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

of her Shapeshifter ignited in an even brighter light – which blinded everyone in the workshop and caused some seriously intense pain, at least she assumed so by their screaming.

Sandra immediately left her Shapeshifter – which was also blind but was fine when it lost its “Echo” shape and returned to its amorphous form – and threw out a huge blanket of over 5,000 Nether Mana, surrounding and smothering the bright light emanating from the Holy energy.  She was momentarily worried when it didn’t appear that even that much Mana would be enough because the floating energy/Mana combination started to expand; after a few seconds, however, it shrunk back down and settled into a more stable floating form.

The screaming had fortunately stopped, and three of Sandra’s Repair Drones were nearby to heal them of their blindness; she had them stationed in the workshop at all times, for just such a reason – or something equally destructive.  A few minutes later they were all healed up from their temporary blindness and Sandra apologized for the accident – but she was also encouraged because she had made progress.

“I think you need to work on exactly how much you are bringing out from your body; a little goes a long way, you know,” Echo said testily, before heading off to bed.  Sandra had improved her room down below with her better leather for the bed itself and Finely Woven Cloth sheets for her, but as the Elf – and the Gnomes, who had made even more progress on their War Machine model (it was almost finished) – left in a disgruntled huff complaining about working conditions to get some sleep, the Dungeon Core knew she needed to find some way to make it up to them.  When she saw Felbar scratching at something underneath his clothes as he walked away, Sandra had an idea.

Using another one of her excavated rooms, she divided the space into two equal halves with a stone wall that stretched nearly to the ceiling.  Then in each divided area she created a large stone basin that was almost the entire length of the room at 20 feet and just under 10 feet wide; building it up so that it was over 6 feet deep towards the center of the basins, she created a series of steps a foot and a half wide that ran around the perimeter, getting deeper the closer to the center it went.  When that was done, she added another narrow set of steps outside of the basins leading from the entrance of the room to the top of each basin.

When that was done, Sandra used her Mana to fill both basins in with water until they were close to full, the water perfectly contained inside the large stone tubs that were assembled without any joins or cracks.  Next she created some traps that only involved Air and Water Mana, with only about a quarter of her maximum Mana used to complete it.  With the Water portion of the trap, she made one pool stay consistently warm – almost bordering on too hot – and the other slightly on the cool side.  Some of the Air portion of the trap caused little bubbles to erupt from the bottom of the hot pool, floating up to the top and agitating the water; she also took one of the traps she had seen in the Water-based Reptile dungeon and downgraded it severely – and switched the element.  All along the edge of the stone steps inside the water, she had delicate air jets shooting out, creating a nice relaxing pressure against the water that slowly swirled the water around until it looked like a very safe whirlpool.

In addition, at the entrance/exit she also placed a hot Air trap that would blow powerfully downwards, so that anyone stepping out of the pools could walk over to it and get themselves dried off fairly quickly, with little slots in the stone floor that the water could run off into.  Lastly, she concentrated on the room and its natural light source; while she couldn’t shut it off completely, she could dim the lighting so that it was much softer than it was before.

Looking at her handiwork, she was pretty proud of what she had created; it didn’t quite match the bath houses or hot springs she remembered from when she was alive as a Human, but it was close enough.  In reality it was better, because it was controlled by Mana alone and had some extra characteristics to it – like the hot air dryer – that she hadn’t seen before.  She didn’t really have any type of soap at the moment but given enough time she could maybe make some, though it wouldn’t smell very pleasing.  Regardless, she had made a place where her Visitors could bathe and relax if they wanted to; she couldn’t smell them, of course, but weeks stuck down in a dungeon – at least as far as the Gnomes went – probably didn’t bode well for personal hygiene when there wasn’t anywhere for them to wash.

She tied the entire thing to a small Hyper Automaton who acted as a catalyst for the dual-element trap, who could trigger the entire trap just by walking over a specific spot.  When it was triggered, she estimated that it would last for just under two hours – which was plenty of time to get clean or even just relax.

Amazingly, she got all of that done within two hours and it was just barely dark outside; her Visitors had gone to bed early after the whole “blinding” incident – which she couldn’t blame them for – so now Sandra had most of the night to work on other projects.  The first thing she did was finish her experimental crafting with Titanium, creating a single warhammer made exclusively from the metal; after giving it to one of her Apes, she found that