“That’s so mean Mistress!! Why did you knock me out after hitting me!” Luna exclaimed as we reach the adventurers guild.
“Shut up!” Misaki said coldly.
“Luna, mind showing us to a puppet maker now?” I asked to make this love comedy end quicker.
“They are already closed, doubt you will find anything open at this hour.” She said.
I looked at the sky and the sun was already set and sigh.
“Fine, let’s look for an inn to spend the night. I want to check out and buy some puppets and maybe that art of spirit gathering as well.” I said and walked out.
From there we looked around and arranged an inn for ourselves. Charlotte and Misaki bunked together leaving Luna depressed in her own room. Since I wanted to do things privately tonight I got a separate room from Hermes so in total, 4 separate rooms but since there wasn’t many people coming and going that didn’t matter. The inns aren’t overly full since this isn’t a popular region like others were huge number of elven adventurers gathered.
In my room I pulled out one of the exp gems and level up my Dungeon Archive skill since I was really needing to do this since a while back to allow the rabbits and puppets to rank up.
The skill rose to level 13 and rose the minion type count to 18. I found that curious since before it was less minion spots per level.
When I looked I even spotted that the Archer puppets instantly evolved the moment the spot was opened which shows that it is true, if I don’t have the space for new species I can forget about evolving them.
When I looked at the skill window for Dungeon Archive I noticed that Spirit gem generating spot and frowned. 1 gem per month, I really need to figure out how to make the spirits like me so that I can gather more.
With five slots in the minion section left I was contemplating about leveling it up again.
I don’t want to level up the knowledge skills like Crafting and runic writing because even if had enough time to check out what I have let alone what having the time to try it out I don’t plan on leveling them up by exp crystals until I can fully make a craftsmen room for each of them. Since I can later on teach them so they can do all the things I needed on their own.
For now I need time to exercise what I have.
As for the spaces for the puppets, I need to save one so I can make the moon rabbits for the wolves to eat.
Since I have that I open up the page for the rabbit dungeon. It was fully covered in grass and herbs with trees and such forming a sort of grassland type dungeon and I put a few field rooms to work as the home for them since they can dig into them surprisingly. The dungeon seems to fill up the area as they dig but it’s not bigger than the space of the room.
First thing I do is bring up the dungeon settings and after looking it over I bring up I look carefully. After finding the runes that make up things like the torch fires and such I edit them adding ‘Moon’ and ‘Light’ runes on all of them.
Then I use an exp gem to form a second boss room on the second floor and after looking through all the rabbits, I can see their stats so I can have a guess of which is stronger, I find the eldest and strongest rabbit.
Then I have it go to the boss room and then I plant the Moonlight Azure Blossom and have the elder guard it from all other rabbits and kill other rabbits if they try to enter this room.
With that done I more or less finish what I needed. The flower takes a huge chunk of my mana regeneration but nothing the other moonlight azure blossoms can’t sustain. After all, I have 4 in the wolf dungeon. I found that I can’t randomly plant them but that is fine. A rare plant can’t be unlimited after all.
Seeing as it was done with, I look at all the common puppets that were already built. The 42 puppets were fully built at last but 22 were still common puppets I made just walk around the dungeons to care for the plants and herbs without them turning into farmers.
As I look at the number of puppets I have for others I start to disperse them through the ranks. Five was set to be swordsmen having them use different types of swords like Short swords, long swords, katana, saber. Five was sent to be Warrior spearmen, with one of the five being halberd.
With the 12 remaining I felt I needed to keep some spares for when I need to replace something or to discover a new class for them. After all just looking at my crafter skill I can more or less guess that these wooden puppets will be able to do every single one of them. That said, I sent two of them to be farmers since the amount of space I need to farm was rather large and it took a bit of time for three farmers to do anything. Though the craftsmen are helpful in this regard since they remove the need for the farmers to visit the weapon growing farm.
Now the last thing I did was use a third exp gem to upgrade minion summon since it's something I need for sure. At the end of it all the skill ended up level 8 and I could summon 29 minions now. After doing the count I found that the skill increases the number of minions by 1 each level. 1+2+3+4 and so on. At level 8 I add seven on top of the previous ones ended up with 29 minions.
After seeing the results I was happen that I could now summon a small raid party with my minions and head off to sleep.
***
“Captain, about the Dungeon maker hero and the swordsman girl hero. The information on them has arrived from the human nation adventurers guild and Royal family.” one of my men said and brought out some papers for me.
