While the level is certainly nice, there isn't a gear drop this time, the remains of The Nightmare dispersing into light without any fanfare, leaving behind a few shards of Terrorstone Gem, which are a higher tier crafting material than normal Terrorstone and used primarily in the weaponry of the dungeon's crafted gear set variants, I believe.

If you get enough, you can get an Enchanter/Jeweller to reforge a Gem, as well, which besides the inherent value of a rare magical gem to NPCs, can also be utilised in higher-end crafting for low levels, though personally I never verified that, not least because by the time you're ready to leave for Farmer's Secret, you'll barely have a quarter of what you need if you're, paradoxically, lucky enough to get the shards to drop, and not lucky enough to get a piece of gear - which is what I'm personally interested in, as this boss drops armour and weaponry for, primarily, Fighter Tanks and Damage Dealers.

Seeing melee damage dealers mix and match pieces of Trophytaker's and Terrorsteel isn't really unusual once this place goes public due to the lack of Class restrictions, though, since the Dexterity and Strength bonuses are useful either way, so long as you have a level appropriate weapon you can leverage the base damage of. 

Putting the shards into my inventory, I tell Jade to dump the Imagined Riches into The Pool of Desire. The gleaming chunks of golden accessory and jewel-encrusted rock melt into what liquid remains of the Pool, diminishing it further and further which each piece discarded. You can't take them out of the dungeon anyway, and given the thematic relevance of it to the dungeon, odds are you'd be cursed for your troubles even if you could. Not that this occurs to Jade, who twitches every time she destroys a chunk of it.

"Interesting," Angelus strokes his chin, fascinated by the sight, "Is it eschewing material greed that satisfies the dungeon, or feeding manifestations of greed and longing to the Pool of Desire?"

"I'd guess the latter, looking at the water recede," Windy opines, "But the name of the dungeon and order to 'cleanse' the mine makes me think the other."

Truthfully, it's probably a bit of both, but we can only speculate.

"Time we received the clear rewards and took a break, how about we continue this conversation outside?" I suggest, sheathing my sword and waving over at the floating prism that popped into existence in the middle of the room.

"Sorry," Angelus apologises, walking over to the crystal, "Watch the landing, please."

One by one we leave the dungeon.

 

 

 

 

---

 

Breakroom, Liggit Mine

Our exit, while not particularly graceful, does not result in any accidents or tumbles. A rustic looking pickaxe with one solitary spike awaits us, embedded into the floor, obviously the reward for the first A. It, much like The Pool of Desire, gives me a strange, uneasy feeling, and immediately I can surmise that it's a Cursed Legacy.

Great.

"Don't touch that," I pull Windy away from the tool as she moves to pick it up, "Let me check it, I'm pretty sure this thing is cursed and seeing as I'm somehow able to ignore standing in the Pool, it'd be best if I did it."

Concerned, Windy mouths an objection before standing aside, "Alright, go ahead, boss."

Yanking the pick from out the floor, I inspect it's stats. And yes, it is definitely cursed. In fact, I can practically feel the thing vibrate in my hands like it wants to escape my grasp.

 

"This thing is nasty," I grimace, keeping the thing at arm's length, "Powerful, but quite insidious."

Placed in the hands of a Newborn with negligible Willpower, they'll mine for hours and hours, never satisfied even as their inventory can no longer contain the spoils of their maddened search for mining materials, buoyed by a sense of power from the over the top mining bonuses and spurred into a further frenzy by the loss of every material to it's Covetous passive effect.

Not to mention that continued use of the majority of Cursed items will slowly build up the hidden stat of Corruption on your Vessel, and the effects on the mind can follow you into reality to some degree.

"What's it do, exactly?" Angelus asks, leering at the pickaxe as though it'll spring to life and eat him at any moment.

"Jade, what're the stats on your pickaxe?" I ask innocently.

"+1 Precision and Penetration. Why?" She looks a little confused.

"This thing has +20 in both," I reveal, making her eyes widen, replaced with a rather telling and ironic hunger.

