[D'sP] Plant Growth - Chapter 431

Doyle stared down at a fox. ‘Huh.’

The fox is using the now familiar Wind Blade and Extend Edge skill combo, but there is something different. Though not in the way he wants. Somehow, this fox managed to also extend the blade. It was at the cost of the two skills separating at the physical level.

Days later, another fox shows an interesting result. This one even has a difference that at least didn’t go in the wrong direction. Except, the shape of the blade became low poly, like something from an old computer game. Doyle wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad change, but decided that he wanted to focus on making the blades look like natural claws.

And so on and so forth. Doyle keeps spawning in level one foxes and testing them. There are some that he keeps around for further testing, like the one with low poly blades. However, it very much felt like rerolling a character’s stats to get the perfect spread. Sure, you can generally boost stuff later, but it won’t be perfect.

Fox after fox, and yet they don’t blur together. Doyle pauses many foxes in and wonders about that. Pre-apocalypse he had sorted things before and re-rolled characters often enough to know that by this point? He would be having a hard time keeping the details straight. Many times, Doyle had accidentally clicked right through the perfect character or missed the card he was searching for.

‘Huh, it must be something to do with being a dungeon core. I guess I’m not as susceptible to such failings now that I’m not depending on an error prone fleshy brain and twitchy muscles. Anyway, time for more foxes!’

And he completely ignored the other change that someone looking in from the outside would notice. Mainly the fact he could single mindedly focus on the task. While yes, most people would be having a hard time telling the foxes apart, they also would have likely taken a break to do something else. That or at least breaks to eat and sleep.

There is a reason dungeons can end up falling into niches. Doyle isn’t even close to that, despite his over reliance on kobolds. Rather, this refers to when a dungeon focuses on iterating on the same monster.

Doyle only has the void and elder kobolds. If anything, given his monster selection, people would suspect either cattle or myconids. And then very much assume cattle after seeing what delvers are hauling out every day.

‘I think this one might have it!’ Doyle pulls a particular fox out of the couple hundred on the last floor. He wasn’t sure the exact mechanics of it, but the extended edges are completely overlapped with the wind blade. Sure, the blades extend beyond the claws, but that was fine in his opinion.

Now was the problem of testing the fox without losing it. After all, Doyle still hasn’t figured out how to spawn anything but the default skill on his monsters. In fact, deep down, he feels this will never be possible.

That meant he was going to have to figure out how to train the foxes to match this one. Doyle has failed at this earlier, but after watching for so long? He had some ideas of how to manage it.

Or rather, the fact that he couldn’t manage it. The skill development felt more like some sort of cultivation novel where every path required a person to personally comprehend it and not everyone could manage a specific development. So Doyle set that one fox up to demonstrate the skill combo.

If a fox watched the successful fox and after a day wasn’t figuring it out? Doyle would cycle them out and replace them with a new fox. This continued for a while and wasn’t the most effective. However, he was throwing enough foxes at it so that even a small chance can produce results.

And with results, Doyle could start throwing these foxes at people on the second floor. Though while that was happening, he discovered something else. The more foxes with the right skill training being used to teach the others, the more successful the training was. A fortuitous discovery as it allowed him to test all the more often.

Which was needed as progress was slow. Worse, Doyle noticed that he could no longer push it forward. The skills were trained to be the best they can be. At this point, it was a matter of waiting.

So, since this issue was at a bottleneck, Doyle turned towards what the town is up to. Which was making headway on the last floor. You know, the one where he has his supply of level one foxes. Good thing the foxes are on top of the cliff.

Not that they made it too far. Ally had kept an eye on things and reported they hadn’t even got past the first lake. Though both the key parties were killing around a hundred kobolds each visit.

There was just one problem that Ally hadn’t noticed. Which to be fair, Doyle felt he wouldn’t have either if he had been watching them develop slowly. Ace and Jim’s two teams both looked like they were holding back.

Doyle, ‘Did they ever spot the elder kobolds?’

Ally nods, ‘They have seen them. Though mostly at a distance. Jim has quite the sight range and the lake is an open area. In fact, because of him, they know the layout of the entire floor. We might need to add suspended dust to the air of future floors if we don’t want him to just see most things by default. That or return to more “underground” style floors.’

Doyle, ‘How did he manage to get high enough to see so much? Don’t tell me he saw the foxes!’

Ally laughs, ‘No, he didn’t quite get that high. Though he certainly got more height than I expected. After all, they’re strong, but their bodies aren’t staying the same weight as before. Magic might be enhancing their strength, but they’re still at the level of being physically enhanced. This is especially true for their bones.

‘Well, I guess some of them are actually getting light? Depends on their paths and stat ratios. Oh, and bloodline stuff. A human with a bloodline that is predominant avian is more likely to skew lighter.

