The Crafter's Dominion: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 5) by Jonathan Brooks (e ink epub reader .txt) 📕

sheet.  Just as quickly as the last time, her vision improved remarkably—too remarkably, in fact.  There was so much energy pumping through the Limiter rune connection that it fed through the enchantment at a horrendous speed, improving her vision by an order of magnitude that Sandra hadn’t comprehended before.

Before she knew it, however, the Shapeshifter’s eyes exploded, unable to take that sort of enhancement for more than a second or two.

OUCH!  What the—?

“What happened, Sandra?  Are you alright?”  Winxa was fluttering around her Core worriedly, obviously reacting to her sounds of pain.  Even now, Sandra was still feeling the temporary pain of having two organs explode in her Monster’s head, and it took her a moment to answer.

Yes, I think so.  Just another experiment gone wrong; I think I know what I need to change to fix it, though.

The Dungeon Fairy still looked concerned, but seemed to accept that it was just a part of Sandra’s normal crafting process.  “Well, be careful please; I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

Sandra assured her that she would, before concentrating on the workshop again.  She had left control of the Shapeshifter as soon as she could after the explosion, and hadn’t had a chance to see what had happened to it yet.  When she looked, she could see the Multi-access Repair Drone she had stationed up there was already at work, as the Shapeshifter in Violet form was lying on the floor, with two craters in its face that were caused by the eyeball explosion.  It took nearly 10 minutes for it to fully heal, and she knew that if the Drone hadn’t been nearby, the Shifter would’ve likely perished.

Sandra mentally shuddered as she remembered the feel of the explosion, as well as the enhancement itself.  Definitely not the most fun experience I’ve ever had with my Dungeon Monsters; not the worst, but certainly in the top 5 or so.

As the Shapeshifter healed, she went over what went wrong—which was fairly obvious when she looked at it.  Sandra had mistakenly ramped the Limiter up too much; she had “logically” been using the same sort of arrangement of the Limiter sequence as the Energy Orbs, because it was ultimately being fed into the body of the person.  However, she had forgotten that the PEEs automatically regulated how much was fed into the person, because of the circular pattern they were constructed of; the same sort of energy flowing through this enchantment compared to the energy refilling someone’s energy reservoir was a vast difference.  Sandra thought it was probably because the energy that was regenerated through an Energy Orb was suffused through the whole body as raw energy, and not concentrated on a particular system or body part.

Wait…does that mean that in a normal PEE, a lot of the energy that sustains and regulates the output is essentially wasted?  I thought that I was actually aiming a bit lower than necessary to maintain the correct energy feed-through, but that didn’t seem to be the case; based on what I saw and experienced, I think I need to shoot even lower – which means that I was wrong about how long these PEEs will last with Energy Orbs attached.  I thought they might last hours or a day, but it could be much longer.

Now that was exciting.  Sandra thought she would just be shortly extending the time the PEEs could be used before they ran out of energy, but everything was pointing at something greater than that.  Years, perhaps – though it was too soon to tell without a working prototype.

She was impatient for her Violet copy to get entirely healed, and her eagerness to keep experimenting was enough to send most of the lingering feelings of pain from the bodily explosion away.  That wasn’t the only thing that was sent away, she realized; as soon as she started to craft for real, the Core shard in her mind had backed off, retreating to the space it had inhabited before the attack on the Orc Warband.  She could tell that it wasn’t confined there, and could reemerge at any time, but for the moment there was nothing that called out to it to press against Sandra’s control.  Knowing that was progress, of a sort, she had hopes in the future that they could either co-exist or there might be a way to banish the contract-based Core shard once and for all.

Neither solution of which was going to come right now, however, because her Shapeshifter was back in action.  With only the slightest hesitation, she entered the Violet copy’s viewpoint and got back to work.  Sandra had already absorbed her failed experiment and salvaged the Energy Orbs, so she tried everything again; this time, she placed the Limiter rune sequence on the very lowest setting she could manage, which basically allowed only the slightest trickle of energy to pass through.  Taking a large breath with her Shapeshifter, she activated and prepared to escape its mind if she felt that there might be another explosion imminent.

But, as she had hoped, it worked.

The Enhanced Vision PEE worked exactly as it should, enhancing “Violet’s” vision at approximately the same rate as it had been without the Energy Orbs.  She could see the stone underneath her feet nearly the same as she would as a Dungeon Core, and looking at the Enchantment inscribed on the Silver sheet made her realize she still had a lot of practice to do to perfect her enchantments.  The enhancements allowed her to see the imperfections in her rune forming even more than she had seen before – but it was something she could certainly work on!

Best yet, the PEE didn’t shut off after 10 seconds, or after a minute, or even 5 minutes.  Her vision also didn’t seem to be sharpening at any perceptible rate, which told her that she had hit the equilibrium of input and output.  If