LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 89 - The Clay Step
Chapter 89
Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth.
Alexandra shook her head as she looked at the screen.
“Gods, I knew they’d suck but this is…”
“Pathetic?” Emilia offered as the Earth-born trailed off.
“To say the least.” Alexandra sighed in disgust and turned away from the screen showing the “clay step,” her first mini-floor. For the first time in…ever, her standard golems had scored a kill. Multiple kills, as a matter of fact. And that was without counting the handful of martial golems dispersed throughout. “I mean, the martial golems I can understand, but the standard ones? You can dodge their attacks so easily it’s insane! Even I would have been able to do it before coming here, without using my implants!”
“You have to remember that most of these people just signed up to get rich quickly. Most of them just picked up a weapon from a store, paid the guild fee, and enrolled.” Emilia shrugged. “The smarter ones trained like madmen on their way there, and tried to absorb everything they could learn from their more experienced fellows, the others…”
Alexandra winced.
“Fair enough. Still, it’s a sad spectacle.”
“It is. But hey, more essence!”
“For what little they had to begin with, I suppose so.” Alexandra sighed. “No, you’re right, it’s still something, especially as this zone isn’t exactly going to be killing anyone of a higher level anyway. Speaking of which, how are we doing with the resurrection room?”
“So far so good,” Emilia said, as she gestured at another screen, which she’d been keeping half an eye on the entire time. Alexandra had started to realize that even with her increased capabilities, there was simply too much for her to keep track of, especially as she kept half of her attention on constantly rebuilding the dungeon. So she’d started actively involving Emilia and her maids in keeping track of the adventurers, taking notes, and coming up with fixes and suggestions for the dungeon. Ella, especially, seemed to relish the distraction, although some of the “suggestions” the maid had come up with would haunt the Earth-born’s nightmares. If she slept and could have nightmares to begin with, that was. “Surprisingly few of them tried to raise trouble, and for the most part, they appear to be perfectly content to sit there and cultivate. Some of them are also exceedingly surprised at how hospitable we’ve proven.” Her face darkened. “Given how many of them descended on the food we offered, I think some of them were starving.”
“That’s…unfortunately not very surprising.” Alexandra looked at her advisor’s gloomy expression, and reminded herself that despite the vampire girl coming from this world she was quite literally from an ivory tower in one of the more well-off, and overall kinder polities. Alexandra, however, had come from the mass-produced hab towers on Earth. She still remembered subsisting on government-provided emergency nutri-gel during her childhood and early teens. The reason she hadn’t had to afterwards was thanks to Arcadia’s orbital farms, which enabled the government to start providing every citizen with free pre-prepared “meal packs,” which were a cross between an MRE and emergency food aid. There was a reason why despite building a monopoly in so many fields, the EuroFed government didn’t dare attack Arcadia. There was simply far too much grassroots support for the AI. “Well, at least with the amount of mana they just cultivated, it won’t be a concern for them for a while.”
Emilia nodded. After all, even without a single bit of loot, since they allowed all adventurers to stay an hour in the resurrection room to recuperate, even the most basic of cultivation techniques would allow them to cultivate three hundred mana or so, which was nothing to sneeze at. And the loot…well, the loot would be valuable, to say the least. In fact, a single look through the eyes of the sentry golems had shown the reaction of the new adventurers when the guild attendants outside told them the value of what they’d acquired. It had been quite hilarious.
“I suppose not.” She sighed. “I just hope we won’t get some slave delves. Those can get nasty.”
“Slave delves?”
“Take a bunch of disposable slaves, fit them with punishment collars, and use them as ablative meatshields for the actual party. If they refuse to go forward? Shock them until they do or just kill them while they’re stunned. It’s widely used in the…less savory parts of the world. Which unfortunately does include the Asarian Kingdom. Well, at least in its eastern provinces. The rest of the kingdom still has slaves, but the royal family has frowned upon the practice for centuries now.”
Alexandra’s eyes twitched, and Emilia had to suppress a shiver as she saw something dark and cold behind her dungeon core’s eyes. Sometimes the Earth-born terrified her. There was something…like someone else was there. Someone who was a monstrous echo of the warm, friendly woman she’d come to know and yes, love.
“Well, let us hope no one tries to pull that off here. Because fair play or not, believe me, the team hiding behind the slave will not leave the dungeon alive.”
Emilia nodded, before clearing her throat.
“So, about the iron step? Are you finally satisfied with the traps and the new golems?”
“Yep.” When she’d started working on the iron step, she’d decided there needed to be a few traps to spice things up. The problem was that drop axes and spike pits were a staple, but not exactly dangerous to prepared opponents. Thus she’d tried to create rooms and encounters around them, and to do that, she’d created some low-level crossbow-wielding golems, which would serve as harassers and an incentive to rush in and brave the traps rather than take your time after drawing in and taking out the melee golems. It wasn’t perfect, but it should help with the traps being less thoroughly obsolete than her old ones had been on the first floor. “Just need to finish the logistics area and forges to equip the golems, and we should be good to go!”
“Good! Because I think the higher-level adventurers are getting a bit frustrated out there.”
