Socks and Boo bounded up the stairs to get acquainted with the swamp while Stew caught Bossy up on what he had learned.
"I know you said a contract can't be broken, but how does that work? What if Raek or one of the other delvers harmed the dungeon involuntarily? What if I ran out of mana and wasn't able to respawn someone within the hour?"
Bossy thought for a moment. "While those may seem like two very different things. Intent, for the most part, doesn't matter. That's one of the things that makes these kinds of contracts so dangerous. There is very little room for interpretation."
"So accidentally breaking the contract is the same as doing it intentionally? What happens exactly? Demons come and punish you or something?"
Bossy snorted. "Demons must be very different where you come from. It's not about punishment. If there's any punishment that's something added to the contract and carried out by one or the other of the parties. If you ran out of mana and were not able to resurrect a delver whom you had contracted to resurrect, they would still be resurrected without using mana."
"Wait, then I don't have to spend mana, it just happens? How can that be? Where does the power come from to make that happen?" Was this another loophole?
"Dungeon contracts are powered by the souls of those whom the agreement binds. Soul magic is extremely powerful and extremely dangerous." She raised her head and looked toward the stairs to level three, although they were too far across the plains to see with normal vision. "That is why the delvers were so shocked you made the offer to let them train and resurrect using your mana, and, not only agreed, but made it a formal dungeon contract. If you were to run out of mana with a delver left to respawn, your soul would pay the price."
"A life for a life."
"Depending on the size of the soul, yes. As a dungeon core, yours would normally be too small to even enter into a contract of this sort. The fact that you were able to create multiple resurrection contracts of this sort tells an astute observer that you are not just a dungeon core, but an Incarnate bound to a dungeon." She lowered her head and went back to grazing. "I had suspected as much, but this confirms it."
"Is that a bad thing, that someone might think I'm one of these 'Incarnate'?"
"It makes your core doubly valuable to those who might want to take it, and it tells them that you are a sapient being with all of the strengths and weaknesses that suggests." She chewed for a moment, considering. "It also means that they are unlikely to believe you are ancient. According to legend, most Incarnate either become extremely powerful or are destroyed in a short time."
"Legend? So there aren't any more around now?"
"There are none remaining from ancient times, but there is certainly at least one other out there right now. There are always two, or two factions if there are more."
"Why is that?"
"The purpose of an Incarnate is to either conquer the world or defend it."
"Just that simple. Some big battle between good and evil? Which am I then?"
"I would think that would be obvious. You're a magical entity building a citadel full of monsters and minions. Does that sound like a hero to you?"
I'm the bad guy?
Bossy chewed for a moment before answering. "That remains to be seen."
More to worry about, but it didn't change anything. It just meant he would have to grow stronger. His [Action] store was finally at 1000, so it was time to turn all of his milk production to building the herd. He had a theory about the milk.
Every milk bottle Bossy produced generated a duplicate bottle for each cow in the herd. Since Bossy could generate two at a time, that meant the herd output was fourteen bottles per second with six cows.
Normally a panther would turn every two milk into five mana, but he stopped that process and started spending every one hundred milk to buy a new cow. It didn't take long for fourteen to become sixteen, eighteen, and twenty.
At twenty bottles per second, things really started to accelerate. Cows popped into existence all around him like some sort of reverse alien abduction.
He worried, at first, when the second bull appeared. He thought there might be some sort of rivalry between the two, but the second bull seemed as placid as the first.
It had taken hours to bring milk output up to twenty bottles per second, borrowing just a few hundred from action production here and there. It took less than two minutes to grow the herd to one hundred head of cows, counting Bossy, plus the two bulls. That put the base production at two hundred bottles per second, but each bull added a 20% bonus on top of that.
The bonus turned out to be additive, not compounded, but he couldn't complain at 40% for a total of 280 bottles per second. That was a massive amount of actions if Fluff and the kittens could keep up, but he wasn't worried about that right now. They could only generate 7 actions per second combined. If he had kept Socks and Boo on the fourth floor he might have sustained 17 actions per second, but only while they were awake and focused on just creating actions.
The second bottleneck was at mana creation. He could create mana as quickly as he wanted, delegating actions to controller golems, but, again, he had to dedicate an entire golem to what was essentially a single click, then he could only store mana in bulky cabinets. He could make more store rooms, or put them out on the plain with Bossy and the herd, but it just didn't seem efficient.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
It was the only method he had for the moment, so he asked Bossy to hold off on adding any more cows for now and set the kittens, panther and golems to action and mana production again.
He watched a few minutes to make sure he hadn't screwed up the flow. The only thing different was that the bottles of milk were accumulating at a hilarious rate. He had never let them accumulate before, so it was the first time he saw how the logic of the system dealt with large amounts of milk. They didn't turn into old-fashioned milk cans or drums the way he hoped. Although, considering where he was, maybe he should have expected amphoras.
