> Testing. Testing. Hey Innearth I'm really sorry it's taken so long to get back to you. I was going to keep responding every week but then life happened and it slipped my mind for weeks upon weeks. I'm sorry, you must have been worried?

>

> I found a new home!

>

> I wanted to get that out of the way. Travelling was fun but I don't think I ever want to do that again. I'm definitely not an adventuring sort of dwarf.

>

> Soon I'll set up a proper relay in my new workshop and we can have a actual two way conversation. I promise I won't go that long without responding again.

>

> Anyways! I found a whole mountain hollowed out and made into a truly wondrous city for my new brethern. The people here are really nice! I'm pretending to like beer more than I do and making alot of friends. Some old gems are a bit rude about my "Lack of hair and weird eyes" but after I went shot for shot with old Cob (Cobalt I belive his full name is) he started defending me. I've been telling people about you - claiming you have loads of useful materials and some of the younger dwarves seem interested. I'll keep you posted if they ever decide to make the pilgrimage to you okay?

>

> Anyways about my life I guess.

>

> It is incredibly easy to buy a home here you just have to give the clanleader a bottle of scotch and you have your pick of the caves. Materials are a bit tight however, I think you spoilt me with the constant free metals and monster parts. I'll have to work my way up to the point I can make that transceiver. I'm learning to be thrifty with the more magical materials and have started learning runes from scratch. Its fun but I miss being able to brute force solutions sometimes.

>

> Anyways Nick's calling me, Sorry Nickel Stoneblood is 'is full name. He wants to try making moonshine out of coal and called me and the boys down to his distillery a while ago. Should be fun, he found a rune that turns high amounts of natural energy into liquor and thinks we can get a steady drip by burning the smelter fuel into...sorry I really have to go! I'll talk to you later okay? This time I promise it wont be as long.

Excerpt obtained from an Onyx transmission 2001 AS.

What do you think these are for?

Innearth was studying the bag of items the bullied and beaten crafter had abandoned. He had pulled them out of his loot storage into the second mirror hall where Steve had stopped working to help him analyze.

“As far as I can tell. These are mostly tools to add inscriptions to generic materials along with some sort of…dust? The dust is similar to void mana but seems inert.” Steve responded after a while.

Yeah that’s about what I decided. I wonder what type of crafter they were?

Innearth would never steal items an adventurer put down or dropped…at least in any situation where they could get them back. That was stealing! I’m not a thief!

If the original crafter instead of their bodyguard had gone back for his bag he would have given it back to him in a heartbeat.

…that being said, now that I have the bag and enough time has passed…well, I’m definitely going to keep the booty. They basically abandoned it. Can’t expect me to keep it there I’m not a storage facility.

…

“This is an inscription pen. It can easily write directly into solid materials and could be used for runes. Kind of like my claw…but it has an option to embed materials as you write? There might be ways to use it to draw runes but if I had to guess, well, if I had to guess this was for enchanting which I really know nothing about.” Steve continued explaining the items the crafter had in his pack.

“This over here is a similar tool to draw items but is closer to being a chisel than a pen. Definitely for the thicker runes…but that’s strange because people who use enchanting spells should not be using runework as well?” Steve muttered while picking up another item and holding it up close to his glassy eyes.

Humans have all the spell systems cobbled together. Crafter probably had a couple of runes they could use and a couple of scripts they could write?

“Huh…can I have some water?” Steve asked while pinching some of the powder and looking at it carefully.

After filling up a small basin with H2O from his inventory, Innearth watched the dwarf swirl powder around in the liquid making a murky sort of potion.

Frowning slightly after examining the liquid the dwarf proceeded to test it in various ways.

First Steve drew a little boxy rune beside it nodding slightly when nothing happened. Then he stuck his finger in and swirled it about before looking carefully to see what happened. Steve shoved his cupped hand into the liquid and drank the potentially poisonous material fearlessly.