"No, you can't have it," I put it in my inventory, "Unless you want to go quite literally insane, doing nothing but mine all day, every day, until your Capsule failsafe kicks you out the game and calls emergency services."

The avaricious fox recoils, "Holy shit man, when you said it was cursed I thought it'd be like a stat penalty for holding it!"

"Speaking honestly, this is a fantastic Mining Legacy tool, but using it for any great length of time would ruin the person wielding it," I admit, "This thing is something that's staying firmly in my inventory until either it's cleansed of the curse - not optimistic about that - or until we find some other use for it. Perhaps find a collector to sell it to for a tidy sum."

Windy frowns, "Can Hectic Works get away with messing with players minds like that?"

"Legal grey area when it comes to VR, for better or worse," Angelus replies, "By the nature of the technology it's modifying our minds to accommodate it, and the experiences we have inside are taken as us more or less agreeing to be responsible for the consequences of our actions, or something similar. The law won't tolerate companies actively trying to torment people into gibbering wrecks - with the quasi-exception of a few horror titles that really toe the line - so in this case, it would be a player choosing for themselves to be exposed to the danger."

"Couldn't have put it better," I nod, "You involved in law at all?"

Angelus shakes his head, "Nah, but my brother is an attorney. I helped him study for his exams in college."

"That's pretty sketchy, not gonna lie," Jade shudders, "So you're saying that developers can put the equivalent of a chainsaw hat in the game, and it's ok so long as someone decides that the fashion statement is worth experiencing what it's like to have a chainsaw pushed onto their head?"

"Yep," Angelus shrugs, "If you're dumb enough to do it, you've gotta put up with the consequences. No cure for stupidity."

"Eesh," she frowns, "Knew there was a reason I didn't touch the horror games."

"You don't play them because you're a big scaredy-cat," Windy teases, sinking to the floor and taking a snack from her inventory.

"Am not!" Jade stomps her foot in indignation.

Shaking his head once more in exasperation, Angelus takes a seat himself, "So, Silver. You seem pretty familiar with the place, know anything about the story?"

"Yeah. You'll have to forgive me if I don't tell you everything, though, because it concerns something larger that I'm working on," I join the other two on the floor. Hearing that, Windy perks up a bit.

"Is it to do with our Quest?"

"Yes and no. It's not directly related," They're ultimately caused by the same source, however, I don't feel like talking about it with present company.

Taking a bite of fruit, I continue, "The story is pretty self-evident, really. Miners dug too deep and released a demonic something-or-other, going steadily more and more insane as they followed it's siren call. It's still down there, actually - all of it is. But the real things are almost twice the level and nowhere near as dumb or simplistic in their abilities - what we saw was just the surface level of their horror."

The group becomes uneasy at the revelation that The Pool of Desire is still active somewhere beneath us.

"Do we need to deal with that at all?" Angelus questions, concerned.

"No. Clearing that mess up is beyond our current ability," I finish off my snack, "For that matter, we have no reason to even bother trying."

Claiming Liggit Mine and, by extension, Miner's Nightmare would certainly prove valuable to the Guild's interests, which would necessitate the suppression of The Pool of Desire - but that's beyond my means for the time being, and not a pressing matter besides. Not to mention, while I know what's responsible for The Pool of Desire's formation, dealing with it is outside of my knowledge, even knowing what it can be used for - which if I had to quantify it, then based off my experience with other sites it would be something along the lines of a Bronze-Tier natural resource, with the mine itself, ironically, being Copper-Tier until the copper runs out, at which point it loses much of it's value.

I try to remember what exactly became of Liggit Mine after it was initially claimed by Rambling Rose, but end up drawing a blank. I think by the time anything else happened to it, I'd already moved on from Meteo City further north. Much of anything past the first year or so is hard to recall, beyond truly major events like the city's occupation by Hammer Holdin.

Likewise, any problems associated with maintaining a presence at Liggit Mine are also beyond my ability to know. With how volatile and clearly malevolent The Pool of Desire is, I completely expect there to be a number of difficulties involved in handling it.

