NOVEL NEXT Chapter 50. The 200th decennial dungeon games!
Adventurers weekly is proud to announce our special issue on the weirdest loot items ever*!
We have interviewed all across the great dungeon belt finding 100s of unique items across thousands of adventurers and dungeons. The full results can be found in the special issue but the most important "Top 10" voted on by our very experienced staff and put in a random order is as follows.
#10. Bag of Moulding. Any item placed inside this incredibly detailed bag quickly ages and grows mould no matter what material it was made of – have a knife you want rusted and governed in black fuzz? Stick it in the bag for a few minutes. The actual reason anyone would want this item is unknown. Maybe some weird mould mana class? I've never heard of that before.
#9. Perfect Chair. Common drop in one of the stranger dungeons near the tip of the belt these chairs are...well just chairs. They are incredibly comfy despite being made of nothing but wood and some strange bouncy material for the seat cushion – they can even be sold for quite a nice price...The only strange thing about them is that they exist. Why does the dungeon drop them? I'm sure adventurers would like all sorts of things more than chairs.
#8. Farting rocks. Useless loot dropped by an otherwise normal dungeon, these rocks have no practical use other than for pranks. The worst part is these rocks have a strange hypnotic effect that makes people want to pick them up and carry them around – despite them just being a rock that makes obscene sounds every once in a while.
#7. Ball and chain. A strange item that when activated locks someone in place with the ball unmoving until deactivated. It appears similar to something you might put on a prisoner but has an even stranger requirement that it must be put on with consent - something prisoners don't have a lot of. Use is unknown. Mike from sales thinks it's a sex thing.
#6. Unbreaking thumb-sized shield. An incredible item made stronger than anything anyone has ever known this shield is effectively invincible. It can block a dragon's breath in a 20mm diameter circle. Unable to be altered or combined into a more useful form it remains a useless oddity.
#5. Rat petting aid. A swirling ball of lights designed to attract rats so that you may pet them. If any action other than petting is taken the rats are incensed to attack. Why would anyone want to pet vermin???
#4. Book of plagiarism. A tome that steals words and ideas from other nearby books and has low utility. Would be useful to steal knowledge from hidden libraries if it weren't for the fact that it lies 50% of the time and doesn't like displaying useful information.
#3. Regular Banana. Non-magical mundane fruit. Strange due to being found in a lightning dungeon and even more so because there doesn't seem to be a good climate for it.
#2. A murders mercy. A knife that is incredibly sharp and can pierce through even the strongest of defences while heightening the reflexes and speed of those who wield it – this appears to be a useful item at first glance. The knife causes anyone who cuts another to feel immense guilt however and causes anyone who tries to fight with it immense mental torture as they start to cry for the monsters they slay.
#1. My personal favourite. Sunhats. A mundane magical item given through the dungeon of shades this hat blocks all harmful light causing even the lowest of levelled adventurers to stare directly at the sun without harm. Useful. Practical. But also not. Who actually wants to look at the sun? When have you as an adventurer found it too bright to see?
*As decided by adventurers weekly. Your new favourite source of news and fun tidbits. Sold at stores all across the continent.
Thanks for reading as always. This list was fun to research and there are many more strange or useless loot items found over the years. For a full list of the top 500 please see our expanded issue.
Excerpt from issue 74 of adventurers weekly.
Abyss: Hey I try not to talk in here, but I felt like it would be rude of me not to give you all a hint. The games are starting in a few days and you should make sure to stockpile cores. That's all.
What?? Innearth was thrown for a bit of a loop as he read the message from Abyss to the group chat.
Abyss: Oh! Also somewhat happy news but my levels reached 97. That's….well it means the games might just be enough to push me over the hump to rank 4.
Abyss: One of you needs to be Tier 6 before that happens otherwise you can't inherit the group owner position and your group chat will fall apart.
Abyss: Good luck! All of you are…well your advancing at quite tremendous speeds. Making me feel a bit inadequate anyways but I believe in you guys!