Finally, he shook his head and filled a pen with the powder before carefully drawing a scribbly spiky rune beside the pool and once more nodding to himself after nothing seemed to happen.

“Powder definitely works similar to your X crystals in terms of converting mana to this sort of void mana flavour efficiently…this rune is now active and actively destroying…something? No clue what it's destroying, because it's not everything and it's not me.” Steve said demonstrating his point by waving his hand above the rune.

…that’s good to know. Did you really have to test it out on yourself?

“Ah it's fine.” Steve waved his hand dismissively.

“The rest of the loot seems to be clothing or hygienic based, there’s some money and a letter. Nothing else interesting. Something more exciting however is these plans I have!” Pulling out several items from a pouch on his side Steve began excitedly talking about the trials.

“I’m going to go back to working on the next hallway. Since the last hall I’ve had an idea to store the trapped spells permanently. Right now, the trial can collect spells in the form of skills the challenger has used…and then play them back as long as the challenger is still attempting the trial. The spell-data is wiped when the challenger leaves the room right now but after seeing how the finished product works, I’ve been playing with some potential changes. If these work we can retain skills between runs of the room so someone returning to try again will find their copy remembers all their previous skills.” Steve excitedly talked about the rooms Innearth had already mentally marked as “done”.

Well…have fun. Make sure not to break them or change the functionality too much from the original. I’m going see what this rune is destroying okay? Innearth responded before noticing the dwarf had already begun making a new alcove filled with fragile crystal plates he had already covered in embedded metal runes.

While Steve worked on a lot of the runework for the hallway, Innearth tried dozens of different guesses of what the rune could be destroying. He briefly thought it was a material similar to how void mana could be tuned to remove specific elements and nothing else – remembering he hadn’t managed to do that yet – but after testing small amounts of everything in his inventory he concluded that was wrong.

…What could adventurers want to destroy? Actually, that’s probably the wrong question. What could sapients want to destroy?

An embarrassing amount of time later Innearth finally figured it out. The rune destroyed “Waste” specifically organic waste – which sewage counted as, along with some dead monster parts in a strange manner. Breaking apart either in his inventory and placing the separate physical elements on the rune did nothing…but the rune was smart enough to attack the combination even if various “organic wastes” were vastly different. Of the monster parts that were destroyed, the monster itself could safely move about above it, but – as soon as they were killed – the rune set to work dissolving the parts.

…welp. I’m pretty sure I know what that crafter’s job was. They were going to make toilets and maybe garbage cans for cooking?

I wonder if that means my portable toilets will be popular? On that note I could start making some less portable versions? And some safety ones using this dust?

Setting up void-based toilets was easy. Setting up safe void toilets that wouldn’t melt someone dumb enough to stick their hand in the bowl was harder.

After giving that job to his dwarves who had become his lazy catch all solution to problems, Innearth set to work seeding the beginner floors – with unique monsters each carrying a toilet that only dropped to low leveled adventurers. Here’s to seeing if this is a good reward or not. Worse case scenario I randomize them.

Unique materials were strange. In some ways they were a crutch – in others a way to spice up an otherwise uniform dungeon. If they had obviously strong seeming effects initially, they could elevate the monster using them but if not they would just end up being harder to make.

For this situation, Innearth began harvesting random materials from his lowest floors and bringing them to his highest. They were materials that didn’t feel special enough to create a boss or strong enough to match his lowest few floors…but when transplanted to the beginner floors? When transplanted to the beginner floors they were just right.

Stone from the in-construction area at the very bottom of Innearth’s dungeon was taken – the mana having warped the material in much weirder ways than in his biomes without having a purpose to guide them.

From the battlefields and monster-blood-soaked floors, came red stains that spoke of valor and courage and made everything around them bloodthirsty. There were parts that had melted into the ground and fused to the stone that Innearth placed in unique crystal worms.

