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

By the time I was done, it was starting to look more and more like a dungeon. I checked my stats now, happy with what we’d done so far.

Rooms:

Core Room

Essence Growing Room

Melding Room

Loot Room

After so much hard work, Wylie had gone from a level 6 miner to level 9, while my three new kobolds had earned levels 2,3 and 3. One of them must have slacked a little more than the others, but I guessed that Warrane was still learning how to lead, and how to keep his workforce motivated. It’s hard-working out when to chew someone’s bumhole, and when to blow smoke up it.

Wait, let me rephrase that.

Actually, forget it. Lots to do, not much time.

As well as adhering to my dungeon blueprint, those lovely little kobolds had done something else.

While carving their way into the bowels of the caves, they had come across mineral and metal deposits from time to time. This built up the beginnings of a stockpile for me.

Material Inventory

Iron x12

Copper x6

Coal x10

Silver x2

It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

Ah. I hear a question from you. Or did I? Sometimes, it’s hard to work out what I actually hear, and what I imagine. Being a core can be lonely sometimes so even if you aren’t reading this and you are just a figment of my imagination, I’d like to thank you for your company.

Either way, real or not, the question was this; what can a dungeon core do with metals?

That was a good question, and one that I will answer shortly. Suffice to say, there are lots of delightful things he can do. And I mean delightful as in, they will help me murder dungeon intruders. Not delightful in the way most people mean it. Language can be a funny thing.

Anyway, I had an empty room in the east part of my dungeon, just beyond the essence growing and the melding rooms.

I crafted pedestal points in all of my chambers, and I used this to hop into the empty room now. I floated there for a second, alone. Dim sounds reached me; Warren giving the kobolds their orders, Wylie enthusiastically agreeing with them. Rhythmic dinks as their pickaxes carved into stone and dirt.

There was a quieter sound, too. Were I not a core, and if this wasn’t my dungeon, I wouldn’t have been attuned enough to hear it. But I listened, and there it was; Tomlin, in the essence growing room nearby, singing softly to himself. “Tomlin is great, he knows to cultivate. Tomlins essence grows the best, really thick and full of life.”

Well, if that was how he boosted his spirits, then all power to him.

In my empty room, I was eager to get started on something new. I pulled up my list of rooms now, which showed the various kind of chambers I could create in my dungeon.

There was one new, brilliant entry.

Crafting List

Rooms

Essence growing room [Cost 80]

Specialised insect and fungi larder [Cost 100]

Melding room [Cost 120]

*New* Alchemy Room [Cost 300]

Now we were talking! Sometimes, being a dungeon core is all about the little things. You know, like being able to create a room that allows you to alter the inherent properties of items, minerals, and metals, magically transforming them into a state that would have been impossible were it not for magic. Simple joys.

I spent 300 essence points to assign this as an alchemy room. It began to change in front of me; first, the stone walls gained a rather decorative swishy effect. That’s not the greatest way to describe it, but that was what it looked like. Thin streams of multi-colored light moving along the walls in waves.

In the center of the room, two spheres appeared. These were illuminated, and they looked like runes. You know, like the tattoos young heroes always get because they think it’s cool? And then, when a real rune-reader translates them, they always mean something stupid like I’m a massive, massive idiot.

One floor sphere was dark red, the other sky blue. I recalled the brief class I’d taken on alchemy rooms. Their working was simple, but from that simplicity, you could create something amazing.

Before I could get started, I heard footsteps behind me.

“Tomlin has massaged vines in the first essence room to maximum potential. They will grow faster and thicker now. He has planted them in new essence room.”

“Ah, yeah. Thanks, Tomlin. I can already feel my essence regenerating faster. You did an amazing job! And you’ve become a level 7 cultivator already. Great work.”

“Tomlin thanks Dark Lord for his praise. What is Dark Lord doing?”

“This is an alchemy chamber. See the spheres? They’re the heart of dungeon alchemy. If I place something on the red sphere, it will deconstruct it. It’ll strip it away to its most basic, valuable elements. The blue sphere, on the other hand, can transform one object into another.”

“Dark Lord can create anything now?”

“Not anything. Only the most basic things, I am afraid. I’ll need a resident alchemist to make full use of this.”

“Tomlin doesn’t understand deconstruct.”

“Let me show you.”

I already had an idea for my first use of the deconstructing sphere.

Create leech.

Two seconds later, 15 essence points poorer, I had a leech. A slimy, slug-like specimen but with teeth on the underside of its gooey body.

“Tomlin, could you place the leech on the red sphere please?”

“Tomlin would rather not.”

“Would Tomlin rather see how long he could survive on the surface, clanless and with only his annoying songs for company?”

Tomlin pinched the leech between his thumb and index and middle fingers, while turning his head as far away from it as he could. You’d have thought it