For the umpteenth time, Nuwa gave an internal sigh at the state things had been left in. She was compiling a “master list” of tasks she needed to finish, the prerequisites needed to finish those, Skills she needed or wanted, and anything else that seemed important.
It was getting distressingly long. She had known that the dungeon had been thrown together haphazardly, but the actual state of things was worse than she had expected. It was practically hemorrhaging DP, and the only thing keeping it afloat was the fact that there were quite a few powerful people using it to train and expending large amounts of Mana in the process.
This meant that once everyone stopped training so regularly, the dungeon was going to quickly run out of DP and would be in a state of shutdown. So, the top priority was to get Mana expenditure out of the red. Anything else could be taken care of later.
And that begged the question of what she could do to get a passive DP income. From what she knew, there were two main ways to earn DP – having things use Mana inside the dungeon, and having things die inside the dungeon.
So, her first order of business was to tinker with Mana and see if there was a noticeable difference in the DP gained when using Mana in different ways. Fortunately, thanks to Carmen’s studies during the month she had been apart from Lilith, she had a lot of spells learned via Decipher that she could test with.
The answer ended up being yes, there is a noticeable difference. Spells that were almost entirely internal were the least profitable type, followed by spells that permutated the Mana in some regard, such as elemental spells. The most profitable type were spells that directly used Mana to affect the physical world. Telekinesis, teleportation, attacks with raw Mana, and the like, all yielded significantly more DP than anything else she tried.
Her biggest discovery, however, was a rarely used spell made to transfer Mana from one person to another. Most people didn’t use it because it ended up wasting anywhere from half to three-quarters of the Mana used to cast it, but that was perfect for what she was trying to do. That Mana had to go somewhere, and it turned out that, when cast in a dungeon, that somewhere ended up being mostly DP. It was still roughly 100 Mana to 1 DP, but it was leaps and bounds better than anything else she had found.
She just needed a place to put all that Mana she’d be transferring. She had asked Kali about materials that could contain Mana and had been told that Mana potions actually could be used as a sort of battery, so she had taken a brief detour to figure out what exactly would be required to make the Mana potion, and fortunately it wasn’t all too complicated, at least for low-grade stuff. She’d probably need to switch to better quality at some point, but for the time being she just needed a place to put her excess Mana.
Some quick number crunching later, she found that a reservoir capable of storing 1 million Mana would last for around 18 and a half hours if she was to constantly fill it with close to her maximum Mana regeneration, and that just wasn’t good enough. That was a lot of Mana potion for just under a day’s worth of time, and while a dungeon may be unrivaled in producing raw materials, she doubted she’d make a profit that way.
So, she had to figure out a way to empty the reservoir. After dipping into Alchemist (and then levelling it to 100, resetting it, and switching back to Wandering Core) and making a couple of potions to test with, she found that Mana was released upon evaporation of the potion.
And more importantly, almost all of that released Mana was then converted to DP, which meant that she had discovered a nearly lossless way to vent Mana into the dungeon. Now, she just had to get enough Mana potions into the dungeon to make it all worthwhile. After absorbing the Mana potion into the dungeon, she found that simply making more was expensive, and the potion created came pre-filled with Mana, so it wasn’t very viable for making a lot of potions. It would eventually get her where she needed to be, but she was sure she could do better.
The next thing she did was make the dungeon absorb some Mana potion that was devoid of Mana, and that did the trick. Manaless Mana potion (which she decided to call Mana battery for the time being) was far cheaper to make, and more convenient to boot.
Then she needed a place to put her little contraption. That was pretty easy – she just made a couple of connected rooms, one to hold the liquid that was being “charged”, and another to evaporate the filled battery. She added a third room connected to the top of the evaporation chamber, which would collect the vapor and condense it, feeding it back into the first and starting the cycle again.
The evaporation and condensation was actually quite easy – all she had to do was use the dungeon’s temperature control system and heating and cooling the liquid became a snap. The real sticker was finding out a way to automate it. Eventually, she ended up placing a “trap” in the evaporation chamber, a pressure plate keyed to activate only after a certain amount of weight was on top of it. It would seal the chamber, evaporate the liquid, open the route to the condensation chamber, wait a small period of time for the gas to leave, seal the condensation chamber, and open only the route to the original chamber.
It wasn’t perfect, and often some liquid or gas was missed, but the system was able to process the liquid faster than her Mana was able to regenerate, and if it became a problem, she could just add more chambers.
With that out of the way, she made a formation that would constantly keep that spell going, tuned it to consume around 15 Mana a second, and set it to work. After a moment’s thought, she added similar formations to the beds of the Parallels. That way, when they were asleep, their Mana would be put to use enriching the dungeon. And, if they woke up and needed to use that Mana, they would still have enough that the moment the formation stopped its work they would be back up to full.
