It was almost evening now, because it had taken a decently long-enough time to awaken everybody which had been posted near the Dungeon entrance, as I usually had to spend around 20 to 30 minutes on each person to get everything just right, since I did not want to endanger any of the subjects that I was “operating” on. Even with everybody successfully awakened, there was one more thing that I needed to verify, therefore I went back to the Smithy building downhill (AGAIN), and I dragged Carmine up the incline and back to the Temple together with her trusty pick, since I really needed to test the TRUE resilience of the Old Monastery floors, to prevent us from having any unpleasant surprises overnight.
The Blood Cultist had said that they had all been transformed into Dungeon-reinforced floors, but I had no idea exactly how tough those floors were supposed to be. There was a simple way to find an answer to that question though, which was to attempt and dig straight downwards by ourselves once we were into the Dungeon and see what happens.
We waited until the Guardsmen had cleared away the bodies from the most recent wave of Dungeon-spawns, and then we went down straight into the catacombs of the Old Monastery as we received the System’s Dungeon-entry prompt in our minds, which warned us that we had now entered a Level 23 Dungeon-level, but we did not venture further than a few steps away from the exit staircase, since we did not have to go any deeper for what I wanted to try.
I had taken the entire group of armed forces to back us up in case something unknown popped-up from below though, minus one sneaky Yi Gore, because I had asked him to go and keep his huge orange-eye on the idiot trio instead of fighting over here, since he was the only one that could turn invisible. His effectiveness as a direct combatant was very poor anyway, so it did not matter if he was currently present or not.
"Are ye sure ya wanna dig thru 'ere? We dunno what's below and wot mite happen if we wreck th' floor." Carmine asked me as she was preparing to strike the floor tiles a few meters away from the main staircase, somewhere on the left side.
"Well, that's actually what I wanted to test out first. From what I've been told, it seems that the floors cannot be pierced through by sheer force, but I’m not certain that it’s all true. Also, can't you use your tunnel-map thingy to see what's below?"
"Dat only werks for meh own tunnels, not EVERY other tunnel." Replied Gibbson instead of Carmine.
"What about your treasure sense?"
”Wat 'boutit? Sure, oi can sense meneh piles o’ dat' stuff below us, but dey all ovva th' place." Carmine added.
"Sure, but how do you and Gibbson know that it's a “treasure” in the first place?"
"Cuz it's valuable?" The pickaxe replied in its rusty voice.
"Well, that's what I'm trying to point out to you both. I think this is all based on your own mental preconceptions about what “has worth” or what has not. Sure, it’s understandable to perceive stuff like gold, jewels, spirit stones and magical gear as being “valuable”, but are you sure you want to limit yourselves to only those simple categories? For example, what about Tomes or Scrolls of knowledge? Don't you agree that sometimes a Spellbook might be even more expensive than a mountain of gold? What about some strange Alchemical ingredients that could save lives? Won’t those be highly “valuable” treasures as well?"
"Ugh...sure, I guess so?”
"Then are you sure you have perceived ALL of the treasures inside of this dungeon?"
"Oooh! Wait! Oi gets it now! Oi understands! Dere's suddenleh more glowy points of different colors dat oi can sees after ye told me dat! Probableh dose are some magic books and other stuff dat oi mighta overlooked before! So the scanner IS based on mah own preconceptions of “valuable” indeed! Noice!"
Phew! I had already suspected that such a thing was a real factor in the detection scheme, since it had happened to me as well, at least with my own “ingredients” herbalism scanner, as I had “convinced” it to show me even the fruits that hung up in the trees as “valid harvestable ingredients” instead of only the ground herbs, by forcing myself and therefore my scanner as well to acknowledge that both were just as valuable and viable ingredients as far as Alchemy was concerned, therefore they both needed to be displayed as such.
"Great! I am glad we have found that out!" I clapped my hands in joy at Carmine."Then, let me toss another question at you, to expand on my previous one. Would you agree that an object which shows you the ABSENCE of something might be just as “valuable” as one that shows you the existence of an object, and it could count as a veritable “treasure” because of that specific knowledge which it can reveal?"
"Aye, sure, dependin' on th' object, sometimes knowin’ which parts are missin' moight be more important den knowin' which ones are still present, loike fer example a missin cog in a large clockwerk assembly!"
"Exactly! I'm glad you could see it my way! Then, extrapolating on that thought, shouldn't you be able to consider all of the earth and construction-work beneath us as a veritable “treasure”, because it could reveal to us by its very ABSENCE where the tunnels and the gaps in the Dungeon are located at?"
