A Dungeon’s Survival

Connie

As much as I wanted to jump straight into hunting down an error, there were other things that demanded my attention in the aftermath of the scouting group's attempt to interrogate us, namely the alchemical supplies they'd brought Archie. After all my loyal alchemist had just gone through for my sake, I at least wanted to make sure the rewards his efforts had earned us were as prepared for him as I could get them by the time the magical effect he was under wore off. For that reason, I wasted little time in absorbing the plants the adventurers had brought us.

[You have absorbed 20 Bitterwarts! Bitterwarts have been unlocked as an environmental feature for you.]

[You have absorbed 20 Migraine Fungi! Migraine Fungi have been unlocked as an environmental feature for you.]

[You have absorbed 20 Decaying Water Moss! Decaying Water Moss has been unlocked as an environmental feature for you.]

[You have absorbed 20 Bewitching Petunias! Bewitching Petunias have been unlocked as an environmental feature for you.]

As soon as the resources had been absorbed, I summoned samples of each variety. From there, I passed them off to Rose in the farm room so that she could begin her initial attempts at propagating them. Due to their unique natures and the potency of the plants, I doubted growing them would end up being easy, but if nothing else, I was at least able to take comfort in knowing that the process had begun. That did, however, leave me wondering how exactly I was supposed to handle the last of my new unlocks.

[You have absorbed 20 Mandrakes! Mandrakes have been unlocked as a monster for you.]

While they, much like the rest of the flora the adventurers had brought, were rare and valuable alchemical ingredients, Mandrakes were a bit different from the rest in one important way. Unlike the others, they classified as monsters. That unfortunately meant growing them opposed to summoning them wasn't going to be an option. Then, there was the other complication that brought with it.

[Mandrake

Level: 1

Cost: 20 DP

Health: 25 (55)

Stamina: 15 (45)

Mana: 150 (210), 0

Stats: FORT 5 (11), VIT 10 (17), STR 2 (9), END 3 (9), SOUL 15 (21), MIND 5 (11), WILL 15 (22), COM 20 (26), DEX 5 (11)

Skills: None

Abilities: Mana Roots, Bloody Mana Capacity, Soul Shriek

Description: A humanoid plant monster that grows from the blood of mortals and is highly sought after as an alchemical ingredient. The more blood it is nourished with, the more potent it becomes. While normally docile, it will unleash a scream that damages the souls of anything nearby when uprooted from the ground.

Upgrades: Professional Amateur (+1 to every stat), A Walk in the Park (+5% to DEX and WILL), Too Close for Comfort (+1 to every stat), Deathtrap (+1% to every stat), Forceful Eviction (+1 to STR), Toxic (+1 to VIT), Kill Zone (+1 to every stat), Mass Grave (+1 to every stat), Raid (+1 to every stat), Great Raid (+1 to every stat), Generalist (+1% to every stat), Grand Raid (+1% to every stat)]

They, much like my Bloodthorn Vines, required mortal blood to flourish, but whereas my other monster species only relied on the substance to temporarily empower themselves in a fight, Mandrakes seemed to have a more long-term need for the stuff, as was evident from one of their abilities.

[Ability: Bloody Mana Capacity

Description: By absorbing mortal blood, you can forge a secondary mana pool.

Effect: You can process the lingering SOUL from mortal blood into a secondary mana pool. The higher the SOUL of the mortal whose blood you consume, the more you can get out of it. As your secondary mana pool grows in size, the costs of growing it further also increase.]

Between the ability and the monster's description, I felt reasonably confident that their access to blood would also impact their usefulness as alchemical ingredients. I wasn't sure yet how important that would end up being, but considering how low my Dungeon's recent death rate had been, I feared it was going to be a problem. It was enough to make me weigh the creature's merits against those of its abilities. Aspect Extraction was always an option, after all, and even if its Mana Roots ability was detrimental, I could think of plenty of uses for its other two abilities on different monsters.

Sadly, though, as amazing as the benefits could've been, converting the Mandrakes into an aspect wasn't something I was willing to do, not after everything Archie had gone through to get them for us. They were his well-earned rewards, and I wasn't about to deprive him of them. There was also my upcoming need to implement my Lizard Men and a plant monster of some kind into my Dungeon to think about. It was a lot to consider, and the more I thought about it, the more overwhelming it all seemed.

The Mandrakes represented a lot of potential, but tapping into it wasn't going to be easy. Similarly to the preparation I was concerned they'd require to be useful to Archie's potion making, I foresaw issues with using them to solve my monster shortage issue. I undeniably needed a new plant monster soon to prevent delvers from getting suspicious about my true nature, and the Mandrakes, in theory, could be that monster. The problem was that, if I were to suddenly start using them after this, the scouting group was likely to get suspicious.

Using them openly or not doing so, it was a decision I was going to need to make eventually, but I figured I could afford to put that problem off for the time being. As usual, I had too many things requiring my attention at once, and that wasn't among the most pressing. Neither was artificially improving their growth. I was still going to need to figure both things out eventually, though, so rather than dwelling on it, I decided to finish reading up on the the new monster species and move on. That way, I figured, I could start preparing for the countless experiments that were to come while I dealt with the stuff that was more immediately important.

[Ability: Mana Roots

Description: You naturally draw mana in from the soil around you through your roots. This is the only way you can restore mana.

