Dungeon Diver: Stealing A Monster's Power C.513

The first thing I do once I get back to Vice City is visit Bri.

I deliver the first 10% of supplies necessary for crafts, and she places them into item boxes so that her craftsmen can begin sorting and making them into magic items starting tomorrow.

After this, we brainstorm for a while and come up with a few ways to build her teleportation platform, rehashing old ideas and coming up with new ones too.

I propose my stealth bunker idea to her and pull out a sheet of A-Grade shielding to test my theory for the concept I'd like to try.

Using my mythic grade craftsmanship and imbuing my mythic grade stealth, I give the shielding a new attribute that makes it completely invisible to mana senses below my mana control.

The sheet of material creates what looks like an invisible wall that I stand behind in the middle of her study. I'm completely invisible to her senses. It's a new version of mana shielding protection, and I've now named it Stealth Shielding.

Both of us walk down to the lower floor of her workshop, the small cellar area right below the ground-level floor.

I use earth magic to manipulate the concrete and begin easily carving out another room below this one.

It is about 10x10 meters, with a high 4-meter ceiling. There is only one small square opening that leads upward. I coat the walls with new A-Grade Stealth shielding everywhere else.

Looking in from the outside, it's as if it isn't even here.

I pull out the same containment jar I used before, full of luminite, a 5x5 sheet of shielding to use as a crafting base, and a mountain of newly farmed mana crystals from my nightly labyrinth raids.

Then, I share my mythic grade craftsmanship skill with Bri and speak up while motioning her forward.

"It's your platform, so please, you do the honors."

After a few flashes of bright white light, Bri uses up about a third of what is inside the luminite reserves and makes herself a fully usable platform along with over 400 teleport crystals from the leftover mana.

She even attempts a craft without using the mythic grade interface and is able to craft more transport crystals with her legendary grade skill because there are no extremely complex crafts happening that need the mythic grade interface; she is already the owner of the platform.

I take a handful of crystals and place them into my item storage along with the leftover luminite, along with creating a special two-layer hatch. The top is made of ordinary concrete that blends in with the floor, and the bottom half is stealth imbued shielding to complete the seal to the secret room.

We plan to meet again in a few days once her contacts in the Bedrock Region get her some real scannable Association IDs sourced for Ember and me.

I leave with a smile and head off to the industrial sector of Vice City to pick up the rest of the construction supplies.

Once I arrive, the older woman assistant leads me to three separate warehouses full of building materials just like before. Two of them are similar in size to the last warehouse I picked up supplies from, and the third is at least ten times as large. The goods I ordered stretch over a full kilometer in length, and it still only fills up a quarter of this megawarehouse space.

As we strike up a conversation from location to location, she explains that years ago in the old era, they used to fill orders of this size regularly, but with earth magic users and dungeon material becoming more abundant in construction, they don't get newer customers like me anymore.

She even offers me trucks again to ship everything out, but I politely refuse and ask to be alone in the warehouses as I cover the cameras and let the enormous amount of materials fall into my item storage.

I make sure to thank her for the privacy and tell her I'll be back at some point for an even bigger order in the future.

The sky is jet black with only dim starlight once I get back to Sector 2, but I work on crafting another five warehouses far away from the Crimson City next to the one I made before so I can store all these items here for the construction workers when they start their shift tomorrow.

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4 days pass.

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Life in the Crimson City goes on as usual.

I meet with the craftsmen team before they start phase 2 of construction and bring them to the labyrinth to power level them, making sure all of their skills are legendary and gifting those who want them extreme strength and others extreme earth magic to help with their day-to-day tasks.

They begin making two more large residential areas, along with streets filled with empty storefronts to prepare for expansion.

A special team gets tasked with building the guildhall up, making offices and specific rooms inside, and my body double that works there helps with making sure everything is made exactly how I'd like it.

Another team gets to work on the small prison rehabilitation system, and all of the slaves that I've been forcing labor upon get formal sentences drawn up.

I use my lie detector skill to find out how long they worked for their gang leaders and multiply this time by the number of slaves they personally kidnapped and forced to do labor. I've added additional years depending on how many innocents they've killed.

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Some are new to the trade and only have 6-12 months of time to serve, while others are long-time grunts, right-hand men to their old leaders. Their sentences are many, many years.

The reactions are mixed.

Some are thankful that I'm giving them a second chance at life, while others are resentful and still look at me with the eyes of killers. It doesn't matter to me; these are the rules I've put in place, and they must follow. I dose them with the elixir of suggestion again and give them back to the construction team under Maurice to get them back to work.

Meanwhile, over these 4 days, the MCP farming with the Elemental Elites progresses very quickly.

Although their raw talent isn't as impressive as my teammates, they all still manage to make it up to floor 38 and 39 by the end of this cycle.

Each individual has managed to absorb over a billion MP, and some groups of them can take out the massive sand worms on the 38th floor, while only a single team of 12 lead by the fire elemental squad leader, Rachel, is able to take down the base level Elite Minotaurs.

No one is capable of defeating the mutant on the 39th floor yet, but its a work in progress.

They still need more raw power and technical training.

Another bottleneck is the pure amount of monsters we're able to fight at these higher floors.

The respawn rate is relatively slow for 37 hunters looking to all gain power quickly. So, we stay in the floor 33-35 range for the most efficient MCP farming most of the days. However, when everyone is fresh at the beginning of every session, we go up to the higher floors to test their combat abilities with high intensity battles and to farm pure level gains.