"So yer saying dat th' walls n' floors are “valuable”, cuz' by lookin' at where dey AINT, den dere's probableh a room or a tunnel in dat location instead? Ooh! Oi gets it now! Both th' absence an th' presence of stuff beneath us is a form of “valuable”! OOOH! Oi seez it! Oi’m beginnin’ t’ see all of th' underground now! Th' “valuable” walls, an' th' “valuable” tunnels! Dei are all incredibly valuable cuz' dei show us th' MAP of dis 'ere entire place! AHAHAHA!"
I suddenly saw Carmine shudder.
"Oooh!" She moaned ecstatically.
"What happened?"
"Oi suddenleh gots an upgrade' to meh Mother's Blessin'! Says Tunnel Map got merged together with Treasure Sense inta' a new skill called [Map Hack]! As long as oim wieldin' Gibbson, oi can seez a map of dis entire place inside of meh head, and in a vereh large radius all around meh too!"
"Awesome! I knew that you could do it, girl! Just as I have predicted, you're a very smart lass indeed!" I patted Carmine on her shoulder, causing her to blush again. Mental note to self: Carmine is a sucker for mental manipulations that could lead to her own Skills upgrading. "Anyway, let's do what we have come here for, before any more of those devil-spawns come screaming towards us. Can you use your newfound Skill to check for any structural integrity before we begin digging?"
"Aye, sure, gimme just a moment...hmm…*boink*klong*" She tapped around on some of the tiles while moving even further away. "Alrite...it should be safe t' start diggin' over 'ere, dere aint nuffin weird or dangerous below us in dis place, at least dat oi can sense fer now."
"Alright, Carmine love, with your trusty Gibbson have a go at the floor surface over there and see if you can manage to break through it. Just make sure that YOU don't fall down onto the next floor as well, if you somehow manage to pierce through it though."
"Alrite'! Hah!"
*Clong*Clong*Clong*Clong*Clong*Clong*
Carmine immediately began to dig through the marble-like floor tiles, sending rock-shards spraying out in all directions, but she was seemingly going at a whole lot slower rate than we were used to, at least compared to her tunneling speed that she had displayed when we had been stuck beneath the earth at the Blue Mountain of Books.
"Dangit! Dis be sum tough-ass material! Oi can barely get th' head of meh pickaxe thru it!" Carmine complained.
"Yes, I can see that. Then, why don't you try and use that fast movement technique of yours, the one that I have seen you deploy when you forge items, and just simply zip through the floor at super-speed?"
"Oi cannay use that technique fer anyfin' else but Forgin', lass. Tis a Smith's Creative Blessing, it cannay be used fer combat or harmin' 'nother creatcher."
"Ok, I get that, but think of it in another way. You CAN use it to Forge anything that you want with it, right?"
"Aye, indeed, it doesn't matter what's bein' Forged, just as long as other people can use it."
"Then, why can’t you Forge a Path with it as well? It's still Forging something that other folk can put to a good use after all."
"Forgin' a Path...Ooooh...OOOOOH!" Her eyes suddenly lit up like neon lights, a consequence of her glowing-mushroom overconsumption. "Oi never thought of it dat way! Yer right! Lemme Forge dat thin' roite up fer ya!"
*Clong*Clong*Clong* X many times faster.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
Carmine instantly began to swing her pickaxe once more, but now she was going at that ridiculously high frequency speed that she usually deployed during her smithing, causing even more of the Dungeon floor to crumble under her might. Yep...definitely a sucker for mental upgrades, this one.
The promise written by the System on the pickaxe still held true though, as it could indeed demolish even the incredibly tough Dungeon floor, except that the rate at which the floor could fix itself was above even the rate at which Carmine could dig through it, even when accelerated to her maximum, and it was probably Mother System's way of telling us that “we were not supposed to go that way by brute-forcing it”.
Even after I got pissed off at the System’s shenanigans and I froze the entire floor with my branch tentacles to prevent it from regenerating, I had found out that the Mother System had deployed a spiritual shielding that disallowed me from moving the thermal Qi away from the floor's material on the next “layer” that we would have been forced to dig our way through, preventing us from going any deeper. This seemingly only applied to the bottom and upper floors/ceilings though, because we were still able to demolish our way through any of the other vertical Dungeon walls that stood in our way, just as long as they were still on the same “layer”. Those regenerated at a whole lot slower rate, but still "regrew" after a while, if mostly left alone.
