NOVEL NEXT 96 - Awesome Gemstone Cufflinks!
The door clicked open, and they entered.
The interior resembled his father's office.
There were lots of officelike things, but suitable for a fantasy world. He hated that was the first instinct of his mind — "an office, but in a fantasy world". A globe, depicting the single landmass of Omnio and the thousand tributary islands across the Great Sea. A pile of scrolls, meticulously untouched. Stamps and seals and quill pens. All illusory, all mirages formed from the Dungeon's power.
Bureaucracies and offices existed in any empire of reasonable size. A fancy office was just a fancy office. They existed anywhere there was hierarchy, anywhere people put themselves above others by doing paperwork. What separated one fancy office from another — be it a middle manager, a CEO, a bureaucrat, a noble, or a prison warden — was the institution it was part of.
There was something cathartic about killing his way through an office of mindless drones. Perhaps one day in the future he could open this place up to the lesser nobility, those who had to work for a living, bureaucrats in the great machinery of the Omnio Empire. Surely they'd enjoy a chance to kill their way through mindless hordes of the dead that resembled office workers. Surely. He could make a whole theme park experience out of this.
Assuming, of course, that the office workers were like those of this world, and not of his memories.
The most prominent feature of the room was a great desk, meant for the boss. The head honcho. The guy in charge. It was in a corner, facing them. Both walls behind it opened into that vast nonsensical blue. The desk itself shone, or perhaps only seemed to, with a great light — glinting silver and white, perfectly suspended between sunlight and fluorescence.
If he walked up to it and looked down, there was nothing but more of that endless blue, though he was prevented from falling by a window. If he looked up, he could see the crystal spires of a distant city, now flipped upside down, stalactites that might fall upon them like spears and raindrops at any moment.
In the Middle Subtier, things stopped making sense. At the Bottom, the dead projected their authority.
This was an office in a corner. If he was feeling punny, he would call this place a corner office.
There were no signs of use or habitation. Not a sheaf of paper was out of place.
Archmund crept forward, wondering if he should be on his guard for attack. His companions were similarly wary, their heads swiveling like cameras.
But there were no Monsters.
He felt odd about this. Worry crept into his throat.
When he'd cleared the First Tier, there had been a room much like this one, that mirrored Granavale Manor. In that room, Monsters had swarmed him and his companion, the Princess Angelina Grace Marca Prima Omnio. They'd beaten those Monsters off, but their shed miasma had amalgamated, calling forth a much more powerful and dreadful being — the Ghost of All Granavale.
It chilled him to remember that fight, how he'd fought a creature with the power to throw fireballs and raise barriers and spawn lesser Monsters out of its own flesh.
And it contrasted sharply with the dense unyielding silence that pervaded this corner office.
It was unnerving, honestly, that no one was here. Surely there was supposed to be some challenge, some barrier that prevented his forward motion.
He'd fought tooth and nail against the Ghost of All Granavale, which had taken the form of his late mother to tempt and subvert him. This was almost too easy by comparison.
Maybe, for once, he'd get a free ride. He'd certainly worked hard enough to earn one.
Slowly, he approached the desk. He almost had to shade his eyes against the brilliance of that vast blue sky, refracted by something lying upon the table.
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Gemstone artifacts, a pair of them. Cufflinks, that would fit perfectly through the holes on his sleeves. Though from afar they looked blue, up close they glistened with brilliant refractive clarity, the pure colorlessness of diamond.
They were of a higher grade than the other Gemstone artifacts he'd seen. Other Gemstone was the lashings-out, the outbursts of the dying, the delusional dead. But these were crafted with intention. His magic sense, still nascent and budding, could feel the density of the crystal, the depth of its refraction, even without infusing into it.
There was power here. So much power.
He put them on.
[Gemstone Cufflinks Equipped!]
[Charisma Buffed: 10 x 2 = 20]
[Skill Granted: Influence]
It was hour fifteen of Archmund's ascendancy, and the factory had to grow.
