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

Unlock Requirements:

Mana Cost to Unlock:

Min. Mana:

Max. Mana:

Small Dragon Glass Sliver

2 Tiny Dragon Glass Flakes

14000

5000

20000

Average Dragon Glass Shard

4 Small Dragon Glass Slivers

56000

5000

80000

Large Dragon Glass Chunk

2 Average Dragon Glass Shards

112000

5000

160000

Sandra had also unlocked the Average and Large Steel Orbs, as well as all of the Elemental Orb sizes, which gave her a whopping 53 choices of Monster Seeds to use.  The only ones she still had to unlock were the larger sizes of Dragon Glass – but creating even a single Tiny Dragon Glass Flake was still beyond her.  Regardless, she had plenty to choose from and had access to seeds that could be used for any of her constructs.

Speaking of that, although she didn’t receive much of anything other than a resource capacity increase for upgrading to Core Sizes 12 and 14, she unlocked a new construct at Size 11, 13, and – just recently – 15.  At each upgrade, the new constructs were right on the edge of her maximum Mana capacity, which meant that they took a little bit to save up for; even though she had some – ok, a lot – of extra Orbs piled around her core, she was planning on keeping those for an emergency.

The first one was an Automated Digger, which was essentially a floating wheel 2 feet wide and 4 feet long with buckets attached to it, similar in shape to a water wheel she had seen used in a grain mill by a river before – though on a much smaller scale.  It rotated around a central axis that also turned in any direction it wanted, giving it a full capacity to reach just about anywhere; when she experimented with it, the digging wheel tore up dirt and stone faster than she could absorb it.  The Digger deposited the material behind it in neat piles, so she ended up using it to start hollowing out her new rooms and using some of her smaller constructs to move the dirt into piles arranged along the edges, where she could use it later if she needed it.

As great as her Automated Digger construct was at digging, it wasn’t really useful for crafting or even defensive purposes; it floated where she wanted it to go slowly, and rotated just as lethargically, so it obviously wasn’t designed to attack or defend.  Which was fine with her, because she already had plenty of things that could do that – and they would hopefully do it well.

At Core Size 13, the non-combat construct trend continued, as she acquired access to something called a Repair Drone.  When she was able to create it, she found that it was an unassuming-looking, white-colored, apparently seamless metal cylinder two feet high that floated an inch off of the floor.  And it did nothing.

Well, nothing until Sandra brought it near her Small Armored Sentinel, which was starting to look a little worse-for-wear after spending countless hours near a super-hot forge.  It was actually her seventh Sentinel, as the others had their joints and vital areas melted from the intense heat; even the slow self-regeneration her constructs enjoyed wasn’t enough to keep up with the constant damage.  Fortunately, they were inexpensive enough Mana-wise that she didn’t mind having to replace them periodically, especially as they always dropped their Seed when they stopped functioning.

When her Repair Drone got near the Sentinel, however, two thin, single-jointed arms with small metal pads on the end seemed to emerge from nowhere on the floating cylinder.  The metal pads immediately pressed up against her little melted crafter and the construct froze in the middle of hammering a double-bladed axe on the anvil.  Sandra saw lightning-shaped streaks of every elemental color flow from inside the Drone’s body, down its arms, and into the Armored Sentinel.  Within seconds, the melted parts of her handy Dungeon Monster started to form itself back together; to Sandra, it was like looking at all the damage over hours of intense heat reverse itself right before her eyes.  In less than a minute, her Sentinel was back to looking brand-new, as if there had never been any damage in the first place.

She watched, amazed, as the Repair Drone’s metal pads released the other construct, before retracting its arms back inside its shell, sealing up the slits on the outside of its cylindrical body as if they never existed.  And then it just sat there, waiting for…something to happen, Sandra guessed.

Curious, she took control of her Sentinel and deliberately placed its arm and hand inside the forge – though only for about five seconds.  Still, the powerful heat from a dozen flame-jets heating up its appendage was enough to almost completely melt it away, along with a good portion of its side closest to the forge.

Normally, that kind of damage would make it nearly unusable, and Sandra would just finish the job and deliberately melt it more so that it would be destroyed – where she would then create another.  This time, however, her Repair Drone went back to work, placing its metal pads on the sides of the heavily damaged Sentinel and doing its healing work.  It took about five times longer than the first repair, but she thought it was probably because the damage had been much more extensive, and its arm had to be almost completely rebuilt.

Her experiment had been a success!  But it also raised some questions.

I thought you said that my constructs couldn’t use elemental energies because they weren’t alive; I’m pretty sure that’s what I just saw, she mentally asked Winxa, who was watching as amazed as Sandra was as her Repair Drone finished repairing her Sentinel.

“That’s…not precisely what I said.  I said they can’t control the elemental energies they are made from to craft the Enchantments that only living creatures can create.  As crazy as