Chapter 21: Chapter 21. Looting for dummies.

Rik seemed to have a problem doing anything but repeating me. “I didn’t ask?”

I nodded, “Yes. You never asked. You simply spoke to me through Cassie. I would not be surprised if there were many other kobolds that understood common as well. I take it you were the individuals that murdered a pack of Juveniles and a guard outside of Dirt?”

Rik grumbled, “I thought they were monsters, not NP...Locals.”

I nodded, “And they thought you were monsters. Your illusion trick was a good idea, but it had too many holes.”

Mae said quietly, “I don’t have the power to do a full illusion for an entire party.”

Cassie spoke up. “Why are you so smart, and talking? I haven’t seen frost kobolds anywhere west of the Silverheart Mountains. The ones I've met were barely more than animals, and while there are some nations we can trade and make peace with, most blue kobolds are greater kobolds and just attack, especially on the surface.”

I shrugged, “I don’t have much of an explanation for you. I have some theories, but nothing confirmed other than what you have already guessed.” I was not going to lie to them, but Cassie mentioned Mae had some social skills. If she had some kind of detect falsehood ability, I wasn’t going to give her ammunition to call me a liar. “For right now, I need to know something,” I said to Rik.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Did you get a quest about the dungeon?” I asked.

He nodded, “Yes. Several actually. One was exterminating 12 Dire Rats, a floor clear quest, a defeat boss and mid-boss quest, which is halfway finished, a defeat 20 shellcrawler quest, and a move to floor 2 quest. The defeat 12 and 20’s are both green, so I don’t care much about them, the floor boss quest is orange, which is normal for a dungeon floor boss that you don’t out-level, and the clear floor quest is white, which means we are the right level for it.”

“So this is normal for a dungeon? Do other people have quests for it?”

He nodded, “Yeah when a new dungeon is discovered, you get a bonus for finding it. It immediately joins the dungeon repository at a shrine, and it’s connected to the Sindaenaway registry. Anyone else that goes looking for a local dungeon can find the quests now. Once people get the first clear bonuses for all the floors except whatever the last one is, It opens the raid menu. Raids are kind of cool, since a lot more people can join a raid, and you can actually conquer a dungeon permanently.”

“If a group conquers a dungeon outside of the newb...outside of the radius of a Traveler city, They can do what they want with it. Tax it, restrict it, raid it at will, or even just destroy it and sell the core. No one has managed to do it yet, not even the Beta pl..travelers, but supposedly a core can be used to build your own base or city, create your own dungeon, and be used by a master enchanter to create truly epic armor sets or weapons, or sold for sick amounts of money.” he added.

“It just went live yest...Umm, the travelers just arrived in the last week, but there are already races to see who can clear a dungeon first and grab a core. Getting here from the city was hard, and dangerous, and I expect more adventurers to arrive before we even finish clearing the first floor, but due to inst...Magic, We shouldn’t meet any, and we are first entry. Even if they clear the floor before we can, we can still get the first clear bonus on this floor because we were here first. We have to move fast, though, if we want a chance at getting the second-floor bonus because some of them will just skip trying to clear the first floor to get to the second as fast as possible so they can get the bonus.”

“That sounds very… complicated. But it means that other explorers are already on their way here?”

He nodded, and I realized Carolinus was right. There was no returning for the Dirt kobold nation, even if they had killed this party, more would have arrived, and they might have tried to completely eliminate Dirt’s guardians rather than just sneaking in dressed as big kobolds.

“Do you want to join my party?” Rik asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, You got a big chunk of the experience from the mini-boss, because you contributed a lot to kill it, but we got most of it as a team because Cassie and I are in the same party. Shiana and Mae are considered my pets, which means that I still have 3 party slots left. I was going to try and make you a combat pet because you are a monster race and still a juvenile, but I don’t know how to improve your attitude. I am kind of a team all by myself, but if we are all in a party, we get an experience bonus, loot bonus, and we can share looting.”

I thought about it. I would have to make a hook similar to Mae’s, but it didn’t look that challenging after I figured out what it did. More importantly, with an information link, I might be able to get a lot more information on Antowyn Online’s system.

Does it look like such a link would make me vulnerable to manipulation by the worm?

From what we have seen, I think not. We should be able to shield our true affinities from the link since it’s a simple information transfer and what appears to be an energy conduit. If we find a shrine, you could also make an offering to Mnemosyne or the Drake. They could probably give you more information or help it work better, but it should be safe for now.

It was kind of interesting. I couldn’t attack or do much more than think while I was in my zone, but manipulating energy seemed to work fine, or even better than at full speed. I built a sort of knot, similar to the way Mae’s loop looked, although I had to directly copy a little loop she had. It was sort of creepy, but it looked like she didn’t manipulate her energy directly… Hers had some weird kind of energy structures surrounding it that I didn’t understand, but could fairly well simulate.

I think you might want to look at what your runic knot did.

What do you mean?

Rik’s hook, and Mae’s link, both contain a spatial anomaly. Essentially, a way to create a small extradimensional space. Your own link also contains such a link. If you expand that knot, you should be able to create an extradimensional space similarly. Like sorcery, imbue has the potential to simulate other affinities, and we may have discovered a way to use part of our soul space to contain objects.

You are reading story The Chronicles of Alandia, A Kobold’s Tale. at novel35.com

Obviously, because we do not have an affinity or knot to create other energies, such as chronomancy or life energy, you wouldn’t want to store living creatures in the space, and time would not pass in it, but for storing small amounts of food, tools, or even objects that contain their own energy it should work well.

I nodded and checked out the knotwork I had already made. She was right. With just a minor modification I could expand it to include the space we had created to house a larger version of the knot. It would be small, about the size of a bathtub, but it would be more than big enough to hold my knife, some food, and the poison vials and poisonous mushrooms.

“Hold on one moment,” I told Rik and grabbed the handle of my knife. It felt weird moving it into the space, passing my hand through the knot was a bit like putting it in a chest freezer, but after pushing it in and pulling it out again, I confirmed that I was the proud possessor of an extradimensional space!

“Try it now.”

I could actually see the weird hook unwinding from his bracelet, and I carefully connected it to the knot I had created for the purpose. After a moment, small energy signals seemed to race along the line, and I was able to see vastly more information about each of the people in the group. I was also able to decide which information I would send along the link, so I only sent physical and imbue.

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