Because all of the floor-transition staircases which led from one level to another were all guarded by some sort of an Elite Boss Monster, since all of them brilliantly glowed with random treasure on Carmine's newfound mental map, it seemed that we would have been forced to go through the “Boss Room” anyway, and then confront the Guardian over there to obtain passage to the following lower floor, even if we were to simply wreck all of the walls just to forcibly get there in the first place.
Still, I saw another opportunity popping-up over here, because any object that could repair and replenish itself at such a fast rate like the Dungeon floor could become an inexhaustible resource that could be repurposed for something else, if used wisely.
Therefore, we had simply decided to try and yank-out completely some of the large square floor tiles, which were made out of an ashen-colored rocky material that was extremely resilient and tough to destroy, but still had a polished shine which was similar to the look of very expensive gray-marble on the top layer, causing the whole thing to become a very nice building and decorative material once properly extracted.
We had used Will-E hydraulic-enhanced strength to pry out the entire rock-tile away from the floor, only to watch the gaping hole that we had just made instantly refill itself with those weird black tentacles of the Mother System, which then simply proceeded to rebuild the entire missing floor tile in the blink of an eye, restoring it to its original integrity without giving a damn about what we had just done.
Hmm, so this may very well become an incredible source of construction materials. We immediately proceeded to pull out even more of those floor tiles by using the magic combo of Carmine's rapid digging and Will-E robot strength+large storage space, as we began to replace the wooden furniture that composed the makeshift barricade at the top of the staircase with the actual square tiles we were pulling from below to create a stone wall that was a whole lot more durable and harder to move than the former wooden barricade, a wall which could resist a lot better against the assault of the incoming Dungeon spawns that kept on popping from below.
It was probably around midnight that we had decided to stop our entire Dungeon-materials exploitation, because everybody was dead-tired from all of the effort of hauling and arranging the rocks into place, especially Carmine who had gotten very little sleep during the last couple of days and needed a long rest, but the results we had obtained spoke for themselves, as we had increased the safety level of our troops by an entire notch by deploying that stone barricade at the Dungeon’s entrance, which gave the Guardsmen a vantage point from where they could assault the incoming enemies without getting hurt themselves by camping behind the large stone tiles and using bows and spears to fill the enemies full of holes before they got to do anything else dangerous.
After that had been settled, I promptly took Carmine back to the village’s inn and gave her a sleeping pill so she could fall asleep immediately once we got back to the Tavern, because I needed her rested and clear-headed the next day. True, I could have dropped her off at the Smithy, since the place did have a bed over there, but I did not want Carmine to get tempted by her surroundings once again and miss even more sleep, so I had chosen the inn as our resting spot once more, as there was also another problem that had cropped up over there while we had been digging and building the stone wall.
Yi Gore had private-messaged me over our raid-chat, to inform me of some unsettling news which he had overheard while he had kept himself invisible around the three numbskulls. Apparently, Lord Jaden knew of a hidden alternative route to get down into the Dungeon, an escape tunnel of some sorts that was known only to the Magistrate and his family, and the three were planning to go ahead and descend down there by themselves while bypassing our entire barricade altogether, in the early hours of the morning tomorrow.
I did not know what bothered me more, that there was a second exit to the Dungeon that monsters could have come out through, or the continuously-suicidal tendencies of the three morons. I had to do something about them immediately, but I did not think that a second round of laxatives would work anymore, since they had been a lot more careful with what they had been eating and drinking ever since they had encountered the previous explosive problem, sticking only to dried-rations and boiled water.
I went straight to them and told them to wait and to not do anything stupid, as we would all start going downwards and deeper into the Dungeon during the next couple of days anyway, but I could see it on their faces, as they were nodding back in acknowledgement to my warnings, that I was talking to the walls.
FIne, be that way! At least they were consistently stupid, which made them sort-of-predictable and preventable.
"Ah! It’s Her! The Awakener! Mother’s Chosen One!" One of the clients that had walked in the Tavern suddenly screamed while pointing at me, causing everybody else that was inside the inn to turn their faces towards me.
"Ugh...now what?" I exclaimed.
Turns out that rumors spread quite fast, especially when you’re in a secluded village like this with not that high of a population and a general lack of any sorts of entertainment. The fact that there was a “weird Monk girl” with the miraculous power to awaken other people among Brother Zhang's disciples had immediately flooded the entire hamlet, and a bunch of random people, mostly the relatives of the guards, were now queuing up at the inn’s entrance to see if they could get “awakened” as well.
