Next morning, it is safe to say the town noticed the new instances on the sixth floor. Jim was thankful that he had been burning the midnight oil last night after the delve and caught it. That allowed him to get ahead of it and come up with some sort of story.
Not that the story was all that good. Jim had basically blamed his party reaching the tenth floor on there being new instances available. Maybe somebody in the Guild hierarchy knew how it worked, but Jim wasn’t one of them, so for now, the excuse would work.
Good thing no one really cared what the story was as long as there was one. After all, they were too busy delving the sixth floor to care. Jim saw a collapse of the meat market coming soon. A thing that Jim was actually happy about. Sure, the town was making a ton of coins off of all the steak flowing through. However, Jim would prefer people have food over making a little more money.
And they would certainly have food. Jim hadn’t really considered how much food a dungeon could output. Sure, it wasn’t hard to understand a dungeon feeding a town and he had expected it. This, however? Even with the current output, they were well on track to provide at least one meal a day to everyone in this cluster of settlements. He could hardly imagine what it would be like later on once the dungeon is bigger and there are more teams to farm food in it.
Down in the dungeon, Doyle is actually less prepared than Jim was for the sudden increase in delvers. There had always been a bit of a line, but never more than a handful of teams at a time. And that was when only one team could be on the floor at a time.
What Doyle had missed was that the line never went down. There were a ton of people in town at any point in time that were waiting to delve. They just only came out once it was close to their turn.
In fact, with the double digit instances, more people would be streaming into town over the next week. Most of the nearby areas had multiple farming teams, but they only kept a couple in the town at any point in time. There just wasn’t a reason to have them all be there. Another thing that would be happening is more actual delvers.
Before, the sixth floor was basically a bottleneck for people that wanted to do a proper delve. Not only because you had to wait in line for most of the day, but also because the need for food meant they couldn’t just leave drops behind. So with how much food was being dropped on the sixth floor, most teams ended up with full bags before they even completed the sixth floor, let alone get to any of the deeper floors.
Oh sure, there was more than one team who didn’t bother with that kind of thing. Some even entered while fully loaded down with their only goal being of racing ahead of the Wolf’s Rest natives. They’re dead though. Not to say that the sixth floor farmers don’t die, they do.
It is just that the reason Jim and Ace’s teams manage to get so deep is they’re heads and shoulders above everyone else in power. Maybe their levels weren’t massively higher, but their paths were of a higher quality. That whole strength through adversity sort of thing. Oh, and using the fact they got ahead to get even further ahead.
After all, if you’re stronger, you can get into more dangerous situations which lead to stronger paths and so on. Just the fact that everyone from the inner circle of Wolf’s Rest had made it to the eighth floor already meant that they had a head start in delving related paths. And the ones who were collecting the ore from the ninth floor? Well, they’re the cream of the crop, only beaten out by Jim and Ace’s teams.
However, by this point, Ace’s team was starting to fall behind as Ace was finding it hard getting enough time in the dungeon. Not that Ace wasn’t growing in other ways, it is just that diplomacy and organization aren’t quite as important as personal power at the moment. The only upside is this difference has more to do with levels instead of a weaker foundation. If anything, Ace and his team would likely pull ahead once they realize the tenth floor was the boss floor as they had worked more on their skill levels.
Though speaking of levels, Doyle got a small surprise even before Jim and his team re-entered to face the tenth floor again.
Level goes from 5 to 6, Strength goes from 56 to 64, Agility goes from 76 to 92, Constitution goes from 77 to 87, Intelligence goes from 64 to 74, Wisdom goes from 128 to 152, Presence goes from 59 to 67, Destiny goes from 111 to 124, Karma goes from 111 to 138, Luck goes from 86 to 103}
It seems that the sudden influx of delvers on the sixth floor was enough to push him over the tipping point. Not unreasonable seeing as more people were going through in a few hours than normally went through in multiple days. Though what really caught his attention was his new Wisdom score.
At the moment, Doyle was only using 95 points to automate things. That meant he had six more floors he could automate, enough to fully automate all floors up to the tenth if he wanted to. He doesn’t, but the option was there.
In fact, the only reason he denies the idea of automating the floors was that he wouldn’t have the Wisdom left to automate the eleventh floor. In theory, it should take a while for people to get there regularly. However, with how he has the shortcuts set up, all it would take is a few managing to beat the tenth floor for it to potentially get crowded.
