had something else that would work for smoothing out the edges and making it taller if it came to that.

She already had a few of her Automated Sharp-bladed Diggers standing guard in one of her defensive dungeon rooms, so she moved three of them to her new tunnel and instructed them to dig into the edges of the floor and ceiling of the tunnel she was creating from her cube-shaped Elimination voids, smoothing them out.  Once it was deep enough and easily passing beneath the VATS column, Sandra gradually leveled out the slide with her Diggers and a little of her Mana, then had the Roc peek its head into the hole-slide in her Home room.  Luckily, it appeared as though the massive bird could bend over enough while it walked such that the height of the tunnel was plenty tall enough, so she wouldn’t have to adjust it any.

From there, and through the next 6 hours, the Dungeon Core continued to expand her tunnel, creating two large rooms that were essentially 200X200X200-foot cubes,