The Crafter's Dungeon: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 1) by Jonathan Brooks (literature books to read TXT) 📕

senses to look at the new, smaller room she was excavating, while the other part was in the second room, looking at the small forge she was starting to build.  Sandra froze in concern for a moment, worried that she had somehow fractured her mind and was starting to go insane after all that time.  Almost a minute later of cautious experimentation, however, she found that she could control things in both viewpoints, though it was somewhat cumbersome.  With a bit more practice, she got used to her split mind, and it became easier to handle what she was doing in each place.

Instead of using the majority of the Raw Materials that she was absorbing from the new room on additional Monster Seeds, Sandra instead used it – along with the ambient Mana that her constructs were funneling to her – to create a small forge for her crafting endeavors.  She decided to place it in the second room away from her Core; although she had quite a bit of knowledge in her mind, she had never actually crafted anything before and didn’t want a potential accident to destroy her fragile physical shell.

Off in the corner away from the tunnel leading out, Sandra used her resources to construct a very small stone forge; it wasn’t large because the only construct that had any hope of using it was her Golem – which was only a foot tall.  Luckily, what she wanted to accomplish with that initial forge wasn’t too complex, so it didn’t need to be that large or complicated.

Normally, a forge was constructed with a few necessary parts: a hearth where the burning fuel is placed, a bellows of some type to provide air, and an external pipe where that air can be pumped into the hearth to make the fuel burn hotter.  Sandra, though, didn’t have need of any of those – because her heat was going to be produced by her Dungeon Core Mana.

She did, however, need a place to contain the heat in a specific place.  With that in mind, she created a small, square, enclosed stone box two feet tall, with a six-inch square opening on one side.  In the middle of the box she created a thick stone grate with crisscrossing slats that formed holes about a half-inch wide, which would allow the heat to transfer all around whatever was placed inside.  It was very basic, but that was all she really needed.

For her heat source, she needed to create a trap on the inside of her new forge.  At first, she thought she should just put lots of flames that would shoot out and hope for the best; after more consideration, she realized she needed to be able to regulate the temperature inside.  If she wanted to do any type of crafting other than melting two metals together, she needed to be able to tone it down so that whatever was placed inside wouldn’t quickly melt into a puddle.

Sandra ended up creating six super-hot flame jets on the bottom of the forge that would shoot upwards, mirrored by six additional flame jets on the top that would shoot downwards.  With the small, enclosed space, the heat provided by those flames would likely be able to melt just about anything she could place inside.

However, with a dozen different sources of heat, she needed a way to be able to only turn on what she needed.  The simplest solution turned out to be the best; depending on the placement of whatever was set on the stone grate (she placed tiny numbers on different spots, so that she wouldn’t forget), a certain number of flame jets would ignite and stay lit for as long as whatever was inside stayed there.  Once it was removed, the fires would go out, only to be retriggered when something else was placed inside.

Since the area she wanted to place her trap wasn’t very big, she didn’t think the Mana cost would be that large, but the quantity, intensity of the flames, and the triggering mechanisms jacked up the expenditure.  Fortunately, she was able to get everything she wanted for the low price of 300 Mana – practically a steal for limitless free heat production.

And now it was time to test it out.

She moved her Articulated Clockwork Golem to the second room, though she almost lost it when she forgot about her spike-filled pit trap near the tunnel entrance.  Fortunately, since it was relatively slow, she was able to stop it before it did more than trigger the collapsing film of flooring above it.  She quickly built a small stone bridge over the trap which allowed her one-foot-tall construct to safely cross, and it was on its way.

When it finally arrived near her forge, Sandra had already prepared everything it was going to need.  Since she didn’t have access to a wide variety of materials, she used her Mundane Object Creation skill to create some stone tools which would assist her in the forging process.  First, she created a large stone crucible in the shape of a flat-bottomed bowl, in which she placed a small block of Tin and a much larger block of Copper.  The crucible was the object which would go directly into the forge, and it had two thick circular rings permanently attached to the sides of it.

Next, she formed a stone mold in the shape of a large brick, in which she would pour the melted metal contents of the crucible once it was done in the forge.  Lastly, she formed two stone rods about a foot in length, the purpose of which was to slide through the crucible’s circular rings to lift it into and out from the forge in relative safely.  Not that she was worrying about burning herself, but she didn’t want to destroy her construct unnecessarily.

With everything as set as it was going to be, Sandra checked everything else going