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

been done to him.  The tour that the Dungeon Core brought him on went even further to impress upon him her intentions towards the races surrounding the wastelands, as well as her desire to help them where she could.

Sandra technically didn’t have time for the whole sight-seeing thing with the newly Visitor-bonded Gerold, but she knew it was going to be imperative that she establish the correct type of relationship with him – and by extension, his people – right from the start.  Fortunately, even though most of her focus was on showing him her crafting stations, the Growing Room, the Enchantment Repository Room, and even – with plenty of personal protection in the form of nearby constructs – her Home room, she was able to split her attention to more…important matters.

Like maintaining her current Mana advantage over the Undead Core.

Her Rolling Force constructs were already “rolling” over the scattered skeleton rats, destroying dozens of them every minute.  The number of her own were still building little by little, and they were already topping 800 scattered everywhere over a portion of the wasteland and the open land near the Gnome village.  While they were making fairly good progress wiping out every rat they found, she had to have her rolling constructs come together in groups of 20 to take out the larger walking skeletons they were starting to encounter.  Eventually, she upped that number to 50 when some of the weaker zombies started to make an appearance closer to the forest, and anything venturing into the forest had at least 100 grouped together.

Having that many together was a risk, but they were also able to work together to destroy all but the most powerful zombie beasts that occasionally made an appearance.  The Ogre Skeletons were the only ones of that kind that she avoided entirely, but everything else fell under the onslaught of her constructs.  As time went on, she planned to send the larger groups into the forest, sweeping through it to destroy all of the weaker Undead they could find, only leaving the stronger ones alone.

She knew from personal experience that it really didn’t matter how strong or powerful one of her Dungeon Monsters were, because they all essentially funneled the same amount of ambient Mana to her.  Now, something like that gigantic abomination of jumbled-up corpses that had joined the Undead forces around her dungeon might be able to reach more because of its size, but she didn’t think it was that significant of a difference.  It was why her Shears – and in comparison, the skeletal rats – worked so well because they accumulated nearly as much as a Monster that was 10 or 100 times the Mana cost.  So, the other Core might have 50 or so powerful Undead that were slowly accumulating Mana, but without the smaller, cheaper ones running around, its overall growth would be slower.

Over time, of course, those powerful Undead could multiply until that was all there was out roaming around the Undead dungeon’s AOI, but Sandra was banking on that not happening for a while.  She had the advantage now – but she had to make sure she maintained it.

To that effect, she had already emptied out about 2/3 of her treasury, keeping the Rolling Force and Shears production going, while also trying to replace the constructs – and Unstable Shapeshifters – she had lost during that chaotic battle above her dungeon.  The problem she was quickly running into, however, was a lack of Raw Materials. She was seriously considering cannibalizing the wagon of Gnome supplies for more, but while she was looking at it she remembered the heavy sphere that Felbar had helped to bring into her workshop – and therefore into her dungeon.

Without thinking, she tried to absorb it – but nothing happened.  At least, she thought that nothing happened, but when she looked at her available Raw Materials…she was completely full.  Peering back as the sphere stuck in the hole it had made in the floor, she saw that a sliver of it had been carved out from the top, exactly where she had been looking at it in her effort to absorb it.  What the…?  How is that possible?

Winxa, disregarding for her own safety, created a portal that led from her home to the workshop, where she peered down at the sphere and her mouth opened in a “O” shape as she took it in.  “Wow, you’ve really got something here.”

What are you talking about?  What is this material?

Sandra still had no idea what it was and absorbing that little sliver’s worth of Raw Materials revealed no new type of material – which she had been half-expecting.

“Well, keeping in mind that I’m not an expert in gravitational physics—” the Dungeon Fairy began.

Uh…what?

“—I’d say that this strange ball consists of everything that was sucked up into your Sphere construct when you activated it,” she continued.  “No wonder you’re limited to only using this every 60 days and within a few hundred feet of your entrance; if something like this was able to be used by a Dungeon Core of a less…hospitable…nature and able to be brought near a village or fortified town…well, I don’t think I need to tell you what would happen.”

How is that even possible?  That vortex thingy sucked up so much dirt and massive rocks, not to mention all of the undead and constructs I had out there, that there’s no way that it would fit in there.

“Well, consider if that material was like your Mana in a way; when you created your Elemental Orbs, you took a large quantity of it and then condensed it down until it was much smaller.  This is essentially the same thing, though the force used to condense this material was at a hard-to-imagine level compared to what you used on that Mana.  What you see here is the result of