Chapter 21: Chapter 21: Loot

Having picked mapping, with the resolution to pick appraisal next time, I spent my remaining envenomed time playing with item box. Mapping simply showed me the room I was currently in, helpfully labelled 'shrine', so there wasn't much I could do with it for the moment. Item box, on the other hand, felt like it still had some untapped potential.

I'd followed the logical progression from 'I can store something I'm touching' to 'I can store something I'm holding' and finally 'I can store something I'm wearing'. Since the item involved popped out of existence, it didn't matter how tangled up it was with me. Now I was trying to do the inverse. While restrained with centipede gunk, I'd managed to summon a spider claw directly into my hand, in the correct position to start cutting despite the tiny amount of space I was working with. If I could do that, why not summon my armour straight onto my body?

I'd expected to need lots of practice, possibly damaging my armour in the process, and only being willing to try because of my planned upgrades. In fact, it worked first time. The item box skill seemed to respond exactly how I wanted it to. That would certainly give more freedom in how I planned my centipede plate armour; I didn't need to worry about getting dressed or undressed. I could do something similar to my original sticky silk plan.

Equipment upgrades were something I wanted to do prior to finding the mana crystal. The side quest had biome restoration down as a reward rather than a penalty, but I knew better than to trust it. If it caused more monsters to spawn, I wanted to be ready for them. Even then, my first task after completing the quest needed to be visiting my respawn cave and making sure the area was still safe.

Actually, that raised the question of whether I wanted to complete the quest at all. The barrier restoration would presumably prevent a repeat of the centipedes invading my area, but if more monsters spawned in my area anyway, such a thing would be pointless. What if I got another brood-mother centipede in the cavern? The adventure wouldn't be that unfair, right? The biggest reason to do it was that completing quests was the only way I'd found so far to advance my class, and I'd already seen that completing one quest may trigger another. And perhaps the restored shrine would have some additional features?

Once the venom wore off, I started poking around the brood-mother to find out exactly what I had to work with. I hadn't actually got a proper look at the thing before, given the low light and that I'd only previously dealt with the head end of it. Now that I had time, I could walk its full length with my torch-shield. It was four metres wide, about three tall, excluding the extra height from legs and sticky-out brain, and over fifty long. It was, in short, humongous.

I tried to slice off a section of its shell to examine, only to find that neither the spider claw nor beetle horn would even scratch it. That was problematic... This creature didn't really have fangs or claws, and the mandibles weren't something from which I could extract anything small enough for me to hold. It would be rather ironic if I couldn't use this to improve my armour because it was too good.

I recalled the way that my spear didn't use to be able to pierce the centipede shells until the skill evolution. Was dismantling a dead creature still counted as an attack, with the damage increase a combat skill would provide? Trying my best to think of the corpse as an enemy I needed to attack, I swung with my dagger, this time leaving a shallow groove in the shell.

It took time and another two levels of dagger proficiency to cut out a section of shell, which was far thicker and heavier than the beetle shell I'd used so far. Without the increased strength from my class, I couldn't have used it at all. Even with my increased strength, I'd be limited in the amount of it I could use.

Of course, skill levels were also something I was after, so the fact I'd gained levels from attacking a dead opponent caught my attention very quickly. Given the sheer volume of monster available, could I grind all the way to the next evolution? I spent some more time with both of my weapons, but alas, the answer turned out to be no. I raised both skills to fifteen, but they stopped there. Still, it was effectively free levels, and it meant that the rest of my shell carving would go more easily.

Experimenting on the smaller centipedes proved their own shell was superior to the horned beetles, but vastly thinner than their mother's. I could use the thick stuff for vital points, and the thin stuff elsewhere. The brood-mother also had an enormous sac of hardening fluid. I knew the amber-like substance it hardened into could be cut through easily enough with my spider claws, but it could at least be moulded into arbitrary shapes. I still had some silk left too, albeit not as much as I'd have liked now that the centipedes had destroyed the remaining webs. It was enough resources to remake my armour.

Evolution conditions met: Makeshift crafter ranks up to improvisational artisan
Professional equipment is generally superior to home-made junk in every way except for one important one; when you're in the middle of an adventure, fighting for your life, you're unlikely to come across a professional blacksmith and their fully equipped smithy. In such a situation, being able to adapt and use the resources available to you can be vital. Of course, when most people look for available resources, they wouldn't ever consider the shell of a chilopoda sagacitas, especially when it's very much alive and still using it. You, for some reason, did, earning you this upgrade. This skill aids in the creation of improvised weapons, armour and items, and improves their performance.
Improvisational artisan advanced to level 11

It wasn't as if I'd killed the thing solely to get my hands on its shell, but I'd take what I was given.

With my skill upgrade and lots of time, I ended up with something that made me look very much unlike a university student. In fact, it made me look very much unlike a human. Admittedly, some of that was my fault; the mandibles I'd attached to the top of my helmet were not, for example, strictly necessary, but they did look cool! Or at least, I assumed they did; I currently lacked a mirror.

