The Discarded, Half-Eaten Apple Core New Life - Chapter 75

The first thing I did was to go bug Marshall. I created a speaker next to him. “Hey, Marshall. I finished picking my Classes and evolutions. Funny, I got three-three-three percent efficiency on one of my Attributes,” I bragged, setting “smug”, “proud”, and “arrogant” as tags in the voice Synthesizer.

Marshall sputtered his whiskey. He stared at the speaker that wasn’t there last time. The Perk to make friendly dwellers’ auras 80% smaller was nice. “Three hundred? I should’ve crushed you at the auction house.”

“You’d be Jabberwock food now,” I typed and pressed, “practical”, “obtuse”, and “oblivious” on the emotion pad.

“I liked your voice more when it didn’t convey fake emotion. Or no emotion at all.”

I had 50 shades of robotic gray voice now. But I wouldn’t torture Marshall with it… and now it’s a weird reference. Forget about it.

“What’s your highest Attribute score now?” He probed and drank a bit more.

“Twenty-seven thousand.”

“I pray to our fruit god that He might have mercy on us,” He dry-chuckled. “Are you done bragging?”

“Yeah. I’m going to grind some Exp later today. I got three new Classes to level up. Thousands of Attribute points to level, and three new Skills to grind.”

“Have fun. And leave me alone! Wait. Before you do, give me the biggest bottle of Scotch you can make.”

“Don’t have time for that. You can have an Olympic pool bottle of Scotch, but that’s it.”

Outside, on his lawn (Marshall was living on the planet’s surface with the Guardians now) I Replicated a bottle (1 foot-thick-glass walls) in the shape of an Olympic pool, with the lanes and trampolines. I also made an ice chamber full of shelves with trays of frozen Holy Water.

Hey, now that’s a good idea. A launcher that shoots spikes of frozen holy water… Humm. Yeah.

Marshall looked out the window and raised his hands, “Thank you for this bounty, my God.”

He wasn’t really a believer. But when a deity slaps you with a big trout for real, you’d be insane to question its existence or not. It’s right in front of you.

Other Guardians noticed the giant glass bottle and went to knock on Marshall’s door. I guess the pool party is a go. Hope they all bathe before diving in. Doubt it, though.

*

*

The changes in my Status were profound. Numbers go up but… The most important ones were my Personal Domain and Beacon range, that almost doubled in size. And this was not my final form. I had three Classes to level up. And… my Domain Volume had almost tripled. From 134 to 338 cubic miles.

That was enough volume to create a seven-inch-tall Dungeon covering all of Australia.

After it was covered in Dungeon, I could project stuff out of it using the beacons. The guns didn’t need to be inside the Dungeon to fire, just the button to activate the weapon. Perhaps a project for later.

I also could remove the Ribbon Perk and still regenerate 135,000 MP per day to play with. I could do that and pay the difference with DM but I didn’t want to go into a debt. Debt is bad.

Materialization speed doubled. Almost doubled but I’m not going to say “almost” this, “almost” that. 56k to 107k DM per second was a doubling and that’s it. Ask a physicist about error margins. I also gained 30 new rules for Dungeon Automation because my Intelligence grew. I needed these badly.

DM and SP pools grew a lot but I wasn’t too concerned about these. It gave me more breathing room to stock on Resources before they overflowed but Dungeon automation had a rule to direct excess DM regeneration to any available trees in Speranza. Some of them were already glowing up and acquiring magical properties because I had so much magic inside them for that long.

Except the damn Gray Alien stole all my stockpile of DM, trillions of it, to give me the internet back.

As an aside, I finally got the BIOS and drivers for all the devices and components I could make. Also, every Windows OS version, and MacOS, and all the proprietary software source code ever created. Who knew the US Army cyber combat division had a copy of all of them?

Oh, look. The source codes for Master of Magic. I loved that game.

My requests of the NASA files and GitHub became obsolete. The government also had mirrors of those. Also, the NSA and CIA had backups of almost everyone’s computers. In the world. Even the European Leaders. Also, what a wealth of Cold War documents.

Hey, Daydream-kun, do you have any software files you have yet to give me?

> Many think that Magic defies the laws of Thermodynamics, but they ignore the fact that magic draws on a whole superior dimension. No use of magic can be reduced to an isolated system. Therefore, the energy flows cannot match the constraints expected in physics experiments. Magical mishaps also happen because of these unknown extra-dimensional Mana flows, swirls, and tides. The decay and loss of energy in one spell is compensated by the “creation” of energy by another.

Great insight! Physics-Chan approves this one.

Where was I? Oh, changes to my Status. The qDCSC link distance increased by 30 miles, and I gained another 10 points of armor. #neat #numbersgoup #hellyeah.

*

*

To farm the Experience I needed, I set the blimps to shoot at the Infernali prowling and reproducing around the Australian Outback. That gave me a steady trickle of Experience from the small fry. I also noticed that several Infernali monsters were swimming to Australia, crossing over from the nearby islands.

With that set, I had the time to craft some things. I held back on creating the big robots for now as they were of a high level and would blow up the Experience cap. I wanted to study the three Skills I gained. The real meat in a Class were the Skills, no doubt about that.

Primordial Transmutation had the looks of being incredibly OP. The Rank I already gave me the power to create resources out of nowhere. Yes, the transmutations were all at a net positive Resources, even after you factored the horrible conversion rates. For example, I created a lump of stone worth 20 Substance. It was a rock weighing about 50 pounds. It cost me 3 DM to create. Then I used Primordial Transmutation on it and turned the rock into a Mana crystal worth 24 Substance for the cost of 100 MP. It was slightly smaller than the rock but about that much denser. It was a Mana crystal weighing around 58lb.

