Jim shivers as he remembers the DMV. Some people could go there, wait a few hours and everything would work out. That wasn’t his experience. Jim’s father and grandfather were heavily into the idea of being “off-grid” in a very toxic way. Not only was a bunch of Jim’s paperwork missing, some of the stuff he thought he had was actually forgeries meant to “throw off” the government. So yeah, the DMV was an extra big dose of pain.

As Jim thinks back on his early days, he can’t help but sigh. To be honest? He didn’t really care all that much about what his dad and grandad did to themselves. It was the fact that they didn’t give him a choice to not join in. If it hadn’t been for his mom, Jim doubted he would have even been a citizen. How his dad ended up with his mom was a mystery.

Jim shakes his head and gestures to the others. Then as one the team enters the building. The first room looked about what they would expect, but the second proved what a lie it was. Throughout the settlement, the team had seen buildings, lived in and not, at all stages of decay. This room, however, didn’t show any signs of decay.

When you’ve spent so many days in a place where literally every building looks to be in the middle of breaking, well, suffice it to say this set everyone on edge. Though Kelly was quick to figure out what was going on. “They were injecting mana into the building. I hadn’t really thought about how quickly the two pre-system cities were falling about. After all, we have monsters literally tunneling through them.

“However this might just turn that on its head. In fact, our cities might be surviving better than they should be because of those snakes. After all, if you have a digging creature, it will shore up their tunnels and with magic, monster versions of those critters are going to take it to the next level. Anyway, Ben has someone that figured out how to do the same.”

Jeremy runs his hand over the nearby wall, “Should we prioritize getting this technique? Like, how good of an idea is this sort of thing?”

Kelly rolls her eyes, “Do I think this is a good idea? No, if you look at the doorway you can see that some of the decay is creeping in already. Maybe if we had some historical monument next to us, I could justify using a method like on the thing until we figure out a long-term solution. For normal buildings, though?

“If what was likely only a couple days is enough for it to already show signs of decay, you can clearly see the folly. Besides, nothing in our town will suffer from any of this nonsense. Even if the wood or stone itself isn’t too magical, the use of skills to process the stuff into proper building material will be enough to, for lack of a better term, give it a charge.

“There is an outside chance that we will need to fix up the town. However, that would require a massive increase in atmospheric world energy over a short period. Otherwise, the fact the material already contains a power means instead of breaking down, it will be able to equalize as the atmospheric power fluctuates.”

Kellinger frowns, “Why would having a bit of power change anything? I played around a little with the stuff in the cities before the snakes showed up and I could feel mana in them.”

Jim gestures at the decayed building outside the room, “The difference comes from whether the material was processed or not. The mountains won’t be falling down on us anytime soon because there is space within their stone to allow the natural powers to flow in.

“The stones used to decorate the outer wall were worked and so have taken on some of the crafter, even if it was cut with a machine. At least that is what I assume is happening?” And he glances over at Kelly who nods.

Jim smiles, “Okay, with that in mind I’m going to guess that some pre-system magical traditions have actual roots in our new reality. They liked to call for unworked materials. Stuff like a river stone with a naturally worn hole or a branch that came off of a tree during a storm.”

Kelly shrugs, “While that is true and I did grab a ton of pre-system books which were meant to depict magic. I highly doubt much of what was basically pre-system fiction will prove to be anything more even now that we have actual magic. Though of course I’m going to be running tests on all those things. With caution, of course. Wouldn’t want to summon up a demon when I didn’t mean to.

“Anyway, why this matters is because if you work a material, those bits act like a sealant that will keep out unwanted energy types. This means that a magic wand won’t be absorbing qi and if you’re just making a brick, it will be able to take in and release any types of power that were there when you made it.

“So when you craft something in an environment that lacks any mystical power, well, you’ve basically got the mystical equivalent of a vacuum chamber, except the material isn’t going to survive the pressure. Which in hindsight makes me question why the buildings haven’t already crumbled into nothing.”

Tess laughs, “Well, a brick isn’t literally an empty tube with a vacuum in it. Certain parts are likely weaker than other bits. When those bits break, it might relieve some of the pressure?”

Kelly frowns, “That is possible.”

Jim claps his hands, “Okay! While this is interesting, we need to move on. I understand that finding out why even the bits that survived the system’s arrival are falling away, but we have a job. This isn’t the only room, let’s continue on instead of standing around like lemons.”

