Chương 81: Limitless Path Chapter Eighty-One

Beth supposed the only thing to do now was to check each doorway and see if there was anything interesting through any of them. She once again went counterclockwise around the room, looking into each doorway one-by-one. The first doorway to the right of where they had entered led almost directly into a large room, only a short tunnel separating it from the main room. Beth noted the room and moved on to the second opening, finding a longer tunnel here which she couldn't see the end of at a glance.

She moved on to the third unexplored opening, the one directly across from where they had entered, and saw another tunnel. She thought she could just faintly see it opening up further down, but whether it was a wider tunnel or a room, she couldn't tell. The fourth opening revealed another tunnel that stretched away into pooled darkness, no end to it that she could see. The fifth and final opening, apart from the sixth where they had entered, led into a room like the first opening she had inspected.

"What do you think girl; rooms first?" she asked Blood. The wolf barked an affirmative in reply and they entered the first opening she had scouted. The room looked like some kind of office space, with a number of desks arranged throughout the center of the room while the walls were lined with shelves. The room must have been at least twenty feet wide and thirty deep, and Beth was hopeful they could find something of use in a drawer, as the shelves were already looking pretty bleak.

They started nosing around, in Blood's case literally, trying to see if they could ferret out anything of interest. It was a rather disappointing browsing session, Beth finding a couple small pieces of mana copper ore on a shelf and a single silver coin. Blood wasn't able to turn anything up either, the wolf merely shaking her head before leaving the room. She led the way to the next doorway, and the two journeyed down the pathway to find a grouping of rooms together.

These rooms seemed to be more living quarters, but they were designed to be fancier than the ones they had previously explored. Instead of individual rooms, these were entire suites, with foyers, living rooms, bathrooms, and bedrooms all together in one unit. Beth was a little more hopeful that these rooms might yield something more than the office, and that hope turned out to not be ill-founded. While the first suite was basically entirely a bust, the second of the ten or so dwellings certainly wasn't.

Beth found a little pouch in a drawer in a stone cabinet in the bedroom, made of a dark leather and slightly bigger than her palm, which was full of gold. This wasn't gold coins, but instead was a pile of glimmering small ingots. Beth pulled one out and inspected the three-inch-long bar in the light, trying to determine what exactly it was. She wasn't one hundred percent sure, but she guessed it was actually mana gold.

If that was really the case, the bag would likely be worth more than its considerable weight in gold. The next few suites were more of the same, empty rooms with empty containers, but that changed again in the sixth suite. There were odd little knickknacks on the shelf in the living room, things that Beth didn't think would hold any real monetary value, but that did breathe a certain life into the room. What's more, there were a number of items in both the bedroom and, surprisingly enough, the bathroom.

The bedroom contained an ornate wardrobe that had several rather nice shirts inside. They looked like they were made of some kind of silk or silk-like material, and Beth carefully took them down and folded them on the bed before stashing the half dozen tops in her backpack. The wardrobe was not quite empty, however, as she moved over to it to check for more. In the back, leaning against the back left corner of the impressive piece of furniture, was an old staff.

It was made from some kind of polished wood with a medium brown hue, sleek and smooth all the way from a base capped with a mana steel endcap up to a flaring top. The wood spread into six different branch-like pieces that stretched for almost a foot. The ends curled inward slightly but did not touch, and hovering within the center of the six branches was a dark blue gem nearly half the size of one of Beth's fists. She carefully picked the item up before inspecting it, surprised at just how heavy the staff was.

It was nothing compared to her considerable strength, but a staff she expected to be a few pounds likely weighed close to fifty. With a bit of a sigh and much maneuvering, she was able to slide the staff into the pack on one side. She was rather thankful for the space-expanding enchantment at this point, already having to deal with hefting her new sword around in one of her two free hands.

She'd like to keep the other hand available to actually draw the blade instead of lugging around yet more weapons, and these of dubious use. The bathroom was a bit of a surprise, as it contained something that looked very much like a standard vanity setup, including a medicine cabinet.

It was within this medicine cabinet that Beth found several small vials of medicine, two of them looking like some kind of potion while the third seemed to be a bottle of painkillers, if she was reading the Universal Standard on the label correctly. The painkillers were made by an alchemist and could not just numb standard pain but block out the effects of magically induced suffering.

With that pleasant new information swirling around in her head, Beth stuffed the three bottles in her belt pouch and exited the suite. The next few suites were generally empty, with Blood sniffing out and snatching up a handful of silver coins, but otherwise they exited with no more than they entered. It was in the final suite that they found their last prize of the area; a hammer.

At first, Beth was a little disappointed to find the final living area contained nothing but a hammer, but upon further inspection of the piece, that disappointment started to morph into excitement. The piece was very similar to what she had been using at the Hall in her work, but compared to the forging hammers she used there, this was clearly a cut above. It was made of dark steel, a very deep gunmetal that was almost black, with a solid handle wrapped in dark red leather.

There were inscriptions on the sides of the head of the hammer, though Beth was unsure what they were for, and the weight and heft of the tool just felt so right as she held it in her right hand and twisted it around with just her wrist. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. Stashing the hammer, the two returned to what she was thinking of as the central room of this area, the large open room with six pillars and six sides.

They entered the fourth doorway and headed down a long and straight tunnel, Beth noting that the rather cool air was dropping in temperature rapidly, quickly progressing through cold towards truly frigid. The tunnel had turned out to be slightly longer than she had thought, but it was still only a little over a minute of walking to reach the end. The tunnel let out into a moderate size hexagonal room, much smaller than the main room, and Beth stopped dead upon entering, Blood almost bumping into her.

