Chapter 16: Diggy Diggy Heigh-ho!

Sometimes the so-called ‘cat delivery system’ really does come through when you’re least expecting it. Especially when you feel like a new cat is the last thing you need in the world right now. But what could I do? This was Tiptap’s home long ago.

I did find it odd that I had gained a new undead minion without acquiring any specifically new Powers or Skills. Her empty shell had laid in the garden before I even arrived here. Yet I hadn't specifically touched it in any manner. My Gardencrafting and Dusting were in completely separate parts of the yard.

Except... Jellybee had gone near her grave.

HIm? Raising the dead? Preposterous. Jellybee of Nazareth?

Please.

I had to assume going forward that any corpse in a dungeon, human or not, could turn into a zombie with enough time. I didn’t think Tiptap was a mistake on my end or happenstance. As one particularly delightful overseas call center representative once told me about a complaint I had with my phone, "It's a feature, not a bug."

Maybe old reliable Brittle Bones would continue to come in handy, eh?

Until then, I had this sweet little angel guarding my Core.

I gave Tiptap a quick ethereal pet across the back that she didn’t react to, then popped back downstairs to say hi and to check on the work of my two minions. The boys were quickly getting used to me Strolling in to say hi and then leaving just as easily.

The cellar had been about what I expected for a countryside small town cottage. If not a bit fancier than usual. Wine bottles arrayed securely on one wall, a tall bookshelf on another, and one brick wall that Jellybee and Jimbo-no were hacking away at.

What I hadn’t been expecting was the monstrous trophy head of what appeared to be a type of dragon hung above the bookcase. Nor did I expect the many crossed off bounty posters that decorated these quarters, the practice dummy in the corner, the weapons displayed in cases, and the stockpiles of what appeared to be gold coins and precious gems hidden within a few false bricks.

Oh, and another secret entrance behind the wine rack. Naturally. Once again, I could see the entrance there, but not much beyond. I would have to extend my reach again.

The previous owner, this adventurer, must have been quite the character. A clever individual who liked to keep common pleasantries and resources hidden away from public view, in their own home… And had clearly been successful enough in their career to justify their secrets behind secrets.

I Dusted through several bricks–causing them to crack and crumble on their own–giving me some extra Mana to work with. “There’s another room here. Can I rely on you both to keep breaking down the wall while I make sure it’s safe?” I asked.

The two skeletons both nodded, then went right back to work. A notably quiet reaction from the two. I could tell they were also in the zone. We all wanted to work. And to survive.

That left me with some extra mental space to work on my Soul Knitting skill and expand the Dungeon into the surrounding earth, including beyond the wall mounted wine rack shelves.

The immediate problem I realized was that this would be a very, very slow process. A few steps beyond the porch was one thing. Literally pulling threads of Mana into my Dungeon, then setting them in place was another matter. Even this cellar room had taken a good while to stitch into place.

I searched through my Gardencraft menus until I found something that could work.

I clicked on the selection twice, It took up a whopping 10 Mana to summon two sticks. Half my Capacity!

Well, the description called them mage wands. Whatever. They had roughly the right shape and length for what I wanted, even if they weren’t exactly what I needed. Country girls make do.

The two wands materialized in the palm of my hand, growing into reality.

Then slipped right through my grasp and clattered to the ground.

I reached for them with my Avatar. And my hand passed right through them.

Oh Fiddlesticks!

How could I forget?

Out of frustration, I Mana Dusted one of the wands away.

Then noticed for a brief moment that the Dust left behind a smoky imprint of its shape.

It started to drift away, towards my Core up the stairs.

Oh no you don't!

I instinctively snagged the smoke within my grasp. The wand remained, though the bulk of the wand’s mass had drifted off anyways.

That, actually, was the perfect size. Exactly what I needed.

Holy smokes! That worked! My avatar could hold ghost smoke!

I repeated what I did with the other wand.

I held onto the two needle thin sticks in one hand.

Now let's see…

Aha!

I looped one of the leylines around a knitting needle, casting on the start of the first stitches.

Ethel Merriweather, you sly fox.

The system seemed to agree with me, since it immediately gave me a level without even activating the Skill.

Alright. Let’s see what these babies can do.

I Leyline Knit just enough past the wine racks and into the secret room to make sure there wasn’t anything vitally important there, like a living person or another corpse. Satisfied with the peek, I continued to Knit. The process went immensely faster this time. And I suspect not just because of the level up, but because I finally had the proper tools.

After I had enough of the room stitched up to make sure there were no further secret rooms, i ended the Skill–casted off the stitches–forming a cozy little blanket over my newly formed domain.

