The Crafter's Dilemma: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 3) Jonathan Brooks (me reader TXT) 📖

all-important knee joint, but it was probably because Violet was becoming a little more comfortable with the process.  When it was done, there were two different enchantments on the right leg, currently unconnected to anything; despite that, Felbar was able to experiment and independently insert an infinitesimally small amount of Spirit energy into various portions of the leg, making it move how he wanted…sort of.  It wasn’t perfect by any means, and there was a section that had a touch too many Natural runes in the sequence – which almost caused the leg to bend in a way that stressed the material and nearly broke it – but once those were fixed, it worked remarkably well.

The major problem with it was that Felbar was forced to devote all of his concentration to the separate enchantments just to have the leg move naturally.  Two enchantments seemed to be about the limit for his focus, however, because when Violet finished up the left leg with similar enchantments, he wasn’t able to manipulate both legs at the same time.  Instead of a fluid movement with each leg as he tried to make it walk forward, it was more of a jerky stop-and-start motion that caused the model to fall down more often than not.  Fortunately, the linking enchantment sequence that would be created after all of the other enchantments were in place would help bring it all together to make it easier to control – or so she hoped.

By the time Violet was done with those two legs and Felbar had experimented with making it walk – and was in general pleased with it, despite the difficulty in trying to manipulate four different enchantments all at once – it was already dark outside.  After they went to sleep for the night, Sandra could finally work on some other things.

Not that she had been idle while the Gnomes had been working.  Apart from ensuring her Dividing Rolling Forces were maintaining their eradication of roaming Undead, she had been spending her Mana on replacing what she had needed to use from her treasure to create said Forces – and used the rest to help with some crafting.  She was finally starting to work with the Titanium she had received from the Elites, and it was turning out to be a little more difficult than she had expected.

The main reason was because Titanium had a higher melting point than even Iron did, so the furnace she was using needed to be turned almost all the way up.  When it got that hot, even her Steelclad Ape Warriors were affected by the heat emanating from the furnace, so it made getting whatever she placed in there hard to get out; not only that, but the Iron tools that she had created to take her pieces in and out of the heat would get so hot that they would sometimes fuse to the Titanium itself.

After some frustration, she found that she needed to coat her tools entirely in a thin layer of Dragon Glass – which took a bit of experimentation and even more Mana to execute – to protect them from the heat.  The drawback with using the Glass, however, was that it made the tools a bit slippery to hold as well as grip whatever she was working with, and even with creating sharp ridges on the coating it was still difficult – but not impossible – to handle.  As for her Apes’ hands and arms warming up and softening because of the extreme heat, she actually had to craft something entirely new – which was exciting and productive in and of itself.

Sandra began with finishing the process of tanning more Raw Bearling Hide she had started a few days before when she had some downtime; she wanted to experiment with a new process using some of the salt she had acquired earlier to see if she could finally make some decent leather.  By adding a small amount to the boiling process, it helped to eliminate many of the particulates that caused them to rot and putrefy afterward.  Once they were done and stretched over racks to dry, she then used something she recently gained access to but hadn’t been able to use until now: Cedarwood Oil.

She found a use for one of her rooms to create a new workstation, one where she could make a Steam Distillery.  First, she crafted a large drum using sheets of Steel, which she had her Ape heat and shape until it was a four-foot-tall, three-foot-wide open-topped vessel; into the drum she had some other constructs place leaves, berries, and some bark from the Cedar tree she had in her growing room, along with enough water to just barely cover the mixture.  Then using her ability as a Dungeon Core, she had her Ape place a Steel dome top on the drum and perfectly sealed it so that it was completely air and water-tight – except for a hole leading out from the apex of the dome.  From there, she created a simple arched Steel tube made from folding a thin sheet of Steel around a piece of stone she created, before sealing up the ends; using her cheating Core abilities to seal the tube to the top of the drum dome and had it arch over to another – though much smaller – Steel drum.

When that was set up, she then created a dual-element trap for the process; Fire Mana was used to heat up the outside of the larger Steel drum, while Water Mana was used to add nearly frozen water to the outside of the Steel tube and surrounding the outside of the small drum.  She tied the entire trap to the Steelclad Ape Warrior she had working in there, so that it would activate when it was close enough to the crude – but serviceable – Steam Distillery.  Before she finished, she also created a much smaller version