Chapter 85 Dungeon exploration

New!

Dungeon miner- Doubles the amount of ore you can gather from dungeon nodes.

Dungeon crafter- Gain instinctive knowledge on how to create items for the dungeon to use.

Core destroyer- Destroying a dungeon core will give you a huge boost to stats based on the rarity of the dungeon core. One-tenth of the stat boost is permanent after the boost wears off.

Resource manager- Gain a very small portion of the dungeon's resources to use.

Magical boost- Easier to learn new magic, all instinctive magic strengthened further, while the cost of all magic is reduced.

Aged golems- All golems' stats continuously improve with age.

Planty McPlantface- Choose a single herb to name. That herb becomes a perennial, ever-growing herb.

The first three skills were all linked, meaning I could only choose one. My eye immediately went to core destroyer, on account of us heading to destroy a core… But that skill is actually a trap, because it was completely illegal to destroy a dungeon's core. It meant that if I did pick that skill, I’d have to do illegal things and risk becoming an outlaw. Ignoring it, out of the two remaining options, I was leaning more toward dungeon crafter. It didn’t really do anything for me, but I bet that by making items for the dungeon to use, the dungeon could provide more incentives for the adventurers to enter it.

Resource manager seemed insanely good… The sole caveat was the very small portion I could use. Still, I would get it eventually. Magical boost was the only skill that provided an immediate benefit, and as one of the only people going on this journey who could heal, I deemed it the most useful one to get. But I was still looking at the other skills before I purchased it.

Aged golems was another skill I wouldn’t see make a difference for years, possibly even decades, but it was another single-option skill. I liked the single option choices more, because it wasn’t a choice, it was just a skill I could pick that would make me a more well-rounded farmer/adventurer. I’d definitely need to buy a higher-tier herb for the Planty McPlantface skill. I doubted I would get the levels to purchase all the level twenty-five skills for dungeon gardener anyway.

Speaking of which… Why was my class named Dungeon Gardener? I didn’t grow flowers in the dungeon… I mean… I technically did, but I didn’t think it would give me a class based on it. It seemed more like a class based around making dungeons more appealing to dive into. I picked magical boost and felt the change almost immediately. I didn’t learn anything new, but I could tell I could just do more with what I did know.

We all prepped, and many others were also purchasing skills. The fight we all just partook in wasn’t something that happened normally; it was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of fight… I mean, you could say that the bandit attack was also a once-in-a-lifetime fight, so… That was out of the norm as well. Looking back on it now after the fact, it was an incredible amount of experience for me and all my wives, even the wives who weren’t my wives at the time were there.

The dungeon felt different once we entered it. I could feel it, the dungeon was hurt, and not just a little, it was hurt badly. It was only functioning at 24% of its capacity. That didn’t mean the dungeon would produce four times more enemies, but it meant that the resources it could generate were heavily limited by normal adventurer wear and tear on the dungeon.

I was excited about the changes to my class, but I couldn’t worry about it right now; we had a mission to accomplish. We made it about a quarter of the way through the dungeon before the golem, who was following us, froze for a few seconds before running off toward the core. I knew that the core was still alive; it had to be for me to have these intuitive feelings for it, but I wasn’t sure how the berserk dungeon didn’t wipe it out.

My only thought was that it pulled back all its monsters to protect/hide the core, and the corrupted dungeon just ignored it to get to us because this weak dungeon wasn’t worth destroying. Still, I felt better that the core had the extra defense in case monsters got past us to fight it in the form of the golem. I wondered if my aged golem skill would affect that, because if it did, the dungeons I protected were going to be extremely hard to destroy in the future.

It felt eerie. I had been in the dungeon after we killed the boss, but it had never been this barren before. It took me longer than I’d like to admit why it felt so wrong. Even the animals were missing; this was one of the few dungeons with a full life cycle, incorporating plants, trees, and animals into what grew on top of monsters. The threat was so overwhelming that the animals in the dungeon were also defending the core right now.

We quickly made it through the dungeon in less than two hours. We were moving in a straight line, and with no enemies to fight, we could go at full speed. Once we started to have to fight, we’d slow down. I just hoped it wasn’t going to take more than a few days, because I was already sick of the asshole who glared at me. He had been complaining the entire trip so far, and I didn’t think he was a combatant either, at least his lack of weaponry showed he wasn’t.

So why was he with us? I wasn’t sure, I only knew he was one of the princes, but since there were so many, I doubted he was one of the three important ones… He just… Didn’t seem competent enough to compete for the kingship, unless no one viewed him as a threat, and he skated by on how unimportant he was. All I knew was I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want him after the first few hours.

The knight captain was actually the one who was blinded by the acid blood; he used a full restore potion, which was worth a few hundred mithril, to recover. He looked upset by how many troops he lost, but did his duty first with a solemn look on his face, as he wanted to finish this as quickly as possible. The few knights following us were all hurt, but not badly enough to be crippled, and their bodies were strong enough to work through the damage that had been dealt to them.

The mercenaries were the opposite. They suffered far fewer casualties, and only the ones who were completely unscathed came on this mission. The leader ate one of my magified strawberries, juice dripping down his face and into his beard as he mentioned. “This is spectacular. Do you do pre-orders for any of your produce? With crops as tasty as this, it’s clear that someone is limiting who gets to try it, because I’ve never seen these for sale anywhere I’ve gone.”

The merchant’s cabal had most likely started purchasing all my goods, knowing that I could start charging more until they undid their monopoly. I had been lowballing myself if they were willing to purchase every single one of my products.

That wasn’t something to think about, though, as we left the dungeon, I felt the immediate shift as we entered the broken dungeon in its final death throes of it’s life, the dungeons monsters going berserk as the connection that had always been their was gone and they didn’t know how to act, only really remembering how to fight in their panicked mind. The berserk dungeon must have shattered this one on its way to our village. Thankfully, it didn't shatter the closest dungeon to us.