[D'sP] Observing Visitors - Chapter 414

Doyle watches with rapt attention. The town had already started on figuring out external magic items, but what little loot they did get from the kobolds included lizard tokens. Tokens that Kelly had already noticed and was going to be checking them out right now.

They received three of the lizard tokens from the fight, which Doyle admitted was probably a little too frequent of a drop rate. After all, it isn’t like there’s a nearby lizard based threat. Though since they are magical, he decides to let things lay for the moment.

While he pondered the drop rate, Kelly used magic to create accurate sketches of the tokens and their carvings. As while they use the same runes, the bone pieces weren’t all the same and so runes could end up placed oddly. Kelly appreciated the fact that the runes were all on a single, relatively flat side of the bone.

Once everything was recorded, Kelly began with the most irregularly shaped token. She could sense there was magic in the bone tokens and so tried to apply Mana to said token. Nothing.

She removed the leather strap the kobolds had been using to hang the token from their belts and nothing changed. Kelly hadn’t expected this to do anything, as she did not sense the inherent magic flowing through the strap, but it was always good to check. Then she destroyed that first token.

Kelly scraped a bit of bone off, and nothing happened. So, she kept scraping. With her Mana sense, Kelly was able to scrape off a good half of the token, mostly around the hole for the strap. Then she took it too far and the runes fizzled. Quite literally.

Now, this wasn’t some sort of explosion or even a fire. Rather, a small, barely visible burst of energy cycled around the runes from where the runes were disrupted, meeting at the opposite side of the rune work. That opposite point is where the biggest effect occurred. Though even there, the discharge only caused a small amount of blackening to the bone right where it occurred.

Kelly was anything but disappointed by this result. Rather, she was happy as the expected result of a magic item being destroyed involved a more explosive release of power. This outcome left her with an intact token to dissect.

A task she got to right away. Doyle wasn’t certain what she is looking for specifically, but guessed it was to try and find any hidden runes or similar. After all, she recognized the runes, so how could they actually work? One “rune” wasn’t even all that much of one, instead being a simplified carving of a lizard.

Well, Kelly had to admit it seemed to work as a rune, or at least a modifier to the existing runes. It wasn’t decoration. The token’s magic had been flowing through the lizard carving just as much as the more traditional runes.

And traditional was the problem she has with it. Because while the cooling and heating plates used familiar runes to work. Those were geometric and so not the strangest thing to find.

And Kelly did know that people had started having luck with pre-system runes. However, with how magic worked, that could just be them believing it would work hard enough. These tokens, though? That wasn’t possible because they came from the dungeon.

This confused Doyle, after all, why couldn’t a dungeon replicate something like that if a person lost one in said dungeon? Good thing for him, Doyle wasn’t the only one confused by this.

Kellinger who was stopping in to help, raised an eyebrow at Kelly’s assertion. “Couldn’t someone have just dropped one of these in there? We certainly have more than enough kooks carving up dungeon sources bones. I wouldn’t put it past one of them to figure something out and then die in the dungeon while testing it.”

Kelly shakes her head, “Even if the original worked off of what the person thought of as runes, the dungeon wouldn’t be able to make it work the same way. The very reason all of its stuff comes out as enchantable is because it is stripped of the very thing that would make false runes work.

“I’m not saying the dungeon couldn’t replicate the function. However, the power would just be in the object. Maybe the strap would be removable, but the second I started carving bits off, the magic would have failed.

“For the runes to be a functional part of this object? These are legitimate runes, even if you don’t believe in them while making them. Which, given the fact that they’re from our world’s history and culture, is not a normal thing.”

Kellinger, “The others have been calling them tokens.”

Kelly shrugs, “I don’t care what they’re called. I care about what they do and how in the world pre-system runes have started to legitimately work. Because I tested these things! They did not work to start with.”

After that outburst, Kelly ended up taking the rest of that day off. She was a bit heated and needed to cool down.

Next day she continued on with the next token. As much as she loathed to admit it, the runes of the past were at least partially working now. That meant she didn’t come unprepared. Rather, she arrived with an armload of books.

A couple were more fantastical, but for the most part the books were scholarly texts on various rune systems. Kelly had recognized the origin of most of the runes on the tokens and is ready to decipher things.

Hours later, Doyle was quite happy, but Kelly was frustrated. Kelly had been flipping through her reference books, giving Doyle a good look at them, but not giving her a clear translation. All she had really managed to figure out is the tokens used some sort of curse.

Not the classic witches curse, though. Rather, it used the language of curses as an inversion of a buff. Or as Kelly now suspected the runes would call a blessing. From this knowledge, she was able to eventually figure out the use of the token.