‘Though honestly, at a certain point, a person’s actual weight doesn’t matter because magic will just offset things. After all, it isn’t like dragons have wings big enough to actually fly using base physics.’

Doyle, ‘So how did he get high enough?’

Ally, ‘Oh, right. He had Jay toss him up into the air. Or act as a springboard? A bit of both, I guess. And it wasn’t too high. What really helped him was Kellinger providing a feather fall spell. That gave him more time to look around.’

Doyle, ‘So, I’m pretty certain the next time they decide to advance, it will be by a fair margin. They seem to be holding back.’

Ally didn’t see it, but after some back and forth, they decided to just sit back and watch. Which took a while as the town seemed a bit distracted.

There weren’t signs of any other disaster coming, but that made Ace even more worried. They had laid out fields and planted a bunch of random seeds. Well, it wasn’t random what they planted, just the selection they had available. At least it was a wide variety and a bunch of wheat from dungeon loot.

Anyway, Ace was worried because it was going too well. Not just that, but the crops were growing at quite the accelerated rate, well besides the wheat. When Ace saw the numbers, he could help but ask his empty office how planets weren’t flooded with food.

Doyle wanted to know the answer to that as well. After all, part of people’s attraction to him was food based.

Ally had the answer, though. ‘Give it a few generations and they’ll slow down. Right now, the world is denser in world energy than the plants were designed for. So all that extra power is being thrown into growth.

‘Now, depending on how you look at things, it is either lucky or unlucky that the plants will adapt quite quickly. Well, that or die. Anyway, regular plants tend to stabilize to have a growth cycle like you’re used to.

‘Well, barring plants that need more power to grow. That is why stories have things like the thousand year old herbs. The plants don’t actually need a thousand years to mature. They just need too much energy and so grow slowly.

‘In fact, they grow slower than even the power intake would denote. After all, they also need power to maintain themselves. That, and there are some plants that can just keep growing.’

Doyle, ‘So, what might be a heavenly herb on one planet could be relatively common on another?’

Ally nods, ‘Yep.’

Doyle, ‘What about those stories that have wonders which develop with the creation of a world? They aren’t plants and we’re a bit past that step.’

Ally shrugs, ‘That certainly is a different thing, but you aren’t quite right. The world was created a year and change ago. Remember, the world was literally reduced to nothing when Mana arrived. The system had to recreate everything.

‘Though admittedly, it will have siphoned off some of that. Do note how all the plants are growing. Without some of that oomph, we’d be seeing plants dying left and right from an overdose of power. Same with animals and such.’

Doyle, ‘Couldn’t the system have changed everything to work with the extra power?

‘Wait, right, that wouldn’t work. After all, the power density is still going up. Any changes wouldn’t be able to take into account that. Or rather, it would have to keep changing things.’

Ally nods, ‘Exactly. Though it is also partly for the same reason, the system doesn’t just give newly integrated worlds a massive library of how things work. It wants to see if something interesting develops.

‘Wheat-like plants are quite common to where most languages don’t differentiate between them in the general form. You have bread made of wheat flour whether it is wheat from here or across the universe. However, sometimes if allowed to develop on their own, you might end up with a special form of wheat.

‘Sure, something similar almost certainly exists elsewhere in this universe. But the details might make it important. Plus, it gives a newly integrated world a specialty export. And it is a lot easier to find your feet on the stellar stage when you have something worth trading.’

Doyle, ‘Fair enough.’

And from there they move on. There is more than enough to mess around with still. Whether it is making sure there are at least a few groups meeting his special foxes or Ally keeping tabs on the town’s big players.

Though at the moment, Ally is a bit distracted. The mage tower has been developing at a decent clip. With the biggest advance coming from another settlement a decent distance away.

That settlement had been located next to a large college with an amazing library. Maybe if said settlement had been closer to the edge of the community, it would have gone a similar direction to Wolf’s Rest.

Instead, being in a relatively well protected area with a number of elderly meant they focused on more than just preserving knowledge. The settlement started right away to develop paper making tools. All so they could start copying down books in case they started to fall apart.

Now, though, they took it a step further. It isn’t a simple spell, but they figured out how to copy books. Sure, it only works on mundane knowledge, but that is basically all books at the moment, anyway.

Now those repositories of knowledge are being used to trade for food. And guess what Wolf’s Rest has a lot of? So yeah, Ace has made sure that the town is getting copies of everything they can.

Though this doesn’t explain the mage tower developing so quickly. That honor falls to Kelly after she learns the book copying spell and turns it into a book transcription spell. You do have to organize everything in your mind first, but from there you can “write” an entire book in a day. And promptly all the research magic users started testing how far you could go, which was quickly adding books to the mage tower collection.

Mixing Skills - Chapter 430

Pattern Update - Chapter 432