บท 139: The crafting team
Aside from expanding horizontally, the dungeon also grew vertically. The dungeon now consisted of 10 floors.
The tenth floor was the living quarters of Five and the high-level monsters. In the past two days, Five summoned nine Nosferatu to join Ivan. He was soon going to make a floor for the Nosferatu and wanted them to start leveling up. Each vampire cost ten thousand DP and were summoned at level 20. So far, only Ivan managed to reach level 23. As he did not have any enemies to kill or fight, he could only slowly absorb the energy of the dungeon core, resulting in his mediocre progress.
With the new monsters, the living quarters had to be expanded and now had a total of 20 rooms.
The ninth floor was divided into several workshops for the craftsmen. There was a small laboratory for Angela and a forge for Five. The seven surviving gnomes lived on this floor and worked on both Engineering and Enchantments.
Although Five already had an Elder Gnome in his inventory, ready to be summoned, he did not do so yet. Instead, he summoned 7 Goblins that were unlocked earlier to balance the Gnomes. He wanted the two races to team up just like they were doing at Tinyland and would only summon the Boss Monsters after he would have unlocked the Goblin King.
He was quite apprehensive of the Goblins. After all, they were the first race to kill him but this time, he was their master; they would be unable to harm him in any way. Goblins were also a societal race that was summoned at level 10. Their main profession was Engineering.
Gnomish Engineering was completely different from Goblin Engineering. The latter focused on destruction while the former aimed at construction.
According to the testimony of the gnomes, at Tinyland, the three races worked in harmony to create a large number of robots daily. The Dwarves focused on forging and would create gears and metal parts required for the robots. The Goblins would then turned these parts into war robots and the Gnomes would enchant them, giving them more firing power and defensive abilities.
Tinyland had already built a perfect production chain but unfortunately, Five could not replicate it for now. Just setting up the workshops and purchasing all the equipment, books, recipes and materials required for beginner craftsmen already cost him a whole day's worth of profit. A crafting team was a bottomless hole; there were always improvements to be made. At the very least, he did not need to bother too much about finding the materials as they could all be bought using the dungeon shop.
The seventh and eighth floor housed the new monsters summoned for the raid. The Zombeasts and Bonemares roamed the seventh floor which like the sixth floor consisted of a series of caverns and tunnels.
The Defacers and Haunting Ghosts protected the eighth floor which was interconnected corridors. The corridors had a medieval appearance and were filled with old paintings and metallic medieval armors. Some of them were just decorations while others were real monsters: the level 27 Living Armor.
A few changes were made to the sixth floor which housed the Cadavers and the Corpse Eaters. Five decided to turn the floor into a more humid one with a similar appearance to a marshland. In addition to the two monsters, the floor was now infested with the level 25 Blood Sucking Mosquitoes.
As for the beasts who agreed to join the dungeon, since they were already used to each other and formed an ecosystem, Five created a room on the fourth floor under the forest biome. The new forest was also connected to the existing forest protected by the Banshees. There was a distinctive boundary between the two forests but both were at roughly the same power level.
Five also expanded the third floor in the forest biome but he did not make any direct passage between the graveyard and the new forest. This new forest housed: Level 10 Bobcats, Level 8 Porcupines, and Level 6 Hummingbirds. All the different floors in the forest biome were connected to each other and Five gave the beasts permission to travel from one floor to another. They were free to feed on other beasts as long as they did it with moderation.
During the past few days, the Giant Ant Queen, Meryssa and Mother Spider, Eyala arrived at the dungeon. They both immediately swore allegiance to Five. The latter quickly made a place for the insects in the Mountain Biome. On the third floor, the Giant Ants were allowed to build their colony together with the Spiders.
Despite the huge difference in level between the two races, Five allowed them to live together for now. The two Boss Monsters had the ability to lay eggs but they would have to wait for a week before the first batch of monsters would hatch. Only then would the room become accessible to the barbarians.
There was still the problem of the food of the insects but Five planned to solve this issue with the next floor in the Forest Biome. So far, the forests consisted only of decorative trees but the forest on the fifth floor would be different! It would be an orchard and would produce enough fruits to feed the insects.
Five was well aware of the difference in power level between each Biome but it was all intentional. In just the Darkness Biome, the increment in difficulty between the different floors was massive. But with six different biomes each having a different rise in difficulty between the floors, he would create the perfect environment for the players in the future.
...
Five stepped on the ninth floor accompanied by Dreidus and Angela. He wanted to see the progress made by the Crafting team. Although it was still in its early stage, the gnomes promised to bring out some results in just a few days.
"Do you like your new laboratory? As a Grade 1 Alchemist, you now need a lot more things. Did you get everything?"
"Thank you, Master. I already purchased all the equipment needed. I asked the Shamans to let me focus on Alchemy and they agreed," happily answered Angela.
As soon as she came back from the auction, Angela immersed herself into her studies and to everyone's surprise, she came out the very next day, having successfully concocted a Grade 1 Antidote. She finally reached the level of Grade 1 Alchemist after persevering for a whole month.
Angela was happy to be useful to the dungeon. She regularly concocted potions, focusing on Recovery potions. Several chests in the labyrinth now gave out those potions.
"May I ask where Harriet is? It is unusual for her not to be by your side," curiously asked Dreidus.
"She went to scout the surroundings. It is as we expected; we found several tribes sending some representatives to the Musclewood Tribe. The Shamans informed me of the situation. There is a high chance that they might attack soon and I sent Harriet to track their movements. I'll need to summon some birds next to do the scouting. Maybe a new Beast King? What about the Brown Eagle King?"
Dreidus nodded. "It is a good idea but right now is not the right time. I know you are eager to quickly complete the different biomes because of Noon's warning about the monster attributes. But it is impossible to upgrade the dungeon in all these areas at once. We need to focus on specific areas and right now, I believe that the Crafting team should be our priority. We only have 250 thousand DP at the moment. We need to save them to summon a Goblin King and the Dwarves if you want to replicate what Tinyland did."
"You are right. I must admit that that guy was quite smart. It is fortunate that he took away all the dungeon's DP or else, we might have failed the raid."
As they approached the working areas of the Goblins and Gnomes. He was quickly greeted by one of the surviving gnomes, Eto. Eto introduced Five to the workshop. As the latter observed the working goblins, he could not help but frown. Out of the seven goblins, four were currently lazing around in a drowsy state.
It was only when they noticed the strangely silent atmosphere that these goblins noticed Five's arrival and hurriedly jumped to their working station. Five naturally wanted to scold them but stopped himself. He knew it was inevitable.
Not all societal monsters were suited for crafting. As a matter of fact, even at Tinyland, more than half of the summoned monsters would not be suitable for crafting. These monsters would then undergo some training and would form the fighting corps of the dungeon. Tinyland was not only protected by mechanized robots but also by several Dwarves, Goblins, and Gnomes.
Five should already consider himself lucky to have found three goblins suited for Engineering out of the seven he summoned. It was all thanks to the new effect: Dwarfism which improved the monsters' talent for crafting. Without Dwarfism, Five's goblins would have probably ended up like Kroff's and become simple low-level monsters.
As for why all seven gnomes were suited for crafting, it was simply because the filtering was already done at Tinyland. Five gnomes focused on Engineering while the last two specialized in Enchantments.
Eto excitedly rubbed his hands when he saw Five's twisted expression. He purposely did not warn the goblins. There was an everlasting rivalry between the two races and he naturally wanted Five to favor the gnomes.
Five lightly coughed and asked, "So? What progress did you make so far? You said you would have something to show me."
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