When placed in the center of a monster, those materials briefly summoned slightly bloody phantasmal armour – or conjured hovering bloody stone weapons in the shape of claws and spikes. These temporary weapons were reminiscent of the monsters who shed those parts deep below.

Now. As far as a monster went, “actually building those parts” would have been vastly better than the summoning version…and if Innearth really cared about making these monsters as strong as he could make them he would have used nearly any monster but a worm to host them…but, in terms of providing a challenge to the desired noobs, these unique monsters were perfect.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

In fact, making something a challenge with next to no mana was a useful exercise. Innearth hadn't reached a point where he had to start worrying about keeping up with remaking everything adventurers killed...but he was getting closer every day. The amount of mana he had for side projects had shrivelled up as more adventurers arrived and every little saving counted.

A whole several-day tangent was made to try and make a monster with close to zero personal mana.

Innearth took several mana rich unique materials – a very fine hair-like slowly growing crystal plant, some rock that was visible in only one direction, and some sections of crystal that had become naturally much denser with mana than normal but didn’t appear to have any effect.

Innearth then had his dwarves grind them all into a fine powder and mixed them with water. He made a thin silica shell around them before attempting to animate his blob…which didn’t respond to his desire. He struggled to seed the monster with life for a bit before finally adding almost 0.03 AMU to the creation. That was enough to claim the spell as his own although it progressed differently with this much of his own mana – slowly seeming to burrow about and claim the body instead of an instantaneous animation.

This experiment was christened the crystal slime and let loose in the beginner floors. Its outsides cracked and flaked as it moved, and it left a faint fuzz of crystal behind it when it moved. With how weak it was, the monster could be considered a failure but Innearth looked at how it cost 0.003 as much as a regular slime and considered it a success…of course the mitosis replicating worms had a zero ongoing cost and were hands-off, but in terms of an experiment this could have been seen as an alternative. Innearth made several variations of them just to watch how his seed of life claimed its body in almost slow motion and gained a slight beneficial insight into the process.

…

Time passed and his toilet loot was found out. There were very few low-levelled adventurers at the start, but – as the town above him started to solidify – low-levelled adventurers steadily started arriving. Innearth began to grow a soft spot for the weakest adventurers. In many ways despite being less impressive in every way they were more fun to watch. Their struggles felt more real and their excitement from levelling up was almost contagious.

Of these low levelled adventurers Innearth had a favourite. He called the adventurer Craig despite not knowing his real name and followed Craig’s delves religiously.

The boy delved alone and used a variety of weapons and skills with more cleverness than strength. Bombs with various magical effects from vine-like "Rooting" to miasma cloud-like "Poisoning" were his bread and butter – but he also had a skill that conjured a needle and another that conjured a gust of wind and shot it. As he grew stronger, he gained an ultimate move he used on the tutorial boss. It consisted of conjuring dozens of needles, dipping them all in a vat of acidic liquid, and then throwing them forwards while conjuring a small twisting tornado.

Every time the boy did this, he yelled something that Innearth privately called "poisoned bladenado".

This boy was singlehandedly responsible for retrieving several dozen toilets and garbage cans in the following few weeks. Innearth could positively see "Craig" growing stronger. Near the beginning the boy had set up ambushes for monsters that involved staking conjured needles about the walls of his dungeon then wrapping an incredibly thin thread between them all and dousing them with some sort of sticky potion. Innearth had cheered the first time Craig had baited a monster towards him and blown it into the trap – shanking the stuck hammer worm with a small dagger repeatedly even as it struggled and ripped thread from the walls.

Over a dozen weeks progressed of watching Craig progress from the prepared but green noob to the amateurish but slightly more skilled noob that now frequently delved him. Innearth had watched Craig through his ups and downs and had almost come to think of him as a friend. The level of connection Innearth felt with their solitary fight against his defences and the feeling of kinship with the way they kept coming up with new traps was a very real thing.

