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

As each of them tested perfectly, she now had to figure out how to combine the two so that they both counted as just one.  She first struggled to visualize them both at the same time, keeping them separate from each other and yet together – which was much harder than it sounded.  Eventually, she thought she achieved success when 500 Mana flowed out of her – which was actually not a large amount, because she was still trying to experiment with the weakest traps as possible.

She was glad that she had kept them weak, because nothing went right when she attempted to turn them on.  The spigot started spitting out boiling water interspersed with flames, almost as if it was trying to burn the water away before it hit the reservoir.  It didn’t really do any damage to anything, but it was essentially unusable.

The oven/cooking surface was an entirely different story.  If you’ve ever thrown cold water on super-heated stone, or vice-versa, you can imagine what happened to the stone of the oven box.  The Dragon Glass helped to mitigate the damage a little, but the entire thing was left with cracks and the copper had actually warped in a few places.  Fortunately, it only took about 10 minutes to repair the damage, but it was also frustrating to say the least.

Before she tried anything else, and risk destroying her hard work that went into creating the two contraptions, she stepped back and tried to think it through a little more.  Obviously, she was missing some key component; she knew that it should work, but she wasn’t exactly sure how to go about it.

Sandra looked around her dungeon after she gazed at her non-working kitchen for a while – looking for inspiration somewhere – but nothing sprung out to her as a solution.  She eventually gravitated to Kelerim again, and she vacantly stared at him while the other half of her mind toiled away at its task to hollow out the large middle column of her dungeon.  The flecks of red and brown on his gear “tattoo” stirred a memory in her mind.

Sandra and her father had been in one of the larger towns – Vardifil, if she remembered correctly – where she was learning from an Enchanter that had access to two different elements.  That wasn’t unusual, as most of the people who employed Enchanting as their primary profession tended to have more than one element; what made this particular one prevalent in her mind was the similarity to Kelerim’s elements – Fire and Earth.

The enchantment itself was a relatively straightforward one; the Fire portion of the enchantment super-heated the edge of a sword so that it could slice through practically anything, while the Earth enchantment maintained the structure of the sword so that it wouldn’t melt, while strengthening it at the same time.  The placement of the runic inscriptions on the blade were simple yet elegant, but the key to it – as to almost every enchantment that contained more than one element – was that it required a catalyst for it to mesh together—

That’s it!

“What’s it?  What did you figure out?”  Winxa had been uncharacteristically silent for the last half a day, but Sandra couldn’t blame her; the last choking fit probably scared her enough that she was hesitant to speak in the fear that those words would be her last.

I think I figured out how to combine the two elemental traps together!  All I need is a catalyst to meld them together, just like an enchantment.  For instance, for a Fire and Earth enchantment, a good catalyst would be powdered lava rock, which is a representation of both elements.  Now all I need is something that will do the same with what I’m trying to do in the kitchen.

“Sounds interesting!  Again, it’s something I’ve never heard working before, so I’m excited to see if you can get it to work.”

Sandra excitedly turned her attention back to the kitchen and concentrated on what the best way to combine the two elements of Fire and Water together.  It didn’t necessarily have to be something that represented the melding of elements; the blood from her body – where Dramien had used it on his Holy/Nether enchantment in which she had ended up dying – was a perfect example of that.  In this case, fortunately, she didn’t need the two enchantments to work together to perform an action – they just needed to coexist without interfering with each other.

It was a rather simple solution she came up with, actually.  Contrary to what most people believed with enchantments, any catalyst could be used; though, to be fair, there were certain ones that worked much better for specific enchantments.  In this case, the catalyst for the kitchen revolved around its main purpose: cooking.  And who does the cooking?  The chef, of course.

In this case, the “chef” was her Small Armored Sentinel.  Sandra placed her construct in between the two contraptions she had created, and then got to work re-imagining her traps.  By that time, her Mana had filled up considerably since she hadn’t been using it on anything but the transportation column, so she was already up over 5,000; she was more than glad that she had that much, because when she completed the two traps, she put it to full-strength, since she was confident that she had it right that time.

Almost every unit of Mana that she had accumulated was consumed in the process of completing the kitchen’s traps.  She could almost see the melding of the Fire in her oven, along with the Water in her spigot, as it connected to her Sentinel that was standing in between the two separate traps.  There was no big flash of light, or any other indication that it was a success for that matter, but when it was done, it