B5 C51: Dungeon Finals I

I left Sett with a pep in my step feeling lighter than I had in ages. For one, my talk with him had gone far better than I’d expected. I was glad that Cal and Verin hadn’t joined me, as that gave me some time before I broke the news. I would, but I wanted a bit more dungeon normalcy before we had that discussion.

And as the cherry on top, I had a new spell!

If the previous ranks had come with a lot of options, then the Adept rank offered even more. A few genuine attack options even started showing up, but as tempted as I was, I filtered them out. The mana costs were too high for me to seriously use them in battle for now, and frankly, I could normally dish out more damage with the rest of my arsenal. Adding a source of spatial damage to my toolkit would heighten my versatility, and I was sure I’d grab the spells eventually, but the opportunity cost was too high.

Instead, I went with something much simpler.

Recall

Mark your current location to drop a spatial anchor. Casting this spell teleports you and up to five consenting targets to your anchor.

Considering it was the highest-ranked spell I knew, it was shockingly straightforward, and I instantly dropped my anchor right outside the house. I originally considered placing it in my room, but I couldn’t always be sure what state I’d be in when I used it. What if I needed to use it while covered in acid, or god forbid while I was on fire? Unlikely as that was, I didn’t want to risk damaging the house.

A quick trip to the mountains let me test the spell out, and while the cost was nearly my entire mana pool and the cast time was nearly a full minute, it worked exactly as advertised. One moment, I was sitting on my rocking chair in my mountain cave; the next, I was falling to the ground in the prairie.

Note to self. Next time, cast it while standing.

The cast time wasn’t ideal, but I’d known that going into it. Just like my level-30 Portal spell, the new spell had been one of many nearly identical options. I could have greatly cut down on the time and cost if I’d grabbed a strictly personal version, for example, but being able to take others with me was too good a feature to pass up on.

As for the rest of the minutiae, the cooldown was a full day, and I could change the location of my anchor once per month. The cast time and cooldown would decrease a bit as I leveled the spell up, but according to Sett, I wouldn’t get any standard augments for each new rank. Instead, every ten levels, I’d earn another anchor.

I’m my own set of recall gems. In that light, I was actually reluctant to tell Verin about my new spell. With all the recall-gem-laden jewelry she wore, the noble would probably consider it a wasted spell. After all, why not just buy a dozen gems and use them instead?

For one, though, my own magic would always be stronger than a gem, especially with my Spatial Magic augments. Even if I was trapped in a spatial lock, I had a chance of breaking through it. Past that, no one could take the spell away from me. For the rest of my life, as long as I was strong enough to break through any spatial barriers, I would always have a way home.

Plus, it was great for the dungeon. Never again would I have to worry about getting trapped in a desert crypt or a vine-covered jungle. The entrapping regions were some of the most dangerous in the entire dungeon, and with a single spell, they’d been neutralized. 

With a day-long cooldown between casts, leveling the spell would be a nightmare, but that was fine. I had nothing if not time.

Having properly field tested my new spell, I found myself in a strangely retrospective mood. It was probably from the conversation I’d had with Sett, but I couldn’t help but consider just how far we’d come since arriving.

Qualitatively, there was the change in my mental state. From a nearly vegetative, catatonic state, I’d gone to who I was today. I’d found a host of hobbies that I truly enjoyed. I’d built a house! Two, if you counted the original cabin. After pitting myself against so many different enemies and trials, I’d discovered a newfound confidence that I’d been sorely lacking beforehand. And overall, I was just far more at peace with being a Protagonist now.

Quantitatively, the changes were no less grand. Having arrived as a brand new level 14, I’d shot up a full four levels to level 18. The situation with my class points was even more pronounced, and if I was counting right, I’d gained over 60 points in the years I’d been here, unlocking an entire ten new class skills.

I was the proud owner of dozens of new skills and spells, one of them Legendary. I’d learned and trained Spatial Magic all the way to the Adept rank. I’d completed a full five class trials, the corresponding skills evolving. 

Anyway I swung it, I was infinitely stronger than I’d been before, and the new Tess would absolutely wipe the floor with the old. Hell, a single overloaded hammer blow might have been enough to end that fight, doubly so if I paired it with a Spatial Step.

The more I thought about it the surer I was, and a serene smile formed upon my face.

Yeah. This is a good place for me.

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As the days passed by, I focused first on spending time with the others and second on my professional skills. Hoping to get as much time in with them as possible, I even geared my hobbies towards including them. With a bit of Woodworking, I made us a new board game. I set up a second workstation in the studio, drawing with Verin. We even tried to rope Cal into cooking with us, though the roguish warrior didn’t take to it nearly as well as Verin had.

At times, though, while I was working, I’d feel myself overtaken by that same backwards-looking mood. It was one thing to list out my achievements, but somehow, that felt a bit hollow. If I really wanted to prove how much I’d grown, what better way than to make something more tangible? 

