With that, Bolton was gone, leaving me alone again. I had gotten used to being on my own down here, but now that Bolton had visited, I was keenly aware of how silent the place was.
That was to be my next task. While I waited for Bolton to return my evaluation, I needed a friend.
A friend who could also kill heroes!
CHAPTER 6
Now that I had my core room, tunnels, a loot room, and two extra chambers, I guessed it’d be good to stretch my legs for a while.
Course, I didn’t have legs, so that was a no-go. But there were ways for a core to travel. It wouldn’t have helped much if I couldn’t tour my own dungeon, after all.
Although I could send my core arms out quite far to dig, and although I could use my core vision to see the dungeon rooms that I wasn’t in, there was no substitute for actually being there. Especially when it came to designing traps and stuff.
So, I needed to take a walk. The means of doing this was actually quite simple.
First, I gave a mental command, opening my crafting list. This brought up a menu for me to read.
Core Crafting Categories:
1) Dungeon Fixtures
2) Monsters
3) ????
4) ????
5) ????
6) ????
The fact that four categories were unavailable to me wasn’t a surprise. I was only a first level core, after all. You don’t get everything all at once, so they say. You have to work for it!
Selecting the ‘fixtures’ category, I read the list of things I could make.
Holy Lords of the Underworld, what a measly list it was.
Dungeon Fixtures:
Pedestal Point [Cost:25]
Lamp [Cost: 20]
Door [Cost: 30]
Pathway [Cost: 10]
Small Loot Chest [Cost: 40]
The cost listed next to each item was how much essence I had to spend to create each one.
It didn’t make for happy reading at first. Twenty essence points to create a simple lamp? That meant I could only make 2 at a time, and then I’d have to wait for aaaaages for my essence to replenish.
Yeah, it was a bum deal. But as I leveled up, not only would more crafting categories open up, but the cost of simple things would decrease.
For now, I was only interested in the pedestal points. Lamps could wait; I didn’t need them, and they were only there to help guide heroes through my dungeon. In fact, it was easy to lead heroes down very dark paths by strategically placing lamps.
I focused on the loot room ahead of me, way down the tunnel.
Build pedestal point.
I felt essence leave me, and there was a great hammering sound, as if some invisible crafter was working in the other room.
Pedestal point created!
Woo hoo! Now it was time to stretch my metaphorical legs. With a mental command, barely more effort than a person takes to blink, I zapped away from my core room and onto the pedestal point I had created.
What a rush!
I found myself in the loot room. This was larger and wider than the core room, and I’d excavated the walls to form an oval shape. That wasn’t just because ovals looked nicer. There were very good reasons to make a loot room oval.
Reasons that involved killing heroes.
Some cores subscribed to the whole ‘let’s make every room square and rectangular’ thing. Pah. That was old school.
I wanted to become something of a visionary, and I had studied lots of dungeon layouts in the academy library. I’d seen plans for all kinds of dungeons, some of them you wouldn’t believe. A dungeon architect named Lazori had even designed a dungeon that was set on a cloud way up in the sky! Course, nobody would give him the essence or the gold to make it, since they were understandably worried a cloud dungeon might fall down.
My ideas were a little more grounded than his, but I still had a good idea of what I wanted my palace of hell to look like.
Right now, I was way, way off the mark. The loot room was large, oval, and bare. The walls were made from mud, but with patches of clay. Unfortunately, I hadn’t hit on any metals or minerals while digging.
At any rate, I could make a start on it.
In my head, I pictured this being a really horrible room. Nothing special, just the kind that made grown men and women quiver in their stupid hero boots. Demon faces carved into the walls, blood dripping from the ceiling, all those kinds of cool and cruel stuff.
For now, there wasn’t much in my crafting list I could use here. The only thing was a loot chest. That cost 40 essence points, and after creating the pedestal point, I didn’t have enough.
Time to wait for my essence to replenish.
To pass the time, I moved back into the core room. My lovely essence vines now covered half the wall, which increased my essence regeneration to four per minute.
Rather than do some more damn digging, I decided to improve my essence regeneration. There wasn’t much real estate left in my core room, and eventually, I’d need to use the wall space to mount defenses, in case any pesky heroes found their way in.
For now, I decided I could devote yet another wall to the essence vines. Using my core arms, I snipped five vines from the mass on the wall, and I planted them at the bottom of the adjoining, bare wall.
There. Beautiful. I just had to wait for them to grow.
With a little more time yet to pass before I could afford to make a loot chest, I