He'd plugged in his Gemstone Tablet to the Dungeon's crystal. He'd wondered if it would work at all, but it did, which was actually unsurprising. The Tablet had formed of the Dungeon and came from the Dungeon. It was only fitting that it would interconnect with the Dungeon. It was like bringing it home.
Upon his desk were the spoils of his labor. A pile of Gems, pure and smooth and round. The crystal hand of the Ghost of Granavale, won on the Upper Subtier of this realm.
The Undead Clerks were mindless, driven by instinct and memory. Those could be hijacked and turned to one's purposes.
Though they were Undead, they had enough of a mind to be subject to the force of his will, his sheer overwhelming Charisma. The Skill Influence worked analogously to how Bodily Barrier's power ultimately depended on the user's Constitution. Though he supposed he'd never put that in words — Bodily Barrier redistributed force across the body, so of course it worked better if you had a strong constitution. Influence, in contrast, was outward pressure.
Influence granted more weight and heft to the things you said. You could say the right things, but others could still ignore them if they had strong enough wills. But if you had a far stronger Charisma than others' wills, even the dumbest things you said would sound just right, intent triumphing over spoken meaning.
The Undead Clerks had very little will of their own. And so they worked like perfect factory pawns in his perfect supply chain.
The Gemstone Cufflinks had drawn out his own natural talent and abilities, propelling them to new heights. For now he had gone through the looking glass, and knew the true synergies that motivated the Dungeon.
Dungeon was such a simplistic, shallow word to describe what this place truly was. "Dungeon", in English, implied a place of punishment. Of lockup and torture. And this place served that role to the Hell-fleeing dead, yet it was utterly insufficient as description.
This was not a prison. It was a passage. And, in the right hands — his hands — a production line. A factory.
A perfectly optimized way to turn the tortured dead into crystalline riches. A perfect way to extract Gems, whether perfected and pure or sculpted into useful form.
His were the hands that designed the production lines. His were the hands that merged the Monsters. His were the hands that tore their Gemstone hearts from their half-living corpses.
The method was simple, and followed even simpler principles.
With his Influence, he commanded the dead to attack the pools of shadow as they budded, spawning Monsters of their own. They would kill the formless darkness before it could take a form, extracting unshaped Gems of maximum size.
Then, if the Gems were small — smaller than the ones he'd already collected, for example, or if there were any extruded pieces of Gemgear, the Monsters were to consume the Gem. They would devour and eat the Gem, and so infuse it into their own forms, becoming stronger, enhancing their own core Gems.
They would continue this for as long as their forms could stand it.
But the fragments of mind remaining to them had limits. The physical form of a Monster was a careful balance between the outward pressure of its power and the inward pressure of what little mind remained, like the radiation pressure of a star.
Normally, Monsters spawned from the dark pools with enough power to balance out their instincts, perfectly within their tolerances. Over the course of a battle, their power drained, leaving them with their minds but not enough power to act out their instincts, making them empty husks, easy to dispatch.
This was different, like overfeeding geese to make foie gras. By pumping excess power into them, forcing artificial amalgamation, their core Gems would grow denser and more complex, more powerful. But that would hit a limit. Eventually, the wild instincts of the Monsters would overwhelm the structure imposed, and they would use their power. They would start venting it wildly into the atmosphere, or start extruding it as Gemstone Gear. They would hit a point of diminishing returns.
At that point, Archmund or one of his trusted subordinates would summon the Monster to the Corner Office, and dispatch it themselves. Cleanly, in a single hit, with no resistance. And they would harvest the beautiful, pure, powerful Gem from the center.
Gems these pure and beautiful would sell for a fortune to the Omnio Empire, but they would also be usable. Even a primitive cut would give enough shape to the Gems to draw out their inherent power, giving him a very long runway for his potential.
This was everything he'd ever wanted.
He leaned back in his seat and had a satisfying drink of coffee, as he recalled the long and arduous journey that had brought him this success.