The face faded now, leaving my core room much darker. Inside, though, I felt a warm ray of happiness glowing through me.
All my level 1 crafting costs would be halved! Way to go! This was going to let me advance even more than the other cores. Sure, some of them would also have received rewards for their evaluations, but plenty of them wouldn’t. I had already leaped forward by using the core split technique in the first place.
I just hoped overseer Bolton didn’t take it personally. If he came to evaluate me again, I would apologize.
For now, though, I had replenished some essence, and my stuff cost less. Time to go make things!
CHAPTER 7
I traveled to my loot room again. There, floating on my pedestal point, I accessed my crafting list and picked the small loot chest, which now cost 20 essence points instead of 40.
I placed it back against the edge of one of the oval walls, purposefully making it off-center. It made it seem a little out of place.
I wasn’t just being different for different’s sake here. Most cores put their loot chests in the center of the loot room. There was no good reason why, really. I guess it was because a lot of dungeon blueprints showed them this way. Again, for no good reason. It was just a habit that got passed down through generations of cores.
The thing was that heroes became used to seeing loot chests in the middle of the loot room. It was what they expected.
Now, I was a newbie core. I had to remember that. It’d be a while before I had a dungeon tough enough to slaughter a party of looters, so I had to take little advantages where I could find them.
By placing the chest off-center and way against a wall, it would throw the heroes off just that tiny bit.
When they entered my loot room, they might not consciously register that it was strange that the chest was placed there, but its placement would play with their subconscious. It’d be like an itch they couldn’t quite scratch.
And on that subject…major plus about being a core. I hadn’t had an itch all year.
The chest itself was crappy. It was made from unvarnished, splintered wood, with a little metal clasp. Really, really shoddy work. Still, what could I expect for 20 essence points?
Now came the problem of filling it with loot. After all, no hero would brave my dungeon unless there was loot. In fact, the four requirements meant I couldn’t even open my dungeon without it.
But where would a dungeon core find loot?
The answer is that there are a few places. One is on the crafting list, though right now, the loot category was disabled for me until I leveled up.
Even then, the loot available in a crafting list was always shoddy. Iron daggers, crappy steel shields, that kind of thing. Maybe even a bag of gold coins. Nothing to salivate over.
If a core wanted better loot, they had to go ask the surface dwellers for help. If I created a monster, I could send him out onto the surface to go trade with a jeweler or a blacksmith or some other mortal chump. One that was happy to deal with a goblin or an orc or whatever.
Another way of getting loot is the cruelest and the most delicious. Given that I was a dungeon core and had a certain evil side to me, this was my absolute favorite. As soon as I had learned about it in the academy, I couldn’t wait to try it out.
The third way of gathering loot is to take it from the heroes that you kill. Some of them race down into the dungeon thinking they’re great and they’re gonna kill a bunch of monsters. Maybe some of them are rookie heroes, there to impress a guild and earn a contract.
They’d go down there with their best weapons and armor. Swords with artificed gems set in the hilts. Fancy breastplates that their mothers bought them for their birthday.
A rather greedy core could kill a hero and loot his stuff.
Even thinking about it made me laugh. A hero enters a dungeon for loot, and the dungeon core ends up looting him! Who wouldn’t enjoy that?
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
When I stopped laughing, I felt slightly embarrassed about doing so in an empty chamber. I guessed I couldn’t help it. The longer you spend as a core, the more your core instincts filter through. I’d have to try and control myself a little. I’d still kill heroes. I mean…I had to. I’d just try and be more professional about it, though.
Anyway, that was the third way. Kill a hero, loot him, and then use that loot to draw other suckers into your dungeon. The circle of life, a person might call it. Or is it death?
But that didn’t matter right now, because I couldn’t open my dungeon up to heroes yet. I was going to have to find loot another way. A fourth way.
My next step was to craft another pedestal point. I placed this in one of the unassigned chambers. I chose the one that split off at the right side of the tunnel leading from the loot room.
After traveling into room three via my new pedestal point, I once again found myself staring at a rather bland room with nothing but mud walls and a dirt floor.
There were a couple of things I wanted to do here, but I was too low-level to do them. I needed access to the trap