After three months of delving, Craig had reached a point where he could just about reach Innearth’s first real bosses - the anti-magic golem and the bed of sand that was an equivalent "anti-physical".

This boss setup was a pretty solid obstacle for the boy. To reach this point he had snuck past the worst of Innearth’s beginner zone monsters and his main methods of attack were ineffectual against either of the two bosses.

While brave enough to risk his life for a well thought out plan as well as delve alone, Craig was not hot-headed. He would retreat every time he knew he was outmatched – running away with a dashing skill that seemed almost like he cut through the air as he ran – piercing forwards in brief bursting straight lines that chained together endlessly, even as faint streams of wind flung out behind him.

Just because he was blocked from progressing deeper did not mean Craig stagnated. He turned to attempting the mini boss that was the minecart mother – sabotaging the tracks with a thin line of sticky glue before switching to a small hammer to break open the crazy balls that swarmed him when the mother ran into them.

Now, there were plenty more adventurers other than Craig. Both in the upper levels that delved down in his crystal caverns and ice caves looking for trial tokens as well as in his lower levels –attacking the twisting mazes or collecting materials from his silver mines to fuel the town's growth. Each adventurer was appreciated in their own way, but Craig got a certain almost creepy level of attention.

Innearth even made a small shrine for the adventurer.

Nothing big, just a few of the adventurer’s trap remains – the early string and a pile of metallic dust that had once been conjured needles were artfully arranged on a pedestal beside a broken beartrap-like snapping device. The abandoned bombs that had been left behind the one time a minecart mother had ambushed him weeks before he was strong enough to blow the crazy balls away. The severed head of a lesser snake that had once wounded him and was now covered in dried Craig blood. You know. Nothing big, just the typical level of merch a superfan would collect.

In news outside of Innearth’s dungeon, his three ascended fossil scouts had steadily collected information on the growing town outside of Innearth – with a level of detail as if they had something to prove. They had begun competing with his three snake scouts to scourge more information and their competition pushed them to acquire information in more dangerous ways.

Honestly…that might be fair with the level of attention I gave them initially. I’m sorry, you guys are just as much my children as the others.

Innearth made sure to spend time telling each of them they were special, important, appreciated, and that he didn’t have any favourites – only telling the original snake scout he was still the favourite child when there was absolutely zero chance of the others hearing.

Information was fed in a steady drip and while not everything was possible to translate from the scouts Innearth was still able to paint a picture of what was happening.

The first month of town building was the most chaotic with nearly nothing having been done but plenty of structures appearing, disappearing and several gatherings of different factions that stayed up late into the night arguing about random topics.

Then, as if suddenly making up for all the time they had been wasted, buildings sprang up everywhere built so quickly Innearth would have thought they were conjured through magic if a fossil scout that had grown into what looked like an armadillo covered in bone plates hadn’t told him they were manually assembled.

With the foundations laid all the builders had needed to do was: process a kilometer or two of ground into rough gravel, recombine gravel into bricks using giant metal caldrons filled with a grey potion, float said bricks into place using either levitating spellwork or wooden logs covered in runes that caused them to slide along the ground. This process took less than a day and created over a hundred houses with an average number of floors as two and a uniform boxy grey pink colour.

After these austere boxes were slapped together, silver roofs were formed from materials looted from the silver caverns – altered and shaped into sheets that repelled and directed rain and dirt away. From the position on the top of the surrounding mountains, a snake scout had been observing from these roofs made the valley look like a sparkling jewel.

A second period of idleness settled over the town lasting a week before with a flurry of motion visible changes spread out once more.

Buildings were claimed en mass with embellishments and paint being applied to individual houses or stores. Individuals furnished and customized their new homes with various shaped holes being created in the walls and filled with either polished crystal or etched glass.

This was the period where the lower-levelled craftsmen shined.

Vanity plants and alchemical gardens were planted in the small yards or window beds the more homely houses had built – one individual even ripped her silver roof off and replaced it with a garden filled with flowers that burned or sparked or floated about.

