<~> Chapter 131

Everyone entering the dungeon were gathered near the entrance as the sun rose. The soldiers were finishing off the last of the crabs that were funneled through the stairs as the water mages filtered the salt from the water. Once the last of the flooding subsided and the pathway was clear, we would enter the dungeon again while we had the most time before the next cycle. It seemed there were about two cycles per day, one that ended around dawn and another that ended in the late afternoon. There was a slightly longer period before the next cycle at night, but most of the people here were on a daytime schedule and the gain in time wasn't enough to warrant disrupting the delvers' sleep schedule for. I felt a little bad for the soldiers that were manning the stairs overnight.

Jol'ket's team were a healthy distance away from us. Some of them still harbored doubts about me, but luckily our groups wouldn't need to interact much today. The plan was for everyone to explore as much of the floor as we could, rather than try to hold the area near the stairs. While we were exploring, the team of soldiers that were following us inside would build some minor fortifications to see how the dungeon treated them. Conventional wisdom said that they wouldn't last, but conventional wisdom also said that monsters usually keep away from the stairs.

"Is everyone ready?" Maxwell asked. The soldiers were finishing up and we would be going in any minute now.

Aria was counting her arrows. "I think I'm good. Do you want me to go in first to scout?"

"Better send Helena first, there could still be crabs near the entrance," he replied.

Piper stretched before looking down at Iris. "Did you rest well?"

Iris nodded. "Yes. The time we spent resting yesterday was nice after what we went through the day before."

"What are the chances we have to fight another of the snake monsters on this floor?" I asked.

("Pretty low today. Most floor boss monsters, which it likely was, usually take longer to respawn. The chances will increase every day until we see it again and then we should be able to guess the pattern. We know that it doesn't respawn right away, or else there would be freshwater and less crabs coming from the stairs,") Luna replied to all of us.

I adjusted the strap of my shield on my shoulder and walked toward the stairs when the soldiers waved us forward. Everyone agreed to let our group go in first again. Jol'ket's team wanted us to go first so that it would be harder for us to follow them on the floor, and we just wanted to have the most time possible. All of us had general directions to search from the stairs, so we would have an idea of the direction everyone went, but it would be harder for us to interfere if we went in at different times. Jol'ket's team would be last, which meant we shouldn't need to deal with them much. Rell'kor was friendly enough, but I didn't get along with any of the rest of them. I promised to sit down and talk with him about the effects of the venom, but we haven't had the chance with how things have gone.

After a trek up the slippery stairs, I shifted into my umber hound form the moment I took the final step into the dungeon. Since my secret was effectively out, I didn't bother hiding it anymore. I would rather be in this form that I was more confident in now that almost everyone knew about me.

The grass was still wet and the lagoons were full. I took a deep breath of the salty ocean air tinted with the mild scent of crab. I could still see some of them off in the distance, but they weren't close enough to be worried about my presence. I continued to keep watch and wait until the rest of my group filed out of the stairwell.

"Better get moving," Maxwell said once all of us were at the top. He started walking straight ahead like we agreed on.

"Is the dungeon always nighttime?" Iris asked as we walked.

"This floor seems to be," Piper replied quietly. "Different floors in different dungeons can behave differently, but most of the time, a nighttime floor will always be night. The fallow dungeon varied based on the floor, but all of the floors in the Ironcastle dungeon were night floors. We'll have to see what this one is like."

Iris nodded and stayed alert. "Good to know."

We walked through the grass straight ahead to the tree line. The trees weren't too dense, but were thick enough to block our vision of the stairs after a short distance. My glowing eyes illuminated everything ahead of us so we didn't have any trouble seeing. The torches Maxwell and Piper lit were a bit redundant, but would be good if I had to separate from everyone for some reason.

("Would now be a good time for Helena to experiment with the ability she gained from the snake monster?") Luna asked.

Maxwell glanced behind us. "We should get a little bit farther from the stairs. In case the ability is flashy."

"I don't think it will be. It feels similar to the plant ability I got from the floral king deer," I replied.

We kept walking for a while longer, only stopping to carve a few markings into the trees to keep ourselves oriented. I don't know a lot about trees so I had no idea if they were similar to any trees I would recognize. The bark had a slight green tint to it, but the wood itself was a bright white.

"Are these trees valuable?" I asked.

Piper shrugged. "Usually no, but they might be valuable for the town that will crop up above us. There isn't a lot of wood nearby since we're in the desert, so it might be a good source, as opposed to importing wood from somewhere else. It'll have to be checked out by the crafters, but from looking at it, it doesn't seem especially valuable. Not unless it's especially rich in magic."

I shifted back to my beastkin form to look over the wood using the blindfold. "It doesn't seem any more magical than any of the trees we saw in the Fallow dungeon."

Piper nodded. "Then these trees probably aren't worth much outside their potential use as building and crafting materials, and maybe low level delver weapons."

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After I shifted back, we walked through a few bushes and found a clearing with a large lagoon in the center of it. It was dark enough that I could see someone accidentally wading into if they weren't paying enough attention to their surroundings.

