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

an expensive energy-intensive enchantment, however, which was commonly used on hard materials such as two different types of stone that were difficult to join using Earth-based elemental energy.  On her harness, however, it would only activate if the Leather were damaged in some way and would work to fuse the sliced or broken pieces back together.

Once she made one harness, she created a second one, because she knew she was going to need it for future Aerie Rocs – such as a third one she was going to have to create soon that would transport Gerold back to the mountain fortresses of the Dwarves.  That wasn’t going to happen until the situation around the Dwarven village of Nurboldar was a little more under control, of course, which would hopefully be the case in the next few days.  In fact, despite it being night out, the two teams of Dwarves and Sandra’s constructs were still going strong, with two of the Shieldmen constantly using their Fire or Holy elemental energy to light up enough of the forest to see.  Another portion of her concentration was working to find additional targets for them via her Shears, though that was relatively easy and didn’t require much focus on her part.

An additional 10% of her Mana was focused on the creation of the new bows that Sandra had promised the Elven Rangers that were coming in the morning.  Not only did she have to create 4 Tiny Energy Orbs per bow to power the enchantments on them, she also needed two Tiny Energy Orbs – one Fire and one Spirit – per Fireburst-enchanted bolt she was creating for the bows.  The materials for normal bolts and the enchanted bolts were easy enough to supply, but everything took time to craft together and enchant, which was where most of her focus was with everything going on around her.

The last 10% of her incoming Mana was used on the purpose she was speaking with Winxa about: she was going treasure hunting.  Although, because she could observe everything within her Area of Influence as long as it was underground, it wasn’t really hunting; rather, she spent her time digging through the dirt and stone of the wastelands, and later underneath the forest where the Reptile-Classification dungeon had been located.

Starting from inside of the entrance of her massive tunnel she created for the Aerie Roc, Sandra used her Mana to remove enough of the dirt and stone near the floor to create an exceedingly small tunnel that was just barely large enough to fit one of her Hyper Automatons inside.  Her plan was for it to be only 4 inches tall and 4 inches wide, which would allow her Automatons to run down and was large enough to transport anything they were able to pick up.  That was the key and the entire point to the whole thing, after all; only by absorbing the Monster Seeds inside of her dungeon would she be able to gain a portion of the Mana and Raw Materials used in their formation.

Unfortunately, her tiny tunnel didn’t count as being part of her dungeon; there were certain requirements that had to be met before a tunnel or a room could be considered a part of it.  That also, it turned out, meant that the tunnel itself wasn’t very stable; not being infused with the Mana that permeated her normal dungeon, the walls were wont to collapse entirely.  This also meant that she couldn’t create stone to cover the walls, because they were outside of where she could use her Mana to create…well, anything.  She could eliminate the dirt and stone already in the ground to make the tunnel, but creation was entirely different from destruction.

Sandra realized that she needed to get creative.  After the fourth collapse of a tunnel section within the first 200 feet, she figured out what she needed to do: craft something that would keep it intact.  Without being able to coat the walls with stone to maintain its shape, the Dungeon Core used the next best thing that was more than strong enough and relatively easy for her to work with: Steel. Luckily for her, what she ended up making didn’t require forcing or a crafting station, and could therefore be made right there in the large Roc tunnel.

Creating thin plates of Steel using her Mundane Object Creation Skill, she used her Mana to cut them into 3-foot-long and 4-inch-wide strips; using some Hyper Automatons she was already gathering to send down the tunnel, she had them hold the strips together along the edges perpendicular to each other, while Sandra “welded” the two plates together using a tiny bit of Mana and an additional use of her Creation Skill.  When those were together, she did the same with two more strips, and then connected those two L-shaped pieces together until they made a simple, open-ended, square tube of Steel.

From there, it was easy enough to have one of the Hyper Automations push the square tube inside of the passageway and bring it to the end, followed by another construct that would push another tube that she was rapidly crafting back in the Roc tunnel.  It took about an hour to really get going and pick up a good rhythm, but after that time she was able to rapidly create more Steel tubes and even more constructs from her Home room that would run all the way there to keep the process going.  Each time she would dig another few feet, all of the constructs inside the tunnel would push their section of the tubing forward, stabilizing the passageway for all the rest behind them.

After a while, it was becoming a bit expensive to keep creating Automatons, even at only a total of 70 Mana for each one when she considered how much it cost to create the construct itself and the Monster Seed required for it.  In this case