I was thinking about the elf as I worked, slowly digging out the chambers and pipes that should make my dreams of water a reality. While I had made some progress in communication with her some things would be very difficult to do. For one thing, learning a language was very difficult without hearing that language, or understanding the context of things. I could have her try to teach me the written elven language, as I understood her just fine, but that would tie me down beside her for who knows how many hours in a given day. While that could be fine, I was expecting the cavalry to show up eventually and I'd need to prepare more levels in the meantime to act as a defense for my core. So I'd need a way to better optimize my time spent working with her and working on myself.

While the room took form I thought of a couple ways to learn that communication, or teach her, and my mind landed on flash cards. I could make small sheets of general metal and draw a picture on it with the name of the object under it in English. I’d also leave a line for her to inscribe the elven word for the things I drew. It was an easy option that would get me the basics. After that would come sentence structuring and other rules that elven writing might entail, knowing English's odd characteristics I was worried about what an ancient ruleset for such a language would require.

I would also have to write out an alphabet, if i hadn’t already, being sure to include upper and lowercase letters. Maybe some punctuation. I wondered if I'd be able to get her to speak English if I included things like pronunciation or emphasis in written words. I sighed, working on the oversized shafts that would connect the chambers, having decided that more room would counteract extra pressure buildup. A big annoyance with the water collector was the sheer size. It should have been built on the fourth or fifth floor where I'd be digging deeper, giving me much more room to work horizontally. I paused as I thought of height differences, remembering some old nursery rhyme about a fox. Maybe short children's stories would be a good direction to go, something nice and easy to understand the context of the words.

I paused my digging to scratch some things out on the walls. “The little baby fox jumped over its brother.” I drew out a very rough picture of a baby fox, notably smaller than the others hoping over another as a big fox looked on. I looked at the bad drawing and sighed, I should have worked at artwork if I was intending to go into children's story books. I scraped away the image and tried another. “The small slime jumped over its brother.” Once again a small slime jumping a slightly bigger slime as a much larger one watched them. I decided to give them simple eyes to help with seeing the direction they looked and the direction they traveled. If I remember right, the story about the fox was one about a fox that dearly wanted to jump higher than the moon. It might have also gotten stuck there and become sad because none of its family was there to see its achievement, or something like that. It would be a good book as it would have many repeating and simple words while also showing different emotions that could easily be seen and understood.

I tried another, grinning as I wrote out ‘the slime and the hopper.’ Another simple tale that would convey easy to understand emotions and words. Things like joy, pride, foolishness, maybe camaraderie and respect. This seemed like a good idea so I filed it away for later, after I was done with my building. I just hoped I wouldn't have to make any arrows pointing from words to objects. That thought made me decide to add a couple pages to the end of my books just for pictures of the objects and the word that would describe it. Things like slime, moon, and rock would be simple enough. Siblings would be harder.

With the thought of a new, simple, task I went back to my work with good energy, bulling through stone quickly and making sure I didn't recklessly press beyond the boundary of my blueprint, only having to stop when I made the tunnel that would act as my emergency pressure release.

I had chosen to make my water room in front of the head of the ‘spider’ that my third floor was planned to be, from there the emergency release point would connect to the room that would house the exit. I’d have to make a fully general metal room, so no one would see a metal plate and poke through it in search of hidden goodies. It would risk killing everything in the boss room if it ever blew open but that risk seemed better than risking a full explosion of the whole water generator. I’d just have to eat the loss for now. I had also thought of coating the entire water generator in general metal, possibly giving it more structural stability, but I didn't have nearly enough stored to coat it. I bumped general metal farm higher on my priority list. Even if a farm would be inefficient it should provide much more than a couple groups munching on the second floor. Maybe some sort of trough system, have spiders break up the ore nodes so the ore would slide down a ramp and land in a trough that I'd have hoppers stationed in front of. From there a short ramp to allow slimes to go back and forth, collecting the processed ore without picking up a bunch or unprocessed ore. I nodded as I finished building the seal. Both the farm idea and the water generator should work.