"This is a pretty nice place to take a short break. Why don't you experiment with your new ability while we catch our breaths," Maxwell suggested.

I looked over at Luna who was excited to see what my new ability was. Her inquisitive nature toward my odd powers was always a constant with her. She was cute when she got this way though, so it never bothered me. It was nice that she was interested in these abilities I gained, it made it easier to ask for advice. Her help in figuring out how some of them worked had been invaluable.

"Alright..." Some part of me felt like holding out my hand as I grasped at that knot of magic in my chest. I felt a tug from the nearby water as a fed the knot mana, just like I had been practicing. I wasn't getting great results so far, so I fed it a bit more mana until I confirmed what I suspected from this new ability. Salt manipulation.

"What an odd ability," I commented. I collected some of the nearby salt from the lagoon and created a small crystal from it, floating above my hand. The rough crystal chunk spun as I continued to feed the ability mana.

Luna's tail waved in excitement that I thought was a bit undeserved. ("How does it feel? Do you think you could create a shell of salt like the snake did?") Luna asked.

I furrowed my brow and concentrated on the clumps of salt that I had collected. They flattened out and laid across my palm, but the crystals didn't take on the same organized pattern that the snake's shell had.

"I'm not sure. This power isn't as straightforward to use as the other ones were, plus it feels like it's taking a lot of energy. I'll have to experiment with it more, but I don't think it will be useful to me at this stage. It would be too distracting to try and use this while fighting. I think it'll take a lot of practice to use it the same way the snake did."

"How far away from yourself can you control it?" Aria asked curiously.

I floated the flat shape away from me, but as the distance increased, the object began to crumble and move unstably. "I have some distance that I can control it at, but the farther away the salt is, the more difficult it is to hold onto. At a certain distance, all I can do is draw the salt toward me or push it away."

"It's not as impressive as earth magic of course, but something like this would be an unexpected way to manipulate things at a distance. You could create hidden weapons or manipulate things out of reach," Aria suggested.

I tilted my head. "Maybe. I could see it being handy if I didn't have any of my stuff with me. I'm not an assassin though. Turning something mundane into a deadly weapon doesn't really appeal to me when my claws would probably be more dangerous."

Aria shrugged. "True. It would have been more useful to me than it is for you."

("Can you harden the salt? Force it to stay in the shape of something?") Luna asked.

I collected about a handful's worth of salt from the lagoon and formed it into a spike about five inches in length. Once I had the general shape, I worked at increasing the density and packing it in as close as possible. Finally, I smoothed the surface as much as I could to hopefully hold the spike together.

When I was finished I handed it to Luna. "How's that?"

She poked at the sharp tip a few times and scratched at its surface before breaking a piece off. ("It's brittle. It doesn't seem that anything you make would be particularly long lasting.")

Luna handed the spike to Aria who also tested the tip. "This isn't too bad. I could still see it being useful if you needed some kind of primitive tool. This one doesn't seem particularly durable, but I could see something made from salt coming in handy."

I laughed as I swirled some of the salt above my hand. "First, I found a way to create my own spices, and now I've found a way to salt my foods. It's like the universe is telling me to eat less raw meat." That got a few chuckles out of everyone as I tossed the remaining salt back into the lagoon.

"I think this dungeon would be profitable even if it didn't have a second floor," Maxwell said. "Collecting salt and crab meat alone would probably be enough to create a thriving town."

Piper nodded, "And we've only seen the first floor so far. We don't know what the other floors are like, but considering how much they were able to gather from the early floors of the Fallow dungeon, this one might end up as valuable as a goldmine."

"Even if they have to regularly kill that snake monster and build infrastructure to keep the entrance from flooding?" I asked.

"I think that if they decide they need infrastructure to support the entrance, it'll draw even more people here. It would be a costly expense for Ironcastle, but one they would probably be happy to support. Additional sources of salt and food is plenty valuable to be worth it. At this point I think there's a different risk that Celeste needs to worry about now," Piper replied.

I tilted my head. "What's that?"

Maxwell sighed. "Depending on how the next few floors go, this place could be valuable enough that someone might try to take the town from her... by force. I'm not sure what result would be better for her though. A barely useful dungeon that only has food and salt, or a dungeon valuable enough someone might try to start a war over it."

Aria spoke up. "Aren't we out here to try and avoid a war with their allies? I thought the trade from a new dungeon town was supposed to stabilize Ironcastle's relationship with the nearby city states."

Maxwell shrugged. "It might. We might be worrying over nothing and she has everything in hand. Just be aware that there are a lot of ways the discovery of a new dungeon could go wrong."

Luna shook her head. ("We're here as delvers. We should focus on that and leave the politics to her for now. If we let ourselves get distracted by the town's problems, we may have trouble focusing on the problems that might kill us in here.")

"Well said," Maxwell replied as he stood up. "We should keep moving. We don't have unlimited time to look for those stairs."

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