The Runic Alchemist

Damian used the prebuilt steel pillars as a sort of cage for the two big runic steel disks of his runic lift. Having slight hatches to interlock them and using oil to lessen the friction had made the ride up and down much smoother and without any imbalance, no matter at what part of the disk weight was more or less.

"You understand how it works, right?" Damian asked the bearded old attendant. "I want you to test it for the whole day—see if there is anything wrong with it before we use it for everyone. Keep Jacob with you—he will help you in case something goes wrong."

Then Damian turned towards the towering chubby golem. "Save him if he is in danger of getting an injury. Keep watch over the lift. If it malfunctions, help him. Okay?"

The golem moved his hand up and down. That was the gesture Damian had taught him to say ’Yes’. Nodding at the man and golem, Damian returned back to his lab and made ten new hexagonal waygate steel structures—unlike the ones he had made for the Sanctuary’s use, these were lower in quality with less use of steel. They just needed to work 40 to 60 times—20 to 30 days if used once a day to send people to the dungeon and get them back. A proper exploration would take days or even months, but since most of the demons needed the meat of an edible monster more than anything else, he shouldn’t expect more than a few floors of each dungeon’s information.

The demons already had 12 dungeons on the island, but after all these years all the capable fighters must have already been in them. If even one person of the party dies, the dungeon plane is permanently fixed for them—meaning the monsters they killed will not respawn. It was hard to go far without losing someone if the team was not elite and the dungeon was hard to deal with. Such small teams can’t get enough food for the whole island. Especially when each time they have to go farther and farther up in the dungeon to get the good edible monsters.

Having ten new dungeons will give all low-level warriors a chance to collect all the monsters they could, even if some of them died. Damian didn’t want poor, desperate demons to die, but life was hard and survival was an essential part of it. He wasn’t responsible for each and every person in this world—he was already doing more than any other person had done for the issue at hand. He would give them an opportunity—it was their job to use that and survive as best as they could.

Damian finished making the ten waygates with a steel stand attached to their base for longevity and gathering environment mana faster. Unlike his waygates that would be installed in Sanctuary soon, these he had to be extra careful with. They were locked to specific dungeons, first of all. But the issue was activating it—only the demon queen was capable enough to do that. Expecting her to activate ten waygates every day was not very realistic. The environment mana-gathering feature with the added extra surface for more efficiency should at least get charged with 200,000 points worth of mana in 24 to 30 hours if left untouched. But with people giving it their mana constantly with one or two mana threads—100 first-rankers could do it in less than 10 hours. For second-rankers, that time and number would be even less.

With one simple lever, Damian could design it to get activated. But that would make security a major issue—so he could just add the specific section on the side of the waygate where the demon queen could use her mana to build the connection between the steel waygate and the target location. The target would be fixed, but the mana required for it would not be gathered from the environment.