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

on to the kitchen.  She created a simple stone platform that was low to the ground – about a foot and a half high, two feet wide and six feet long.  It was short because she expected to have one of her Small Armored Sentinels doing the cooking, mainly because most of the preparation needed for cooking didn’t need the advanced dexterity that her newer Ironclad Apes possessed.

For the rest of the kitchen, she needed two things: an oven/cooking surface, and water of some sort.  Both by themselves were fairly easy – it was combining them both into one trap that was going to be the hardest part.

For the oven cooking surface, she pictured the different ways she had seen people cooking before; the best-kept secret she had learned through the years was from a little town called Copper Hollow, who was near a dungeon that had an over-abundance of Copper dungeon loot.  The residents used it for a lot of things, but the best use of it was in their cooking – and their ovens.  Copper was an excellent conductor of heat and did wonders for cooking meals quickly and evenly.

To get started, she first created a hollow stone box that was two feet long on each side, and then lined the entire inside with Copper, leaving a slot six inches wide and the same tall on the bottom of the box that would allow access to the inside.  On top of the stone box, she placed a thicker sheet of Copper so that it covered the entire surface.

Next to her new oven and cooking surface, Sandra made a solid stone pedestal a foot-and-a-half tall, and then hollowed out the top so that it created a concave bowl shape on the top of the small column.  From there, she placed a stone spigot attached to the back of the pedestal that was similar to a well pump she had seen before, and had it arch over the back of the new reservoir until it was pointing down.

With the basic structures in place, she started experimenting with getting the traps to work.  She used just the barest amount of Mana in her tests, so that she wouldn’t end up wasting more than she wanted to spend on the kitchen.

First, she made examples of each trap she wanted to place in there.  For her oven, she first hollowed out eight large channels in the stone on the top of the box, in between the top Copper cooking surface and the oven’s top portion of its Copper lining.  Then, she carved even more lines in the stone underneath the lining, so that there were channels on every single side – including the bottom.

To create the trap that would heat the entire contraption, she imagined small lines of condensed flame that would run down those channels, heating up the Copper lining the inside.  Each flame wasn’t hot enough to negatively affect the stone box, but just in case she spent a significant amount of resources to thinly line the channels with Dragon Glass.  It took a few hours to accumulate enough Mana to do that, but it was worth it to make sure the entire thing didn’t fall apart when it was used.  The channels lining the top portion of the oven lining would also heat up the Copper cooking surface.

To help regulate the temperature inside and out of the box – since if it was on full all the time, the heat might end up cooking things too quickly, thereby ruining the food – she placed trap triggers along the bottom right side of the box.  These triggers only required something to be placed on it – like a piece of stone – and depending on which one was activated, that many channels would turn on.  She numbered them 1 through 8, and they would start activating from the center and alternately turn on more channels as they made their way to the edges.

It took about 100 Mana to do a test of the oven, which worked perfectly when she had her Small Armored Sentinel come back down from the second room where Kelerim was still lying unconscious with no signs of waking up.  With that small amount of Mana, though, the heat was just barely noticeable when she created a small a little hunk of Raw Bearling Meat and placed it on the surface even on full heat.  Fortunately, it was just a test, and the meat didn’t even cost that much in terms of resources; since she didn’t want to use it as a Monster Seed, it was much less expensive than the Seed version.

Everything she could create cost much less than the Monster Seed version, of course – which was thoroughly demonstrated by the fact that she could convert stone to Dragon Glass at all.  The only thing that didn’t work as another material, unfortunately, was her Elemental Orbs; she had thought to use them in her blacksmith crafting somehow, but whenever she tried to combine the metal and the Orbs, it did a whole lot of nothing.  She couldn’t even create a non-Monster Seed version of it; her skill that allowed her to create them negated that possibility from the get-go.

So, now that she knew that the trap for her oven/cooking surface was working, she got rid of that Fire-based one and toyed with a Water-based trap.  With her pedestal and reservoir, she placed a trigger on the top of the spigot-looking protrusion, which would cause fresh, ice-cold water to spill from the end, falling the short distance to the reservoir below.  It would continue to run until the trigger was activated again; to prevent the hollowed-out top of the pedestal from overflowing from the spilling water, the stone automatically absorbed the water after a few seconds.  When the spigot was deactivated, there was another trigger on the side of the reservoir that could be activated to