The odd lizard rune represents the target. Though Kelly still wasn’t sure if it is a proper rune or simply an identifier. Whatever the case, she was able to test the tokens after finding a source of lizards to test it on.

Good thing, while not dungeon monsters themselves, the lizards in the dungeon worked just fine. This wasn’t a surprise for Doyle, of course. After all, the purpose of the tokens for the kobolds was to target said lizards.

And then Doyle didn’t even have to wait an entire day before Kelly managed to replicate the lizard tokens. In fact, the thing that held her back was attempting to carve a token out of improper materials. After all, you needed to carve it out of a bone from the target creature type.

This ended up requiring another trip to the dungeon to grab some. Which given the size of the dungeon lizards, meant it was hard to carve the token. Kelly managed it, though mostly because the sourced bones came from an early floor and so was easier for her to carve.

From there, though, Kelly hit a bottleneck. She could take one of the cattle bones they get from the dungeon, cut it down, and carve the runes. Yet that didn’t work. She replaced the lizard carving with multiple other things and moved around the runes to try and accommodate any potential changes.

At this point, Doyle turned his attention elsewhere. He had already seen a similar process when the kobolds were first working on it.

Besides, he had other more pressing matters. The town had reached the 17th floor, the lowest floor in the dungeon.

Now, normally Doyle would be rushing to build a new floor. He had even been planning to do that instead of watching Kelly, except for the fact that he wasn’t quite able to do so yet.

Well, he could make a new floor. The system had taken care of the sapient sourced world energy costs up till floor 20. No, his problem was that they hadn’t gotten far enough on the 17th floor!

Doyle’s plans had been to do more kobolds. Sure, he was going to add goats to the 18th floor, but it was still going to be focused on the kobolds. And he didn’t know how the elders would do! Jim and his team didn’t even know about them!

Worse, he wasn’t certain when any team would make it back to the 17th floor. Sure, he could make the floor itself, but he just didn’t feel it right now. So he sat and watched the town.

It is actually quite the good distraction. Every day, new people arrived in the town. Sure, most people that showed up were simply merchants that had been to the town before. However, there wasn’t a single day that went by without some new hopeful coming to delve.

More interesting to Doyle was the few who had only recently started showing up. Those from the opposite side of the community. People who had delved the other dungeon. They held personal knowledge of what a normal dungeon would be like and Doyle wanted to see how he stacked up.

The answer to that seemed to a mixed bag, but a mix that Doyle had been aiming for. To make the multi-day journey, those who showed up were at least somewhat proficient. If only because the roads weren’t safe.

So rarely did any of the visitors die. However, that wasn’t to say they found his dungeon easy. In fact, most comments Doyle heard portrayed his dungeon as being overly difficult. They also seemed to mostly get stuck at the sixth floor.

Though these visitors also had the most parties to make it past the sixth floor. None of them, however, got past the tenth floor. Which at first didn’t make much sense to Doyle. After all, even discounting Ace’s people, there were multiple parties who had long ago beat the tenth floor.

It was Ally who figured it out. ‘Hey Doyle, I think I got it! They’re stuck at ten, not because the people over there are vastly weaker. Rather, those who are still making progress at the other dungeon aren’t bothering to come here.’

Doyle, ‘How did you figure it out?’

Ally pulls up a still screen of one of the stronger visiting groups gathered around a tavern table. ‘I caught these guys talking about another team, but it wasn’t one from here. Seems they have a bit of a rivalry.

‘Anyway, this group stalled out while their rivals didn’t. And once that came up, they started gossipping. Now, not everyone here came because they were stuck. Some were either slow in advancing or simply wanted to travel and see what there is to see.

‘The important point of it though, was that those at the front of the pack? They are stuck there in a similar way to how Ace and the others in the inner circle are stuck here. Sure, there isn’t anything sticking around here, but if they’re advancing here? Well, that isn’t guaranteed if they go elsewhere.

‘Err, I guess that isn’t actually entirely true. Ace and company are actually stuck here because of your Energy Well path. That kind of secret isn’t going to ease its grip on them anytime soon. Not that there is anything wrong with staying in one place.

‘There are even paths based around gaining power by staying in one place. Though that sort of path can be quite fragile and often limited. You either have to keep growing the area you control or cultivating the limited area you have to be stronger.’

Doyle, ‘Huh, that makes sense. If anything, as a dungeon, I’m sort of like that. At least, others would see it as such. It isn’t a good comparison as the dungeon is my body as well. Though I do wonder if there is a dungeon out there that instead of getting more floors, has focused on growing their first floor.’

Ally shrugged, ‘Anything is possible. Though that isn’t going to be at all common. It is hard to increase a floors world energy density and an increasing density is important for a dungeon’s purpose.’

A Quick Fix Gets Them Through - Chapter 413

Cracked Wood - Chapter 415