Chapter 121: 119. Cliffs and Caves Redux

You stay precisely long enough to make sure that the resources you set aside for your goblins have indeed spawned in before you flee from your diminutive lover's wrath. It's not cowardice, you reason, if you have work to do, and the larder cave does still need expanding.

It's not like anyone was seriously injured anyway. It seems that having a opening to the outside world helped mitigate the damage somewhat.

You push it from your mind as best you can, as you open your menu once again.

Unlike the goblin town, you have plans for the Larder expansion, both aesthetic and functional. It's not a good job, after all, creeping into the web filled cavern and hunting for centipedes the length of your arm. Some sort of defensible hunting camp would make the job much easier on your minions, as well as provide another distraction for adventurers entering your lair.

With that in mind, you start off with a hundred stone on two large, irregular rooms, one behind the tavern, and another behind the kobold village. Another seventy goes on seven small rooms that, with a bit of finagling, you turn into twisting dead end cave offshoots. Three attach to the middle room, and four to the cavern nearest the kobolds. More places for skittering things to breed and hide, and ambush unwary heroes seeking a shortcut through your dungeon. Forty five stone one three connective corridors that wind through the cave complex, linking them together. You keep the corridors thin and tight, to dissuade heavy armour and in turn make the insects deadlier. The final corridor bucks upwards into a scrabbling slide of slick stone, before emerging in the cave you designated as Sapphire's, before she started spending every night with Feathers.

A touch of wood, scrap and iron fashion another locking door for that end. No need to unleash chitinous hell on your loyal kobolds, after all.

This time, as you confirm the blueprint, you take several large steps back. The caves do have openings to the sky above but...

The oread twitches next to you, and the locked door in front of you shudders, but holds. A muffled crack of air is still clearly audible, but it's drowned out by a most unexpected noise.

You just levelled up. Three times.

It takes you several seconds to figure out what has just happened, before you wince. There were a lot of bugs in those caves, and technically, you guess you did cause them to die. You resolve not to look a gift horse in the mouth, boosting your integrity once more. Hopefully next time you're forced to leave your lair you'll be able to stave off Dragon's Avarice for longer.

You briefly consider ways of exploiting this new method of experience gathering – could you remove the rooms, let the larder repopulate again, and repeat the de-compressive explosion? Expensive in terms of stone, but one hundred stone for three levels is a trade anyone would make in a heartbeat. It would naturally get less effective as you level – already any bugs that gave you thirty or less experience would now give you nothing, but free experience is free experience. You table the matter for now.

Under the level up notifications is another menu box, asking if you wish to spread the 'Larder' designation over the new caves. You accept, of course, even if the act causes you to repress a shudder as dozens of black cracks spread over the new caves and spindly legs begins to emerge.

You push down the mental image, and review your resources.

Between the two expansions, you've burnt almost your entire stock of stone again, but your lair probably has more than double the usable space now, as well as the space and food production to house and feed your new population. You still have more than four hundred wood, which should be plenty for your hunting camp, and a solid chunk of metals, bones, hides and other miscellany.

Camp then. As much as you want to go for some of your more off the wall ideas, such as huts hanging from the ceiling, or purpose built mushroom houses, you think practicality does need to win out somewhere.

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Instead, you go for three squat wooden huts, large enough for a dozen goblins if they were comfortable with each other, clustered at the southern end of the middle cavern. With a little thought, you decorate them slightly – the same carvings of twisted faces and short figures that decorate the goblin areas of your lair, and give them reinforced, lockable doors. Some hides put aside to act as simple bedding, a few crude pieces of furniture. You don't bother being too precise or providing comforts. Anyone who spends long enough in those huts to require sleep really should have known better, the point of expanding the larder like this is to prevent your people from being on days long hunting trips.

You nod, satisfied. You can always add more later – barricades, some way of escaping, things like that, but for now you'll call them done. There's only one thing left you really want to do, based on what Charlemagne said.

You bring up a different part of your menu, finding the option for living trees.

Somewhere around here, surely there must be-

Living Mushroom – 30 Wood

Perfect.

Or...

You have a silly idea. You know it's silly. Just because it worked for the demon tree doesn't mean that forcing objects to appear inside objects will always work. And you only have one mana potion. It would be better to give it to Amanda.

These thoughts all pass through your mind as you extrude the mana potion into the middle of the third cavern, and place the Living Mushroom blueprint around it.

The Oread seems much less inclined to help with non-stone build projects, but that's alright. She just wiped out all the bugs after all. You walk through your expanded caves with leisure, seeing it with your own eyes and watching small scuttling things flee from you.

It doesn't take long to finish the mushroom. It expands into being with a pop of breaking glass, and a flare of blue light that makes you flinch as the mana violently disperses.

The flare grows dim, but doesn't disappear entirely. You look up at your creation with pride, as the glowing mushroom bathes you in blue luminescence.

 

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I'm sorry if this one is a little off. Just started some antidepressants and I don't know if its them or not but my brain is the consistency of rice pudding today.

A huge thank you to my patreons Spockk Kirkk, Abysslsniper, Tyrant615, Dakkanor, Jakelandiar, CBK, Roman, TheDrTelos, RD, Bakerdea, Hemlock, Baby Bird and Torish12. A special thank you to Spokk Kirkk who is paying more than they need to, which is one of the most incredible feelings. A very special thank you to Roman for being insane and updating their pledge to a truly silly amount.

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