What they did was almost as much fun. For each six bottles a crate would appear. As multiple crates accumulated they stacked themselves in a pyramid. He waited a few minutes to see if the pyramid would just keep growing, but it stopped at 10 high, then started another. He counted the crates and found each pyramid held 385 crates. With six bottles in each crate that was 1320 milk in each pyramid. He already had two and the third was starting.
Time to go see Smittee. He had some contractual obligations to fulfill and some ideas about mana and milk.
Smittee had finished the new mana crystal, so Stew turned it into a false core for Eira's staff and generated a new golem he called "Courier 1" to take it to Eira on the second floor. That seemed more appropriate than having it just appear in her hand. Things might go differently the next time she sparred with Theus.
Now to do some experimentation. Sluice had unlocked new options by having mana crystals in his possession while accessing the forge. In all the time Stew had been making mana glass, he had never thought to try the same thing. The glass had always appeared on the smelter's shelf, then gone right to storage. He had been using it right away just like the milk.
Now he pulled a sheet of mana glass from storage and gave it to Smittee, then opened the menu for the forge.
[Lunar Forge]
[The light of the Moon has kindled a subtle fire. Use the forge to shape and improve magical implements, gear, and weapons.]
[Items:]
[
Living Stone - (5 Stone, 5 Mana Core Levels)
Mana Core Level 2 - (3 Mana Core Levels)
Mana Core Level 5 - (6 Mana Core Levels)
Mana Core Level 10 - (11 Mana Core Levels)
Mana Cube - (100 mana glass)
]
There it was. He was starting to get a sense for the logic behind these things. Everything was a building block for something else. He spent one entire mana cabinet to create a single mana cube.
A half-meter tall, translucent green cube appeared on the forge.
[Mana Cube]
[An aetherial precipitate capable of capturing vast amounts of mana energy. When charged, the wise wizard will handle the mana cube carefully. Energies within are contained under enormous magical pressure.
Mana Stored: 0 / 100
Mana Recharge: 1 / hr
Affinity: None
]
Stew felt a little prickle of awe. One hundred stone, one thousand mana all to create this single block of mana glass, but this one cube would replace an entire mana glass cabinet, and it actually generated mana. It was a slow process. He could fill one of these blocks in seconds with his milk production, but this was the first entirely passive generator he had discovered.
He moved the block to storage, next to the now empty mana glass cabinet. He sent Exterminator 1 to keep an eye out for stone weevils while he cleared out another mana storage cabinet to create another cube, then another. The cubes began to glow as he stacked them.
They glowed brighter and brighter the more he added with six glowing twice as brightly as three, at least to Exterminator 1's eyes.
He looked again at that first mana block.
[Mana Cube]
[An aetherial precipitate capable of capturing vast amounts of mana energy. When charged, the wise wizard will handle the mana cube carefully. Energies within are contained under enormous magical pressure.
Reaction Efficiency: 0.06
Mana Stored: 9 / 600
Mana Recharge: 56 / hr
Affinity: none
]
That little prickle of awe from earlier turned into a full blown chill. If creating the cube had felt like discovering fire, then this was like inventing the steam engine.
He had enough mana glass to create ten cubes, but he decided to keep the stack of six and make another of four. He thought he understood what would happen at 10 cubes, but he was going to have to find a safe place to test how closely he could pack the cubes safely. If finding a safe way to do that was even possible. Maybe he could send Big John out with a false core to dig a test bunker.
With 10 cubes in two stacks he had 5,300 storage and was passively generating 90 mana per hour. The new reserves gave him enough to safely double the number of slimes in the lava pool and add a dozen new shamblers to the swamp.
Action generation was still his biggest limitation. He already had five cats. He wasn't sure why that felt like a large number. He had more slimes. He had shamblers, and golems, and a whole herd of cattle, but cats seemed to take up more attention and mental space somehow. He barely had to think about the wolves.
In fact, I should probably check in on the wolves
Maybe he just didn't feel comfortable becoming "that cat dungeon." What mattered was that turning milk into actions was a bottle-neck with real bottles. It was the only thing holding him back now. And what he had just seen with the mana glass confirmed a hunch he'd had for some time about the way this System worked.
Unfortunately, it also supported Bossy's theory.
He had been underestimating the System. The reason he was able to exploit the rules wasn't because he was somehow smarter than some World or even Multiverse spanning super intelligence that could rewrite the laws of physics. He was an Incarnate grabbed from another reality to fill a role. He hadn't been what it was looking for at first, but the System had found a use for him. The reason he could bend the rules was because this was his role in the larger game the System was playing.
He had gone out of his way to be peaceful, merciful. He was building a market, a town, a nice training dungeon.
But he was also building an unstoppable army of stone soldiers that could march right out into the world, if only for a short time before his false cores degraded.
Using his slime's eye he considered the glowing cubes of what could be the literal building blocks of a super weapon.
Maybe I am the big bad.
That raised a disturbing question. Who's the hero?