[D'sP] Am I Strange? - Chapter 399

Over a month has passed, but Doyle managed to finish the cliff wall. Every little bit of the wall is carved in a way to make the water flow down it in chaotic patterns. From marks large enough to use as hand holds, down to those small enough as to be invisible to the naked eye.

And as Doyle takes a mental step back and the magic of his conceptual reinforcement settles in, a pulse spreads through the entire dungeon. Good thing this causes the dungeon monsters to pause or else there would have been many casualties from this event. Then a pulse returns, coming from a certain cliff many floors away.

Doyle can feel a connection form and the limit breaker runes appear on the cliff as well. These aren’t new runes though, they’re only duplicates from the previous cliff. As he looks closer at the connection, there doesn’t seem to be an actual physical connection. No shortcuts that only requires you to climb a bit.

Rather, it feels like they are cliff faces that share a mountain range. Different cliffs hewn from the same rock. Which is technically completely true, since it is all the generic stone Doyle uses. That isn’t what Doyle meant, though.

Ally flew out of the core room and took a look. ‘Huh, what do you think it means?’

Doyle, ‘It feels like either one will work, but they also count towards the same achievement. You climb one and you don’t need to climb the other. Or more to the point, you climb one and it doesn’t matter if you go right to cheating on the second.’

Ally, ‘So what does the water add to the experience?’

Doyle, ‘I guess you could say the benefit of this new cliff is it will be quicker to climb. Not easier, though. After all, the whole point of them is that you have to keep climbing until you go past your limits.

‘So, since the water makes it tougher and the chilly dampness will sap people’s strength? They’ll reach their limits a lot sooner. However, it is still just climbing until you surpass yourself. Need to think of something else they can do to surpass themselves.’

Ally shrugs, ‘Most people don’t ever even come across a chance like this in the first place. Like, sure, they could get a treadmill and run on it till they do it, but as bootcamps the universe over have known, you can’t manufacture limit breakers.

‘You don’t get it if you’re forced into breaking your limits. Otherwise, so many people would have it from doing stuff like running away from monsters. To be a limit breaker represents having made a purposeful decision of your own free will to break past your limits.’

Doyle, ‘A bit more informed on the subject this time around?’

Ally nods, ‘You were working on the cliff for over a month. I had a little time on my hands.’

Doyle tilted back, ‘Well, that’s a bit of time. Anything I should know about?’

Ally fills him in on the events up in the town, but within the dungeon itself, not much had changed.

Doyle shakes his core, ‘Why are they so slow to go deeper?’

Ally shrugs, ‘I say give it a few more months. As it is, they’re probably more being held back by the density of the world energy than anything else. While Ace and friends have plateaued hard, the regular people are doing much better.

‘They might be overly focused on the sixth floor, but when they do delve deeper? Fewer people are dying and they’re going further than ever before. I suspect we’re in for a breakthrough in world energy density soon enough. It will be a little rough and rumble when that first happens, but I trust the town to survive handedly.

‘Oh, and I can’t really say much on the subject. Not to hide anything from you, but rather because repeatedly it has been proven that doing so tends to backfire. Mystical energies love to warp themselves to fit or break people’s expectations and rarely anywhere in-between.’

Doyle, ‘Does this only happen once? Because it would seem that any subsequent events would have people having an opinion.’

Ally, ‘That I can half answer, but please, no more questions. Even my not answering a question causes you to think certain things. Anyway, while the specific world energy density for each world differs, you can, in theory, keep climbing that ladder.’

Doyle nods, ‘Fair enough, I guess that just leaves me to sit back and watch things develop for a bit.’

Ally, ‘Though likely not for that long. I suspect the town’s inner circle is about to make a push for deeper floors.’

Doyle tilts to the side, ‘What makes you say that?’

Ally pulls up a screen displaying a simple clay brick forge. Well, simple in construction. It seems that each brick has been treated with something to make one side smooth and then runes were carved into them. Runes that Doyle is quite familiar with as they’re basically his heating plates, except they’ve removed the part dealing with making the Peltier effect work better. You know, what with it being a brick and not two pieces of metal.

Doyle, ‘So they’ve figured out how to pump their forge full of Mana? Why haven’t I seen any mithril?’

Ally raises an eyebrow, ‘Well, for one you’ve been busy. But more importantly, they noticed you haven’t really used mithril in any items yet. I listened in and it seems they figure you simply haven’t realized the best use for it.’

Doyle nods, ‘That does make sense. Maybe to tweak their noses, I throw some mithril wands on my kobold mages after they start using them?’

Ally, ‘I’m honestly more interested in the alternate uses they are finding for it. Most people do limit themselves to wands and Magic with mithril. Which, to be fair, is the most natural use for it.