After getting a report from one of my vice captains about two heroes from the human nation coming over I obviously sent a request to the human nation and adventurer guild for their record. It became even more important now that my little second niece has inexplicable become a party member. I rather pray for any soul that dares to hurt the girl she is calling Mistress.
“Hand it over.” I say and start reading over it.
The request was more for personality traits, fighting style, background info, what is studied, how they act and achievements.
We already know about Ace Cross’s amazing achievements of completely destroying the goblin advance in the jagged mountains without casualties but taking a lot of resources.
Dungeons are after all something that need a lot of resource to make but after the initial days he made most of it himself by gathering raw material.
The girl is much less apparent due to being overshadowed by Ace. Initial class swordsman, original world culture is similar to our eastern nation but theirs is much less evil but they seem to have lived in a warring period similar to now. Highly skilled in swordsmanship and magic, she is comparable to ace in talent but due to him having access to the book he can store much more combat power than her.
Then I get the report on the other members and my eyes widen when I see who the gentle little girl was and smile wryly at this. Then the file on that young gentlemen with the glasses makes me left me curious. A human alchemist has a lot to gain in our nation for sure, especially when together with Ace Cross.
Nothing was really off besides the two heroes rather blunt personalities but nothing that wouldn’t fit into our nation. Though it could cause quite a few incidents with hard heads.
“Nothing to really worry about these heroes. That said, please send a report to his royal majesty and the queen so they know human heroes are in our nation.” I said and handed back the report to the guard.
“Yes captain.” He said saluting and moved to turn.
“Also…!” I call out making him stop.
“Yes ma’am?” He asked.
“Get someone to calculate the total price for all the living dolls in the storage.” I said.
“Yes Ma’am!” He saluted and left.
***
In the morning I sleeply descend the stairs before walking to the table with around 15 cleaned plates on it.
“I’m going to start making you pay for it with your own money.” I said sleepily.
“Your money is my money!” Misaki says.
“If it wasn’t for me, you would have starved by now or you would plunged the royal family into a huge debt to pay your snacking habit and made the country go deeper into the ditch of starvation.” I said.
“Now now, mistress is just someone with a high metabolism you can’t blame her Ace!” Luna said trying to split us up.
“Hmpf.” I sneered then asked for a small breakfast before turning to Luna.
“Luna, do you know any puppet shops, particularly those that can make living dolls, possibly very low quality ones.” I asked.
“No, I don’t know any like that because living dolls are all high quality and follow a strict code to make. If you want old or low quality you would need to buy a broken and old one and repair it but that would make a really butchered doll.” Luna said.
I click my tongue at this inconvenience.
“If I could get at least a low quality living doll then I would be able to make quite a good number magic dolls. Just from that doll I saw yesterday I could see that I could make the living dolls all to my tastes. I might even be able to make my favorite gothic vampire loli queen from one of my favorite light novel where the mc fell to the deeper floors of a dungeon and didn’t go insane because of her. Then there is also maids, although Luna is cute but due to her fetish I don’t see me getting turned on by such a baby faced masochist. Instead I want a beautiful busty dark elf maid with white eyes and silky black hair as a vice head maid and high elf maid as head maid. Both of which are using glasses and have that cold beauty atmosphere. If I could put some soul gems in them then I will be in heaven. If I can have them learn to do cooking and stuff then we might be able to handle all the food needs for the glutton but we need to get cattle and stuff.” I thought
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I let out a sigh as I think of all the stuff I need just to sustain this japanese glutton.
After my breakfast arrived Hermes had already come down and asked for his own.
He also handed me several bags of seeds and one of which was for mana herbs which I was greatly surprised about and archived them all.
Mana herb, Bitter citrus, Hollow Root Flower and Red-Fruit Pitcher plant. The last one almost counted as a monster if it was larger in size but do to it being only the size of a human hand it was only a regular pitcher plant that produced a sweet red fruit to attract flies. The roots and fruit were missing components to mana potions meaning once these reach maturity then Hermes will be able to start producing mana potions.
As he ate I fixed up a field for the flowers and herbs.
With that done and everyone done eating we pay and I asked Luna to take me to any puppet maker. I wanted some puppet horses, even broken ones are fine as long as I can get the model, so that we could pull the stagecoach with ‘real’ animals.
With that we walk outside after paying and walking around with Luna leading and looking around before we arrived at a rather large shop.
“Puppet Mausoleum.” I muttered then looked at her. “You brought us to a puppet graveyard?” I asked frowning.
“You said you wanted the ones that are old and broken. It's possible a doll can be located here. The owner is also a renowned puppet maker but he retired and simply gathers the old and broken ones to not let the city be cluttered with so many.” Luna said.
