Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) by Alex Oakchest (book suggestions txt) 📕

Since I couldn’t make any creature more adept at mining than a kobold, I create three more of them. 105 essence points left me, and the core room glowed with the three patches of light that spun around and around, soon becoming fully formed creatures.

Two were Shadow’s height, while the third was even smaller than Wylie, and had a rather pronounced gut. Unlike Tomlin, Wylie, and Shadow, these kobolds had taken more of the lizard side of their lizard/wolf genes, and their faces looked more reptilian.

“Wylie,” I said. Both he and Warrane had been standing side by side as I created these new dungeon dwellers, both of them equally as transfixed. “These are your new mining mates.”

“Wylie is boss?” asked the kobold.

I thought about that. A team needed a leader, no doubt about that. And Wylie was technically my second-longest-serving kobold and had dug many rooms for me in my old dungeon. Should I reward his loyalty?

I decided against it, as much as I felt bad to do that. Loyalty and long-service wasn’t a great way to award power. Someone should have to earn power through a display of skill and experience. Though Wylie was a good digger, he wouldn’t make a good leader.

“Wylie, as much as I could use you as a leader,” I said, “It pains me to say I need my greatest digger to focus his attention on what he is the best at.”

“Wylie sad.”

Hmm. I wasn’t doing a great job at letting him down gently. Maybe this would have been a good time to take a more authoritarian dungeon core attitude.

Warrane kneeled beside Wylie and put his hand on his shoulder. “This leaf has seen many kobolds. There is a kobold tree in Wrotun caves who also dedicate their lives to mining.”

“Tree?” said Wylie.

“He means family,” I added.

Warrane nodded. “For all the years the Wrotun kobolds have spent mining, none match you, Wylie. A gift like yours would be wasted without a pickaxe in hand. This leaf has not found his gift, yet, so he can recognize its absence too well.”

“Wylie is good miner?”

“An exceptional miner,” I said. “And from now on, the four of you are my mining and excavation team. And you will be supervised by Warrane.”

The green-faced boy stared at me now, his three eyes blinking not in unison, but one after another. I hated it when he did that!

“This leaf will supervise them?”

I could see the smile creeping on his face. Warrane had spent his life dishonored thanks to events he couldn’t control. Was it his fault people in his tree turned tail and left the caverns? Nope. All the same, he’d grown up knowing he’d never be allowed to rise to a fourth-leaf or anything above, and he’d never get whatever perks of authority that came with it.

Well, I couldn’t fix their wonky honor system, but I could help the kid.

I displayed my map to them all now, but I spoke primarily to Warren. “See the essence room? I need a tunnel coming off it, with a new room excavating. This will be a specialized essence growing room. Essence grows on walls, so I’ll need lots of smaller walls built in rows all through the room.”

“This leaf understands. Many walls in the same room, but with space between so that cultivator Tomlin can attend to them.”

“Exactly.” I pointed to space beside the essence room. “And right here, I need you to build a melding room.”

“How can this leaf distinguish on room type from another?”

“You just need to give the order to Wylie and his team and dig the space, I’ll allocate a purpose to the room, okay?”

“Yes, Core Beno.”

“I’ll need yet another room connected to this by a tunnel. Then,” I said, this time pointing to the opposite side of the map, just west of the core room, “I’ll need a large, oval-shaped room here. This will be the loot room. Only, we won’t be using normal loot.”

This was something I had thought about a lot over the last few hours.

See, I was a dungeon core trained by the Dungeon Core Academy. This meant that my skills were honed toward a very particular type of dungeon. The common kind, where the core placed loot for the heroes to find, and they battled their way through to it.

The function of a loot room in place like this was to stage a final battle. Providing the heroes didn’t die before getting there, a core would always place a boss monster there, ready to tear the heroes new bumholes.

Things were a little different here, in the Wrotun caves.

For one, the Seekers weren’t ordinary heroes. Their motivation wasn’t to earn treasure and glory, but to get to the mana springs. I assumed that they would also want to spread out into the Wrotun’s main cave and wipe them out so they could claim the springs as their own.

So, the Seekers didn’t want loot. That meant they wouldn’t behave the same way as regular heroes, which threw quite a lot of my training out of the window, right?

Yeah, I’d thought so too.

Then I thought about it. Loot itself is just a prize. It’s a token of success.

That was what the mana spring was to the Seekers. Getting to the spring represented success. All I needed to do to get them to act more like the heroes I had studied how to kill, was to replace loot, with mana.

How could I do this?

Well, now that I had figured things out, that was the easy part.

CHAPTER 15

Under Warrane’s supervision, it took Wylie and the other miners three days to dig out tunnels and excavate the rooms like I asked. When they were done, I visited each