‘However, they’ve been playing with how it interacts with other powers to interesting effect. After all, just because it is easiest for them to forge it with Mana is only a limitation of their current knowledge. Mithril is a great conductor of mystical energies, period. Not just Mana.’

Doyle, ‘Huh, I hadn’t thought of that myself. Very much went all tunnel vision on the wand aspect.’

Ally shrugs, ‘It is literally one of the best uses pound for pound if you aren’t doing alloys or wires.’

Doyle, ‘Wait, if mithril is good for wires, what is the point of the quartz cables? Couldn’t they use mithril? I figure it should be a lot easier to pull a wire instead of crafting a cable.’

Ally, ‘The cable does more than just transfer Mana, however, it only works with Mana. A mithril wire can transfer any mystical power. On the other hand, it isn’t as lossless as those quartz cables and mithril is much harder to find a large supply of. So yeah, a balance of concerns that make both good in different situations.

‘Oh, and I guess the fact the cable doesn’t require mystical energy to make means the cable is a good tech for civilizations new to the stuff.’

Doyle, ‘Wait, you seem much more familiar with the quartz cable than I would expect? Didn’t we just find it?’

Ally shrugs, ‘This iteration of a quartz cable is likely new to this universe, otherwise the system wouldn’t have used that fallen world as the setting. However, the idea of using an attuned crystalline structure to transfer one mystical power or another isn’t new.

‘Besides that, I can figure a couple things out from the pattern’s name. It specifically mentions Mana, meaning it only works with Mana. More importantly, it is a “sealed” cable. The very structure of the cable will keep Mana contained to the cable.’

Doyle, ‘Hmm, it will be interesting to see what Wolf’s Rest does with them. After all, they now have decent availability of both materials. Oh wait, that’s right, why would mithril be rare if dungeons can spawn it?’

Ally shakes her head, ‘Not rare, just less common than quartz. On most worlds in this universe, quartz is everywhere even before magic arrives. Mithril? Some worlds only have it in dungeons, if that.

‘Just look at yourself, you have a ton of patterns you aren’t using and that is with your mind behind it all. You throw a chunk of mithril in a dungeon and cross your fingers the dungeon decides to use it. Best odds if they’re a dungeon that uses ranged mystical attackers. Though you’ll have to deal with the monsters being better armed.’

Doyle, ‘So uh, is it strange that I have ore and the kobolds mine it?’

Ally shakes her head, ‘I would have warned you if that was the case. Dungeons inherently change their floors to suit their monsters. You won’t find a dungeon with a desert floor full of literal fish out of water. And with kobolds?

‘They’re natural miners and metalsmiths. As long as a dungeon has kobolds as one of their first monsters and a base metal of some sort? They’ll end up with ore nodes.’

Doyle, ‘Good to know.’

After that, Doyle continues to watch the mithril forge area to see what the town has figured out. Of course, they were making wands. It is just too resource efficient not too.

Besides, the mithril wands made targeting near effortless and spells cast through them were more likely to cause secondary effects. Fire spells in particular had a nasty side effect that the town labeled “burn” because it did that and video games. It didn’t mean the spell caused burn damage, though they did. Rather, flame from the spell would linger on the wound and continue to burn the enemy.

Doyle was quite thankful that the effect was super rare. He had watched Ruby testing it and with a mithril wand the chance of it happening was less than one in a hundred. Also, it is per spell and not per projectile.

That means you can’t just use a single spell to spam a ton of fire darts and hope to get lucky. In fact, if you aren’t careful about separating your casting from spell to spell, it seems that repeated casting will end up counting as one spell and the effect can only trigger once per spell. Also, it required the wand to activate, though Ruby guessed and Ally confirmed to Doyle that you could make a spell that focused on causing it.

Though wands certainly weren’t the only thing the town worked on. They made staves capped in mithril, inserts for armor, sewed runes into cloth with mithril wire, and even tried making a mithril version of gold leaf. Not everything worked, of course, and Doyle had honestly forgotten a large number of failed attempts already.

For instance, an alloy of lead and mithril did not make a solder that works for transferring mystical power. That came from an attempt to find a better way to connect the sections of quartz cable they had been slowly collecting from drops. An interesting idea, but the resulting alloy did not melt like you would need for a proper solder.

Oh, and some might have noticed the staves capped in mithril and wonder why that wasn’t more efficient than a wand. After all, you just need one, maybe two, small cups of mithril that you attach to the ends of the staff. A shame that it didn’t work. For the caps to work, you needed more metal than would be used in a wand.

However, channeling a spell through a staff increases the damage and then doubles up on it by piercing resistance. The second isn’t the most important feature at the moment as long as you aren’t using an earth-based attack spell on the wooden or grassen goats. However, it certainly will be important for those exploring the wilderness outside of the community. So there is a group of people devoted to testing staff designs, even if they’re a bit unwieldy.

Been A While - Chapter 398

The System Shouldn't Do That - Chapter 400