The group makes small talk as our MP and Stamina recover, once we've completed the stat allocations for my, Jade and Angelus' level-ups of course. I finish off my Strength goal of thirty with half of the ten points, then put the other five into Agility. Dexterity isn't a high priority at the moment, so that will be third.

Now at Level 7, Jade can equip her new gloves, but Angelus still has to wait a bit before he can use his new wand, which will be easy to accomplish within the next two runs, by which point, Windy will also be level 7 and able to wear any pieces of the Feardrinker set that The Nightmare drops.

If I had to make a wishlist though, I'd place the Schematics for the Terrorsteel Set at the very top of the list, as I am desperately in need of a new sword - even with five extra points of Strength and a Bronze-Tier crafted weapon, the fact remains that the weapon is still a Level 1 item. Getting the ability to create for myself a Terrorsteel Horrorblade - one of the edgier names for a sword I've seen - would easily double my damage capability. Second, of course, is the Feardrinker Set Schematics, which would give Windy a much-needed boost in her ability to tank, thanks mainly to the 3-Piece Set Bonus of increased enmity generation, the only set bonus on any of the equipment here and a poor man's substitute for dedicated Class Skills from after The First Step.

Lastly, is any Trophytaker armour pieces we can get off the boss for Jade, since none of us are leatherworkers - something I do want to dip into once the playerbase has Ujax Forest well in hand. More pieces of Vacantsoul for Angelus would be nice, but he's not a Guild member, so any further gains for him are a comparatively low priority. I do plan to ask him whether or not he's interested in joining up for the long-haul before we part ways, having said that. I've seen nothing to suggest he would be a poor choice so far, and finding a healer worth their salt is always a chore.

"Breaktime is over folks," I glance at the Reminiscence, "Let's get to work, I want another fifteen runs at least before we log out."

---

 

Alex's Room, Le Chevalier

Flopping onto my bed and scraping my feet out of my shoes with it's neighbour, I mumble incoherently into the fabric, extremely tired. Also, rather pleased with our gains, after squeezing out 17 runs total, all of us are now comfortably sat at Level 8, putting my Agility up to 30. Sadly, now that we've passed the intended Level, the experience gain has slowed down tremendously, so even if we were to pull a hail mary, and ignore our much-diminished supplies, we wouldn't get much out of it.

In total, we gained 986 Terrorstone, one Terrorstone Dagger, every piece of Trophytaker's armour besides the boots, the legs and gloves from Vacantsoul, 68 Terrorstone Gem Shards, a pair of Feardrinker Chausses, and a Terrorsteel Handaxe. Schematics-wise, two sets of Vacantsoul, three Feardrinker and one Terrorsteel, but no Trophytaker's.

In essence, almost everything I set out to get. I'm actually a little suspicious of how good our luck is, but I'm not about to argue. Having said that, I do need to figure out what we're going to do with the extras, particularly the Schematics. I can't really sell them, obviously, at least not yet.

I did hit on the idea of passing one of the Feardrinker Set Schematics bundles to Henna, though. There's little to stop her from learning how to make her own, save for the availability of Terrorstone-related products. I think she'd appreciate the chance to make something new and interesting, and I don't have to worry about her upsetting the market value. If Jade plans to work toward becoming a Mechanist, giving her the third bundle to boost her Smithing in anticipation of unlocking the hidden crafting subclass is also not a terrible idea.

The Terrorstone Dagger could be useful bait for Olrica, when next we meet. I have her down as being very mercenary in her behaviour, so a trail of shiny toys and money may be all it takes to get her to change affiliation, and if not on it's own, will certainly paint us as being an attractive place to turn to if and when her relationship with Rambling Rose sours.

As for the Handaxe, I would have passed it to Winfrey, but already having gotten a set of Feardrinker Schematics prior to obtaining it, she insisted that I keep ahold of it and forge her a sword instead. Seeing no reason to argue her preferences in weaponry, I agreed, which means it's now joined the Fang Pin in wasting my inventory space.

A little unwilling, I roll over onto my back, then after a few attempts, pull myself up into a sitting position, digging out my Pane from my backpack, to record the day's events and some more of my memories.