Chapter 77: How Not to Manage a Dungeon
Thank goodness Aria came home before all of that!
As Freya made her way through the decorated corridors of her dungeon, she knew perfectly well that she would have gone completely insane at the thought of not getting any answers, and might even have let herself be entirely swallowed up by her own sin, greed.
A shiver ran through her at the thought, as she pictured herself again in the deplorable state she’d been in only minutes earlier.
How strong was my desire in that moment for me to end up like that? And how far can this skill push me into situations like that one? Would I have lost myself in greed? Would I have become some kind of husk of it, no longer making a single decision through reason but only through avarice? What would have happened if Aria hadn’t been there to bring my mind back?
She had always understood that the skill was as dangerous as it was effective, but she hadn’t imagined it to quite that extent.
She shook her head from side to side to pull herself together.
At least it served as a reminder. A reminder that for now, I’m nothing but a puppet. Greed’s puppet, and the system’s too.
[ ... ]
"What, an ellipsis?! If you wanted me to trust you, you should have given me a skill without strings attached!"
This time there wasn’t even an ellipsis, just Freya waiting there and staring into empty air, before letting out a sigh and resuming her walk.
And that pathing of mana, is it—
The thought was crushed all at once by a far more recent memory, that of the warmth of Aria’s lips against her own, and Freya’s cheeks went red instantly as she thought back on it, the memory dragging along with it the exact words the demon had spoken right afterward.
"For the moment, let your mind rest by doing something else."
Right! Then let’s do something else!
She told herself this while looking over the buildings she had just unlocked, her cheeks still every bit as red, no longer entirely sure whether she was hunting for an occupation to avoid thinking about Quantimana or simply to recover from the still-fresh memory of those lips against hers.
First off, we have a wood generator and an iron generator! Exactly what we needed, finally!
Because all this time Freya had been buying iron from the shop to restock, and as for wood, she had simply been going up to the surface to fetch it, though she knew full well that neither method was truly sustainable, the first only working as long as her mana stayed capped at ten thousand, and the second only up to a point since Freya absolutely did not want to strip the beautiful forest sitting right above her home.
After all, I don’t have self-sabotaging tendencies like those damned ungrateful children of Nymeria!
Next came the new branch of buildings, namely the Nursery followed by the entire education chain.
Which means the Mycofoxes will finally be able to reproduce! Without me having to summon more and more of them!
That’s definitely one of the best upgrades since the very beginning~!
On top of that, from what she’d understood, they would learn and train entirely on their own in whatever domain they chose, without her having to lift a finger.
Aaaah~ Definitely a pleasure~!
"Speaking of which, what exactly is universal knowledge, System?"
[ Universal knowledge is that which is given to Mycofoxes as a baseline, and that which is acquired by all of them over the course of upgrades and time. ]
"So that means the more my dungeon grows, and the Mycofoxes along with it, the more universal knowledge grows too?"
[ Yes. ]
"But then future generations will learn better knowledge, or at least more complete knowledge, than the ones before them?"
[ Yes. As on your world of origin, and on every other world besides. Was that not precisely the point of a society? Well, I presume. ]
"A-a-are you making fun of me right now? Fine, my question wasn’t especially intelligent, but aren’t you supposed to be a neutral and entirely robotic entity? Don’t stray too far from your role, you overgrown calculator!"
She said this thoroughly offended at having been mocked by a system.
[ ... ]
...
"Anyway..."
She reached the Heart chamber and sat down on her throne, while the leech promptly turned up to start siphoning off her mana.
There were also the burrow complexes and the reactor, but none of that really mattered to her anymore, because she had a fairly good idea of what Mycofox self-reproduction and self-education actually implied.
A new species!
At any rate that was what she was hoping for with all her heart, so she didn’t waste another second.
"System, raise the Summons category to level five, please."
[ Spend 2,000 mana points on upgrading the Summons category to Level 5? ]
"Yes~!"
[ You have unlocked five new summons! ]
[ Nurse Mycofox — Level 1 (0/3) — Rank B — Cost: 200 mana ] Assists births at the Nursery and watches over the newborns. Can recognize a distressed pup by ear before ever laying eyes on it.
[ Educator Mycofox — Level 1 (0/3) — Rank C — Cost: 100 mana ] Teaches the fundamentals of universal knowledge to young Mycofoxes at the Universal School. Will repeat himself as many times as it takes, without ever losing his temper.