Off of just her own Mana, she figured that she would be seeing roughly 540 DP an hour. That singlehandedly solved her DP leak problem and gave her a bit of wiggle room to work with. So, with that problem solved for the time being, she began to look for ways to put the aforementioned wiggle room to work.
Before she could get started, though, she read and then dismissed the notification she got after making that little contraption.
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For creating a constant stream of DP using only your own resources, you have earned the Achievement Self-Made Dungeon! Self-Made Dungeon |
She could have finished up what was left to do with the training rooms, but that wasn’t a high priority right now. They were working well enough as they were, so her effort was better spent elsewhere.
So, that meant it was time to poke around the dungeon menus and see if she couldn’t find some bonuses she could snag with her DP. If she was really lucky, she’d be able to select bonuses that carried over to the other Parallels too, allowing her the most bang for her buck. She took a brief glance at the main screen of the dungeon menu to take stock of her resources before continuing into the “Dungeon Upgrades” menu.
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Dungeon Name: Hall of Judgement Available Options: |
She flicked through each of the upgrades listed and compiled a list of things to get soon. The goal was, of course, to purchase as many upgrades as she could later on, but for now an upgrade would need to have one of several qualities for it to be considered. The first and most important quality was the ability to directly accelerate the dungeon’s growth, whether through providing more DP, making purchases cheaper, or otherwise allowing her to progress faster.
The second quality that would put an ability on the list was it working towards one of her goals, namely making a sub-dungeon or getting dungeon-sight. And the last quality was simply if the ability gave her something productive to do during her downtime. While she figured her progress would be accelerated compared to standard dungeons, the fact of the matter was she’d still be stuck waiting on DP when trying to purchase things, so she might as well be productive during that time.
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To-Purchase List: Double Vision Duplicity Font of Power I See You Mixed-Up Monsters Monster Mash Who Let the Monsters Out You Are Here |
Font of Power was her highest priority but was unfortunately far out of her price range for the day. She would be able to pick it up a couple of hours after the other Parallels went to sleep, though, so she wasn’t too disappointed.
Duplicity and I See You were both highly likely to be required for her goals, but neither was immediately useful, so they were at the bottom of her priority list. You Are Here, despite not being useful (at the moment), was cheap enough that she just bought it instantly – the expenditure would be covered within a minute, so it was nice just to get it out of the way.
Double Vision had the potential to be useful to her, but she also didn’t have anything that required double focus at the moment. She had something in mind for it, but she couldn’t test it out until she had actually purchased the upgrade, so she had to shelve it until she had made the proper preparations. That could take a bit, but also didn’t require her to be actively doing anything, so she decided to get that out of the way.
That just involved sending Mae a message and letting the other Parallel know about the plan. As expected, she was very enthusiastic about it, and came over almost instantly, using the spare Avatar so as not to interrupt whatever Lilith was doing. She then opened up the display case that Nuwa’s body was in and began to thoroughly inspect Nuwa’s body.
As the core, she was suspecting that some modifications had been made to her to allow her senses and focus to be that of a dungeon. If things went as she hoped, those modifications would have large physical components to them, and by closely examining the before and after of her physical state when purchasing upgrades modifying those senses, she might be able to mirror them in her other bodies.
If it worked, they’d be able to better utilize their shared senses by allowing two sets of senses to be actively focused on instead of the one they were working with currently. It would probably only be really useful in time-sensitive situations such as battle, as otherwise the Parallel actively focusing on those senses would just be able to relay any necessary information, but it would be a welcome upgrade anyway.
While Mae worked, Nuwa pondered her other choices. They were a combination of something to do in her free time and a more personal goal; while thinking about potential threats to herself and her loved ones, she came to realize that they were sorely lacking in numbers. There could only be so many places the powerful people were guarding, and if it came down to a fight with Titania, Elenoa, the Society, or any other person or group of people that was able to muster large numbers of troops, they would quickly be surrounded.
So, she needed an army, and she just so happened to have the ability to tailor-make one to suit her needs. Being able to bestow degraded copies of her Skills onto subordinates would mean she would be able to teach the dungeon large quantities of Skills and further fine-tune her monsters to fit her needs.
Monster Mash would provide incentive to make multiple types of monsters, not that she needed any. Making just one or two kinds of monsters, no matter how capable they might be, was likely to result in large quantities of them being destroyed by someone with a decent enough countermeasure.
So, mixing the groups up would be the key to success, she figured. If she was lucky, she would be able to get away with having one “base” monster and several “derivative” monsters, allowing her to give a group several monsters that fulfil the same (or close to the same) role and still keep it relatively small.
But, before she could purchase any further upgrades, she needed to let Mae finish her examination. So, in that short window of time, she decided to check up on her Watches. She had unfortunately been slacking off in that regard, trusting in the notification effect to let her know if anything was up.