Alexandra chuckled. There had been a basically permanent crowd of adventurers camped near the entrance, for whatever reason, and the higher-level ones were looking fairly unhappy, to say the least, especially as the adventurers guild had decided to allow mainly low-level adventurers into the clay steps.
“Well, let’s give our resident baroness a hand, and augment our mana income at the same time then! Man, I love civil service when it means lining my pockets!”
Emilia giggled, then laughed out loud at her dungeon’s antics, Sarah chuckling behind her. She might be worried about those…darker moments of her dungeon core, but Alexandra was still the same woman she knew.
*****
“So, is the new dungeon floor to the guild’s liking?” Allya asked as she leaned back into her seat.
“You could say that, yes,” Dominique answered, settling down on the chair in front of the baroness’ desk. Allya had been a bit surprised by Starvak’s choice of “observer” for the military alliance with the dungeon, but pleasantly so. She knew and trusted the attendant, and moreover, she was generally pleasant to be around. Overall, it could have been way worse, and the upside of having a permanent guild attendant at hand was that she could serve as a liaison for more mundane matters, which was nothing to sneeze at given how busy Starvak usually was. “There have been some complaints from some of the adventurers, especially about how short the delves were, or the fact that the doors prevented you from backtracking, but those worthy souls’ criticism had a tendency to fall silent once they were made aware of how valuable the loot was.”
Allya smiled. “Valuable” was an understatement. There were about a dozen golems in the clay step, and the parts from each of them were worth six hundred to a thousand mana. And if you grabbed the whole golem and kept it relatively undamaged it could go up to three thousand! Also, given how short the delve was, and the fact that you had a dedicated horizontal elevator to bring you back to the entrance when you were done, it was a lot more feasible to bring back the whole golems, at least from the final fight, than it used to be. That meant, on average, about ten thousand mana was earned by adventurers per delve in terms of loot, even counting those that got absolutely wrecked early on, and the ones that dragged every golem body out earned even more. That was…absurd. At a rate of one party every fifteen minutes, they were only five thousand mana short of the forty-five thousand mana per delve, and thus per hour, average they used to have from the main dungeon. And that was one of those mini floors!
“Yes, especially as the value doesn’t seem to be going down.”
Dominique nodded, although she looked fairly confused, and Allya smiled internally. She hadn’t expected that, but when Melia had explained it to her it made perfect sense.
“I don’t really understand why, but yes.”
“I had one of my advisors explain it to me, and honestly it makes perfect sense. See, when those golem parts are sold off, most of them are used to build new golems, when we don’t ship an already repairable golem. Once those golems are created, their very existence creates demand. You need maintenance, spare parts, and replacements when some fall, which means they still need more parts.”
“Yes, but wouldn’t you flood the market with golems, and drop the price regardless?”
Oh yes, we are. And it is going to change the continent, Allya thought. Slavery had always been used throughout the continent—although the Republic was careful not to call it that—except in Tark because it was cheap, disposable labor. With golems to replace that…
But the attendant didn’t need to know that or worry herself about it.
“No. Because there is always far more demand for cheap labor, especially disposable labor, than even Crystal could possibly fill, even if she just handed us the golems intact. There is always a need for workers for the mines, the farms, or the lumber mills. And a great many of those occupations are dangerous, by their very nature or because of the monsters that haunt the land. Thus, having golems do them makes perfect sense, and we will always need more, if only just to replace those that fall.”
In fact, it was something that pretty much held the entire Eris Empire up. Yes, it practically enslaved the outer protectorate, but the Erisian Imperial Army and the megacorporations brought with them legions of golems to reconquer the wilds and the wastelands, thin out the monsters, and turn once abomination-infested hellscapes into habitable land. Not to mention bringing with them knowledge, medical technology, and agricultural techniques that made everything these lands had known before pale by comparison. It was a frail shield before the atrocities perpetrated by the Empire to keep control over those lands, but it was something.
“So no, we cannot flood the market, the fact being that the more we put in the more the market grows to absorb those golems.”
“Then why didn’t people just…mass produce them? I mean doesn’t supply expand to meet demand normally?”
“Yes…unless you run out of trained personnel. To put it simply, golem parts require skilled artificers to manufacture, which requires years to decades of training and experience. Even Erisian factories are limited by that, even with the simplest and most standardized pieces. Putting them together though? It only requires some schematics and an instruction manual. Hell, the Eris Empire’s final assembly of golems in the factories is handled by other golems! So that’s why golem production has been kept low; there just have never been enough artificers. You can view it like blacksmiths being the bottleneck until foundries and factories came to be.”
“I see. Well, I guess we found our equivalent of the foundry then, no?”
Allya nodded, although that wasn’t quite true. Dungeons had always been a loophole. And a foundry for golems…she tried to imagine a gigantic machine, building golems automatically, which would go on to build more assembler machines, and she shuddered internally. If such a thing existed, she didn’t know what would happen to the world. The power of the person possessing it would be unlimited. But that was unlikely to happen. The scholars called it the beginning of a “technological singularity,” and only a madman—or woman—from the Old World would have the knowledge to build such a thing.
Little did she know…