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I could only get the thing on and off by using item box, given that I'd made it completely in one piece. It was heavy, and I wouldn't want to run long distance in it, but I'd managed to keep my movements unrestricted. That meant it did still have some weaknesses, mostly my fingers and eyes. I didn't have much I could do about my fingers, and while I'd done my best with the hardening fluid and silk, it wouldn't stand up to a serious blow. I'd considered making a visor from the hardening fluid, which was sufficiently clear in thin enough sheets, but after some experiments showed that such thin sheets easily shattered into sharp fragments, I decided that would be even worse than having nothing. Nevertheless, it was a vast improvement from what I'd previously built.

Unfortunately, the centipedes didn't seem to have anything I could use as a new melee weapon. The mandibles, even from the smaller spawn, proved useless. Their fangs were interesting, but proved inferior in every way to the horn spears I was using. I collected a few anyway, just in case, but unless I managed to lose the beetle horns, I wasn't intending to use them. I did use the brood-mother's shell to make a new, larger and much heavier shield, along with a couple of backups given my tendency to abandon my shield from time to time, but an attempt to sharpen the shell to create a cutting edge was a failure.

I harvested a bunch of venom sacs, both in the hopes that they wouldn't decay as quickly as the murder tree's nectar, and hence be usable in battle, but also for more resistance training. Unlike the nectar, even a massive dose of this poison didn't seem fatal, which wasn't a surprise given that they generally didn't seek to kill their prey, so I was hoping I could pull more levels out of it.

Speaking of resistance training... I located the tentacle the brood-mother had violated my face with and followed it down to a sac on the underside of its head. I'd got three levels in disease resistance in twenty-four hours last time. It was probably worth taking some. Gross, but still worth it. Humans crossing between continents in Earth's history had wiped out entire populations by introducing novel diseases, and I was in a whole new world. Goodness knows what they had here, so disease resistance felt important to me even without the presence of monsters. Admittedly, as I gathered some up, the part of me that cared more about being a sensible human being than it did about skill grinding was strongly hoping that the eggs were no longer viable and wouldn't do anything to me even if I swallowed them, but that part of me was now firmly in the minority.

Resources gathered, I set out exploring centipede territory to find the mana crystal, and any other goodies they may have stashed around here. The dark cavern was still crawling with centipedes, to the point I didn't dare stab one because I doubted I would survive the resulting assault. They were still treating me as friendly, which meant I spent the whole search being crawled over and rubbed against. When I first arrived here, I'd screamed at a mere muncher... If a version of me from two weeks ago was here right now, there was no doubt a cardiac arrest would be involved.

Most of the cavern was boring, featureless rock. There was no cliff face or running water in this one. Only around the breeding chamber was there anything interesting. The walls turned out to be artificial, similar to the hardening fluid, except far thicker. The colour was different, and it was rough and opaque, but perhaps I could attribute that to age? Nearby was a tunnel that looked like it belonged to the brood-mother, given the size, and it was at the bottom of that I found what I was looking for.

The mana crystal was a blue orb the size of my fist, and it actually reacted to sense presence once I was close to it and actively feeling for it. It felt like the brood-mother when its attention wasn't on me, except on a smaller scale. The sense presence description had talked about mana, which is why I thought it was worth a try.

New skill gained: Sense mana
Mana is ubiquitous throughout the world, present in the air, seas, earth, and all things, living or otherwise. Nevertheless, there are differences, and someone skilled in mana detection can tell much about someone from the mana they possess. This skill permits you to sense the presence of mana with limited range and fidelity.

Woah. I checked my status, and it confirmed my hopes; I'd finally got a magic skill! One step closer to being able to fling the long-promised fireballs at my pet murder tree.

Along with the crystal were a couple of golden, unadorned rings and a thin longsword. All lit up to my new sense mana skill in a way that my own equipment didn't. Were they all magical somehow? This was my first proper loot in the whole dungeon, because monster bits really didn't count, but what if they were cursed or something? Cursed items were a common thing in RPGs, right? At least as common as needing to eat and drink... Would the appraisal skill have told me if I'd taken it instead of mapping? If they were cursed, would dying remove them? Probably not, because I brought items with me now when I respawned... I could chop my fingers off, but what if they had some sort of sleep or paralysis effect that left me unable to? Drat, I wasn't expecting that class feature to have a downside.

It was annoying having a few probably magical items that I was too scared to do anything with, but for now I shoved them into my item box and finished exploring the area. There was nothing else there, which left just one more thing on my to-do list before reactivating the shrine.

Or hopefully reactivating the shrine, anyway. The quest had demanded a mana crystal worth a minimum of a hundred mana, but I had no idea how much this stone was worth. It might only be worth one, for all I knew.

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