She wasn’t quite so willing to trust that, now that she was thinking more about it. There were plenty of things that people could be doing that technically wouldn’t fall under the conditions necessary to notify her. Of course, if those people decided to act via their subordinates, there wasn’t much her Watch could do, so she just had to hope people didn’t do that.
She didn’t spend too much time looking through people who hadn’t shown her much animosity. That was most of world leaders she had deemed potentially troublesome when she had met them, and none of them were visibly trying to make trouble for her, so she moved on to the people who were more likely to pose a threat.
The people from the Society didn’t seem to be plotting against her specifically, so she let them slide as well. That left Elenoa, Winston, and Titania, and she was far more worried about those three than she was about any of the others.
Elenoa was…doing paperwork. Just sitting behind a desk and filling out what, as far as Nuwa could tell, were just average day-to-day forms. Of course, she didn’t think this meant that Elenoa wasn’t planning something, just that she had caught her at a bad time. She’d have to check in at all sorts of different times to see if she could catch her red-handed. It was an invasion of privacy, sure, but Elenoa had tried to have her killed before, and from the few interactions she had had with the woman, Nuwa figured Elenoa wouldn’t just give up on that.
Winston was asleep, so she just moved straight to Titania. For her part, Titania seemed to be holding court. She was on her throne in front of a large number of faeries, listening as she was given reports on the status of her kingdom.
It was boring, but also more likely to give Nuwa more information than what Elenoa was doing, so she listened in until Mae had finished her checks. Unfortunately, she didn’t learn about any schemes Titania was cooking up. It was all just what she would imagine Titania’s day usually looked like.
When Mae was finished, she purchased Double Vision and began to mentally brace herself. Even after Mae’s checkups were complete, she wouldn’t really have much to do until some more DP came in and she could get Mixed-Up Monsters. She could expand the number of rooms and regular monsters the dungeon had, but what would be the point? It would just drain resources and most of those were liable to remain unused.
No, better to do something at least somewhat productive with that time. And she supposed that something would be formally introducing herself to everyone. She didn’t want to, but she was probably going to be nagged about it until she did, so she figured she might as well get it out of the way as soon as possible.
Mae finished about ten minutes later. And, giving her umpteenth-plus-one sigh that day, Nuwa went to go say hi.
Patreon
For creating a constant stream of DP using only your own resources, you have earned the Achievement Self-Made Dungeon!
Any reason this isn't in the window?
As a side note, I also had my first dream about this story, which is unusual for me, since I normally don't dream about stuff like this. I remember being super pumped as I had a great idea to expand the Lilith/Kali relationship, but when I woke up I realized that the main issue with it was that it flew in the face of all established lore. Also it introduced time travel and all in all was a really bad idea.
That sounds hilarious. I'd ask if you could put it in a non-canon side story, maybe framing it as Lilith's dream, but I'm sure you've long forgotten it now.
Mistakes, mistakes are why
And I can totally put that in a non-canon story, I still remember the broad strokes of it and that sounds fun :P
So testing a weapon to kill her dosnt alert watch? That is stupid. Unless her girlfriend in blocking her vision on it to teacher her that need is the fuel of invention and to only act at the last moment
It is, unfortunately, a matter of plausible deniability. Elenoa hasn't directly done anything that is specifically targeting Lilith. While it may be obvious to anyone with a brain what the weapon is for, to the unthinking Watch, Elenoa is just "testing a weapon", and so it hasn't been flagged. There is a lesson in this, though.
@Fighterman481 what would constitute a flag then? As the only time an unthinking watcher would have anyway to tell that what she is doing is harmful would be if lilith was visibly in site. Kind of making it a pointless addition to the skill.
@ShinyApocalypse The defined triggers are breaking laws (which Elenoa, technically, hasn't done) or going against Lilith's direct instructions (*usually* defined as a geas, although clear public statements like the restrictions she's imposed on war also count). A Watch isn't meant as a self-preservation tool unless it's being actively used to scry someone; it's more a way for Lilith to know when someone has broken the law or done something that she would be able to punish, and the Watches she placed during that meeting were on people most likely to try and make some sort of power grab.
And, as Elenoa hasn't done something that she could reasonably be punished for, the Watch has had no reason to trip. It's working as intended.
Just a question, but whatever happened to Judy? Haven't seen her in a while.
She's been quiet lately, choosing to let Lilith's parents do most of the...parenting. But, just wait a couple of chapters, she's got some ideas for things she can be helping with ;)
Thanks for the chapter.
intruder. If you You Are Here, the locations
you have You Are
Fixed, thanks!