I Strolled away and used just my Core’s vision to peek into the new room, leaving the hidden entrance behind the wine bottles still closed. I didn’t want my minions to get damaged or hurt if they walked through. I suspected there could be dangerous traps guarding terrible secrets or copious amounts of wealth.

Instead, I found something entirely unexpected: food storage.

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There was all the hallmarks of old timey preservation methods to keep the room as perfectly dry and secure as possible. Flagstone flooring, white washed limestone walls, decent ventilation, and heavy marble stone slab shelves. The temperature was colder here than the rest of the house.

And lots of food.

In this storage there were about three dozen shelves, all filled to the brim with preserved foods. Casks of fermenting small beer, pots of salted pork, smoked meats, dried herbs and oyster mushrooms, bags of sunflower seeds and nuts...

And so many, many jars. Mostly preserved jams and pectin, but also jars of pickled eggs and pigs feet.

The food storage reminded me of when I would visit a childhood friend, Grace Larson. She grew up Mormon and her parents were well off to afford an entire pantry room in their basement. It was big enough that we play hide and seek amongst the rows of shelves. Most of my generation, including Grace, had grown up under that heavy shadow of the Great Depression. We had inherited from our silent generation parents a healthy fear on how to survive when food ran short. We were all taught how to reuse what we had. No plastic tupperware, Christmas ribbon, or Alfredo jar went in the trash. Grace, however, got the double whammy with her family upbringing. It was the equivalent of living with neat and orderly religious food hoarders. Don’t get me wrong. The Larsons were lovely, nice folks. They could cook up the best funeral potatoes for any ‘newly weds and nearly deads’ event. Yet each of them were practically looking forward to buckling down in their mason jar bunker for some 'latter days' apocalypse.

Just looking at these shelves made me suddenly crave a funeral.

The clanging racket made by my boys in the other room pulled me out of memory lane.

I briefly explored to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

I discovered a stout barrel of what seemed to be... hardtack? I tried Mana Dusting a sample to verify, but I couldn't even make a dent in one without putting in substantial time. The density was practically thicker than stone. Which only confirmed that, yes, this was in fact hardtack.

Now that was interesting. There’s a contrasting juxtaposition between hardtack and Mason jars being in the same room. I didn’t see a whole lot of hardtack in the modern world I left behind. Civilization had moved onto better ways of preserving food for long distance travel. Yet this room had a whole lot of canning going on. This many jars, all uniform in appearance, required a scale of industrialisation I hadn't noticed elsewhere in the home. All that glass and aluminum would require a society to have a certain degree of manufacturing prowess beyond medieval. Which is what I presumed the technology level to be roughly at.

Aluminum in particular, while abundant in modern times back on Earth, wasn't in mass production until later in human history. Like the late 1800's, I think? It was so rare at first that it was worth more than gold. And then in the next century it was in the gutters of every street.

The question remained: was this a sign of modern technology? Or was this the real treasure of the home?

It seemed awfully strange to me that the adventurer chose to essentially hide away a fancy pantry behind several locked doors. Moving a rug, opening a trapdoor, and unlocking two doors seemed like a ton of steps just to fetch a jar of olives for a snack. Were they planning on some sort of end of the world situation? Did they think they could ride it out over a couple months? What was the point?

Overall, it was highly ironic. All this abundance of rations and supplies and potential wealth–squirreled away between multiple doors–discovered by a rock. And a couple of dorks that didn't need to eat normal food to survive.

I returned back to the main basement room to find another surprise in that Jellybee already had a few levels in his Digging Skill. The hole in the wall had progressed much faster than I expected to be physically possible, becoming roughly the size of a doorway. I knew from personal experience that digging a hole even two feet down into soil could get mighty tough. So Jellybee had clearly seen some hard labor in at least one of his lives to be this good at shoveling dirt. Between Jellybees Skill and my Mana Dusting to weaken the bricks, we made quick work and began digging several feet in. Any of the debris they left on the floor I was able to Dust up, topping off my Mana Capacity enough to gain some experience here and there. Before long we had a sizable start to a tunnel. This steady rate of progress on something substantial was a welcome blessing.

I did start to worry as I saw dust and dirt tumble down every so often. I wasn’t much of an engineer, but I knew enough about physics to be worried about all the weight above pressing downward the bigger this hole got. Which seemed like a problem inherently contrary to my nature as a Dungeon. How was I supposed to keep building a whole prison system deep underground without even having the faintest idea on how to build a simple mine or mountain underpass? How was I supposed to keep the roof over my head without knowing what was up above on the roof? I knew there was a river in the opposite direction we were digging, but what happened if we hit a trapped gas pocket or a hidden underwater reservoir? My two minions made for terrible Canaries. They couldn’t even breathe. How was I supposed to know if something was going wrong with the air?