The more I thought about it, the more fitting it felt. For one, I’d probably grown my professional skills even more than my raw fighting abilities. As wrong as that sounded to say considering this was a dungeon, it was impossible to talk about my progress without touching upon the levels I’d gained in all my hobbies.

And then on top of that, it felt properly nostalgic. If everything hadn’t gone to hell in Sylum, I probably would still be there, taking classes. Actually, now that I thought about it, with the time dilation, how much time had passed at the academy? We’d been here for somewhere between two and two-and-a-half years. With a time dilation factor of five, that translated to about five or six months. 

The differing year lengths and break durations made calculations a bit tough, but considering we’d left shortly before the end of the second semester, we were probably close to the first-semester finals season for all the students. 

I know that I haven’t been learning in the most traditional way lately, but what if I had some finals of my own? Not that there was anyone to grade me besides myself, but it felt like a strangely fitting way to see how far I’d come.

Okay. I think I’m in. I wouldn’t stop spending time with the others, but for the next few weeks, I’d focus on my dungeon finals.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Before I could start making anything, I needed to decide which skills deserved finals in the first place.

To start, I reaffirmed my decision to nix everything but my crafting skills. Short of recklessly hunting down new region bosses, there was nothing that would serve as a fitting showcase of my strength, and that wasn’t really the point of this endeavor anyway.

With that in mind, that already narrowed things down to 17 skills: Cooking, Woodworking, Butchering, Fishing, Stonemasonry, Jewelry Making, Enchanting, Alchemy, Smithing, Clothworking, Gardening, Drawing, Mining, Architecture, Papermaking, Glassmaking, and Construction.

I was betting that some of those skills could be combined into the same test, but even so, that was too many to focus on. Winnowing the list, I decided to cross off any skills which didn’t lend themselves to big projects well. There wasn’t really anything big that I could do with Butchering, for example. To different extents, the same held true for Fishing, Gardening, Mining, and Papermaking.

From there, I figured that I should really only test myself on the skills I’d learned in the dungeon. I’d gotten much better at brewing poisons while here, but Alchemy felt distinctly like something from the before-dungeon days. That took out Woodworking, Jewelry Making, Construction, and Cooking. 

Plus, the named poison I’d made in the jungle already felt like a good Alchemy final, as did the house for Construction. I might have done a Cooking final anyway, but to really show my skills off, I’d need to wait a few months to gather a lot more mana-enriched ingredients from Arbor.

So from the original list, we were now down to seven. Of the remaining, I decided to drop anything below the Initiate rank, removing Glassmaking and Clothworking. I might incorporate them into my other projects, but they wouldn’t be my focus.

And so, I was left with five: Enchanting, Smithing, Drawing, Architecture, and Stonemasonry. I was almost certain I’d be able to combine the first two, so that was four big projects. Without an instructor to assign me an exact task, the possibilities were dauntingly endless, but that was part of the fun.

From there, brainstorming took a few days in and of itself, but in the end, I had a solid idea of what I wanted to accomplish.

That, of course, was the easy part. After that, it was time to deliver.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Stonemasonry, I decided, was a good place to start, partly because it was one of my lower-leveled skills and partly because it was the most straightforward.

The recent augment I’d grabbed for the skill boosted the quality of any stone kitchenware I crafted. Rather than double down on that, I viewed it as a sign I’d been pigeonholing myself a bit too much. Almost everything I’d crafted was domestic or overly functional, rarely larger than a pot.

This time, I wanted to shoot for something much larger and primarily decorative. As for what could fulfill those two conditions, the answer came fairly quickly: I was going to make a statue.

None of the rooms in the house were begging for a large new addition, so I settled on making a statue that would sit outside. From there, I immediately decided to place it in the garden. That, too, was a bit overly functional now that I thought about it, almost more of a miniature farm than a real garden. Some decoration would do it wonders.

Only one question remained: What should I make a statue of?

I briefly considered and discarded the idea of modeling it after one of us. That just seemed like too odd an addition for a garden, not to mention how mortifying it would be to see a big statue of me all the time. Cal might go for it, but I figured Verin would feel the same.

A monster then? Or some other dungeon creature? One of the bosses would make sense, especially if I paired it with the appropriate region of the garden.

We already saw enough of Tal’Ket, nor did I have a desire to try my hand at his sludgy sister. No one needed a constant depiction of the dark Forsaken Seer, and besides, if I placed it within the range of the Sightless Eye, it wouldn’t even be visible without darkvision. I’d started a small patch of fire herbs, but the hedgehog didn’t excite me as a project, nor did I think Verin needed a constant reminder of the time she’d lost an arm.

Ultimately, it came down to Arbor or the hydra, and frankly, Arbor was a bit boring. A stone tree wasn’t too exciting, and his elven form just looked like some guy, for the most part.

And so, the hydra it was. From the onset, I realized I was biting off more than I could chew, but I was looking forward to it nonetheless.