I moved back into the generator, settling in the middle of the sap collection area. I’d spawned moss nodes as I built the submerged tubes, hopefully they’d function under the sap and give my slimes a job to do. While they couldn’t separate water from sap, an earlier test proved they could harvest moss without collecting the sap as well. With that i had one last thing to do before adding my ember slimes. My test proved that a single slime could make twenty units of sap simmer, even if it took hours to accomplish, so I'd need to find the volume of the room before throwing some of the boys into it. This was something I found hopeless. I was always a bad student at math and barely dragged myself through basic algebra, most of which I'd long forgotten. For now I could try adding in forty units of sap at a time, until I reached the max level I'd set for the boiling chamber. While that could work, even if it took much longer, I wasn't sure I had the supply I'd need to fill the chamber.

I cursed into the dark and moved to sit down and scratch on the stone. As much as I hated it, I'd need to at least give the math a try. “Let’s see, each tube is fifty meters long.” I didn’t count the v-notch I put in the tubes for my moss nodes. “And each slime is.” I sighed, having to summon a slime to measure it. “So, twenty four centimeters in width. So it’s fifty meters divided by twenty four centimeters.” I scratched out the numbers, deciding to multiply fifty by a hundred to get a centimeter measurement instead.

“Two hundred and eight plus a third, that’s how many units of sap should be in each tube.” The tubes were stacked ten high, matching the above water condensation area. That didn’t include the notches in the tubes, which would likely account for a good deal extra sap. I was now glad I had decided smaller would be better and made the chamber five meters across. Even so, I counted six hundred and fifty individual tubes. A bit of slow math later and I discovered I'd need over a hundred thousand units of sap, just to fill the tubes alone, that didn’t account for the chamber they were connected to. If that was right I'd need three and a half thousand slimes just to make this farm work for me. Something had to be wrong here, I had to check my math again.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I wasn't wrong, with six hundred and fifty tubes I'd need an outlandish amount of sap just to fill it all up. Even if I just filled up the bottom ten tubes I'd need thirteen and a half thousand units. I’d only gotten a couple hundred from my moss squishing rock. But, I'd also need far fewer slimes to keep that amount of sap simmering, a quick check showed three hundred and thirty eight. Still a lot of slimes.

My earlier optimism dashed into dejected annoyance, I tried to come up with a solution. I could build much smaller single slime farms, maybe just make a load of stills that would feed me a trickle of water rather than a rain shower but I didn't know how well my idea would scale down. For now I could try out a single tube and see how well it worked, maybe eventually building up into a larger scale. Each of the tubes had been slanted upward, I had thought the tubes might have a chance to boil, thus making steam get trapped and decreasing my efficiency, so each could technically be filled individually and be left to cook.

I frowned as I looked around me. I could also start up my slime experiment again and see if I could gain a water slime. If a fire slime made heat then a water slime might drip, thus cutting off this entire operation. It was very annoying to think I'd made something that could be rendered completely pointless but I had to sit back and accept it. It wasn’t like it wouldn’t have a point, i still needed water, and a water slime wasn’t guaranteed, and I'd basically built a giant boiler. If I wanted to, I could likely figure out a way to pipe heat around my dungeon, or steam. The idea even reignited my earlier idea of a piston engine, though I still liked the idea of slimes powering things.

Still thinking of uses for my overkill water generator I started to dump sap down one of the bottom holes. I’d use it and at least see if the concept was a good one. I was puzzled that my moss made green sap for a moment, at least until the tube was full, when I started spawning slimes, six dropping down in front of me and waiting until I ordered them to patrol the tube. They’d have to deal with bumping into each other for now but I didn't have any other ideas. They’d just slide up and down the slope in some Sisyphus-like task that might generate me some water.

Then I thought of Sisyphus, the fellow that had to roll a boulder up a hill each day before it crashed down and he’d have to do it again. It gave me an idea. While I wouldn't be able to constantly fill up my squish chamber with moss, simply taking too much time and delivering too little for results to consume so much of my attention, I could have some monsters do something similar.