As I was totally surprised by the unexpected new influx of vict...Ahemm…”Volunteers” that were now coming my way, I began to try and create some sort of a semblance-of-order in the whole chaos before people started trampling on eachother, so I simply told everybody that I could only do 10 more people for today, because I had already performed the feat on all of the Guardsmen and Warring-Monks at the Temple, which meant that I was nearing my daily limit, a fact that had caused a wave of disappointed protests to come back towards me which I promptly ignored.
I then told them that only the most able-bodied men which were willing to fight together with us should come forth, because what we needed at this moment were people capable of combat, not “awakened” housewives, no matter how wonderful those may seem.
Still, I had also asked the gathered folk to bring me the oldest person in the village before doing anything else, because I wanted to try and see if my newfound ability worked on everybody no matter the age, or if there was some sort of a limit before you could not become awakened anymore.
After hearing that, about five minutes later a family had dragged their Grandpa over, as he kept complaining that these young whippersnappers had disturbed him from his sleep, because it was currently almost already 1 am, which was basically the middle of the night for him, since most of the villagers usually went to sleep together with the sundown and woke up with the rooster.
Still, when he heard that I might be able to “awaken him”, he began laughing so hard that he literally farted while guffawing, and then he challenged me to “do my thing”, as he was certain that it would not work. As I was never a person to back down from a challenge, I immediately went spirit-surgeon on his ass, cracking his rather diminished life-shield in an instant and then flooding his Crown-Dantian with my White Qi.
It took a lot longer, time-wise, to get anything done, as my White Qi was “melting” through the membrane of his Dantian at a whole lot slower rate, since I almost had to push it inside by sheer force, rather than see it become absorbed like on a sponge, as it was the case with the other younger people, but I kept persisting while whispering relaxing things and giving the old fart a scalp-massage so he would keep still and not mess up my process until something finally happened. I had to fill his Crown-Dantian to about 90% full before he even began to feel anything, and to 100% for him to start believing that my skills were actually real.
His roots, which had basically looked fossilized before, were now beginning to crack and shudder as the flood of nourishing Qi was finding its way inside of them, making the whole structure come back to life after being inert for god-knows how many years, and causing the old man to gasp with an expression of half-surprise and half-disbelief on his face as he was constantly feeling the whole process.
While the Spirit-Roots of the old man kept absorbing the White-Qi, I kept on adding even more and more Qi motes, keeping him topped-off at 100% for the entire duration, just to see what would happen. The hunger with which those old roots were consuming the White-Qi was astonishing, and after a while, they began to look almost alive, instead of being just some old withered pieces of nothingness.
It was rather strange too, as I could literally see the old man becoming more and more lively the more his Spirit-Roots were getting rejuvenated, as if almost his age was reversing before my very eyes. Of course, I did not mean that body-wise, he was still just a farty old prune, but it was more about the Energy levels that he displayed, which you could have sworn they were coming from a man barely in his forties at this particular moment.
He had also felt it too, and it showed, as he began to dance on top of one of the inn’s tables with pure joy after he had finally found his roots after an entire lifetime. I had to stop him from jumping up and down like that before he dislocated a hip or something, and calm him down with soothing words of wisdom which he seemed to appreciate even more than the rest of the gathered crowd, probably due to his age.
Seeing that my test had been successful, and that it was indeed an issue of concentration and exposure to Qi which dictated the capacity for “awakening” in people, I then proceeded to do the same for the other nine people in queue, albeit at an increased rate of speed, because I was now getting the hang of this whole “awakening” thing and I could be less cautious on the overall, which sped things up by a decent amount.
The last guy that I “awakened” had strangely been Lord Jaden himself, as he had been among the fastest “able bodied volunteers” to jump at my offer, but I had purposely left him last, since I had another plan for monitoring the idiot group in mind, but the method required a certain amount of subterfuge from my behalf once again, to get everything just right.
Once the Huntress came up to me to get herself awakened as well, I simply told her that “I am sorry, but I ran out of Qi, and I need to rest. I have done this on too many people today. I will get back to you next morning and awaken you then”, as I left the Tavern’s main room, and simply climbed back to my room at the inn to get some shuteye.
It was almost 3 am, for fuck’s sake, and the whole day had been long enough already, making me dead-tired! And I knew for a fact that I would not be getting any rest tomorrow either.