The Crafter's Dungeon: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 1) Jonathan Brooks (sites to read books for free .TXT) 📖

directly used as a Monster Seed, it can also be combined with specific other materials to create a whole new Monster Seed.

You now have access to:

Tiny Iron Orb

Origination Raw Material Cost: 500

Origination Mana Cost: 50

Monster Min. Mana: 50

Monster Max. Mana: 400

Less than a day after learning about the Advancement system, Sandra found a small pocket of Iron Ore while she was excavating her fifth room.  The fourth room had easily been finished the day before, and the progress she was able to make with a higher Mana and RM capacity being Core Size 7 was significant.  When she was able to stock her fourth room with more of her constructs to absorb the ambient Mana, the constant stream of Mana increased – but not as much as she would’ve expected.

She remembered that Winxa had mentioned that there was a threshold of how much her dungeon could supply in terms of ambient Mana; she wasn’t sure if she was hitting that point yet, but she was definitely seeing diminishing returns as she expanded.  Nevertheless, the influx of Mana was still great enough to do almost anything she wanted – including crafting.

While she was expanding her dungeon, she had been working with her Armored Sentinel to produce more Bronze knives.  She still wanted to create other items, but she also knew that she should probably master one of the simplest items first before she moved on to other things.  With essentially unlimited materials, a vessel that could craft non-stop without tiring, and hours of constant practice, Sandra became much more efficient at using the limited mobility of her construct.  Whereas the first Bronze knife took at least an hour to heat up and shape into a crude representation of a weapon, she was soon churning out nearly a dozen in that same time.

That was her limit for the moment, however.  While she could make more, it was a waste of resources to have hundreds of Bronze knives just sitting around doing nothing.  So, after building a dozen molds that would help her cast the basic shape of the knife, Sandra would then heat them up again and use her hammer to refine them further.  Once they had taken on the basic form she wanted, she set them aside for finishing.

Now that she had another room to play with – namely, the third room that was finished earlier (she wanted to leave the fourth room as a kind of buffer between what she was excavating and the rest of her dungeon) – Sandra made what she imagined to be a finishing and refining station.  A low stone table lined one wall, where she would be able to place her tools and unfinished/finished crafts.  Within easy reach of the table, she utilized a “trap” to create multiple grinding wheels to help with the crafting process.

With her experience she had making her forge, the process of making the grinding wheels was quite simple in comparison.  Using her significantly larger store of Mana, she created a metal pole just over eight feet long, with seven varying degrees of small coarse stone wheels attached to them with a foot distance in between them.  It was set up horizontally on two stone pillars that she created independent of the trap, with smooth polished holes a foot off the floor, allowing the pole to fit inside and able to rotate.

Sandra placed invisible activation triggers in front of each wheel, which would turn the entire trap at the same time.  She wanted to create each wheel independent of each other at first, but in order for the whole thing to be considered as a single trap, she had to live with them all going at the same time.  Which was fine, as it didn’t really matter in the long run.

In front of the grinding wheels, she also made a low stone wall with a Bronze top that butted up almost against the line of grinding wheels, which would allow her to hold whatever she was grinding steady.  The top ended just under the halfway point of each wheel, and when the grinders were rotating towards her, they would effectively hold the weapon or other item she was grinding down while she worked.

Normally, these grinding wheels were operated by foot petals, where the blacksmith or other crafter would have to constantly keep it rotating as they worked.  Sandra’s Mana that was infused in her trap fortunately made that unnecessary, as it could rotate indefinitely without anything other than a trigger from her.  Also, grinding wheels normally wore down over time and had to be replaced, but she didn’t need to worry about that.  Just like her constructs, her Mana would keep them in proper working condition no matter how much they were used.

Now that she had this finishing station set up, she could use it to work on her Bronze knives when they were done with the forging process. It took some creative thinking and a little experimentation with how to hold the knives while they were grinding because she didn’t have wrists.  Eventually, she discovered that with a little patience and by moving her entire construct’s body, she could do a fairly good job.  With a bit of practice, she was able to smooth them out and sharpen the edges with the grinding wheels.

When she was done with all of her knives…she melted them down and started over again, this time with a new material.

Sandra already knew that Iron was a good metal for certain applications, but it was nearly the same in terms of material strength as Bronze when it came to weapons.  The major difference was that Iron would be more likely to bend and chip when subjected to stress, while Bronze was more likely to shatter.  It was for this reason that there weren’t as many Bronze swords (without enchantment, of course) as there were Iron, because they