So with that in mind, he only automates the seventh and eighth floor for now. Both floors that would likely be seeing a ton of new delvers in the near future. This would be especially true once they find out about the ore veins on the ninth floor. The system hadn’t added more ore back into the ground after all. Of course, who knows what might happen in the future, but for now the dungeon was the only reasonable place to get metal.
What happened to the massive amounts of metal things found in towns? Stuff like vehicles, tools, and soda cans? Yeah, that stuff was sort of not lasting. Metals which were supposed to be rust proof were rusting and the stuff that wasn’t rust proof? You need to refer to it in the past tense.
The wood and concrete structures were surviving so much better. It was sort of ironic, though also scared the people as there weren’t any skyscraper style buildings nearby. Just considering how unsafe those things must be now was horrifying.
Why were the various metals going bad so fast? The same reason everything pre-system was breaking down except with a twist. Wood is wood, but metal? It is all alloys or coated in something. Except that didn’t work for the pre-system stuff.
Was alloys a dead science now? Of course not, but they were going to have to make it with magically infused metals. Without it, the magically infused elements would simply slip in between the metals and tear it apart. Same with stuff like how cars where they are painted to prevent rust. That doesn’t work when magical water basically just leaks through the paint and rusts the metal at an accelerated pace. Fresh chapters posted on novęlfire.net
Oh, but plastics were likely dead for at least a little while. Not because they weren’t possible. Rather, the current supply of oil and petroleum was all going to break down quickly and you need very specific conditions to have it form. That and time, a lot of time.
All of that to say, Doyle’s dungeon was the only reasonable source of metal at the moment. Nevermind the fact it was the only source of magically infused metal. Though that specification wouldn’t exactly mean much within a decade. Rather, by then, the ore wouldn’t even be considered magical in the same way metal isn’t considered electrically charged when grounded.
Sure, everything has electrons, but it is only once there is an imbalance that things become charged. In the same way, magic will be everywhere and only once there is enough of it in something will it truly be seen as magical. Any pre-system artifacts that survived a few decades likely will end up being seen as uniquely unmagical.
Of course, that is only for Doyle’s early floors. Not only will he soon enough have mithril kicking about, but even normal metals spawned on a deeper floor will inherently have a higher concentration of magic. Sure, leave normal metal in a lower magic environment and it will equalize, but if you craft something with it before then? That’s when you get some good stuff. You can think of the magic already in the metal as raising the cap on what can be done to it while crafting.
All that will have to wait for later, though. Right now, the town has only just managed to get to the tenth floor. Though speaking of which, Jim and his team have just reached the tenth floor for the second time. There was a bunch of paperwork which needed to be done, but Jim was able to delegate some of it to the off-world guild officials that were there to help him.
After all, the Guild of all places knows how important it is for an organization to have powerful people in charge. Their main backer being a True Immortal is the only reason they’re a multidimensional juggernaut. A thing that is normally restricted to churches.
So there Jim and his team are, back at the first carved out section of the tunnel which dips down into a marshy area. This time, though, they brought ropes with them to help climb down. Jeremy and his wife had even whipped up some makeshift repelling gear. The only problem being the fact they didn’t really have a chance to practice with the stuff.
Still, it was simple enough to understand and soon the party touched down on some not so solid ground. It is at this point they find signs of the myconids. There are half decayed mushroom huts gathered on the opposite wall of the pit. Not that they take much from that. After all, a dungeon can just as easily make a decayed hut as it can a pristine castle.
Though it is at this point that they are faced with the challenge of climbing back up. Jim stares up and shakes his head. “This is going to be a problem.”
Jeremy shrugs, “I can climb it and attach the rope. That or someone can magic the rope up there, though while I’m okay with using magic to untie the rope, I’m not sure I trust it to tie it in the first place.”
Jim shakes his head again, “Not about that. All of us could easily climb up this cliff if given enough time. My problem is if we have to retreat. Say someone is injured, how are we going to manage to get them across this?”
Kellinger nods, “That would be a problem. Plus, if we leave something here to assist with that later, what about when we are going to beat the floor completely? Are we just going to let the dungeon take its due? Plus, how many pits are there? We need a better method.”
Kelly sighs, “I bet if we were stronger this wouldn’t be a problem. Whether that is with magic or might. As a more magical type, all I can think of is the classic fantasy spell, feather fall. A simple spell to cushion your fall. Though I’m sure that with enough Strength someone could literally make their own handholds and climb down with ease.”
Jim, “Now the question is, should we continue right now or wait until we have a solution?”
Bill snorts, “We’ve already been turned back by these cliffs once. We should at least give it a try while we’re here.”