The Crafter's Dominion: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 5) Jonathan Brooks (books that read to you txt) 📖

was infectious, and Winxa was fluttering around as if she was unable to hover in place.  “Don’t you understand what this means?  To be able to double the energy that someone can hold and use will have repercussions felt the world over,” she said breathlessly, before she frowned.  “Speaking of repercussions, what happens if someone takes the enchanted item away—while they’re still holding the extra energy?”

Oh.  I never thought of that.  I…don’t know, actually, but we can find out.  From previous experiments when using an Energy Orb as a monster seed, she knew that pumping extra energy into a Dungeon Monster had ended up making it explode, and she didn’t want to see the same thing happen here.  She brought her Repair Drone close enough to react if something went wrong, but far enough away if there was an explosion. She then warned Winxa: I’d back up to the other side of the room, just in case.

As soon as things were in place, Sandra lightly touched the mind of her Violet copy, enough to understand what was happening and control things, but hopefully not deep enough to experience something as painful as having her eyeballs explode again.  Then she lifted the Shifter’s hand off of the Gold sheet.

Unending pain seemed to suffuse the Shifter a few seconds after contact was lost, as the body felt as if it were burning up from the inside.  Luckily for Sandra, she was prepared and had exited at the first sign of pain, so she wasn’t subjected to the agony that the Violet clone was visibly experiencing as it writhed on the floor of the workshop.  Strangely, the Repair Drone nearby didn’t do a single thing to help – as if there weren’t really any injuries to repair.  Perhaps there isn’t one; the energy burn going through the Shifter right now isn’t causing any permanent damage – but it sure looks painful. 

This was all happening with an extra 400 Natural energy that had accumulated while she had been explaining things to Winxa, as well; what would 16,000 extra energy look like?  Would she have exploded?  She didn’t want to test it out and lose her Stabilized Shapeshifter, so she could only speculate.

The Energy Burn (as she was going to call it) only lasted about 10 seconds, but that was enough for her Shifter to appear physically exhausted.  Another minute was enough for it to recover back to normal, but there seemed to be another side effect to what had happened.  A brief glance showed that the Violet double now had 15,600 Natural energy, and it wasn’t going up even though it was still holding the Energy Orb.  Wow.  Not only did it hurt, but it literally burned out the excess energy from its normal maximum it could hold.  Thinking about the situation, she realized that if she had allowed it to accumulate the extra 16,000 energy before taking the hand off the PEE, if it didn’t kill the Shifter, it would’ve permanently destroyed that amount of energy for the Monster.

Shifting out of the form to the base was an easy procedure, and Sandra soon had it in Echo’s form.

Stabilized Shapeshifter

 

Current Form: Elf

 

Current Elemental Energy:

Air – 15800 energy

Holy – 15800 energy

 

Natural Ability:

Stable Shapeshift: 0 energy

 

Special Ability:

Invisibility (10 Holy energy per minute)

Speed Boost (15 Air energy per minute)

Sure enough, there was a total of 400 energy missing, though it was evenly spread out between the Air and Holy energy that Echo’s form could manipulate.

“That’s certainly a frightening drawback,” Winxa commented with wide eyes when Sandra told her about what happened.  “The pain alone would probably be enough of a penalty to deter some people, but permanently losing access to some of their energy is horrible.  I doubt that anyone would want to use something like this,” the Dungeon Fairy said sadly.

While Sandra knew that was undoubtedly true for some, she knew it wouldn’t be true for all.  I think you’d be surprised at what people will do to become more powerful; when they are faced with potential death every day, many of them would take any opportunity to survive that much longer.  Imagine a Shieldman being able to withstand double the amount of damage to their armor, or an Elf being able to cast twice the amount of spells.  This isn’t even considering what the Gnomes could do, with being able to pump more energy into an enchantment. 

“You have a point, I guess.  But make sure that you give clear warnings before you start handing stuff like this out.”

Oh, I certainly will.

The experiments with gemstones were next, but they were going to have to wait for a little bit because of one simple reason: she just couldn’t create the faceted shapes she needed for each particular PEE.  Each one needed them to be just slightly different depending on the enchantment, and that would require some work down below in one of her never-before-used crafting rooms.

Unfortunately, the room was going to have to require some replacements; the shard in her mind had gutted some of the crafting stations to use as raw materials, and the gemcutting/silversmithing/goldsmithing station had been one of them.  She couldn’t blame the shard too much, however, because the room truly hadn’t been used up to that point – but it was time to change all of that.

Chapter 31

A simple replacement of the implements of the craft, the trap that activated the small powered tools she had before, and the workstation would be easy enough to accomplish, but now that she had more knowledge of how to make it better, Sandra wanted to improve on some things.  For one, she didn’t need a massive forge like she did with her Blacksmithing projects; a very small, table-top forge would work just as well.  Second, she had many more choices in who or what Sandra