[D'sP] Cheating Themselves - Chapter 397 (Patreon)

Doyle goes through and buys each skill and then buys them for the kobolds and elder kobolds. Which causes the system of having to buy the skills twice to make more sense. Though it also included an urge to buy as many skills for his basic monsters as possible. Not as some sort of mind control or boost to his instincts. Rather, it was the fact that the elder kobold pattern had all the skills he had previously applied to the kobold pattern. It just didn’t update to include these new skills, though the voibold did.

Anyway, most of the skills were as cheap as usual. Two points each to buy and apply leatherworking, charcoal burner, engraving, and rustic tanning. A single point for clawed woodworking and the expensive buy, runic knowledge for five.

That might not seem like much, but after being bought for kobolds and their elders was 15 points. Which is two and a half crafting skills or five generic combat skills. Though speaking of math, the total number of points spent was 42.

‘Wait a second’, Doyle turns to Ally, ‘Why do I have 20 more adjustment points than I was expecting? It should be 646, not 666.’

Ally looks over and shrugs, ‘Were you forgetting the points you got from gaining a new monster pattern?’

Doyle, ‘The what?’

Ally nods, ‘Yeah, a while back you got a path which gave you that. Even talked about how nice it was to have a method of earning points without spending path points. Though of note, you don’t get points for splitting and merging monster patterns.’

Doyle, ‘Oh, huh, I completely forgot that.’

Ally shrugs, ‘Doesn’t come up much at the moment. I think this should be the first time it has been triggered.’

Doyle, ‘Well, that’s nice?’

Ally, ‘Yep, and since you’re asking that, is the floor finished? It must be close if you’re pondering skill choices.’

Doyle shakes his core, ‘Not yet, I still have to put the kobolds down and I would like to carve the cliff.’

Ally, ‘The cliff will be interesting, whether you manage to duplicate the limit breaking wall or not. Though you might manage it. However, they won’t stack. No second limit break, it will just be to maybe increase the number of people who succeed through the simple method of increasing the number who try. After the core people finished it, no one has managed to climb it without cheating.’

Doyle, ‘I wouldn’t call it cheating. There are no rules saying you can’t do any of that. Though I guess it is true that they’re cheating themselves.’

Ally, ‘You’d feel different if this was a roadblock to your core instead of a fun side distraction.’

Doyle, ‘If it was meant to actually stop them, I’d have safeguards in place and actual rules. Though I would doubt the limit breaker climb would be a permitted challenge to put between delvers and my core if it was the only way. After all, it literally requires them to go beyond themselves.

‘The only people that even try the climb on any regular basis are the Barrais. And they’re mostly just using it as an infinite climbing wall instead of actually trying to complete the climb.’

Ally nods, ‘Fair enough, well, I’ll keep an eye on things, you spend the time you need to get it just right. Though, maybe don’t try and simply duplicate what you did? That rarely works for stuff like this and maybe if you go for something different, you’ll get a surprise.’

Doyle nods and gets down to figuring out what balance of skills. Except, that doesn’t really match what he intended. In fact, Doyle turns his attention back to the balance of Magic users to Qi users. This setup is meant to let the kobolds experiment with their knowledge. To open up new runes for the dungeon and the town.

So, why be so strict on ratios? What if there is something special that can be made with everyone being Magic users except for a single Qi user? Doyle takes a moment, but after that, settles on wiping the work clean.

Now, the farms won’t be set up to provide specific ratios. Instead, the kobolds and elder kobolds will be random, both in skill and whether they use Qi or Mana. Yes, this does mean it is possible that there aren’t any smiths or no one to make charcoal. However, that isn’t the most likely outcome and Doyle also allows them to move between lakes a bit, even if they are required to keep the same number of monsters at each lake.

And the best part about this? It requires the opposite of what randomness usually would. Instead of having to define it all strictly, Doyle just has to let nature take its course. Well, okay, the skills required a little bit of work, but that’s life.

Then he turns to the cliff. To be honest, Doyle doesn’t even rightly remember how he made the original cliff anyway, so trying to copy it wasn’t an option. Well, he could attempt to copy all the effects, but it was clear that part of what made it work was the intent he had originally used. So, for this cliff, he would carve it anew.

Doyle spends hours staring at the cliff and getting a feel for it, all the while the first batch of kobolds work. Those kobolds admittedly did end up balanced in skill because he had to personally spawn them. Except that allowed them to quickly put up buildings and such, giving Doyle a view of what the cliff could be with them.

In particular, the walls of the cliff that cradles the lake are constantly slippery. The waterfall misting them all hours of the day. And while it doesn’t make logical or physical sense, Doyle feels like spreading it to the entire cliff.

