An hour after I had passed through the gate, after killing almost five hundred giant insect monsters, and even more smaller insects, I finally stopped pushing forward, and started to retreat. I might not be physically exhausted, but it was not true from a mental perspective.
But, being under constant siege by monsters had grown exhausting despite the relative tedium.
I wondered if it was an ordinary problem, or if it was what happened to a dungeon that had been left unattended for a long time — Eleanor explicitly mentioned that she wasn't coming down to the fourth floor to cleanse.
However, the reason didn't matter in the short term. Either way, it meant that I had to delay my plans to move my forge into the fourth floor. I might have to spend an even longer time than I had expected.
Still, even as I retreated back to the gate, I wasn't feeling defeated. The incursion might have been exhausting, but it was also profitable. I was holding almost a dozen Rare skills, and even more Uncommon ones — unfortunately, all of them were either unusable for me or another copy of Nurture.
Then, there was the other, even more concrete benefit.
[+2 Vitality, +2 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +1 Essence]
And, they were not the only discoveries. Some of the rocks I touched reacted to my Forge talent. They contained iron. It wasn't dense enough to make it worth my while to collect it. Even the richest rock had an iron content of barely more than five percent, which meant that collecting and processing them would have taken a lot of time even if I wasn't attacked by monsters every second.
The trick with the carts was far more efficient. Still, it was always pleasant to have an alternative path. Also, it was convenient enough that I didn't need to go back to the forge or destroy a part of my weapon to forge a large bucket, bringing water and soil samples together.
The main objective was to test it for forging, to see whether it could be used for quenching the weapons I forged to cool down, freeing me from the need to use mana to compensate. But, that was not the only purpose I had in mind for it.
I wanted to test its effect on Nurture as well, which was why I didn't scoop just water, but also the mulch from the bottom. Considering how the other materials worked, it was worth a try.
It was not a suggestion from my skill that led me to that decision, but my common sense. Well, that, and the memory of my considerable success, using silver and gold to push my Forge skill higher. There was no reason it wouldn't work on Nurture.
It wasn't the first experiment I did. I had already tried that with a half-dead cutting, but the constant corrosion effect had destroyed it before I could even start my experiment. Luckily, it didn't affect flesh.
"Now, let's try it," I muttered even as I dug a small pit, and put a palm-full of mulch and water. Then, I followed up by putting another cutting, ready to fill it with Health through Nurture.
"Alright. Even that's too much," I muttered. This time, I decided to reverse the direction slightly. I put another cutting into the ground and flooded it with Health until it started showing signs of growth.
[Nurture (Uncommon) 5 - 6]
Once again, a wasteful burst, barely able to turn the cutting into a sapling. But that was the fate of experimenting. I reached into my pocket, ready to take a concentrated food pill … only to find they had been already destroyed by the corrosive attacks. "Alright, that was an oversight," I muttered. I hadn't expected it to work that way.
The leather pouch survived, but the signs of degradation were still obvious.
However, the map I created had been destroyed as well.
Luckily, my memory was still fresh, and I was confident I could go back without being touched, or I would have been in big, big trouble.
It looked like moving to the fourth floor wouldn't have been as easy as I had expected.
However, without the ability to refresh my Health, I needed to stop my plans of pushing Nurture to its limit. "One last experiment," I muttered even as I took a drop of water, and put it in the roots. The small sapling had immediately started wilting.
I put my hand to its surface. A flood of Health counteracted the corrosion. When it ended, the sapling was slightly taller. Not enough to be worth … in terms of growth.
[Nurture (Uncommon) 6 - 9]
Increasing the skill was a far more valuable benefit. "A note, bring a lot of food to replenish health tomorrow," I said, curious about how far I could push Nurture here, and whether it could grow a small woodland for me to actually benefit from it.
Also, it was finally nice to discover a trick to improve Nurture. Disseminating it alone would solve a lot of problems Farmers faced. I just needed to find a way to spread that without ending up being assassinated.
Or, one that would trigger a bloody labor dispute. Empowering workers and lower classes historically had been a bloody affair, and that was before the people with power had the ability to cut metal and summon lightning.
No, it required a lot of finesse.
"I know what I will be experimenting on tonight," I said. I had turned the bucket into an anti-corrosion metal, but I made sure to cover it with a more ordinary alloy.
From outside, it looked like an ordinary water can, which meant, no one would pay attention to it. It was important. While bringing some water samples was not wrong, it would also reveal that I had gone deep enough to reach the fourth floor.
I still stopped by my forge and buried it with a layer of dirt to keep its presence a secret, and left my other set there, including my spear. However, while I did that, I still broke a thick stick of wood and roughly shaped it until the System started to treat it as a spear.
Fleeting Step would be useful for getting out of the dungeon.
Running full speed without slowing down, it didn't take long for me to reach the gate to the first floor. Just to be on the safe side, I spent ten minutes hunting, collecting enough broken shells to fill the cart, enough not to be suspicious.
"It's such a pity," I muttered even as I examined the broken shells. I would have received more than twenty gold for them if they were not broken. However, I didn't have the ability to remove them without causing damage. Even if I had, carefully removing it would have been too challenging.
"What if I create a small device for it," I muttered, my mind already working on how to do it. The skill didn't have any such plan, because it didn't include any device with moving parts, but as long as I come up with a working design, it should be doable to make a hand-powered device, maybe one with a simple crank and multiple blades…
On the way back, I chatted with the guards. When I arrived back at my temporary residence, however, I didn't start playing with it. While I had a general idea, I didn't know how long it would take to create a working copy.
As much as I was tempted, pushing Nurture to the next stage was a better idea.
I once again picked three pots, one with an herb from the dungeon, and two others. While I made the preparations, I ate a quick meal, which replenished my Health, even faster than I had been used to. Still, it took time.
The first result from the experiment, using the water from the fourth floor made the dungeon herb react. That alone was an interesting output, showing that it was possible to grow those plants outside the dungeon.
Whether it was worth the effort was a completely different thing. The empirical result was … underwhelming. Meanwhile, even a small drop of it had been enough to kill the other two plants, and Nurture was not enough to save them.
"Progress," I said still. In the next step, I used some of the materials I had prepared for forging, mixing them with a drop of swamp water. I didn't have to work hard or think, because my experiment methodology was essentially a rough version of my anti-corrosion material experiment.
Some of them, I even flooded with my mana to see if it helped. That, it didn't. I continued to experiment.
Was it absurd to try and make a fertilizer almost the same way I tried to prepare an alloy? It certainly should have been … but an hour into the experiment, I was looking at an empty water bottle and a dozen herbs with various states of growth, which disagreed with the absurdity of my methodology.
What I had managed to make was more of a poison than a fertilizer. It was certainly not worth the effort from any productivity angle.
But, from a System enhancement angle, it was a completely different story.
[Nurture (Uncommon) - 34]
Amusingly, I had a feeling that what really improved the skill was not the growth aspect, but the poison aspect, while curing it pushed the skill higher. Unfortunately, the water I had brought with me was gone, preventing me from experimenting further.
I needed to return to the fourth floor for more material first.
Luckily, I had a lot of other things to do … including my first prototype of a shell removal machine.