“It’s all in here. The bigger stuff you requested, like furniture, I unfortunately couldn’t get due to limited space, but most of the smaller or higher priority stuff on your list, I was able to get.” Greendew said, showing Fia the Bag of Holding strapped to his belt. “You think you’d be able to copy the bag with everything in it?”
“Hmm.” Fia hummed, analyzing it with [Identify]. “No, I can’t copy the Bag of Holding at the moment. Sorry. No, I won’t tell you why.
[Bag of Holding]
Quality: Rare, E
A magically enchanted bag with more space on the inside than the outside.
Ding! Common Skill evolution available: Due to prolonged use of the [Identify] skill, [Identify] can be evolved into new general Skill: [Inspect]. Would you like to accept?
Notice! Accepting a Skill evolution removes the evolved skills permanently, and all of their effects.
Ding! Uncommon Skill evolution available: Due to the use of the [Identify] skill on a higher grade item, [Identify] can be evolved into new racial-general Skill: [Weaver’s Eye]. Would you like to accept?
Notice! Accepting a Skill evolution removes the evolved skills permanently, and all of their effects.
Fia blinked once in surprise at the several notification boxes in front of her face. First, she was disappointed by the little information posed by the identification of the [Bag of Holding], then intrigued by the two skills she had just been offered. [Reincarnated] at work? This was the first time her [Identify] skill was offered an evolution. That on its own wasn’t anything shocking, almost everyone evolves that skill at some point. It is a general skill offered to most all Awakened Freewilled and Fated races, after all. The issue is, it’s usually offered an evolution after years of prolonged use, and she had never gotten it to that point in the few years she was an Awakened [Bandit]. Either it kept its hidden experience from before her reincarnation, or it was her Title at work.
Some skills were like that. Almost all skills could evolve with prolonged use, or merge with other skills to provide new skills. While it was a known phenomenon, for skills other than general skills, it was a rare occurrence. Prolonged use didn’t mean use a couple of times, it meant years of use. And even then, it wasn’t a guarantee. As far as anyone knew, it was pretty random. At least according to Fia’s knowledge.
And here she was with two different options to choose from. She used [Identify] on both of the skills’ names in the windows.
[Inspect]
Effects: Inherits all effects from the [Identify] general skill. Information provided will be more verbose and accurate, requiring less actual knowledge from the skill user to show expanded results. Access to some hidden information not available for [Identify].
[Weaver’s Eye]
Effects: Inherits all effects from the [Identify] general skill. Information provided will be much more verbose and accurate for items such as strings, ropes, baskets, sacks, cloth, and similar items, requiring much less actual knowledge from the skill user to show expanded results. Also provides more information for monsters and individuals capable of tailoring, weaving, ropemaking, and similar tasks, either from skills, perks, classes, or innate knowledge. Access to much more hidden information not available for [Identify] for these types of items. Objects and creatures outside of the purview of this skill will have information provided be more reliant on the skill user’s actual knowledge.
Fia didn’t have to think about it for very long. She understood why [Weaver’s Eye] would be offered to an arachne, and why many arachne would probably take it. But the downside wasn’t worth it; She’d get less information about most things in general, and much more information about items the skill likes. [Inspect] on the other hand, didn’t discriminate, but she’d get less information about the [Bag of Holding] or her various spider web types out of it than she would from [Weaver’s Eye]. It wasn’t worth the trade-off for her.
She mentally accepted [Inspect] and noticed [Identify] disappear from her status, with [Inspect] replacing it. Then she used [Inspect] on the bag of holding.
[Bag of Holding]
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Quality: Rare, E
A magically enchanted bag with more space on the inside than the outside. The bag is capable of storing up to 2 cubic strides of volume not exceeding a weight of 35 stones. If torn, ripped, pierced, or otherwise destroyed, the Bag of Holding’s contents will spill out quickly. Bags of Holding interact very negatively with other spatially enchanted items.
This specific bag is also enchanted with tracking magic.
Upon reading the last line, Fia stiffened. Yes, yes, the skill was nice, it would provide much more information and all, but she didn’t care about that right now. Instead, she tried to hold down feelings of rage and betrayal.
“Tracking magic?” She asked Greendew with a raised eyebrow, wide eyes, and a barely contained shout. “Did you know that this bag is enchanted with tracking magic?”
“Hold on-”
“So you knew??”
“I did, but-”
“Dump the bag. Dump the contents right here. Then leave. With the bag of holding.”
“Lady Rush. I meant no-”
“NOW!” Fia yelled, [Ettercaps] and [Web Weavers] flooding into the room from the darkness. “I don’t want to hear your excuses, or how harmless it is, or whatever. You shouldn’t have brought it here knowing that. I don’t care what you have to say, frankly. We have a deal and I will honor it. Your gold will be by the entrance. Take it and leave. Do not return, there will be no future deals between us.”