I hope to see them all be able to take on the 39th floor boss alone by the time we finish another week of training. It seems like a reasonable goal. Then, I'll actually be on track to ranking them all up a second time before this month is over.

During my downtime, I continue to farm element stones and collapse dungeons out in the desert.

Over 4 more days, I manage to farm 188 more, collapsing 20 E-Grade dungeons.

I've found that it takes fewer containment stones worth of MP to collapse an E-Grade dungeon, but the mass of luminite that falls out is exactly the same as the mass the comes from D-Grade dungeons.

Its far more time and energy efficient to target E-Grade dungeons when farming luminite.

However, I'm not sure if this is entirely true. I may be inefficiently farming luminite altogether. Every D-Grade dungeon that I've collapsed, I've shrunk down to an E-Grade dungeon before fully destroying it. So, I haven't found a way to tell if this affects the total luminite mass that falls out yet.

Considering this, I begin to change things up during my nightly tests, and I come across quite an interesting phenomenon.

It's gotten to the point where I have to travel further than 400 km out into the desert sometimes to find new rogue dungeons.

Now, with over 300 full containment stones with roughly 7 billion MP stored inside each one, I've been constantly thinking up ways to use this energy. 𝚏r𝗲ewe𝚋𝐧𝚘vel.𝚌𝚘m

At 4:30 in the morning, roughly 470 km away from the Crimson City, so far away that the terrain has changed from desert to grasslands, hinting that I'm nearing the border of Sector 3, I finally decide to do another test with a fresh E-Grade dungeon.

It's a standard mountain terrain dungeon, and there are wolves inside, ranging from level 40-50. These are the most common dungeons I find out here in the low mana density areas of the empty space between civilizations.

Instead of using a newly crafted empty containment stone in this dungeon, I pull out one of the full containment stones and set it down in the center of the dungeon.

It slowly gives off mana radiation, but overall, the stone is fairly stable. A few hundred MP leaks out every minute. It'd take forever to naturally decay and release all of its energy.

So, I fly far away, over 2 km in distance to the edge of the dungeon near the exit portal and aim a high-powered mana slash back in the direction I came. Using my new mythic grade telekinesis skill upgrade, I'm able to easily aim this shot with pinpoint accuracy onto the target.

The moment the slash hits the containment stone, it shatters and releases its energy. I jump out of the exit portal and let chaos ensue.

In the darkness of the open flatlands, I watch the blue glowing portal slowly shift from blue to red and a grin comes across my face.

"A dungeon break...."

I wait a few more minutes before jumping back inside the portal to find a massive hole torn through the center of the mountainous dungeon, and billions of MP being absorbed into the natural dungeon mass..

The wolves that respawn after this blast are surprisingly all level 50-55, and some have odd mutant traits like fire magic or intimidation, unlike the normal level 40-50 monsters in this dungeon.

I've seen the levels of monsters go down every time I steal mana from a dungeon, and now I see there is potential to make them go up as well.

It gets me curious about many things...

Is there a limit to how high a certain dungeon's monster levels can go? Is that why there are breaks? Can this process of decreasing and increasing monster levels work in labyrinths too...?

As these ideas rush through my head, the only conclusion is that I just need to test things out and see.

I let another full containment stone fall from my inventory and repeat the process, firing a high-density mana slash at it and hopping out the dungeon exit.

My eyes widen once I get outside and watch the bright red portal slowly shift back to blue.

"It stabilized the dungeon..."

I jump inside again, and the entire terrain inside begins to shift and change before my eyes.

The mountainous environment becomes more of a thicker forest area, and a new variant of high E-Grade Orc Monsters level 60-70 start to spawn in.

The wolves dissolve back into the dungeon along with the rocky terrain like they were never even here, and everything starts to click into place as I come up with plausible theories for what I've just witnessed.

Dungeons break when too much mana is brought inside them.

The most common procedure hunters use to stop these breaks is to kill the final boss and collapse the entire dungeon. A precaution many guilds and the association itself use to keep dungeons at bay is to constantly farm them, taking resources away to balance out the mana brought in by hunters and the natural mana in the air that flows in.

I've just found another way to stop a break.

Instead of bringing it back down to its old stable level, it's possible to push the dungeon to evolve and grow to hit a stable level at a higher level rank.

Just like a labyrinth adds floors over many years of farming mana from hunters, it seems it's possible to increase the strength of a singular dungeon in the same way.

My mind races with more questions, but I decide to just do a few more tests, adding about 10 more containment stones to this dungeon and bringing the level of monsters inside above level 100 in just over an hour and roughly 70 billion additional MP.

Still left in my storage, there is over 2 trillion MP worth of containment stones, and I decide if I'm going to be using this resource on anything to raise its value, it should be in the dungeons back by the Crimson City.

My mind fixates specifically on the high B-Grade dungeon far below the others that I have sectioned off for personal use. It could be an incredibly valuable resource if I could make the monsters inside it even stronger.

The sun is starting to rise, and I have another full day of training to get back to today with the army. In addition to this, Bri should be coming by today for a check-in too.

I'll be letting this brand new D-Grade dungeon sit for a while. If it is still stable with no adverse effects of foreign mana being injected into it after a full day passes, that will be a good sign that it is safe to begin tests on dungeons closer to home.