Chapter 29 - Another meeting

Day 42

Neo's POV:

In the last eleven days, Neo had heavily focused on his mining operation. He only made pauses to re-spawn his gladiator goblins or to select a new research. He finished a few researches over the two weeks, the extended research lab helped a lot.

One way safety doors*researched*

Novice rank mechanical trap design *researched*

Intermediate rank mechanical trap design *researched*

Hidden doors *researched*

After searching through the huge amount of possible research topics, he found one that he was very interested in. He immediately selected it.

Novice creature trait manipulation

Research points 57/250

Hopefully, it would open him new routes to improve his creatures.

Another thing he found was conformation. Before, he thought his pop-ups could maybe be projections from his subconscious, but when he went to more of the research topics, he found concepts, he never knew or thought about. In addition, he saw no way that even a group of a million of his shamans would be able to research something like advanced mana theory. Together with the fact that he was summoning mana from the void, there were more questions about dungeons than answers.

Normally, with dungeons pushing mana into this world and creating matter out of nothing, the mana concentration of the world should've grown year after year, but it didn't. There were only three reasonable explanations for this. The first was there were more and more people at higher and higher cultivation levels. This way, there would've been more and more mana stored away in these people's bodies.

The second explanation was a mana drain. If something was removing mana from the world, it would create some kind of balance with the dungeons bringing mana in.

The last explanation, the one he believed in, was a growing world. When he was younger, he tried to figure out how large this planet was, because nobody he talked to knew. So he wanted to measure it curvature, but even when he flew ten thousand kilometers, he still wasn't able to detect one. From his perspective, the world was either some kind of weird flat plane or an unbelievable big hull. It couldn't really be a planet. With the undetectable curvature, it would have to be at least a few hundred thousand kilometers in diameter. The gravitation from a planet like that would be far too strong to support higher life forms.

His current working theory was a plane that was ever expanding from the mana and materials the dungeons brought in. But, a plane like this shouldn't naturally form, so somebody had to have created it. This, together with the research menu, indicated some kind of connection between dungeons and this force of creation. As a former scientist, he was very happy about this connection and the possibility to gather knowledge about this topic. But the amount of his collected data was too small to draw any further going conclusions. He decided to come back to the topic, when he got some new clues.

His mining hadn't been very successful. while he was searching for ore veins, he mainly found some banded iron. All in all, he got 400 tons of it. He placed it in the mining floor on level 5, together with a ton of copper and 200 kg of silver he created by using magic. It was not in one spot and the miners would need to move a lot of material to get it, but with this, his first mining floor was ready for business. He really needed some kind of technique, to extract the traces of metal from normal stone. He'd moved over a million m³ stone in his mining operation, if he could've separated the metals in them from the rest, he could've gotten a massive amount. After all, didn't the earth crust contain six percent iron?

The other treasure he found was coal. It was only a small end of a vein, at the outmost end of his influence, but when he absorbed it, he didn't get carbon, he got one hundred plant material and ten life energy for each ton of coal. It wasn't much for now, and he didn't know how large the vein was, but he immediately created 50 blue goblins, equipped them with mining gear and sent them to work beyond the reaches of his dungeon.

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He already gathered 20 tons and together with the generation from his creatures and his life energy increased a lot over the last two weeks.

Life energy: 9722.1

All the mining he could do, was finished for now. He needed to increase his max extension and the depth of the dungeon to gain access to more material.

Another good news was that his arena training started to show some results. Some of the black goblins improved to E11, but what he was most satisfied with, was the evolution of one of them.

Hobgoblin

The third evolution for a goblin . Hobgoblins are larger and stronger than their weaker cousins

Rank: D1

Traits: strong(rank 5); resilient(rank 5) merciless(rank 3)

Costs: 20k mana ; 120kg animal material

After this, he immediately started to replace his casualties in the arena with hobgoblins. The other thing he noticed was the rank increase from Biff to E8 and Wolfgang to D3. He didn't dare to have look at Mr Floppy, because he didn't want to spoil Luna's fun to surprise him and because the rabbit was kind of creepy.

He was just increasing the rest of the floor height on his ninth level, when he noticed Mike entering his dungeon.

Mike'POV:

  "Mike my friend, welcome back. Oh, I see you made some progress. You must have been working hard. Going from F11 over F12 up to E2 is not an easy task in three weeks. I think congratulations are in order."

"Thanks, the book helped a lot. You wanted me to come back to inform how I can notify the guild?"

  "Straight to business, ok. First you should tell me if you trust your mayor. From all I know he is a former C ranked adventurer."

"I trust him with my life, he'd been like a father for me and my sister."

  "Good, that makes it easy. Take him with you and go to the guild in Geldern. With him at your side, they shouldn't give you shit for being a newbie. Then say to the reception you want to join the guild, but you want to do the advanced entry test. Most don't know about this test, and it costs ten gold instead of one, but either the local guild master or his deputy has to be present. After the test, you tell him that the reason for your joining the guild is your discovery of a dungeon. They will use some kind of truth detection spell on you, so don't lie. Just tell them, you hunted a bear, wounded it and followed it to a cave. When your second arrow killed it, while you were still outside, you saw it disappear and concluded it had to be a dungeon."

"And if they ask me if I entered?"

  "Tell them yes, but you stayed near the entrance and weren't attacked. The only dungeon animal you saw was a rabbit."

"Did you forget, I saw your wolves and the bear killing the goblins."

  "Yes but not when you entered after I absorbed the bear, so this wouldn't be a lie. You just didn't tell everything. Let's make a test. Did you notice something unusually going on with the dungeon?"

"Maybe like this, I'm a newbie and I never saw a dungeon before, I don't really know what is normal for one."

  "Not bad, remember keep your answers short. They should be far more interested in your discovery than in you anyway."

"Doesn't sound so complicated, but I don't have ten gold."

Mike saw silver appearing in front of his eyes.

  "Take this, there are 2000 silver coins. The 1000 extra are for another task. I need you to go to an alchemist or a smith and get me some metal samples. The amount of each metal doesn't matter. If you manage to do that, you will get 250 silver for each type of metal. Rare ones, will get you 1000 silver."

"Metal samples?"

  "Yes, a dungeon can only created materials he absorbed. I can drop better stuff for adventurers if a have access to better metals. So it would be your fault, if they only get crappy stuff from me. By the way, I already have iron, steel, copper, silver, gold, orichalcum and highsteel, so you don't need to get these."

"Ok, I'll do it. But I don't want any additional silver, I want earth and wind fighter techniques."

  "Ok, I don't really care. But you do realize a good fighter technique can costs thousands of gold?

"No, I didn't. But with you not caring about that fact, I'm glad I've asked. I'll be on my way then."

  "Good luck boy, next time we see us, you'll probably be a dungeon diver. Don't expect a special treatment from me. It would only hinder your progress."

With that said, Mike started to pick up the silver. It was too much for his purse, so he had to put the rest in his backpack.

Neo's POV:

  "Neo, I think I've forgotten to tell you something."

When Mike moved his focus to Luna, he saw the little fairy nervously playing with her hair and looking to the floor.

"Ok, Luna what didn't you tell me?"

  "Well, with no real attack on the dungeon I kind of missed it, but I should've probably told you that you can possess some dungeon creatures, like I did with the bear."

"Some, which ones?"

  "Your boss monsters."

"Awesome, WOLFGANG I need you here!"