Fia watched the elf as he looked around at the monsters surrounding them, pale and frozen for a second, before he nodded. He dumped the bag of holding out, turning it upside down and inside out. A pile of torches, tools, and various other things clattered out noisily.
She glared as he backed away from her, still facing her and the monsters filling the room. He picked up the sacks of gold by the entrance, identical to the ones he took last time, and swatted at the [Web Weavers] attempting to crawl up his arms. She glared as he stumbled out and ran from the cave entrance, the curtain doof audibly flapping as it was moved aside. She glared at the curtain door for a few more minutes, just to glare.
She sighed. “Fuuuuck.”
Thinking about it, it would be sooner rather than later before this dungeon was crawling with humans. The guild knew something was here already, having sent an adventurer team to check it out after another team disappeared here. Now Greendew would tell them all about it, and her, presumably. She should count on that for certain. Then there was the issue of the tracking magic. It most likely wasn’t from the guild, as Greendew had expressed wanting to wait a while before returning to them. So a third party. Maybe she should have let him explain a little, not that she’d forgive him for it, but just to learn more about the who and why.
But it had pissed her off. No matter.
Honestly, she was stressed. She’d had this feeling at the back of her mind ever since the start of the entire situation. Like a noose tightening around her neck, a guillotine mid-fall, or a bear trap just sprung and about to bite. Something critical, something bad, something was coming. She needed to prepare. Honestly, for some gods-forsaken reason, she had tried to ignore it. Maybe she thought it was just stress induced by her new and very weird circumstances. She should have known better.
One day, definitely soon, someone she won’t be able to handle will invade her dungeon. Even one combat-classer around Greendew’s level would be a major threat. A fellowship of them? A fellowship even higher leveled? She’d be screwed. Helpless. It was time to really get to work.
First thing’s first; new loot. The highest-priority items she had asked for were long-term lighting. Torches, lanterns, glowing stones, it didn’t matter. Greendew had delivered. She counted twenty torches, ten lanterns, and a suspiciously red-orange glowing sack the same size as a coin purse. She opened the sack and it was filled with tiny grain-sized… Gems? It looked like glowing sand. [Inspect] enlightened her as to what they were.
[Flame Sand]
Quality: Uncommon, F
Flame sand is a type of large-grained sand made of magically glowing gems similar to rubies. The gems can be commonly mined in volcanoes from cooled lava, though it is also very commonly found in fire-related dungeons. A single grain of flame sand can give off a soft glowing light for a couple of inches to a couple of feet in complete darkness. Flame sand glows brighter in areas with higher temperature, if exposed to high heat such as fire or lava, and in more magically dense regions. In colder temperatures, its glow may only extend to the edges of the grain of flame sand itself. Flame sand glows perpetually, feeding off of very little mana, but will become regular volcanic sand in areas of no magic, such as an antimagic field.
Hmm. [Inspect] was indeed doing work giving her more information than before on items, especially those she knew nothing about beforehand. The single sack of flame sand was little more than a handful of it, but she already had ideas about incorporating single grains into webbing, suspended in the air, to light up a room or two. The grains were pretty large, it would be a very rough-feeling sand in large amounts, and grabbing an individual grain was easy. She’d put it to the side, for now, however. The torches and lanterns would be plenty sufficient to light up the second floor for her to help excavation. There were even several vials of alchemical oil to refuel the lanterns.
Speaking of excavation, there were several more pickaxes, a couple of hammers, metal pitons, several large sacks, and even a wheelbarrow. All of these would be useful in mining out new rooms down below.
There were a couple of sacks of nails. Those would be useful. With the wood being chopped by the ettercap with the steel axe, she’d be able to make proper wooden doors now. No hinges, but it would be hard to install a hinge in the stone walls. She’d probably make the doors rotate on a wooden pole for a spine, going into the ground and ceiling. There were a couple of buckets, manacles, chains, and other miscellaneous tools. Mostly metal. Currently, she’d be able to make or have made anything cloth-like she needed. Wood was a resource she was also about to have a secured supply of. Stone, she had too much of. Metal, though, she had no idea how to forge or work metal, not to mention a lack of ore and facilities. Maybe she could get some monsters in the future to help becoming self-sufficient on that front, but for now she’d need to get that stuff from outside. She’d also had Greendew get a tinderbox, a small box containing some pieces of flint, steel, and various tinder and cloth fire-starting material. Useful considering she didn’t have any fire magic, and would likely never choose a fire-related spell due to her low affinity with the element.
There was various other stuff she’d had Greendew get, but in truth, the torches were the things she had desperately needed. Being totally blind everywhere but the main room and the loot room with her dungeon core meant it was hard for her to truly expand the dungeon. Now, she’d be able to regain her old pace with the lighting bottleneck gone.
It was time to turn these empty halls into a proper dungeon.