The Crafter's Defense: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 2) by Jonathan Brooks (top 10 novels txt) 📗

Using Holy elemental energy, Sandra practiced creating a Minor Mending enchantment rune on some scraps of cotton cloth.  The enchantment was perfect for bandages or even clothing, though the last was a bit hit-or-miss; Minor Mending slowly healed wounds near where the cloth was pressed up against, and sometimes the runes would get sliced apart when they were on clothing, making them essentially ineffective.  Despite having seen the enchantment done dozens of times over the years when she was human, she was having trouble getting it right.

First, she found that the thickness of her rune lines actually did affect the quality of the enchantment, despite thinking otherwise.  When she was able to actually complete the rune, she could see it flare up when the energy from her body was pulled out and infused the enchantment; however, if the lines weren’t perfectly formed, she could visibly see that the rune was extremely faint – which signaled to her that it wouldn’t perform its functions very well or even just sporadically.

Second, if she started the enchantment from the wrong section of the rune, it fizzled and disappeared when she completed it, wasting the energy used in its creation.  Fortunately, she only made that mistake once when she started it just slightly off from where she should have; after that, she made sure to start it in the exact place she was taught.  She was just glad that Minor Mending was a relatively inexpensive enchantment to create – at least in the small size she was making it – as it only cost 15 Holy elemental energy per enchantment.

And third, expending so much elemental energy within a short period of time was literally draining.  She didn’t think her Dungeon Monsters could get “tired”, but it turned out that she was wrong – at least when it came to using up its energy.  Sandra figured that it was very similar to how she felt momentarily drained in her Core when she expended a large amount of Mana, though it was magnified exponentially when it came to her Shapeshifter.

In all, in just over 45 minutes of practice with the Minor Mending enchantment, Sandra had used exactly 3,000 Holy elemental energy – but it had paid off dividends.  The last few that she was able to make were as near perfect as she could get; not exactly master-quality, but with the simple enchantment rune she was making it couldn’t be improved too much even by a master.  The form of Echo that her Shapeshifter had acquired was tired – and so was Sandra by extension – but she was happy with her progress.  Of course, the enchantment she had been creating was so basic that it was actually recorded in some books that she had seen when she was learning as a Human; for the more-complex, three-dimensional enchantment runes and strings she knew, that practice was barely more than scratching the surface.

Still, it was a good foundation to prepare for that type of work.  Next, she was planning to practice a little more complex Air-energy enchantment—

Sandra felt her connection to Echo’s double waver for a moment and she paused in her actions.  When nothing else happened after a few seconds, she started to make the first line for the Hover enchantment, when the wavering came back stronger and interrupted her concentration.  The enchantment fizzled out without harm, fortunately, but the wavering didn’t stop; after another few moments, Sandra felt Echo’s form start to rapidly expand and lose its shape, until – after another second or so – she was back to having a mindache as the larger-sized Unstable Shapeshifter.

Confused, she tried to Shift the Monster again into Echo…but she was rebuffed.

Warning!

Due to its unstable nature, the Unstable Shapeshifter has temporarily lost the ability to Shapeshift.

Shapeshift Cooldown remaining: 59 minutes, 55 seconds

So, obviously there are some issues there that I need to consider.  Sandra was annoyed that her new Monster had another drawback, because she thought that the inability to communicate (she tried again when she copied Echo’s form and had the same problem) and enchant anything in its base form was bad enough.  Still, the fact that she could finally enchant was a positive, and if that meant that she had to wait an hour after each use of the Shapeshifter’s Shifting ability (hopefully the down-time wouldn’t increase), then that was an easy price to pay – and might even be solved with another solution.

While she was enchanting, she had only spent a little of her incoming Mana on creating materials, so she had acquired enough to unlock a Monster Seed that would easily hold another Unstable Shapeshifter: Small Faceted Sapphire Sphere.  It cost 7,000 Mana in addition to 2 Tiny Faceted Sapphire Spheres (which she fortunately had created and placed in her treasury a short time ago), but she needed it if she was going to be able to make another of her new Dungeon Monsters cheaply – because the Raw Materials needed to create another Large Steel Orb (at 32,000) was extremely expensive.  She wasn’t worried about Mana too much anymore, so if she could get away with something that cost more Mana but a third less RM (at 24,000) to create, then that was the way she was going to go.

Her thought was that if she had two of the Shapeshifters, then when one was on cooldown, the other would be able to work – if she timed them right.  She still had to wait for her Mana to recover from the expense before she could do that, unfortunately, but she estimated that it would only take about a half hour or so before she was to that point.  In the meantime, she was going to use that time to think more about the interesting enchantment “cage” around her Core.  In fact, while its Shifting was inaccessible, she might even bring her Shapeshifter