I knelt down and scratched out a quick design. I’d need to make new pipes and a new chamber but it Shouldn’t overly affect the generator, or floor three. I’d just add in some pipes from the new moss squishing design right into the old one. I cursed slightly, opening my blueprint instead of scratching on the floor. I’d make it like old school grinders. A big wheel with a spindle through it, enough length off to either side so my spiders could get a decent hold on it. The spiders lacked fingers but they could use their pick arms to cradle the spindle and push the mill stone upwards. I had started the design at a forty five degree angle but that would likely be overkill, and way too heavy for my spiders to push along. So I dropped the angle down to a fifteen degree angle. If it was too little for my millstone to roll down with moss in the way then I'd just have to have spiders push it along. I mocked up a simple concept and frowned at it. As it was, it looked like the stone could get jammed easily, the tolerances were too tight, short stone walls meant to act as guides giving it around a millimeter of clearance on either side.

I didn’t want to overly separate the guides, risking the stone toppling over and giving my spiders a harder time. So I carved out channels in the guide walls, making them into half circles so moss sap, or crushed moss, could get pushed out of the way and allow the mill stone to pass a little more easily. I gave the millstone a higher clearance to the ceiling, figuring it could go over whatever wouldn’t squish down or away, but added another set of retaining walls to either side. Another touch was making ridges down the length of the slope, long fingers that might act like gutters for sap, or just act as areas where moss could survive and regrow much more quickly. Seeing the ridges also made me rough up the stone on the trails that the spiders would walk along, hoping for better grip.

Getting the new construction to line up, without interfering with the old construction or planned third floor rooms was a little annoying. I had to put it past the condensation area, then had to extend it further as I thought of a last necessity. Crushing the moss would inevitably lead to pulp which would cling to the stone and start to slowly accumulate. Now I needed a room that would separate the pulp so I wouldn't end up with annoying blockages in the future. I could forgo the pulp elimination room for now but it would be a headache to add it in the future when everything was already set up. I was already having to build this because I lacked the foresight to do math before I started building my water generator. I wouldn’t happily make the same mistake so soon after my last blunder.

I had to sit and plot for now. I didn’t have any mesh designs so that would be out for now, unless I wanted to try and make a million needle thin holes in a general metal sheet. I was also trying to avoid having metal in the design for fear of accidentally making poisonous water. I could also try incorporating my vine nodes.. In a dense enough bunch they could act as a natural filter that I could have a slime chew on after each millstone drop.

I sighed as I thought of the drop. If i just had the stone drop without any kind of slow down area I'd just be building a battering ram. It seemed like a simple enough fix, add a flat section to the room and extend it out so the stone could roll to a stop with the moss acting as a buffer to help slow it down. I decided to add a flat section to the top of the ramp so I could have the spiders pause the mill should anything go wrong, or if I just needed to repair or adjust things.

I sat back, trying to think of all the things this would need and what I had checked off that list. I had the stone, the ramp, places for the moss to grow back from, room for spiders to push the stone. Considering that I doubled the space so four spiders could push at once. I might need to have them make harnesses so four could push and four could pull, but that would require testing first. I’d only build the ramp partially so I could test things. I had a stopping section on both ends, one to act as a buffer and another purely for stopping the mill.

So I just needed a pipe and a filter. I was thinking I'd have to risk my low quality copper being good enough not to leach metals into the whole generator. The boiling process ought to leave anything unwanted behind as sludge, or so I thought. I was beginning to wish I had been a plumber in my previous life as I finished my design by adding a small chamber at the end of the ramp. I’d add in a copper ramp that would have a ton of little holes. The size of it should allow for most of the sap to get through, even if a bunch of the holes got quickly clogged. Four slimes were enough to span the length of the new ramp so they could consume the pulp before the mill was reset. With that I added a funnel to a slime sized pipe that would go down to the generator's sap collection room, deciding to drop in from the top of the room.

All together this method would be a slow process but it should offer me a constant source of sap. I wasn’t confident that it could keep up with a fully active generator but it might be able to keep the bottom one or two layers of tubes of the generator going. All I needed to do was get everything going, test some things then build it all out. I almost started on it until I felt one of my slimes alerting me. Only one of my slimes had orders like that so I sighed as I went to go and deal with the elf. I did have plans for her so this shouldn’t be much of a setback.