Unrelated question to this chapter, but I was thinking about Lilith’s ability to annul both magical and mundane contracts. While the magical ones are easy and simple, merely remove the magical components and it is annulled since it can no longer function as binding, how does she annul mundane ones? The contracts themselves are just pieces of paper with ink on them for all intents and purposes and are only binding because all involved parties agree that it is. The contract is a metaphysical agreement, so when she annuls it, do all involved parties just suddenly agree that the contract is void? If not, then nothing is stopping them from just continuing to say it is binding and refuse to acknowledge that she annuled it, aside from the danger of angering Lilith and causing her to take direct action. Or does it form a geass that forces them to accept that it is annulled?
Excellent question. What happens is that all documentation regarding the contract is changed so as to reflect the annulment. There is nothing to stop people from saying that it is binding and continuing on.
The main benefit is that any magic which deals with contracts, mundane or otherwise, no longer sees the contract as valid. And if they want magic to see it as valid, they have to remake the contract through the proper channels.
Furthermore, if someone was to, say, be brought to court over the breach of a contract annulled in this way, and then convicted over it, then that would count as a miscarriage of justice if all involved parties knew the contract was annulled in this manner (which they should), those with justice-based Classes would likely see penalties from the system for not listening to the High Arbiter's judgement.
Thx
Credit for the name Mana battery goes to Nuwa Clements.
Did Baern order some extra SALT?
Also Monster Mash? I fully expect all of the Parallels or at least some of the "new" new Chimeras that come from this to perform the Monster Mash as a gag.
Also nice LOTR reference, I see you are a *insert preferred gender so I don't get flamed here* of culture.
Also time travel isn't really a stretch, time magic has already been established with Divination and the fact that it shows up on the Attribute/Resistance sections of the character sheets. Also, she has Eldritch domains and assuming the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods exist similarly enough to the Cthulhu Mythos, then she could try tapping into Yog-Sothoth's Racial Classes for Time affinity. Also I'm pretty sure Humans get advantage in time magic which is why most major Divination mages are Humans, so this applies to Lilith and co as well.
Thank you for the chapter.
Also why does Nuwa come off as a slightly edgy teenager who just can't be bothered to have to physically interact with other sentient lifeforms?
Time travel totally isn't that much of a stretch, it just makes the plot infinitely messier if you're not careful and that's not something I want to introduce
And Nuwa...yeah that description fits. People are so much effort that's better spent doing dungeon things.
She can't even tell you to get out of her room....Well, maybe she can? It's technically her house, her rules. But there's nowhere else for people to go and Nuwa doesn't really have a room so does that make the whole dungeon her room? Can she tell someone to get out of her room if there's nowhere but her room to go to?
Um, I'm losing track of things, but yeah. Get out of her room, she's playing Minecraft (in real life). Or Dungeon Keeper. Whatever.
@Fighterman481 Well, she could always just make herself her own little room that only she's able to access (probably wouldn't keep Kali and the other Parallels out because reasons but whatever) to just chill when she isn't busy and just totally play some tower defense and dungeon keeper-style games, maybe some RTS with base defense (she should totally aspire to whup some sweaty South Korean's asses at Starcraft 2 just to flex her skills).
Also, her house=her rules and being the High Arbiter means her rules are THE rules, but what happens if Parallels get into arguments? If say Nuwa and Carmen got into a fight to the point of breaking the word of law, would Arbiter skills like Righteous Indignation get proc'd and would the buff apply to all Parallels?
@DemonLordShadowheart Inter-Parallel conflict is a bit of an edge case, but I'm currently leaning towards Arbiter Skills would proc. And Lilith would probably end up having to step in since, Carmen aside, they all view Lilith as the one in charge, and (for the time being), Carmen sees it the same way.
Oh, by the way, Mae would 100% be the best gamer, she's predisposed towards being good at management, especially micromanagement. Nuwa would be second best for sure, though. It'd take practice but she'd likely be able to reach pro-gamer levels. Until the gamers get high enough in their Classes and get all sorts of gaming specific Skills, anyway
@Fighterman481 But would ALL Parallels receive the buffs/debuffs from the Arbiter skills or how would that work out.
Also I know Lucas played video games before becoming Lilith, but there wasn't a gamer-related Class during the new system implementation bit with Kali?
@DemonLordShadowheart Oh, whoops,. I typo'd, meant wouldn't proc. Kinda a bad typo because it's the exact opposite of what I meant.
Uuuuuhhhh that's an oversight but I'm going to wave it off as 'not played professionally/there wasn't enough data to make a gamer Class' or something. I am slightly regretting dropping a hard and fast Class list that's just asking for oversights with the nature of the system, so in the future any potential Class listing will likely be just "relevant" Classes to reduce clutter and give me plausible deniability for things like this, since it's so hard to cover every potential thing and I feel it's better to just...not try since it wouldn't add too much to the story.