Chapter 45: Two Months Later
Two months had passed since Amy and the dungeon eliminated the goblins in the dead knights side and a lot of things had changed.
Whilst the cave entrance remained basic and without adornment, the inside was much brighter. Zach had completed a basic oil lantern design which relied on a combination of animal fat and seed oil, most of which required Amy to help in the beginning until the intellectually challenged shroom gnomes could managed to extract the oil from the seeds and dismantle corpses correctly.
Amy still helped when Zach commanded, mostly for training her skills, and had gotten highly proficient in the tasks.
The oil was then infused with mana which made them burn longer and also gave the flame a soft blue tinge. One lantern full of oil would burn for an entire week,
The initial corridor has widened to be twice as wide and high, along with the cave entrance, but it still remained unadorned to avoid making anyone recognize it as a dungeon from a distance. Zach always wanted to lure in more beasts and eventually adventurers, but Amy had explained the dangers lurking in the forest and he decided to be a bit more low key whilst in the early stages of growing.
Beyond the corridor, the dungeon then opened up into a huge chamber with giant stone and ardonite pillars in the four corners with Aztec and other ancient type carvings in them. The walls were carved to look like stone blocks and had several other decorations on them.
Zach had spent almost an entire week testing different designs, ending up returning to basics and doing a high and low picture rail out of basic steel, while using stone and ardonite to create carvings of demons and hell like scenes, and under the bequest of Amy, more carvings of flowers, trees and nature.
The strong contrast between the two actually created a balance which left Zach extremely pleased, which he then continued without any requests from the elf. Some of the things he was most impressed with, was the use of manasteel to create suns in the carvings, and small starlight like pins of glowing light on parts of the ceiling.
Wolfbone steel was also used to replace random stone blocks on the wall.
The ground was a great stone bridge approximately 5 meters wide, underneath of which he had managed to locate an underground stream and direct up with a series of custom built wooden water wheels. The water filled underneath the bridge and would slowly flow under the circulatory system he designed.
This design extended past this large room, as the bridge broke off into three directions. The dungeon had become a mass of tunnels and rooms like an ants nest. There were random rooms disconnected from the bridge system, leading to other empty rooms for future designing, and some new districts it was still working on.
The three rooms when immediately entering the dungeon, including Amy's room, were gone. The young elf maiden now had a new room further inside the dungeon which was a collection of several rooms.
Amy's new room was four times the size and had timber slotted floorboards, which was one of Zach's great accomplishments with a rotary mana engine, a manasteel sawblade, and several guide rails and supports to form a giant band saw.
He could take the wood as a pure resource and store it, but doing so ended up removing all of its grain and natural beauty from the wood, so he had to manually have his minions carry trees in and process them.
The floorboards were then treated with an oil resin that was of elvish creation, leaving behind a beautiful timber floor.
The structure of the bed was still made out of stone, but it now had a mattress padding over the top of it and a cotton pillow stuffed with feathers. Amy had been so elated with having a proper bed again that Zach had some trouble getting her out of it.
The room also had several items of furniture inside of it, all of which were Zach's designs. There were three book shelves and three shelving units made out of wood, which stored only some things as the elf didn't have a lot of belongings.
There was also a large dresser and chest of drawers for her to store clothes inside of and several hooks to hang things on the wall. The room also had her favourite design of flowers along the wall banner.
A small hallway led to a pantry storage area as well as a large kitchen, although it was currently only a bench, cabinetry drawers, and a wooden table and not even running water.
There were also giant rooms filled with stone storage crates. Zach had even managed to manually duplicate the space expansion fractal, and used an enlarge version in a hidden layer behind the walls. He could only increase the space in the room by 30 percent however before space became too chaotic to store anything inside of them.
The idea gave him inspiration to create a space expansion trap. These were one off, and the room had to be destroyed afterwards, but he looped his mana in a circuit behind the walls of a room along with a trigger.
When set off, the mana would rapidly unfold into a large space expansion fractal, turning the space inside the room highly chaotic and inevitably turning anyone or anything into a real life gore filter.
In another area was the current training room, which Amy was currently inside of.
This room was extremely large and had lots of wick lanterns, including ones on the ground which much be avoiding to avoid burning or pouring flammable oil over oneself.
There were several different training fields in this giant room, including thing wooden posts to stand on, rocky terrain, slopes, and a basic urban landscape. Each one had wooden pillars with pegs for hand-to-hand combat, stone steles with narrows slits for sword practice, archery and magic targets, and others training dummies for spears, bunt weapons.
Amy was dancing around on the wooden posts, each one only wide enough for one foot at a time. She held a thin sword with a wooden hilt and leather grip. It was no longer massively out of balance and now balanced properly at the crossguard.
She thrust the sword into the narrow slits on a stone stele as she jumped between posts, striking like lightning before retreating to another post. She also attacked other stone steles which had slices half an inch thick cut out of them at various angles and depths meant for training sword slashes.
"Good, now stab points 2, 5 and 7 on the first target, slash points 1 and 5 on the second target, and throw three knives at the first three targets."
Amy danced around the posts and followed the command, grazing the second thrust and first slash, but otherwise completing the challenge perfectly.
This training continued in different ways for another hour before the elf was covered in perspiration and sat down at a small rock pool in a side room. She stripped off her clothes and stay along the edge with her feet resting in the water.
Zach was enamored by her beauty and stared so much he paid less attention to other parts of the dungeon. Her bare breasts heaved up and down as she breathed deep breaths, her body having a slick sheen to it from heavy training.
"You are staring again, aren't you?" Amy asked in her oriole like voice to nowhere in particular.
Zach immediately answered in her mind, "is it not natural I would admire my thing?"
The elf merely giggled at this with a faint smile on her face, not trying to hide her naked body and even sticking her chest out a little more.
Something different from the months ago her.