Amy: Wait what! The chat's in danger of being lost?
With that next message, Innearth was thrown more into confusion. He tried to imagine what the games were and started to move towards checking the market for a guide when a final message was sent.
Abyss: Oh! And I know I just told you to stockpile cores, but the games are slightly better if you don't research them first! Your first games are the best and they feel more special if you just enjoy the surprise. Good luck!
Abe: hey m8. you gotta give us more than that. you can't just say "don't look", that makes me want to look even more.
Fated Eternal Design: Mystery for mysteries sake is important sometimes Abe. I trust the core. He's never led us astray before.
…what was the point in that?
…stockpile cores? Okay…well let's see.
| Innearth | ||
| Level | 52 | 2899/3286 exp to next level. |
| System Access Level | 5 | 0/2 requirements met to advance. |
| -0/50 sapient delves. | ||
| -Level 64+ | ||
| Stats | ||
| Mana Regeneration | 81.82 | personal unit/min |
| Mana concentration | 2.69 | AMU / personal unit |
| Mana Storage | 8837.30/8837.30 | AMU |
| Physical Storage | 60% | Capacity |
| Age | 894 | days (2 years) |
| Distance underground | 293 | meters |
| Number of floors | 13 | floors |
| Titles. | ||
| Earth Mana Specialization, Crystal Mana Specialization, Void mana Specialization. | ||
With Innearth's current stats he could make…well a tier 1 core roughly every 55s.
He could make roughly 1584 tier 1 cores a day if he stopped all operations and started working on nothing but pumping those out…That was…quite a bit higher than when he was younger. All the materials he had seen that were hundreds of cores now seemed easily within reach. All he had to do was spend a day or so and they could be within his grasp. What happened!
…but he didn't want to stop all operations just to churn out cores endlessly. He still had to remake monsters when they died, and he didn't want to have them stop their skirmishes. He also – and this was important – didn't want to just sit there making cores and nothing else. That sounded incredibly boring.
What he could do was pump cores out while designing stuff in the system panel. That didn't take any mana until it printed and was a good distractor.
Besides. If we were given such short notice it couldn't be that important right?
Deciding on using around two thirds of his mana on making cores and the rest on keeping everything running smoothly, Innearth added roughly 1k cores a day to his emergency stockpile.
While that was happening, he spent time planning out monsters for the ice caverns. The most popular ice schematic being sold was the "snowman".
Three balls of ice roughed up and covered in the snow that naturally appeared once enough of an ice biome was set up, they were the bread and butter of ice floors. There was even a specific supply chain going where certain cores supplied buttons, or carrots, or woolly scarves that they claimed "needed to be included for it to be a proper snowman". They were relatively cheap but incredibly expensive for decorations…and Innearth did not want to rely on them for potentially hundreds to thousands of snowmen over the years.
The snowmen were however designed for ice floors set a wee bit easier than where Innearth had his located.
There were instructions on turning the tier 4 core in the middle ball into a tier 8 core for a linear increase in strength…but well, while Innearth could theoretically do that–
Theoretically, because higher and higher tiered cores were harder to make in anything other than a single "make as fast as you can and hope for the best" manner (mana leaked everywhere otherwise and decayed while Cores were waiting for their mana to regenerate). And, as a tier 8 core was 7200AMU to Innearth's current max pool of 8837AMU. It was now "theoretically" something he could make.
The main reason Innearth didn't like that linear increase in strength was that the snowmen's tier 4 core was already drastically underused. With circuits and a tier 4 core the snowmen should have been powerhouses each deserving of being a boss! Not bouncing mages that shot (admittedly hard and fast) Icicles or flung bits of the environment around. It was also 7200mana instead of the 2000 mana of a tier 4 core!??? For only a bit more than double the strength?
No, that was wasteful.
Instead, Innearth took each ball of the snowmen schematic and started "fixing" them.
A center tier 4 core on the bottom ball. A center tier 3 core in the middle ball. A center tier 2 core on the top.
