Chương 205: Psilocybin Sixteen

The Wendell-Smith Dungeon had eight floors. One more than the Ditz Dungeon had. Unfortunately, or perhaps not unfortunately, the bottom three floors were only rarely visited, and so obtaining a map for those was nigh-on impossible. Once I reached that level of depth, I'd be more or less on my own. But that was fine, I was ready for a deeper dive. The moment the foreman told me that I could go down to the third floor was the moment the Wendell-Smith Dungeon was given a timer before it was changed forever.

On that first day, I followed a crew of others down through the first two floors. The monsters here were... well, dead. So I didn't have to concern myself overly much about them. There were tracks laid out for little minecarts through the first floor, and then wooden planks to help with wheelbarrows going deeper than that. The first floor had rats that were almost as big as those that lived in the slums, but which were twice as aggressive.

They were apparently good meat, which was something I was determined not to think about too much. The entrance looked like an old mine. Long, winding tunnels. The second floor had spiders, because of course it did. There were also more rats, and bats. The second floor was more lived-in. The looked almost like a small city, with the entranceway tunnels leading into a wide, rather open room filled with hundreds of small, stone houses that were long abandoned and covered in layers of dust.

The bats would sometimes swoop down and try to grab someone, and the rats were a constant threat, but it was the spiders that other delvers warned about. The mammalian creatures were more directly aggressive, so the first crews of delvers that came in in the morning were assaulted non-stop, but once they were all dead, that was it. The spiders on the other hand, were ambush predators. They'd wait and jump onto any unwary delver. It was made worse by the work found on this floor.

The homes here had items within that were extracted daily. Small furniture made of copper and brass, and old, rotting chests with ancient weapons within them. The third floor started at the far end of the open space and down a set of wide stairs. Those lead to an underground area that was something like an ancient aqueduct, with arched ceilings and a small maze of tunnels. The first teams through every morning marked them out with glowing uranium-chalk lines so that no one was lost.

Here, the work mostly involved setting up wider passages with wooden planks and reaching these large pillars of salt that seemed like they were almost melting out of the ceiling. The first time I went down, my job was to pick the chunks of salt off the ground to toss them into wheelbarrows. Further in, there were teams extracting small crystals from some walls. I was warned not to approach the waterways in the centre of the rooms, and to keep an eye out for movement in that water.

There were eels here that could snap out and drag someone in. I just nodded along and did my job, all the while keeping an eye on the crews coming in from deeper. Floor four was called the Fungal Grove on official paperwork. The delvers called it the shithole, very unofficially and usually out of earshot of the rare foreman that came down this low. The grove was... impossibly tempting to me. I wanted to go there so bad. An entire floor with massive fruiting bodies? Yes please!

The enemies down there were giant beetles and some sort of frog. There were a few frog bodies carted up to the surface for later butchering, and I think I'd even eaten some of their legs at the academy as a sort of local delicacy. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. What was mostly extracted from the fungal grove was raw ore.

There were these rich deposits all over the floor that men mined at and shoveled into wheelbarrows that did the long trip back to the surface. At the moment that contract was mostly in the hands of Whitmore & Hale Cavern Surveyors. So not the company I was working with at the moment. That was fine. I made note of how they were dressed and how many people were working with them, including younger people. That night, when I got home, I started to collect some things and set others into motion.

First, I told Bet and the girls that I'd be busy for maybe as long as a week or two. I gave them instructions for the farm and then set all of the more dangerous stuff away to grow in relative peace. That night, I packed a bag with essentials. Mushrooms that could collect water, canned food, a few medical things. I went out and spent some of my hard-earned cash on some delving tools in the city. Good, expensive stuff. Torches with magic stones empowering them, a folded up tent, a sleeping bag.

Basically, the best stuff of the highest quality I could buy without raising any alarms. As for weaponry... I had a small arsenal of mushrooms with enough deadly potency to wipe out a sizable population of anything that needed to breathe or that had blood in them. Then came telling my mom. It wasn't something negotiable. This was my life's work, my mission.

The fact that I offered her money and that she was reluctant to take it, the fact that she still wanted to work at the factory rather than spend time working with and for me... well, it made things a little awkward. The last thing I 'packed' away was Sir Nibbles. He had the luxury to only be shoved into my backpack the next morning, right before I headed out to work at the dungeon.

I paid for a fare to cross the city quickly, then grabbed a bigger breakfast than usual at a small dinner a few blocks over from the dungeon itself. If anyone wondered about a child ordering a full meal, or sneaking some of it into their bag, they didn't make a fuss. I was on the third-floor shift again, and so when I arrived I tossed my things into a wheelbarrow and started down after the rest of the crew, keeping mostly to myself.

Someone walking with their head down and a clear idea of where they were going, dressed like they belonged, and with a few skills to make someone's attention slide off of them, could damn well get into just about anywhere. Still, I was a little worried as I made it to the bottom of the third floor. This was where things would be a little tricky. If my plan was going to fair early, then it was at this stage as I separated from the rest of the Brasslight crew.

I set my wheelbarrow aside, then moved around the group, checking in on everybody before moving on to the next. I tried to make it look like I was carrying out some duty for the foreman, even going through the trouble of counting something on my fingers as I moved about. No one thought to stop me as I moved further back, then slipped around a corner. The next obstacle was down a staircase. There were members of other crews down there, but I had come prepared.

I pulled out a small strip of coloured cloth and quickly tied it over one arm. The other crews used armbands to mark themselves out. It was a quick and easy way to tell who was working with whom. Mine wasn't quite the right shade of yellow, and I didn't have the company logo painted on, but a scrunched up, dirt-covered band was hard to read in the lamplight that illuminated this part of the dungeon.

If anyone noticed that I didn't belong, then my skills were enough to make them assume that it was someone else's problem. I just smiled and nodded and walked on past what little security there was down here. The guards Whitmore & Hale Cavern Surveyors were paid to kill off any monsters that the earlier crews had missed. In theory, they'd keep out anyone from a rival company from going where they didn't belong, but I don't think they were on the lookout for a single child-like troublemaker.

I slid past them unnoticed and moved into the fourth floor. It was a forest, a fungal one. The trees were thick, tall mushrooms with bark-like stems wide enough that a grown man wouldn't be able to wrap their arms around it, and the room was lit up by bioluminescent moss above. I had samples of both, already, though I had a hard time not keeping my eyes on the ground to search for new and interesting mushrooms.

"Eyes on the prize," I muttered to myself as I pushed in deeper. Fifth floor, then sixth, then I'd camp the night in. After that, the bottom and a second dungeon claimed by Feronie. 🍄︎🍄️🍄︎