Gathering my materials actually proved to be fairly trivial. In much the same way I’d quarried stone for our kitchen countertops, I returned to the stone resource room and removed a good chunk of green marble. I didn’t know all that much about statues, but marble was supposed to be popular for sculptures, right? Not wanting to spend months on the project, I didn’t even think about making the piece life-sized, deciding to make it about my height instead.

  At that size, the stone easily fit into my storage which had grown quite nicely over the years. Given that it scaled based on my Wisdom and Spatial Magic level, my recent advancement to the Adept rank had done it wonders. From its humble beginnings as a tiny closet, it was now on par with a studio apartment. Not the shoe-box kind, either, but the swanky kind in a nice doorman building. It was definitely larger than some of the crappy places I’d rented back on Earth.

A single Recall took me back home, and I got to work. Just like my instructor for Woodworking had once shown me, I started with the basic shape first, not even bothering with a chisel as I sawed away large swaths of stone with a summoned blade. A few times, Cal and Verin stopped to watch me work, asking what I was making. Feeling no need to spoil anything, all I said was “You’ll see.”

With each pass, the sculpture grew progressively more detailed until I was forced to coax Arcane Armaments into forming a chisel. The body was the easiest, and while I botched the first dozen scales I tried to make, eventually I improved. Likewise, the tail wasn’t too hard.

As to be expected, the heads were much harder, and I nearly had to start over once I carved out their general form. I’d had such a clear image in my head that I hadn’t thought about gravity or stability, and the five heads, extending out into the air, threatened to snap off or send the statue toppling forward. It was touch-and-go for a while, but I figured out the issue early enough to make a few of the necks more vertical, saving the sculpture from getting scrapped.

When it came to the heads themselves, I struggled, but I also got to cheat a little. I made sure to capture the way their scales stretched and joined together to form crowns of sorts, and I carved out the basics of some eyes and facial features, but there was one last feature that I was planning to add that would partially cover the faces, letting me render them with a slightly lower fidelity.

Needing to make a brief trip for more materials, I took a few days to start the prep work for my other projects, but once the timer was up, I took Tal’Ket out to the jungle. Having grabbed Overload Resistances, I wasn’t too afraid about the poisons considering how few could affect me the last time I’d been here.

A single day of foraging was enough, and a quick cast of Recall brought me back home. From there, only two steps remained.

Move Earth. The Apprentice-ranked spell was best at shifting around loose dirt, but with enough mana and effort, it could minorly alter stone. While I might have been able to use the spell to assist with some detail work, that felt a bit like cheating. Instead, I focused inside the hydra, cast by cast, opening miniature tunnels that ran through the statue. A few of these channels exited out of the hydra’s back, and five more widened out to escape from the hydra’s mouths.

Earth Magic has reached level 24!

While this was primarily a Stonemasonry project, halfway through, I’d realized I could incorporate some Gardening and Alchemy as well. From my storage, I pulled five cups, each filled with a slurry of moss in an alchemical growth solution. Then, much like the junglings had offered up their cauldrons, I poured the cups down the five throats one at a time. Each cup held a different strain of poisonous moss, and I’d tried my best to grab varieties with slightly different colors.

As the slurry rushed down the inner channels of the statue, I finished it all off with a few casts of Vivify. It wasn’t enough to make the moss suddenly burst out of the marble and cover the entire statue, but I was fairly sure I’d done enough. Soon, the moss would cover the back and fill the mouths of the terrifying garden guardian.

With one more glance, I took in my creation and nodded.

“Done.”

Stonemasonry has reached level 11!

Gardening has reached level 12!

Congratulations! You have crafted an item: Marble Hydra Planter. 

The quality of your work is: Standard. 

Note: This item was made using components harvested by the crafter. For creating an item using your own materials, a vertical bonus will be applied: Quality upgraded to Good.

Based on the quality, rarity, and tier of your crafted item, you have been awarded 20xp. 

That was about all I’d expected, and considering it was my first big statue, I was content with a Standard quality. Surprisingly, things didn’t end there, though.

Note: This item has a unique design! Due to the Prestige of the crafter, the unique design, the vertical bonus, and the surrounding environment, this item has been granted additional effects.

The notification, while similar to some I’d received before, was a new one for me. It looked like I hadn’t quite earned the distinction of making an actual named item, but I was still getting a bit of a bonus regardless, the details of which the system immediately went on to inform me.

Marble Hydra Planter

Grants a small boost to the growth speed, potency, and taste of nearby poisonous plants.

A fitting power for a fierce hydra. Admittedly, I would have loved to earn some of the actual hydra’s powers, gaining a poison breath from any of the herbs I ate, but I supposed that was too much to hope for as a simple Initiate stonemason.

Still, I hadn’t been expecting any grand powers in the first place, so I was more than satisfied. It was, at the very least, a fine start and a good omen for things to come. 

And with a bit of luck, hopefully I’d only do better on my projects to come.