Each of the 3 balls were going to be completely separate monsters that could jump away or return with small interlocking connections of short-range gravity mana.
They were all "Linked" using the link tool and then Innearth set about designing circuits for all of them.
The only way to make the expensive ball fulfill its full potential was to give it a lot of hints towards affinities for their spells. A tier 4 purecore was kind of disappointing and almost weak while a tier 4 elemental core was strong and exciting but limited to forcing the monster into only using that mana type in its body and spells. A tier 4 purecore and then a weaker tier 4 "non-purecore" could make a good spellcasting monster…but a tier 4 purecore and 50 small nodes of a whole bunch of different affinities?
That made a boss monster.
…I'm not meaning to make a boss. Let's dial this back a bit.
Center large core. 6 sub "ice" cores set up in the "up, down, left, right, back, front" directions.
Connect all those cores to the center and the 4 nearest ones placing a couple different potentially useful mana types in – water, kinetic, crystal, void…
Now! On to the next one. Middle ball gets 4 cores equal distance apart and attached in a cube shape and with similar connections.
Top ball gets 2 ice cores on the left and right and if I make this section clear…
The two cores now appeared just below the surface of the icy head. They glowed softly with a blue light and looked like ominous eyes.
Yep, that's a good aesthetic for these.
A squiggly looking mouth with two icicles like fangs completed the look.
This was almost a snowman made of solid ice, but it didn't have any snow attached to it yet.
Working on that Innearth found a "cheating" method to make a mostly non magical snow. He simply had to make a spinning blade that scraped up ice into rough shavings.
Donating the material to his schematic he was just finishing packing the shaved ice onto the outside of the monster when he received a notification.
|
Attention. The 200th decenial dungeon games has started! A new event group has been made for any who wish to participate. These games will last a month and are being hosted this year by <Phantasmal Patterns>.
</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. ...Okay? ...Welll Nothing is going to happen until I join the games and I was warned of them beforehand. Guess I'll see what this is about. Phantasmal Patterns: Welcome! Welcome! It's time for play! Ehehehehe. I'm your lovely host Phantasmal Patterns! Tier 7. It's my third time participating in the games, and my FIRST time hosting. Thank you! Thank you! Now as much as I love to talk I'm going to show off a prepared description of the games! Please read this year's packet It will provide just enough information to get you by! - The Dungeon Games are an official system sanctioned event run by dungeon cores for dungeon cores. Nothing that happens in them couldn't happen without the "official" designation but having the system's approval makes the whole thing feel so much more important. Pretend it's the tutorial again. The very world is conspiring to help you advance. The games are here to pull you forward and scrap any ruts you've found yourself in. The games are a chance to interact and unwind as well as a way of challenging yourself. If you treat these games well and enter all the events you can, you might just learn something new! A simplified way of describing the games are as a string of several "main" events that have been designed and improved over dozens of years by all the cores before you. The more deserving description is that these games are the most fun you'll have in a decade. Good luck! Finishing the packet Innearth sighed. That...doesn't tell me much does it. Are these games just a bunch of undeserved hype? I'm being told they are fun but...being told something doesn't change my mind a single bit does it? To be honest, being told I'm going to have fun, makes me almost want to not have fun just based on spite... Grumbling, Innearth waited for the next group wide announcement while slowly losing excitement towards the whole process and considering returning to his ice cavern design. Phantasmal Patterns: There are plenty of events in this year's games both big and small. Plenty of events yes! Phantasmal Patterns: Last time we did this the previous host hyped up the first main game for ages and I HATED IT! This year I'm going START us off with a BANG! Phantasmal Patterns: MONSTER RACES. Yeah monster races are great. You have 24 hours to read the rules and decide if you are participating. Should give enough time to catch all the late joiners and let you tweak some things. Phantasmal Patterns: I HOPE our first event is PHENOMENAL. Silence as the Core stopped messaging, followed by Innearth moving around the event server. A tacked-on tab listed the rules as well as providing a simple checkmark for if you were joining.
|