The Crafter's Defense: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 2) Jonathan Brooks (large ebook reader TXT) 📖

Next, in the upper room, she placed a simple water-producing Water trap in the corresponding plot above the planted dirt.  It would fill slowly, however, because she didn’t want to flood the ground below; while plants needed water, there were only a few that she personally knew of that could grow while they were drowned underwater.  She also placed an activation trigger on the “walkway” where her Rolling Force was located, so that she could activate it when it was needed.

With everything in place, she had her constructs activate her two traps…and multiple events started to happen at the same time.  Water filled up the reservoir above and started to pour down in great streams, light bathed the dirt below in a bright steady flash, and shoots of green growth sprouted from the ground – but only in certain places.  Some of the plants grew at a rapid pace but were quickly drowned out by the quantity of water pouring down on them, while some grew slowly or not at all because the water didn’t get to them.

Sandra deactivated both traps and rethought the process.  It seemed like the Natural and Holy traps were working fine, but the water was the issue. She briefly thought about just adding a bunch more holes to the ceiling and making them smaller, but she thought she would have the same issue as before – flooding.  She wracked her mind for a few minutes trying to think of a solution; she needed to both control how much came down from the room above and find a way to disperse it evenly over all the dirt.

Eventually, she thought she had an unconventional solution, but a solution, nonetheless.  Over the next few minutes, she created a dozen Singing Blademasters and sent them up to the growing room; once they were all in place, Sandra altered the water trap above so that the water level would rise even slower than it had been previously, to reduce the flow of the pressure pushing the water downwards.  With that changed, she activated both traps again and positioned her Blademasters underneath the holes about halfway in between the dirt and the ceiling.

The light turned on and the growing activated; the water flowed down slower than it had before and hit the quickly spinning constructs in the middle of the air, and the water was flung out in a circular spray, liberally covering half of the room.  Acting quickly, she lowered the Singing Blademasters until they were only a few feet above the plots of dirt, and their flung-out spray was limited – mostly – to where she wanted the water.  Within minutes, the Flax plants had grown out of the ground in beautiful green shoots, reaching three feet in height before stopping and starting to turn yellow.  As soon as she saw it start to turn colors, she deactivated both traps and sent her Golems back in to work.

The best way to harvest Flax was to pull it up by the roots to extend the amount of fibers that would be found inside – so that was what her constructs did.  Snapping off the seed pods from the end and placing them in a pile, the Golems then brought the stalks of flax to the vats of water in the next room and placed them inside.  Sandra had already removed the boiling water traps from inside the large vats and instead replaced them with warm, but not hot, water that would continuously churn.  When the flax stems were placed inside and a very thin stone cover was placed on top to contain it all, the retting (or removal of the tough bark on the outside) would commence.

There was a bit more that needed to be done to turn the fibers inside the Flax stalks into linen thread and then into cloth, but the retting was going to take a few days to break down the fibers enough to be useful.  In the meantime, she had the hard seed pods that were produced by the plants broken open and reused for replanting the rest of the room. The seeds themselves could be used in different applications as well, including cooking, but it wasn’t something that she wanted to do anything with at the moment.

Since the growing room had been a success, she got rid of the current traps and set it up so that there were traps that covered both rooms – which ended up taking approximately 4,500 Mana for the actual growing room and another 2,000 for the Water trap.  She also placed trigger switches for each plot of land, where her Golem and Rolling Force could dictate which plot of dirt they wanted to focus on; when they would activate each trigger, the Singing Blademasters would move over and provide the water spraying system she had developed.

She thought about doing the entire room at once, but she thought about the future; if she eventually obtained different seeds, then she would want to be able to grow different plants – and hopefully even trees – at different times and different growing periods.  After working out a few kinks with the new system that were easily fixed, the growing room was working as perfectly as she could get it.

Now all she needed was more seeds or other growing materials.

To get that, however, she thought she was going to need to be able to reach the forests she saw in every direction, and to do that, she was going to have to give in and upgrade her Core Size.  Anxiety rippled through her mind at the thought, so she turned back to her blacksmithing for a little while.  She reset the catalyst in Kelerim’s Forge to an Ironclad Ape and used it to start churning out steel swords and knives by the dozens.

There’s nothing like banging away with a hammer to settle