I turn to Arie.
"You should come too. As long as you stay within 100 meters of me, your body doubles won't deactivate. They can continue to train here by the Abyss while we go into the desert."
Then, I turn back in the direction of the rogue dungeon.
"Sure, I'll come along!" Arie replies.
The three of us head off into the desert, flying with various magic techniques to increase our speed and fly over 50 km in just a few minutes.
It reminds me of my flight over here from Sector 1 on Ember's back. During it, I felt quite a few other rogue dungeons out in the wilderness.
There's far less in these deserts than the crowded forest areas back in the Vice Region, but near every town out here there are rogue dungeons scattered about, the same as Sector 4.
The canyon that houses over a hundred of them is quite the mystery to me, honestly.
Dungeons of that magnitude and quantity are usually only found near massive cities where thousands or even millions of hunters excrete excess mana every day to fuel and grow them. There is hardly any activity way out here in Sector 2, and there couldn't have been more than 500 people living in the small town.
They must have been created or maintained artificially, but now isn't the time for me to ponder this.
I'm just glad there's a rogue dungeon not too far away, but not too close. If anything goes wrong in my test, the working dungeons won't be affected, and the town is far away from any potential blast radius.
"Here we are."
The three of us touch down in a desolate portion of the desert with the remains of what looks like it used to be a small trading station and check-in hut, but is now just scrap wood that has fallen apart and sunk into the desert sand.
Next to it is a small spinning blue dungeon portal, that gives off the mana reading of a middle-ranked E-Grade or possibly low-ranked D-grade at the highest.
Someone must have regulated this dungeon or farmed it pretty often in the past, but it has been long abandoned.
Even Arie, without a specific perception skill activated, can tell that this is an odd place to trek out to.
He speaks up as we all walk inside and take in the lush green scenery.
"What kinds of tests do you plan on doing with a dungeon this weak...?"
The rustling of jungle trees, long colorful flowery vines, and thick underbrush fills our vision.
"Here, I'll show you."
I place a hand on both Ember and Arie's shoulder, dungeon walking us to the center of the dungeon right beside two wild boar mobs at level 53 and 54 just to get a closer look.
We take the pair of monsters by surprise, but they hardly let out a squeal before the overwhelming aura of our trio suffocates them to death and they fall to the floor.
I activate enemy detection to find a few hundred other boars between level 50 and 60 filling the dungeon, but they're all running far away from us in fear.
With a sigh, I reach into my item storage to pull out one of the jet black firestones and place a hand on Ember's shoulder.
"Arie, you should probably place a hand on my back. I'm about 50% sure this will work, but to be safe, I'll be dungeon walking us out of here pretty quickly."
His eyes widen at the intense rippling black flames of the stone that I let hover over my right hand using telekinesis, and its fire burns so strong and bright that trees above in the jungle regions begin to erupt into flames.
He places a hand on my back, and I take this as a cue to activate my mythic grade craftsmanship skill.
I take a deep breath in and out before my gaze hovers over the [Imbue] tab next to Ember's [Plunderer][Mythic Grade] skill.
Beforehand, I thought this through very carefully.
The element stones and various items that became cursed or unstable the last time I performed this test were items made from material far inferior to the power of a Mythic Grade skill.
However, this element stone is a borderline A-Grade material. The pure mana and fierce power it gives off is higher than anything I've ever tried to merge in a craft before.
Even the leftover ice, earth, and unique wyvern stones in my inventory pale in comparison to the pure power these black fire stones produce.
My plan is to activate the craft, then leave this dungeon the instant I do.
The air goes still, and the jungle becomes silent. My vision burns through the [Imbue] tab in my mind's eye... then, I press it and watch the white light of my craftsmanship skill envelop the entire stone.
The instant I feel the craft complete, the mana in our surroundings begin to collapse in toward the stone.
My MP is dropped to half in a fraction of a second and I catch a glimpse of the new item's information with my all-seeing eye. I blip all three of us away to a dungeon back in the canyon 50km away to safety before I can conceptualize what I've seen.
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Elite Minotaurs Firestone [Containment Item]
Info: An element stone left behind by an Elite Grade Minotaur with a fire magic variant. It has been imbued with the Mythic Grade Plunderer Skill to create a one-time use Containment item. This stone will plunder mana from its surroundings until the mana control limit of its previous monster owner is met. Once its limit is reached, the plunderer aspect will cease to function.
Class: A+
Type: Containment Item
[Current MP Containment]: 0.0001B/7.8901B
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We all materialize in a random D-Grade grassland dungeon in the canyon, and I speak out loud with a grin.
"I think it worked..."
I create a body double and it immediately teleports back to the dungeon to do reconnaissance.
Less than half a second after I do, the double dies, but I see what is happening inside that Wild Boar dungeon as clear as day.
In just a few seconds, a massive twister of fire has begun engulfing the jungle.
A crater of disappearing dungeon mass is forming in the center where I dropped the black stone, and it is expanding outward and downward at a quickly increasing rate.
My double gets too close to the blast, attempting to use all of its perception skills to visualize what's going on at the item's core, but is sucked dry of MP and pulled into the black fiery core before it can do anything.
Over the next half a minute, I continuously send in body doubles to watch the increasingly large ball of flames destroy the dungeon I dropped it in.
Enormous jungle trees, dozens of boars, and tall rock formations are burned away by the black flames and consumed as energy for the growing ball of dungeon mass.
However, once the stone's fireball diameter reaches a point of about 300 meters wide, for some reason it stops expanding.
My double watches the flames begin to flicker and die down.
The raging ball of violent MP-hungry energy stops completely, and I finally get a clear visual on a black stone glowing with energy at its center.
I manage to get a reading on the stone by flying closer as the flames fizzle out.
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Elite Minotaurs Firestone [Containment Item]
Info: An element stone left behind by an Elite Grade Minotaur with a fire magic variant. It has been imbued with the Mythic Grade Plunderer Skill to create a one-time use Containment item. This stone will plunder mana from its surroundings until the mana control limit of its previous monster owner is met. Once its limit is reached, the plunderer aspect will cease to function.
Class: A+
Type: Containment Item
[Current MP Containment]: 7.8901B/7.8901B
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Using water magic and wind magic, my double carves a path through the leftover flames and floats down into the dirt-filled crater to stand right next to the large black stone I left before.
It still flickers with black flames, but they are not nearly as violent. Its mass looks like it's grown a few times larger, almost half a meter wide now.
The most fascinating thing is the immense amount of mana it contains. It feels as if one wrong move could set off a massive explosion. However, my double opens up its item storage and drops the fully saturated stone inside.
It dungeon walks back with the package contained, then speaks to my main body with an outstretched hand.
"The test was a success. Let me see one of the isolation pods, I'll try to feed the result of this experiment to the machine."
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Author's Note:
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There's custom chapter art for every new daily upload too!
Thanks for reading:)
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