The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 1

Level 10/10

Heart 160000/160000

Experience 40000/40000

Workers 9/47

Monsters 1/49

Traps 59/109

Rooms 68

Food 1981

Timber 801

Iron 1034

Steel 705

Charcoal 0

Mana 58

Rock 2515

Gold 6073

Leather 402

Leather Sludge 300

Lava 90

Glass 800

Explosive Runes 5

Triggered Explosive Runes 0

Triggered Explosive Runes (repeating) 5

Quest: Reach Tier 2

Quest: Get 10,000 gold

What surprised Travis was that when Squishy ate the upgraded undead lord and Penelope dropped its weapons—he got steel and timber from them. It was the first time he'd gained any kind of salvage. More importantly, though, he had reached the max level for the tier and the upgrade had finally become visible.

Unlock Tier 2:

15,000 Gold

5,000 Timber

5,000 Food

40,000 XP

The groan he emitted could be heard all throughout the dungeon by the kobolds. "Sorry, everyone. Okay, I got the details on the unlock for Tier 2. Fifteen thousand gold, five thousand timber, and five thousand food. So, when you go to escort the next delivery, I want you to take as much gold as you can haul—literally as much as you can haul. Steph, can you arrange for more food and timber to be delivered?"

"I'll handle it, Trav," Stephan said.

"Thanks, Steph," Travis said. "Okay, I want it to mostly be our adventurer employees helping with the delivery, since that's partly what we're paying them for. As for everyone else, I need timber and food, so we're going to get all those empty rooms made into warehouses. Katelyn, can I get you to prepare to mine iron and a lot of gold?"

"Priority is gold first, right?" Katelyn asked, already standing up from her seat in the tavern.

"Right. I want that wagon groaning under the weight of what we can haul to town. Everyone not helping with mining or resetting traps, can you please help out by cutting down trees?" It had become second nature to phrase everything as a request—always asking if people can help rather than telling them. He couldn't do anything about the mental compulsions that drove kobolds, but he could make sure they didn't trigger into something no one wanted. "Except Tannyr. I'd like you finishing off digging and also set up an experiment for me—if you could?"

Ludmiller and Wild got to work rearming the Bowling Alley, Katelyn headed upstairs to start on getting more gold, which left everyone else except Stephan and Tannyr heading out to cut down trees.

Tannyr was working her way along the new tunnels in the lower areas of the dungeon and was humming happily to herself. "Where do you want me digging first?"

"It's been way too long without us being able to make our own steel. So, let's make a Blacksmith. I have a good spot for it in the newer area." Travis gave her directions and finally led her to a room that had already been dug to a five by five, but he had changed the plans.

When Tannyr sliced through the rock as if it was barely there, Travis paid the cost of the Blacksmith he wanted there.

It never ceased to amaze Tannyr how things were built in the dungeon. Bang a desk into shape here, push an anvil to a pile of bricks there—next thing she knew there was a raging fire in the furnace and she was standing in the middle of a blacksmith work area. "Okay, Trav, all done."

"Nice! That unlocked a few extra traps for me. Okay, just down the hall is where we can put the charcoal burner. Then a few mana storage rooms, then more warehouses."

Cozy in the grip of the stone around her, Tannyr walked to the side of the room and said, "Pen taught us all how to do this. Much quicker to get around." And with that she pictured her arm pushing through the rock—and stepped through it.

"You know what, I actually just modified things a little. Let's just go with three warehouses."

Digging out three more rooms, then modifying a tunnel, Tannyr was in her zone. She ignored building the charcoal burner for the moment and instead just set about digging what she could. Finally she went back and built the charcoal burner and two more storage rooms. "There. More dig—"

"So close to ten thousand gold. But we don't have enough timber, so you might as well keep—Crap, there goes another gold mine." Travis had to turn his attention to the first floor where Katelyn had just melted down the last of that gold vein. "Time to move to another, but we don't have any room for more. When are they loading the wagon?" The last he directed at Stephan.

"I can start now if you'd like?" Standing behind the wagon just inside the entrance of the dungeon, Stephan jumped up into the empty bed. Reaching behind his back, he started pulling out the odd little bars of gold that were surprisingly heavy.

Watching his gold go down at a rate comparable to the springs under the wagon, Travis let out a sigh of relief. "Thanks, Steph. Now all we need is piles of wood and we can start building a lot more storage warehouses."

While he waited for Stephan to load all the gold into the wagon, Travis started some calculations of his storage. With the one big specialized gold warehouse, twenty-two that had been upgraded once, and another twenty-one regular warehouses, he figured he had almost eleven thousand storage in there. But the numbers didn't add up, especially from his first figures on how much he could store. That meant that his own capacity for storage increased as he leveled.

It was reassuring, though it didn't change the fact that he was probably going to have over a hundred warehouses before he got to Tier 4.

"Trav, I think this is it. Fife is taking bets on if the wagon will make it and I don't think I'll be joining the pool if I put more in," Stephan said.