The team focuses back on the job and spends a few hours exploring the whole building including the decayed parts. After all, the maintained parts were a little too obvious so they might have hid things in a decayed part. In the end, though, they did find what they were looking for in a maintained room.

In fact, they found it in the very first room where they had stood around. It was a simple note and it had been wedged into the little hollow where the door’s deadbolt goes. As for the message itself? It was a simple hand-drawn map pointing to another building and a reminder to replace the note when done with it.

Of course, the note was a bit of misdirection. The actual message with the new location was on the deadbolt itself. They had almost missed it, if not for Kelly noticing a wisp of magic hanging onto the mechanism. It was quite a clever place to hide the note, honestly. After all, the bolt is only out when you’ve locked the door.

Though this did lead them on another bit of searching as the deadbolt had a lot less real estate to write a note on so it was just a shortened address. Simple and yet frustrating as people weren’t exactly doing upkeep on the various signs around town. That meant quite a few buildings completely lacked any signage to tell you what their address was.

While this new search is going down, back in the dungeon, Doyle had managed to succeed with his myconids. Though the only reason he was so quick in figuring it out was because he also tried a variety of situations. Of those situations, only one of them resulted in the myconid growing into a new stage. That wasn’t the only reaction, but everything else was a step back at best.

What was the condition that let the lesser myconid to upgrade? A simple enough thing that would be easy for Doyle to handle as well as making some sense. They needed to be in an area completely infested with mushrooms and myconids. It even needed a certain amount of spores in the air, which meant Doyle had been lucky that there wasn’t any large-scale air movement on the floor. Otherwise it would have taken a good bit of time for the spore density to get up there.

Of course, going forward he would just be farming them in small cave areas as that would make things easier. Still, it was an interesting condition, especially since as far as Doyle could tell, there wasn’t an actual physical need for this. Instead, it seemed that the monsters had simply developed so that they wouldn’t ever come about by themselves, as there would always be other funguses around.

In fact, being completely separated from other mushrooms was one of the states that caused the lesser myconid to basically “die” of loneliness and turn into around five sprouts. They didn’t actually die mind you. After all, if they had the lesser myconids would have vanished like every other monster. Still, the conditions to farm the new monster was well worth the result.

{Myconid (Lv12)

S[25] A[15] C[40] I[15] W[10] P[6]

Skills: Spore Talk lv12, Teamwork lv10, Summon Paralysis Spore lv10, Summon Sleep Spore lv3

Cost: World Energy[300]}

If the sprout and lesser had been the classic mushroom man, the full grown myconids were that but stretched upward. Their thinner form certainly helped with their Agility and the Intelligence took a big step as well. What really got Doyle’s attention though was the simple weight of all the stats together.

Compared to other monsters in the same cost band they absolutely crushed. Sure, his kobolds are honestly just toxic with the current stat totals, but their size seemed to limit them as apparently some physics still applied. The myconids, on the other hand, had the size and mass to pull it off. In fact, when Doyle got a sense for them, the mushmen were heavy. Though that did get him thinking about his kobolds.

Like, Seriously, the level 11 kobolds on floor eight have almost three digits in their Agility and they played like clowns against Jim and his team. Doyle could understand not being able to use their bows all that well. It doesn’t matter how agile you are as despite how it looked, reality hadn’t actually turned into a video game. That means being agile didn’t automatically make you accurate.

It all came back to skills if he was to be honest. His kobolds only had the heavy bash skill and that was more of a Strength skill. So sure, his kobolds had some strength, but that was in the low 30s at the same level. What Doyle needed was a way to give his monsters a better skill load out. After all, a natural monster wouldn’t just have a small number of skills. They would be filling their load out.

Even the myconids haven’t filled up the five skills. After checking the other monsters, Doyle only found one other monster with four skills and that was his grassen goats. Though the udoroot technically surpassed this because of their bag of telepathic skills. Not that Doyle was going to count that or else his patterns would make him look like he was constantly switching classes.

Still, Doyle needed an answer to skills. The goats should be fine, they might only have a charge skill, but simple physical attacks are easy enough leverage and they have over double the Strength of a similarly leveled kobold. After looking through his options, though, nothing jumps out.

Maybe his still unbought ability to name things would be a solution? But that wasn’t likely to do enough. So, for the moment, the only way he had to change skills around was evolving them into a new variant. Still, he knew it was possible to change a monster’s stats without changing the monster. He even had an example of this from when the system pulled a kobold variant out of its database that had the animal handling skill.

Akhier

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