Let it sink for a moment. I had 58lb of Mana Crystal in front of me right now. A Mana Crystal that size was worth… Six thousand DM.

The rank I of this Skill allowed me to convert 100 MP into 5,997 DM. I could absorb that stone right now and convert it into 59,000 MP and make another rock.

I was wrong. This isn’t incredible OP, it is “get you banned from the game server for duping” kind of broken. Literally a cheat. When those stupid Isekai protagonists talk about cheats, they have no idea what they were talking about.

System, if you want to take this thing back, do it now. I’m going to abuse this shit so much you’re going to be sore in the morning.

No? No changes? No take-backsies! Mine. My precious!

I set a bunch of Dungeon Automation rules and designed machines to save me a few.

I created a conveyor belt of mine carts that would cycle around, throw their contents into a chute, and then come back. The first rule was that every time a wagon came under a certain spot, it would Replicate one hundred and eighty rocks inside of it. Then, it would use 2,000 DM to convert the rocks into Mana Crystals. This step took some time as each use of the Skill took 1 second. 3 minutes to convert a whole mine cart.

The conveyor belt would move the cart away and bring an empty one. Two Crystals in every wagon were converted back to DM and Substance, to pay for the operation. This three-rule cycle operated at a small gain of 5,448 DM per wagon. Not counting the 178 crystals that went to storage. The filled wagons dumped the crystals into a chute. The chute brought the crystals to a conveyor belt and then a robotic arm sorted them inside a storage room. I would grow out of room to put the crystals soon.

The first wagon dumped its contents half an hour later. The conveyor belt had twenty wagons, to create a buffer in case something went wrong. This chamber and the storage room were completely cut off from the outside and protected by ten layers of Dungeon walls. I didn’t want to see the damage this many Mana stones exploding would cause.

I counted the stones as they were put in place by the robotic arm. One hundred and ninety-six. Yeah, nice. Wait. Shouldn’t it be 178? Where did the extra eighteen came from?

Did they appear out of nowhere? Did the crystals (gasp) have babies in the mine cart? No. It was my new Factorium Skill working its thing. And the crystals didn’t come out of nowhere. Dungeon Automation was creating 198 stones and converting them to crystals. The Resource accounting worked just fine. The extra stones weren’t coming from thin air. It was just that the automated factory process was that more efficient. Also, my Materialization speed was not being overtaxed by this extra batch of stones.

This factory was giving me a net 23,628,960 extra DM (and 94,080 SP) per hour, straight into storage. And it was also exercising my two Skills, adding points to the next rank up.

But this was one factory. It depended on Dungeon Automation rules to work and consumed a small amount of Materialization bandwidth. Could I make this infinitely scalable?

That’s when the third Skill, Technomancy entered the field.

Combining Wondrous Magic and Technomancy, I created an enchanted machine that could cast Primordial Transmutation for me. It could load one standard 24-point Mana stone (that’s how I’ll call the stones made by this factory from now on). Standardization of magitech power sources was a must! Using the energy of that stone to power the enchantment, it could cast Primordial Transmutation rank I 240 times per stone. While this was 150% worse than what Dungeon automation could get, it also freed a precious slot.

> For creating Magitech Transmuter [rock to 24-point Mana stone] (level 150, Very Rare), you gained 48,000 Experience points.

> You gained 6 levels […]

Why did the System consider a contraption that used a Legendary Dungeon Skill only Very Rare was inconsequential? I blew the Exp cap by a ridiculous wide margin. Orz.

Anyway, making that enchanted transmuter and hammering out the kinks took me a few days. I changed strategy. I now had ten of these transmuters pointing at a conveyor belt, with instructions to shoot every time a rock passed under them. The wagons were loaded with the rocks and moved to storage as normal. But now, robotic arms took stones from a hopper and moved them to this transmuter conveyor belt. Dungeon Automation only Replicated the rocks now. The command was, “Replicate more rocks using only DM if this hopper is not at full capacity.”

Each of the nine copies of the Magitech Transmuter also gave me 48,000 Experience points. Except the last one, that gave “only” 22,210.

Robotic arms reloaded the transmuters as needed, using Mana stones from the conveyor belt. This new factory could make 39,585 Mana Stones per hour, already accounting for the ones used to charge the transmuters. I Created another nine such factories, all drawing stones out of the same hopper.

This thing could cough up 9,500,400 stones per day, each worth 6,000 DM (and 24 SP). I turned it on and saw my Dungeon Mana plummet. Why? Each rock (pre-transmutation) cost me 53 DM to create, because I was converting DM to SP. To make all the stones consumed in a day, it would cost me 457,920,000 DM.

After the initial panic and with a full hopper, the flows of Mana inside my Dungeon stabilized. This factory was actually helping me by spending a quarter of my daily Dungeon Mana income.

I had a ridiculous amount of Mana Stones. Enough to break the world’s economy if I were to go back in time 15 years.

Should I show the storage room to Marshall? I emailed him a picture of it.

Now, since I couldn’t buy nice things, only one thing remained. How the fuck could I weaponize this stupid amount of Mana stones?

The answer was obvious.

But making this factory netted me 90 levels in my new Classes. I had perks to ogle at, and Attribute points to spend. All in Willpower, obviously.