Then, as he makes a few practice grooves, an interesting quirk of this change reveals itself. The moisture gathers in the grooves and will cause a small trickle of water off of the lowest points. An interesting side effect that pulls in Doyle as he focuses on the cliff.

Good thing he hadn’t planned on mimicking the other cliff, because they would have slipped away at this point. While Doyle still is focused on making the cliff a challenging climb, instead of a pure endurance challenge, it now involves keeping your grip as well. On top of that, while some runes are used, the focus is on other aspects.

Each carving is carefully placed to spread the trickles of water across the entire cliff face. Not evenly, but sporadic and changing. Doyle doesn’t even use anything fancy for this. Rather, the very nature of water to bead up until it overflows is used.

It isn’t random, but for someone to figure out the pattern would mean they are so far beyond the level of the floor, it wouldn’t be funny. Not just because the water cascades across the entire cliff face, but because each drop of water changes the way down as it passes. Drawing in excess water to make the path more likely to trap the next drop. Laying down water so that it takes a certain path over another. And so on and so forth.

But Doyle’s carving goes beyond that. So focused is he, that time passes without notice. His attention splinters over the wall in a way similar to how it splintered in the void to find the souls for his bosses. Each thread of attention begins to make small, sometimes even microscopic marks. All towards one goal.

Outside of the dungeon, a few things begin to change.

The Raccoonkin land on their feet and become powerhouses of the community’s merchants. More important for Wolf’s Rest, in a species wide moot, they decide to make it their principal base of operations. This means not just the fact that all trade routes will lead to them, but that they are planning to make a large facility to house all Raccoonkin that visit.

This will be possible as Ace had decided to go forward with the third wall. A massive expansion of what would be considered directly under the town’s control. The plans only became possible because the Deerkin ended up showing an above average talent with earth magic, allowing great works like this to happen in a much shorter time frame.

Though on a more personal level, the very first locally made masterwork item has appeared. Jimmy had not only managed this, but had also done something Ally had thought unlikely at best. He had managed to combine his wood and bone skills together. However, he went about it in a different manner from what Ally had laid out.

Instead of turning carpentry and bone carving into the more general wood and bone working, he only changed the bone carving skills. This had two benefits. The first was obvious enough, he only needed to get the system to recognize his changes to one skill.

Though maybe even more importantly, when he managed it, the actual skill levels weren’t that far apart and hadn’t grown too much. That meant the number of path points he had to save up to merge the two was significantly smaller than Ally had expected. And as an interesting side note, Jimmy revealed to Ace and the sneakily watching Ally, how it worked.

Jimmy was given the option of a literal path called “Combine Carpentry and Bone Hammerer” which cost a number of points equal to the level the skills were at. Then once he started investing points into it, the two skills stopped leveling.

On top of that, the path didn’t give him anything and vanished from his status once completed. Though probably the thing that annoyed Ally the most, he didn’t say what the name of the combined skill was! However, it was with this new skill that he managed to craft a masterpiece.

It wasn’t anything fancy, just a quality wood and bone fishing rod with a reel. However, it represented that at least in Wolf’s Rest, people were way ahead of where the average newly integrated world would be. Though it probably helped that the ambient world energy levels were still rising. The planet was well on its way to being a mid range world.

Though admittedly, for the most part, things had settled down in the world at large. There was a reason the system gave planets so long to integrate before opening them to the wider universe. It wasn’t even a consistent time, Ally knew of at least a couple among those first to be hit by magic after the system was introduced that were still in quarantine. Best guess on that being that the locals were immortal in some form and so taking a long time for their culture to adjust.

This planet, on the other hand, had a much shorter integration period. Not only was it a human planet in a humanocentric universe, but they had been in the information age with plenty of fantasy literature to prepare them. As long as nothing happened, the planet would open in a short century. This meant that barring accidents, Ace and his inner circle could easily survive till then. Though as already proven once, nothing is certain.

And so Doyle carved away at his cliff, time passing him by. During this time, Ally is able to catch up on a bunch of minor things. After all, it isn’t like a fairy is required to run a dungeon. In fact, most dungeons don’t have one for most of their life, if ever.

However, that doesn’t mean they don’t have things they can do to help. Slight changes here, tiny tweaks, and doing upkeep is well within their remit, especially while their core is deep in focus. Ally can go well beyond that, having been given permission by Doyle.

A major place that they tend to focus their work is earlier floors. Dungeons, as a whole, are loath to touch them and so it either languishes or if they have a fairy, at least it doesn’t metaphorically collect dust. Simple things like adjusting where monsters tend to stand so delvers don’t get things figured out so well they can headshot the mobs from around a corner. But now, Ally is all caught up.

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