"Okay, you have just under seven thousand gold worth of bars there. Use that to order more timber and food, and when their wagons are returning tomorrow we'll fill them up with gold." With his plans set in motion, Travis watched as the group headed out—and he felt much emptier.

There was something reassuring about having people living in his dungeon—a level of background noise that let him ignore non-issues and discern what was important. With just Katelyn and Tannyr left in the dungeon, Travis couldn't help but watch all the lizards scurrying around.

When Penelope hauled in several logs of timber, Travis let out a sigh of relief. "Just knock down the wall there if it will help fit it in easier."

"Travis!" Tannyr's voice drew Travis' attention to her. "I found another mana shrine."

"Ugh! Why are they always in awkward places? Okay, give me a second to adjust this." Travis worked fast to redesign the area not dug into a series of three by three rooms for mana storage. "There."

When Penelope started working on the logs, Travis quickly paid for the upgrade in the timber mill to boost output, at a cost of one hundred steel. Then the others started hauling in trees too. He took a guess and figured out each large tree was giving them a hundred timber.

Tree after tree was hauled in until Travis could see his timber finally reach three thousand. "Okay, we can call it there. Don't take down any more trees, just bring what you have." What they had was another two trees.

When it came down to it, he spent two thousand, six hundred and sixty timber and a hundred and ninety iron to build thirty-eight more warehouses. "This is insane, but it should help."

"I think," Penelope said, as they all filed down into the lower dungeon, "that Trav is fixated on warehouses. Anyone else think so?"

Travis groaned at all the voices that called out in support. "Come on! It's not like that. We need to be able to store twenty-five thousand stuff to get to Tier 2."

"We know, Trav," Blake said.

"We're just having a little fun. So, thirty-eight? That's how many each?" Brayden asked.

"Four and a few left over." Stephan was first to answer, cutting several others off. "Trav, can you get the stuff set out for us?"

"It already is. Just find a room, build a warehouse, then look for another." As they all filtered out into their rooms, Travis watched as each was turned into storage for the dungeon. When the construction was finally done, Travis had to admit it was crazy. There were almost ninety warehouses in his dungeon now, and they still wouldn't quite be enough. "The good news is that it gave me enough storage to get the have ten thousand gold quest completed. The bad news is that there still isn't enough storage to get to the next tier."

A round of groans from everyone made Penelope wince in sympathy for Travis. "Hey, we can't let that get us down. We knew this would take work. How much room do we have now, Trav?"

"Okay, so we have three thousand resources worth of stuff. We have fourteen thousand, six hundred more, so we're about seven thousand resource space short. The fastest way to get there now would be to harvest a lot of timber and start going wild upgrading what we have to the first or second upgrade." Travis was checking out the stats as he spoke, building a bigger picture for himself of what he needed to do.

"Right, so the downside of building more warehouses is that it takes more space, needs us to dig into more dangerous areas, and finally we have to store all the rock we get." Blake tapped his chin with a claw. "The upgrades are more expensive than just building more, but at the same time why—"

"Why don't we see what the gold quest gives us?" Katelyn asked.

"Okay, that's good. I know some of you have been working long hours, so consider this night time. Go up to the tavern and have a drink. We don't have any undead scheduled and the town will be sending us a lot of presents tomorrow."

Despite his heartfelt request that they take some time to themselves, Travis noticed that Robert went straight to his lab, Blake found his design for the first floor and started revising it, and Katelyn went up to the first floor and found one of the gold veins.

"Okay, Trav, tell me when." Tapping her staff on the floor a few times, Katelyn built up a good flow of mana and opened herself to the vein to pour heat in. She only stopped when Travis shouted at her. "Is that it?"

"Yeah. The quest completed but I'm not sure what I got or where I got it." Travis was trying to work out what his reward was. Eventually he thought to check out that one warehouse he had that a quest had upgraded previously and—found it exactly the same. However, he did notice a gleam in a few of the other warehouses nearby. Eventually he realized what it was. "Every single warehouse just got upgraded to its next level!"

"So, do we have enough storage to make it now?" Katelyn asked, backing off from the still softly glowing vein of gold.

Travis felt elated at first, but then he noticed something. "I don't even know, we might have but there's a new quest: defeat an enemy dungeon."

"Oh." Katelyn started making her way back to the tavern. "Let's just—Wasn't the town hoping to keep these other dungeons alive to get resources from them?"

"Yeah, well, they might have to put up with just me. Thanks again, Katelyn."

"Trav, you don't have to thank me for doing everything, though a wizard tower would be nice when you can build one." Katelyn turned the corner for the bar.

"If is probably more like it, but you've got it. A wizard tower would probably be like me putting on a hat, after all, and I think I'd look good with a big hat." Travis didn't have to split his attention any longer because all the kobolds of the dungeon were in one room.

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This story is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. If you are paying money to see this or the original creator, Damaged, is not credited, you are viewing a plagiarized copy of the story.