Blacksmith vs. the System 285

Observing dungeons was not a simple affair. How could it be, considering their miraculous nature, one that people ignored because of their commonality?

But, when one stopped to think, dungeons were truly a marvel of existence, one shrouded in mystery. The simplest issue was their existence. They didn’t exist in our reality, but instead overlapped it. That alone would have driven most of the scientists crazy, while likely vindicating many other theoretical physicists, allowing them to talk even more about their multidimensional models of existence.

Along with their existence, came the scale. Every dungeon had multiple floors, and each floor was larger than the previous one. The decay dungeon wasn’t counted as a big one, but the fifth floor was roughly circular, with a diameter almost a hundred miles in places, which brought the total surface area to close to eight thousand square miles.

There were more than eighty smaller independent countries back before Cataclysm.

Yet, their miraculous scale and the multi-dimensional spatial nature weren’t the most important thing about it.

There were many other issues, like many indicators that put their source as other planets, their ability to constantly generate living soulless creatures merely as a side effect to break down some kind of cosmic energy that threatened to devour life, the way they could link with human souls, and many other shocking qualities.

No, despite how we started to treat them as just another simple phenomenon, dungeons were not normal.

Far from it.

“And, here am I, trying to bond with them further,” I muttered as I closed my eyes, focusing on the connection. I found it easier to delve after my panicked utilization of it while trying to save Maria.

Even with that, I had no immediate answer. My Void Sentry skill didn’t give me an immediate answer, as the connection between my soul and the dungeon was deeper than the skills, which prevented the skills from assessing the connection directly.

Or, at least, that was what I believed the reason to be.

But, just because I couldn’t use the skills didn’t mean my skills didn’t help. The Void Sentry skill allowed me to feel how Void energy operated and reacted. That information, I could use to understand what was going on in the lowest floor, where Void Energy broke down to the first dungeon mist.

A part of the process was the mana dungeon had in storage, which, combined with the conceptual power of the dungeon, decay in this case, broke down the void energy into pieces. Yet, knowing how void energy acted, I could finally confirm that there existed another energy I couldn’t detect.

“Is it Ichor?” I muttered. Combined with the speed the dungeon absorbed it through me, made that a possibility, but I couldn’t make that a judgment. It might also be a completely different type of energy. I needed more data to answer that.

Instead of wondering that, I started examining the flow of energy within the dungeon. The biggest difference was the Strength the dungeon could display, getting stronger with each passing day. Managing the initial corruption had been a challenge, but as our number of elites increased, so did our ability to slay the corrupted dungeon monsters.

While a generous portion of that mana had been extracted from the dungeon, either by my forging activities, or indirectly through dungeon products, a significant portion of it was used by the dungeon. That, combined with the endless fields of decay plants farmers had planted under Rebecca’s leadership, had transformed it further.

The difference was apparent. The walls between the floors were more solid, the concept imbuing the space with strength. I tried to reach the dungeon, trying to make a connection, to see if I could access another dream.

But, there were none. Not yet.

“Maybe I need to repair it more,” I said, but I didn’t stay focused on that. Instead, I shifted my attention to the fire dungeon. The fire dungeon had gotten stronger as well, but the degree of improvement was much lower.

The decay dungeon took the majority of the corruption and kept the fire dungeon safe, but it also did the same for the mana. “No, not just mana,” I muttered as I examined the breakdown of void energy in both dungeons. The fire dungeon didn’t lack mana to handle the process, yet the decay dungeon was an order of magnitude better at breaking the energy.

The difference was interesting, but it was not something I could measure. Not properly.

“That seems like a limit,” I said as I stood up, breaking my meditative stance. I went into the dungeon. I stayed on the first floor, and found a small horde of insects, one that was not corrupted. Destroying them had been easy.

Once they died, I piled them together, waiting for the dungeon to absorb them back, keeping Void Sentry active, hoping that I would be able to see what was going on that triggered the drop of a Skill stone.

The monsters disappeared in a bright glow, leaving a skill stone behind. A simple Common Meditation. My attention was on the transformation of the energy. The glow was mostly about the monsters being reabsorbed into the dungeon, to reutilize the mana and the half-processed void energy that was bound with decay to break it down further.

“That told me nothing,” I said, and instead, I decided to pay attention to something simpler. There was no guarantee that any single monster would drop a skill stone, yet putting them together often triggered one.

The way to understand it was simple, but only possible due to my new skill. Previously, I could only examine monsters indirectly with Observe, which involved killing and directing them. Void Sentry allowed me to identify them in their natural state.

Following that, I had killed upward of a thousand dungeon monsters, but only after using Void Sentry on them to memorize their energy distribution, and kill them. While doing that, I wasn’t able to apply my usual rigor.

The output of Void Sentry was complicated. Horribly so. It gave me a perfect glimpse of its energy distribution, measuring different types of mana and reduced void energies in many different dimensions. Every single measurement would have taken a small book to record accurately.

Instead, I applied three of my stats aggressively. Perception to capture all details, Wisdom to commit the details to my mind, and Intelligence to analyze them. “No wonder anyone who tries to analyze the System lacks intellectual rigor. It’s really easy to work this way.”

Deceptively so. I made a mental commitment to redo the experiment properly to validate the results, but with the war going on, I had to ignore the rigor.

I needed to solve the issue of mana alloy production scale before we could establish our fort. Only then, would we be able to leverage our sea access successfully.

I had to test hundreds of insects to catch a pattern, which I ultimately saw as the reason. Or, more accurately, I failed to see it. Each insect had a central piece of shell, one that held a concentrated dose of mana and dungeon mist, which was void energy that was neutralized by the concept of the dungeon.

But, that was not all there was. I noticed a tiny piece of energy in those shells, one that I couldn’t observe directly, but the distortion it had on other energies revealed its presence nonetheless.

While my method was less than satisfactory, the correlation was clear. The bigger that energy fragment, the likelier it was for a skill to drop, which was far more relevant than other aspects, from the amount of concentrated dungeon mist or mana content. It even held true when considering the presence of the monsters.

That helped me to pull an interesting trick. I visited one of the warehouses that held the insect shells, and started shattering them one by one, testing various isolation runes to contain that tiny bit of energy. The enchantments that were on the Ichor bottle worked surprisingly well, but even though I broke upward of fifty thousand shells to gather the energy, the concentrate didn’t immediately turn into Ichor.

Once again, confirming nature was out of question. Instead, I took down another monster. However, this time, before the monster dissipated, I sat down to meditate, and focused inward, turning my full attention to the connection.

I released the bottle just as the monster started to turn into energy, the burst mixing with the others. At that moment, I felt an echo in my connection. Like a subtle itch, like someone was poking my neck with a feather. I followed it mentally and … I found what I was looking for.

A shadow of mine. Something of a magical picture, to the best of my ability. The experience was vague and surreal, but I had used my soul directly too many times to miss the implications. I reached the shadow, one that carried the weaker echoes of my skills, back when my class skills were limited.

Once again, the dungeon’s intuitive operating nature worked. Once I knew exactly where to focus, making changes was easy.

I had several ghosts of skill stones, of the skills I had possessed before. Luckily, I was familiar with Epic Mana Forge enough to add it to the mix, and some of the complications were handled by the dungeon and the System. The moment it was completed, I felt exhaustion hit me hard. Combined with my earlier attempts to push.

Once I rose from meditating, I traveled to the fourth floor, and went through insect hordes until I got my reward.

[Skill Stone: Mana Forge (Epic)]

“One more problem solved,” I muttered in satisfaction. It might not be the kind of perfect automation I desired, but sometimes, we needed to play to our strengths.