Effect: Your roots naturally draw in mana from the soil. The rate at which you can refill your mana pool through this method is based on your (COM) and the amount of mana the ground around you is saturated with. You are incapable of restoring mana through any other natural means.]

[Ability: Soul Shriek

Cost: 1% MP/second

Description: You imbue a scream with magic that damages the souls of anything nearby.

Effect: You release a wave of soul magic around you through a scream. It deals a base magic damage equal to your expended mana x 0.1 x (SOUL). The further away a target is, the less damage they take. The range of this ability is dependent on your WILL.]

I wonder if I could collect blood and store it somehow, I mused as a final consideration before moving on.

Even if, with the concerning exception of those daily sacrifices that unknown group had been carrying out, there wasn't much mortal death taking place in my Dungeon, people were still fighting and getting injured in it on a daily basis. There was nothing stopping me from digging small holes in the ground in areas that saw more action and just hoping people bled into them. I wasn't sure how well that would work or even if it was a good idea, but it was something to consider and potentially workshop when I got a chance. I added it to my ever-growing list of things to get around to eventually. As for the time being, however, I had System errors to hunt.

* * *

The effect of the powder Lawrence had used on Archie ended up taking what I roughly estimated to be an hour to wear off. When it did, however, my loyal alchemist had been a mess of conflicting emotions. There was remorse for his perceived failings, frustration at the ordeal we'd just gone through, and even a sense of betrayal from the apprentice alchemist he'd grown attached to through the reading of his journal. There was another emotion radiating from him, though, and it was strong enough to eclipse all others: excitement.

“Mistress,” he'd hesitantly spoken up once he'd regained the ability to, “the ingredients, were they truly all there?”

I barely managed to explain in full what I'd done with the new plants before he bolted for the farm room. It was enough to fill me with a sense of relief. I'd been worried the interrogation would stick with him and potentially have lasting consequences. Fortunately, those worries seemed to have been unfounded. So long as he stood to gain in the field of alchemy, he'd be fine, at least mentally.

[Sir Archibald II (Level 6) has died!]

Not even a handful of minutes later, an explosion echoed from his lab and I was met with a death notification.

Well, that was fast.

It'd been a while since he last blew himself up, but considering the new ingredients he had to work with, I felt as though I should've seen it coming. The plants were supposedly more advanced alchemical reagents that what he was used to working with. I wasn't entirely sure what all that meant, but it seemed them being more volatile was at least part of it. I could only roll my metaphorical eyes at his antics. Something told me things would start getting a bit noisier around here.

Hey Loot, I called out, could you drag Archie's corpse to Stein for me? Tell him to focus on extracting memories of him using Spore Wave from it.

“It will be done,” the darkness hissed back.

There was no use letting his brain go to waste. It wasn't as though it would affect Archie once I resummoned him, and the alternative was just to reabsorb his body in full. This way, his accidental death would at least benefit the Dungeon as a whole.

Now, where was I? I thought as I turned my attention back to the matter at hand.

I hadn't spent the rest of the time it took Archie to come back to himself idle. I'd been carefully considering how I wanted to proceed with triggering a System error. In the end, I'd come to a few conclusions.

From my experience, System errors tended to come about when I did things that caused the System to contradict itself. Be it by earning a reward on a monster that couldn't receive it or by causing interactions that wouldn't occur under normal circumstances, errors only seemed to appear when pushing the bounds of what a Dungeon Core could usually be expected to do. Furthermore, looking back, I'd been able to pinpoint three different types of scenarios that seemed to lead the System to spitting out errors.

First up were the errors caused by the flaws in the System's logic. These included things like the, “Loraine was here,” exception and how the System's seemed to struggle integrating me as a Dungeon Core when I'd first come to this world. By far, when the System ran into one of these hiccups, it almost always seemed to result in it spewing out errors more consistently than anything else.

Because of that, I'd initially considered it to be my best bet. After some more careful consideration, though, I'd soon realized it was far less viable of an option than I'd initially thought, all for a single reason. I didn't actually know enough about the System to be able to predict where its logistical blind spots were. Because of that, I couldn't rely on them.

From there, the second type of scenario began seeming like the way to go. There was a single set of circumstances that had come up on multiple occasions, and each time they did, it had resulted in a lingering error, the kind both Seven and Twelve had gone out of their way to fix for me. It was when I triggered an achievement that tried to reward a monster with something they couldn't receive, be it Archie already having the Alchemy skill or a Crystal Puffer not under my control forming a symbiotic relationship with my Bloodthorn Vines. It was the most reliable situation to artificially reproduce. There was just one problem: it was too predictable of a method.

Ordinarily, that would've been a good thing. The issue was, I no longer had access to the Fairy Council's archives of knowledge and, by extension, the records of achievements Dungeons could unlock. I'd been making do without that information so far, but for something like this, it was necessary. There was just too much precise planning and foreknowledge needed to make it work.

Technically, I still could've made a few educated guesses in an attempt to brute force it, but the time and effort that would have taken would've been significant. I wasn't beyond resorting to that if I needed to. As things stood, though, I couldn't justify the effort, not when the last set of circumstances I could try to replicate were more readily accessible to me anyway. For most other Dungeons, it wouldn't have been possible, but for better or for worse, I was no ordinary Dungeon Core.