I tried not to think about that. Fretting would get me nowhere. Chewing through dead tree roots all the way to the surface did feel like a bad idea–there was a chance they were holding loose soil together in clumps–so I only Dusted up the roots that dangled in our way. To ease the rest of my troubled thoughts, I Gardencrafted some support beams into place to help mitigate cave ins. Then, actually thinking about it a bit more, I then Crafted my first trap.

Kind of.

It was a secured wooden plate above the entrance to the new tunnel, holding up some rocks I had cracked through using Mana Dusting. All I had to do was Dust the plate and I would cause a cave in. Which would provide us with an escape route. More importantly, it would fill in the entrance so the actual home owner wouldn’t have to worry about random tunnels into their cozy reading library. They’d just need to replace the bricks or hang a nice painting over the mess. Good as new. This meant it wasn’t really a trap. Just a home renovation project that could kill someone if they were in the wrong spot.

So basically no different from any other renovation project.

After that I went back to digging away with Mana Dusting. This was technically still part of the cottage, which also meant I was passively wracking up even further additional experience from my Homewrecker title.

This quickly resulted in those sweet, sweet announcements I had been looking forward to.

A NEW UPGRADE TO THIS SKILL IS AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE UPON LEVEL UP.>

AT THIS LEVEL WE OFFER A COMPLIMENTARY CORE UPGRADE, ALONG WITH A DIVERSE SELECTION OF NEW POWERS AND SKILLS. PLEASE CHOOSE ONE CORE UPGRADE. FURTHER CORE UPGRADES WILL BE AVAILABLE AT EVERY ODD LEVEL.>

[PLEASE SELECT ONE:

MANA RENEWAL UPGRADE

MANA CAPACITY UPGRADE]

That's when I remembered this was a world with game-like mechanics. And that not all game mechanics were perfectly balanced. Or realistic.

Upgrades made sense.

Cave-ins made less sense.

Wasn’t there a video game about mining? Ah, yes, Minecraft.

I never played it. I just saw kids at the public library playing it constantly after school. It was usually the more annoying kids that didn’t know how to shut up.

Perhaps the children of modern eras yearn for the mines. But I knew none of those brats knew how to actually dig a tunnel. They wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the salt mines with my grandpapa. That newfangled cube game wouldn't have been so popular if it had realistic mining with black lungs and dubious child slavery laws. Starving slowly to death under a tunnel collapse in the dark didn't sound like good fun to me. But who knew what the kids enjoyed these days. I certainly didn't understand it.

After I chose my new abilities I made a mental note to conduct tests on tunnel digging far from the home and without my minions in the way. Maybe the tunnel roof would hold without compacting the material around it? If this world had video game logic, then I had to stop applying real logic to it.

Speaking of which… There was another game I was thinking of. Not a video game though.

What was it… the one with a cheesy movie poster and made kids commit crimes in the park while dressing up? It’s on the tip of my tongue. Something about mazes and monsters? Eh, I’ll come back to it.

I had a hunch that with enough Mana Capacity I could create some crazy objects using Gardencraft. Not just objects, but maybe actual monsters. Well, besides Tiptap. Living creatures seemed out of my purview at the moment, but I figured it was entirely possible to make my own monsters, if not expected later on. Traps could only go so far to help against axe crazy home invaders. I bet that man wouldn’t last long against a dragon!

By jove, I remembered! That other game was Dungeons and Dragons!

I also hadn’t played that. That one was also played at the public library, by annoying teens that didn’t know how to shut up.

I didn’t want monstrous teens or greedy dragons lurking around the place. Both sounded expensive and demanding. The most expensive object I had created so far was a tree. I didn't expect to make much more than some kitchen cabinets or support beams. Even the porch roof could be built piecemeal over time. I didn't need that much Mana all at once.

But with a higher Renewal Rate? Oh boy.

I think I figured out a way I could game the system! All I had to do was be a frugal penny pincher and not spend all that much. Whenever I was maxed out, anything excess would turn to experience. Naturally there would be diminishing returns, but I would still rapidly gain levels by doing essentially nothing.

Levels so far seemed to be my primary resource for gaining more power over this world and for gaining tools to survive.

Sorry, Spinemess. Wait a bit longer. Ethel here has to figure out first which game she got herself trapped in. Then lickety-split, we’ll find a way to fix you up.

I pressed the first option.