I sigh at what she brought me to but I did ask for the junkyard so I got it.
Walking inside, we found large bins with many mannequins.
“Wooden puppets of elfwood on the left, Mana wood next to the counter, dirt puppets you can just bury and it will be good fertilizer, rock puppets you can dismantle it at a quarry, anything else you can just leave!” A grumpy voice called from a back room.
“Uncle! We are here to buy some puppets!” Luna said loudly.
After a moment a middle aged dark skinned elf with black hair that was turning white walked out with a frown.
“What the hell do you want from scraps?” he asked sneering.
I looked around at all the puppets made of various woods.
“Got any living puppets?” I asked.
“Like hell I do, those are taken before they even reach the bins to be remade and fixed.” The elf said.
“Not even really broken ones?” I asked.
“If you want to piece together a doll with random parts you are free to do so. The bin is in the back room.” He said.
I sighed seeing as I wasn’t going to get a full living puppet today.
“Then can you arrange 2 horse puppets.” I asked.
“Follow me.” He said and walked into the back where we found a huge pile with bodies of animals made of wood.
“Choose your steed. If you can start it up you can take it for 10 silver.” he said
My eyes shine as he said that and I summon two wooden puppets and my runic pen out and stab their chest and activate the mechanism to release the soul gem.
Once I have two out, and leaving the shop keeper shocked I archive one before he snaps out of it.
“BOY! You're a puppet maker! And one that uses soul gems!” He shouted.
Then he looked at my book and his face paled.
“I-I’m sorry sir dungeon maker! This simple minded fool did not notice your grand class!!” he said bowing deeply.
It shocked me extremely by his sudden change in demeanor.
“Um… uncle? Did something happen?” Luna asked.
“What do you think! Every Puppet maker knows that dungeon makers are the ultimate puppet crafters! To meet one is akin to meeting a god of the craft! The Grimoire of the Dungeon Maker is the greatest artifact that any puppet maker would wish to have for its ability to make puppets so intricately that it's regarded as a monster by the world system and can evolve like a monster growing more powerful and eventually gaining sentience even if you install a low grade soul gem inside it! The gem will eventually grow into higher ranks with each evolution until the puppet is a true living being! If I was a common puppet maker I would have instantly offered a trade of puppets, even the lowest ranking common wooden puppet if necessary because the runes on the puppet aren’t all identified and to get a research sample would cause any puppet maker droll for the possibility!” He exclaimed at Luna’s remark.
I smiled wryly at the man's enthusiasm and looked at the pile of animal puppets.
“If I give you a inactive Common wood puppet what would you give in return?” I asked.
“Your request!” He said.
“Besides the two horse puppets I need, do you know all the ingredients and refining process for the ingredients to make living puppet dolls?” I asked.
His smile scrunched up into a frown hearing my request.
“The living doll recipe is very rare and while I do know it, even a chance to get a common wooden puppet off a dungeon maker wouldn’t make me part with it.” He said.
I looked back at the main store.
“What is the rarest wooden puppet material you elves use for making puppets?” I asked.
“Mana wood, those puppets are the most comparable to the dungeon maker puppets. That said if such a puppet was made in the hands of a dungeon maker then don’t even say that its quality can’t be compared.” He said.
“Then if I make you a mana wood puppet would you be willing to part with it? If not then I can upgrade the mana wood puppet to a warrior class.” I said.
The elves eyes widened and his hands began to tremble a bit. He bit his lower lip as he began to weigh the pros and cons.
“That may… surpass the rewards….” He ruefully said.
“Does it have that much difference?” I asked.
“Mana wood is used to make staffs and the magic guns for the main reason that it aids in perfecting runes channeled through them which in turn allows the user to perfect their comprehension. If such an upgraded mana wood puppet was made, even at level one with a low grade soul gem it wouldn’t become a common puppet and instead would be Low grade Warrior puppet.” He replied.
My eyes widened as I realize that.
“Mana wood is really something, I should buy sprouts when I get the chance. Anyway if I trade for 2 mana wood horses and the recipe?” I asked.
He thought a moment and nodded.
“I can do that but the mana wood puppets are uncommon even in these piles. I can find them for you but there will be broken parts and some missing even.” He said.
“That is fine, if it's broken or missing I bit, the book can make them with mana even if I needed to use all the mana gathered.” I said.
“Good, let me gather the best puppets still in one piece.” He said.
I summon another common puppet and remove the soul gem and archive it for when I can reactivate it. I need to check with the help system on how to produce them again.
After that we go looking in the pile and soon we help him pull out two very heavy horse puppets made of mana wood. One had a half the chest area broken and splintered and the other had the hind legs broken.
