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

but she was alive.  She didn’t wake up after she was completely healed, but for some reason it didn’t look like the same unconsciousness that Kelerim, Felbar, and Echo had or were still suffering from.  It looked more like normal sleep, to be honest, so Sandra left her alone to sleep off the trauma of a near death as she surveyed the rest of the damage left by the explosion.

The Hauler was made of sterner stuff than the squishy body of a Gnome, fortunately, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t damage.  In fact, the entire Pilot’s Carriage had been essentially completely destroyed; it would be relatively easy to rebuild it, however, as it was made of wood that her Apes could put together and Sandra could seal it up.  The track on the right side of the Hauler appeared almost unscathed, other than a few scratches here and there; the other track, however, was half gone.  Looking around, Sandra saw a few pieces of the Steel track embedded in the ceiling almost 40 feet above the Hauler, as well as a few chunks peppering the nearby wall.

Luckily, none of that shrapnel had shot backwards to hit the wagons, nor did any strike Violet during the explosion – otherwise the little Gnome likely wouldn’t have survived.  Equally as lucky, since she had already helped to build the track – after hours of arguing between the other Gnomes that were still sleeping down below – she was able to rebuild it along with the gear and the Pilot’s Carriage.  A small portion of the undercarriage was damaged, but that was easily fixed by absorbing the damaged section, creating a length of Steel that would replace it, and then having her Apes hold it in place while she used her Core abilities to “weld” it back into place.

That didn’t take more than an hour, at least, though most of that time was spent with her Apes hammering large pins into place with their fists; the way the track fit together with the pins was ingenious, as it allowed the “band” to stay connected while being flexible at the same time.  It was unlike anything she had ever seen before, and she could only imagine the possibilities for new crafts using that same technique in the future.  It was a pain getting it all into place, but once it was on the gear, it appeared to work perfectly.

With everyone essentially asleep for the night – at least, she hoped Violet was just sleeping at that point – Sandra had an opportunity to finish some more of her crafting.  After checking on her Jute stalks, she found that the retting process had progressed far enough for the outside bark to be easy enough to strip off, leaving the fibers underneath usable for making into thread – or, more accurately, twine.  Therefore, using the same technique she used for the Flax plants and Linen Thread, she extracted the fibers and dried them in her Leatherworking shop.  After a couple of hours, they were dried enough to bundle up and feed into the next stage of the process, which combined the fibers together so that they could be spun into a relatively thick twine-like thread.

New Monster Seed and Origination Material found!

Jute Twine

While Jute Twine can be directly used as a Monster Seed, it can also be used as a material for use in the dungeon or other purposes.

You now have access to:

Tiny Jute Twine Bobbin

Origination Raw Material Cost: 5

Origination Mana Cost: 5

Monster Min. Mana: 5

Monster Max. Mana: 5

It was possible to make it thinner, but it wasn’t nearly as durable and tended to fall apart easily if it was made any smaller.  The twisting of the fibers together made it fairly strong as a result, which was why Jute twine was used in the making of ropes and other similar products.  That, and it was fairly inexpensive to make, which was also reflected in the costs associated with them as a Monster Seed.  It took barely a minute to acquire enough Mana and Raw Materials – obtained from absorbing the broken pieces of the Hauler from earlier – to unlock the rest of the Jute Twine-based Monster Seeds, and that finished that part of the crafting process.

That, of course, wasn’t the end of it; she wanted to make cloth out of her new thread-type acquisitions.  She had already started weaving cotton using a warp-weighted loom, so she continued that, as well as starting a Linen and a Burlap weave on separate looms.  With a reed that she was able to make out of wood that would help condense the weave, her three weaving Apes were able to work fairly rapidly without tiring on the new crafting project.  She even took control of one of them for a while to get used to the motions of feeding the shuttle pick through the weaves but left most of the process to them.  Normally, crafting took a bit of her own personal attention to complete, but once they were started her constructs were able to repeat the same motions over and over and over without much supervision.

Within a couple of hours, they had all finished a large length of cloth 4 feet wide and 12 feet long, and Sandra was able to easily cut them off the looms by eating away at the thread or twine.  The hardest part was tying off the warp thread ends, actually, because her Apes didn’t quite have the finger dexterity for something like that; strangely enough, she ended up having to use two of her Tiny Automatons working in tandem to tie the thin strings together with some complicated maneuvers.  And then, when she was done, she hoped and prayed that she had made enough and with enough quality to count as a material she could use for the future – and then she absorbed all of them