[ Instructor Mycofox — Level 1 (0/3) — Rank B — Cost: 200 mana ] Delivers advanced universal knowledge at the Academy. Holds that a student who doesn’t understand is a student who was badly taught.
[ Professor Mycofox — Level 1 (0/3) — Rank B — Cost: 200 mana ] Oversees Mycofox specialization at the University. Capable of talking about a single subject for hours without ever noticing the room has emptied.
[ Reactor Technician Mycofox — Level 1 (0/5) — Rank A — Cost: 500 mana ] Monitors and regulates the Mana Proliferation Reactor. Never takes his eyes off his post, and does not appreciate being asked to.
[ Summon count increased! ]
[ Soldier Mycofox: limit raised to 20 units. ]
[ Worker Mycofox: limit raised to 20 units. ]
[ System Note: Given the gender imbalance among Mycofoxes, the system will intervene to correct it by prioritizing the summoning of Mycofoxes of the minority sex. ]
Ohhh... so no new species...? Maybe next time, I hope...
As usual, aside from the light-hearted Mycofox descriptions that made her laugh every single time, and that closing note which was clearly setting up the dungeon’s demographic growth by outright cheating on the odds of pulling a female Mycofox, there was nothing particularly interesting in these notifications.
Well, there was something, but not much to build on given that these were simply the summons tied to the buildings she’d already discovered, and not a new species.
Which suited her just fine as it was....
..or not.
But she did her best to swallow her disappointment and move on to the next topic. Next, her thoughts turned to the mana she’d spent upgrading the categories, which had left her with only three thousand points.
So, what now?
Then she remembered she also had the points she had never bothered collecting from the shop, from the sale of her thirty mithrite.
She opened it.
[ You have sold all of your mithrite. Receive 1,800 mana points? ]
"Yes~~"
She was pleased to get mana points back this way, but she had nonetheless convinced herself of one thing since hitting her mana ceiling, namely that selling limited resources on the inter-dungeon shop was the height of stupidity.
It was simply rushing, wanting more in the moment, when those resources could have served her plans perfectly well, exactly like the trade deals she’d granted her two associates up in the human city, or something along those lines.
Resources which, once used or sold, would never come back, whereas her mana would always replenish itself.
So that was the very last time she’d be receiving a notification of that sort for mithrite.
So let’s make the most of it~~! Now, how am I going to use my precious four thousand eight hundred mana points~~?
Then something clicked in her mind, in the middle of all that.
Hold on... hold on... hold on...
She tried to find some way of staying in denial, something that would prove her wrong, that her reasoning was flawed somewhere, but everything led inescapably to the same conclusion.
She had been stupid. Spectacularly stupid, in fact.
When she could very easily have made use of the shop for something other than emptying it of whatever caught her eye now and then over these past two weeks.
I could absolutely have bought a resource and resold it at the same price, or slightly cheaper, so my mana would never have stagnated, couldn’t I?!
"System, please! System, tell me that loophole doesn’t exist, that you built in a countermeasure to block that kind of exploit! That I’m not the single most idiotic Dungeon Lord among all the idiots! Please!"
[ The system has no flaws. ]
"So you’re implying it isn’t possible?"
[ No. It is. ]
"Then what exactly are you implying?"
[ That there are merely hosts insufficiently developed to exploit it to its full potential. ]
She swatted the notification away with the back of her hand before she’d even finished reading it, breathing out to herself, then turned her head toward the bee still clamped onto her arm and carrying on with its thoroughly indifferent bzzz~bzzz~bzzz~~.
Then her eyes drifted to the window still hanging in her field of vision.
[ 4,800 / 50,000 ]
She looked at that window a moment, thinking about everything she still had to build, about a skill that was patiently waiting on her slightest mistake to swallow her whole, about a robotic colleague strangely gifted at passive aggression, about a particularly clingy employee who refused to let go of her arm, and on top of all that about the fact that she had just lost her elite Dungeon Lord status in the space of a few hours.
Freya sighed.
There was no point dwelling on it.
She had made a mistake. So what? She’d made plenty before, and she would probably make plenty more.
Besides...
No one knew about this one.
"Hehe~ I can make a few mistakes here and there. It’s not like anyone knows, anyway~"
With that thought, Freya promptly put the matter out of her mind and returned to her usual self.
Now then, what should she build next?