“Well this is the best I can offer, the rest have limbs missing and most puppets are custom made. Each part is adhered to each puppet so mixing parts won’t work well.” He said.
“It’s fine, like I said the book will repair it. I have a guardian that was at the brink of breaking down so this isn’t anything.” I said.
I take out the pen and move to the chest area where I poke around until the pen reacted and I began to process of opening the chest and sticking it in and then binding the horse.
When the binding was done it turned into a flash of light and entered my book and I found it I the minion page as Low Grade Mana Wooden Horse Level 1. When I looked at the exact category I smiled when I saw it fell under Wooden Puppet Beast. Since there are so many types of animal puppets this caused types to be categorized together.
I do the same to the horse and normal human shaped puppet.
“Alright, it will take the horse around 10 hours to be fully repaired, once they can walk around they will appear in the dungeons and will use plant roots to heal faster as will the human puppet that is already doing that. He will take 30 minutes to reach fully restored.” I said.
“Good, while we wait then I will pass the ingredients list and refining method and production method of the living doll puppets.” He said and gestured to the stairs that were in the back to the second floor and we walked up and began to talk it over.
For half an hour he explained and wrote down in detail the workings of making a living doll puppet.
It was amazing how many magical wood and flowers needed to be grinded down to make the magical plastic like substance that would be almost like a human body.
“Isn’t there a tree that makes rubber in this world?” I asked.
“Rubber? What's that?” He asked.
“Its an elastic material, never mind, since puppet makers don’t know it means your hero didn’t locate the tree I was talking about since we are probably from the same world. Where can we find all this?” I asked.
“Oh Ace, I can help, I noticed many of these common and uncommon type flowers and plants in the herbalist's shop I visited. We just need to sap of the Invita tree which we can get at a florist shop who sells it.” Hermes said.
“The real problem is the preparation state really. All these complex proportions and mixtures.” Charlotte said a bit worried.
“I won’t be trying to make new living puppets any time soon. I will get a few from Luna’s Aunt first and live off that for now until we can grow enough of the ingredients to make all of this several times over and do trial and error.” I said.
“Okay kid, the puppet should be repaired.” the shop keeper said.
“Prepare a spirit gem, I’m not leaving the soul gem.” I said.
“Sure, I have plenty of them for when I need to move a puppet or to and use other puppets.” He said.
He went and began to prepare it while I had the Puppet in my dungeon retrieve its roots and walk to the armor and weapon fields and retrieve a halberd and a full set of only wood armor.
Then I thought a bit and walked him to a different field where trees were planted for materials for making the dungeons. I sent a farmer that way and inside I have the mana wood puppet spread his roots and break off several groups and then have the farmer connect to them and grow them as trees.
Ever so slowly the sprout appeared making me smile but the next moment the mana in the entire book began to get sucked by the seven trees making me smile wryly and sigh.
I send all farmers and the guardian to take care of this and after looking at the horses that weren’t even mobile yet were forced into the dungeon to plant their roots due to the mana of the book being sucked in.
“Well I won’t be having any mana regeneration for a while.” I sigh.
“Let me guess, you planted so mana trees right?” Misaki asked.
I nod and sigh.
I have the mana wood puppet put on all the armor that was slowly invaded by the roots of mana wood and slowly gained purple veins and the purple color from the mana wood began to spread like a plague and as it put the last piece, the helmet the prompt appeared.
Your Mana Wood Wooden Puppet has evolved into a Low Grade Mana Wood Wooden Warrior Puppet. He has gained basic level sentience and will be loyal to you.
As the prompt vanished I summoned him and he looks at me.
I took the pen and touched the seal on his chest.
All the runes began to glow and I undid the seal and removed the soul gem in his chest that was glowing purple unlike before.
“So a soul gem really dues evolve with the puppet.” I mutter as I store the gem.
“Wow! This is amazing!” The shopkeeper said as he looked at the chest of the puppet and put his Spirit gem inside and began the process of binding the puppet forming a small seal on the chest.
“Well, our transactions is done. Don’t let me find out that you used the puppet I upgraded for evil.” I said looking at him sharply.
“Hmpf, don’t look down on me boy! I only want research samples. If you’re ever charitable then come back and hand them over. Hahaha!” He laughed.
I rolled my eyes at his words and stood up.
“Let's go, Luna please lead us to your aunts barracks then we can go to the adventurer's guild and get some missions to rank yours and Hermes adventurer rank up.” I said.
“Alright!” she said and got up with us.
We bid the shopkeeper farewell and left for the barracks.