In the center of the room was a shining portal of silver light. There was no sort of structure around the portal, no arch or doorway or frame of any kind. Instead, there was simply a large silver hexagon standing alone amidst the room. Beth only hesitated for a moment, taking that time to do a short but thorough scan of the room for any hostiles before she approached the portal. She had played enough games and experienced enough in this new, changed reality to intuit right away that this was a dungeon entrance.

Where they had been treading to this point was clearly some type of old ruin, or something meant to be a facsimile of one, at any rate. Reaching out her hand as she stood before the portal, she gently touched it with the tip of her gauntleted right index finger. A notification sprang up in front of her immediately, causing her to twitch slightly before she lowered her eyebrows and frowned, examining the message closely. Kobold Labyrinth discovered. {Properties: Closed, Large, Anchored.} Closed - This dungeon is split into instanced pockets. The minimum number of pockets is ten, and the maximum number is based on a scale influenced by available mana and dungeon age. Large - The category above Simple, this dungeon extends at least a mile in one or more directions. The maximum size is an area of ten miles in any one direction, and the layout is only restricted in not requiring any sort of spatial movement or special skills to access the main section of the instance.

Anchored - A step beyond Discrete, this dungeon exists at a nexus of mana; from a conjunction of leylines to a natural Mana Well, something at this location provides a continuous source of power much greater than the simple gathering point that forms a Discrete dungeon. This dungeon, unless altered or destroyed through some special or extremely powerful means, will function continuously without needing any time to recharge or repair.

The message was not entirely new to Beth, as she had seen this twice before at the dungeons near her development. It was, however, chocked full of new and interesting information, including the parts about leylines and Mana Wells. She would be sure to do some research back at the CRA Hall to figure out just what those things were.

It also appeared from the descriptions that this was a bit of a more powerful or difficult location, as both the second and third tags' descriptions basically said they were a stage above the tags for the ant dungeon. While the description for the first tag didn't state as such, she also assumed that a closed dungeon with multiple internal instances would be something more powerful than an open dungeon.

"Let's not mess with this just yet," she said to Blood before turning and leading the way back to the main room. When they had returned to the main room, she led the way to the fifth doorway, journeying down the tunnel therein. After about two minutes of walking, they came upon a huge room, the ceiling lost in the gloom as the massive rectangular space extended away from them into pitch darkness.

Beth could see some boxes and crates scattered around in the light of her light stone, and she noted several pillars supporting the vast space, more light fixtures attached to each of those pillars. She did a quick scan to see if she could detect anything hostile, the memory of the Kobold Hulk still fresh in her mind and likely to stay that way for quite some time.

Nodding after checking the immediate area, she moved forward to the first pillar and fed the fixture a little mana, creating a warm glow in the area around her. She continued through the room, lighting the fixtures as she scanned the area. Blood joined her with the fixtures, surprisingly, able to turn them on herself with a bump of her nose. When the entire room was lit and exposed, Beth estimated it at over two hundred feet in depth and three-quarters that in height.

It was a little more than a hundred feet in width, a truly massive rectangle of space, the lights unable to fully drive away the clinging shadows pooling thickly about the ceiling. Scanning the room, she made a determination from the small stacks of boxes and crates that this was supposed to be a warehouse of some kind, though having only one small entry/exit would have made it terribly inefficient.

The floor was in better shape than the main room, smooth and covered in some kind of clearcoat or resin to increase its durability. The area was also somewhat dusty, Beth able to see motes floating about in the light of the column lamps, though it wasn't to the point she had to even rub her nose. She moved back to the start of the room as Blood sniffed around, confident that the wolf would sniff out anything unusual with her powerful nose.

Beth set about checking a few of the boxes and crates, prying the first crate closest to the door open with nothing but her raw physical power. Peering into the three-foot-wide container, she frowned, seeing a small pile of what she could only describe as awful mana copper ore. It was more rock than copper, with the copper itself having a very distorted coloring indicating a high level of impurity within the metal.

If all the crates were like this, they would be practically worthless; she imagined the whole pile she was staring at might be worth a couple of silvers and only if Jaq were feeling generous. She worked her way through several of the other crates, prying them open with a little strain on her arms and a grunt. What she found was simply more of the same, anywhere from a few pieces to the crate being three-quarters full of rough, dirty ore.

Even if she had had a full spatial item able to store things in a pocket dimension, she wouldn't have bothered with the contents of the crates. Filling her entire storage space with ore so poor it was little more than discolored rock would have been a total waste. She found the rest of the crates more of the same, but was pulled from that melancholy by a yipping noise from Blood. The giant wolf had found something interesting, something she couldn't get at herself without help.

Beth walked over to find the wolf pointing to a stack of crates that, when Beth moved several aside, revealed a chest hidden behind them. The chest was about two feet wide and deep and roughly eighteen inches high, made of a dark grey stone with a faint embossing on the front. Beth stuck a leg into the area of open space between it and the crates and half-squatted to grab it, letting loose a deep grunt as she was startled by the weight and nearly dropped the container.

With a heave, she lifted it up to her armored stomach and managed to half stumble back over the crate she had been straddling before setting the chest down in an open area on the floor. She had some guess as to what was inside already from the weight and was proven right a moment later as she flipped the lid open to observe the chest was full of metal bars. It all seemed to be good mana steel stock, ready to be forged and worked by a smith.