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

Sandra couldn’t produce cloth as a material at the moment, because she thought that it was technically a finished product that could be used for clothing and protective defensive purposes – just like leather and metal armors.  Therefore, she had to start from scratch…which meant growing Flax plants from the Flax Seeds she had received approximately a week ago from Kelerim’s foray into the nearby village.  He had brought back some linen cloth, which she assumed was why she had received the seed – because it was needed to produce it from the very beginning.

To this end, Sandra filled the bottom of her new 100X100X40-foot crafting room with 5 feet of plain old dirt.  Then, with an extra application of Mana, she created very narrow walkways leading through the room by turning the dirt into stone, separating long 10-foot-wide plots of dirt from the others.  The walkways were going to be useful in moving some smaller constructs she was planning on using to seed the ground with her Flax seeds – and for harvesting afterward.

So, she had dirt and seeds – but there were three other issues that she had to address.  One, the dirt she had supplied had very little in the way of nutrients that plants needed to survive, grow, and thrive.  Two, there was no sunlight in the room to help them grow – the ambient light provided by her construction of the room wasn’t nearly enough.  And three, they needed water – and most likely lots of it.

The easiest solution would be to create a trap that combined three different elements: Natural (substituting for the nutrients the plants needed and to speed up growth), Holy (for the light needed by the plants to grow), and Water (for…water, obviously).  She attempted to do this by placing a Natural-based trap inside the dirt, which would supply what was needed there; she placed another Holy-based trap in the ceiling, which would shine light down on the growing plots; and lastly, she placed a Water-based trap on the walls, which would spray out water when it was activated.

And every time she tried to tie it to a catalyst, it completely failed.

Sandra even sent one of every construct she had access to (other than her Iron-plated Behemoth), and every single one of them had no luck.  She tried to tie multiple constructs together as a catalyst without success; trying to tie it to a stationary object didn’t seem to work, either.  She wasn’t sure what was going on or what she was missing in the whole process, and neither did Winxa.

“Using multiple elements in a trap is a little beyond my knowledge.  If I hadn’t seen you do it already with two elements already, I would’ve said it was impossible.”  The Dungeon Fairy shrugged in apology.  “It’s just unfortunate that you have to place them all in the same room, otherwise I think you have a good idea.”

Yes, that is unfortunate—but wait…do they all have to be in the same room?  That really got her to thinking.  After running a few scenarios through her head, she thought she might have a solution.  Thanks, Winxa – you figured it out!

The Dungeon Fairy looked confused but pleased at the same time.  “Um…you’re welcome?”

Sandra had been thinking that she had to have everything in the same room to get it to work, but that wasn’t necessarily the case; ironically, she could split things up to make it all come together.  With this new thought in mind, she began excavating a room above her growing room.  It didn’t have to be very large, fortunately; in fact, while it was the same length and width as the one below, it was only 6 feet tall – just enough to be classified as a room and have a trap installed into it.

She created a steep tunnel that curved sharply up to the new space to make it an “official” room in her dungeon, and then she added some more stone dividers so that it looked like a replica of the growing plots down below – minus the dirt.  Instead, she created a Rolling Force construct and sent it up to her newly built room and created a stone pathway that led across the separated plots.  Lastly, she drilled multiple holes in the floor per plot equidistant from each other, so that they led directly down to the growing room.

Going back to the dirt-filled plots, she created and brought in a veritable army of 50 Articulated Clockwork Golems, created a big pile of Flax seeds on either side of one of the 10-foot-wide plots, and set her constructs to work digging holes and transporting seeds.  Their clamp-hands worked just fine digging through the dirt and even clamping onto seeds, and they were able to cover the seeds back up once they were planted without difficulty.  Once they were done, she picked a single Golem for a catalyst and began her trap preparation.

First, Sandra infused the dirt in the planted plot with the Natural element, which would locate, sustain, and enhance the growing speed of the seeds planted there.  Next, along the ceiling she placed large orbs of the Holy element that would shine brightly down and illuminate just the plot of dirt that had been planted; she wanted to concentrate on just the single 10X100-foot section of the room to make sure her experiment was working.

Unsurprisingly, since there wasn’t really anything too Mana-intensive with the trap she was making, it only required about 500 Mana for the entire dual-element trap to be placed and tied to the Golem – which meant that it would be easy enough to fill the entire room later…if it worked.  She also placed an activation trigger at a central point in the room where her construct could turn