Amateurish-looking runes and scripts were placed against doors and windows to keep out bugs or warn against intruders. They actually caused the fossil scout who had grown into something like a giant centipede to be chased through the entire town by some bushy man waving a cane after the alarm was tripped figuring that out.

Another flurry of buildings was created several times after the initial group had been claimed –bulk sections of town appearing in a day, then slowly being transmuted into their desired shapes and functions over weeks.

Sections of buildings were shaped into storefronts or workshops – with crafters of all walks of life-altering their place so drastically, the strips they had clumped together in started looking almost futuristic. Neon glowing signs and holograms with hypnotic effects were set up before the town seemed to crack down on the more predatory advertising. Display cases floated about in front of shops while in the back ally’s more clandestine booths were set up – peddling items that disappeared whenever anyone of authority arrived.

In many ways, this initial burst of town building was the most drastic, but – even after they ended – constant, more permanent changes spread throughout the valley.

It became clear the only reason a large part of the town had grown so quickly was due to a small group of high-levelled crafters because as soon as they finished their duties and settled down into territories the largest changes stopped. Three sections of town centered around these crafters who had appropriated blocks of buildings which were then torn down and rebuilt from scratch yet again.

In the east district a massive complex was built using the “lots” that had previously belonged to two dozen buildings. The building extended up 20 stories and was solid and smooth from the outside a glossy finish being placed that made both wall and window an identical slate black. Three towers were constructed on the top that broadcasted the feeling and name of this building – “ManaCorp, innovating and staying at the bleeding edge of technology since 650AS. Currently Hiring”.

Between the east district and the west district, a line of unaffiliated buildings formed a solid wall on either side of the “main strip” – otherwise known as the commercial district.

The top west was claimed by a faction that comprised of several high-levelled human crafters and one dwarf that all met every night at the bar that had been immediately created in the direct center of it. Over the course of a few weeks, they set to work – creating floating orbs of light that turned on at night and off in the morning that illuminated everything in a bright glow stronger than moonlight.

The buildings in this district began being meticulously covered in individual scripts and runes that provided a massive array of effects starting with each of the main high-levelled crafters' homes before slowly being piecemeal placed on other houses who had commissioned the work.

The final main faction was in the south end of the town and bordered the lake. It was hesitantly the “non human” portion of the town because while humans did occasionally walk down the center to the lake and pier that had been made, they purposefully avoided the side streets. There were very few violent altercations – but humans frequently got into tense situations while passing the tribe of orcs that called a corner of the town home and were watched by furry eyes from windows as they passed.

Now, these orcs had come through from Abe’s dungeon and found a group of houses by one of Innearth’s entrances. They preferred to keep their homes simple and practical but with a single section full of trophies they had won carefully arranged in a position of prominence. Their final contribution to the town was building a gladiatorial pit. This pit was covered with life-saving runes they had commissioned from the crafting section – only trusting the dwarf to make them. The runes allowed them to frequently duel one another – or any who slighted their honour or challenged them – to loss of limb or near death before being miraculously protected and healed.

This was the extent of the first few months of information Innearth received from his scouts before their capabilities were drastically shut down.

The strongest monsters had been slaughtered in the first few weeks and the weaker ones pushed further and further to the edge of the valley as the town grew. However. After exactly 6 months. And, after the city had been founded, a truly massive field covered the entire valley. One that caused any monster above level 1 inside of it immense pain and forcefully pushed against any that tried to enter. The humans had laid a ring of endlessly repeating script about the entire perimeter of the valley and had only now activated it once the loop had been fully complete.

This prevented Innearth from receiving anything, but vague descriptions received from scouts peeking over the lip of the mountain.

That cut off of information made it seem like the town was done being built.

But in many ways, it marked when things really started to kick off. That barrier was the stepping stone the town needed to really solidify and become a city.