473 Time To Purify This Place!
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I tried to calm down the System but he was quite the grumpy little guy. At the end I wasn’t able to do much for him, but at least he was still sometimes answering my questions. I guess I’ll have to see what I can do. He’s strangely very annoying with his personality. He’s worse of Tsundere than Lucifer himself, the prideful dragon… He’s supposed to be a nice and serviceable System, but he just gets angry over anything. He really just needs to chill out a little bit at the very least… Well, whatever’s the case, I should get up.
As I got up from the ground, I noticed Emeraldine, Takeshi, and Laura, who were all sleeping. They passed out by all the enormous pressure of the giant spell we unleashed. The amount of Mana they had to control was immense, so I guess it makes sense they feel so terribly tired. The day was already ending in here, so I suppose it was better to spend the night, get down to the next floor in the dungeon, and then out of here. I can already guess there’ll be a big boss later, so we need to properly prepare.
The distance from here to the next floor seems very long, and I can already calculate that the monsters down there can’t get up here so easily, if they were just beginning to make a tower here and then just sent their first Ant Parasite to the first floor with the Mole King, it probably means they are still scouting the area, a night where we can sleep and recover so we can go down there shouldn’t be an issue. At most, we’ll get interrupted by an army of ants in the morning… but that only means even more bags of EXP for us!
“Anyways, you guys must be tired, let’s make a camp here for now.”
I quickly unpacked a tent and other things, and even put to boil some stew, which I added some medicinal herbs so it could bring them back to full soon. And while leaving a pack of Phantom Clones watching over them as they slept inside the big tent I had bought and built some time ago, I moved towards Lucifer and Partner, finding them inspecting the area.
“Hey! How’s things going? We won!” I said happily.
“Yeah, that was insane…” Lucifer flew down into the ground, quickly turning back into his humanoid form. “I think I skipped a beat when I saw that attack, Emeraldine really did something incredible there… With enough Mana, people can really do insane things…”
“T-That was so amazing!” Partner flew to my side. “If we didn’t moved in time we would had most likely gotten turned into ashes though!”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right… Sorry for not having told you to move away beforehand.” I sighed. “But it looked like you guys were very busy dealing with the incoming ants, so that seemed to be quite a difficult task.”
“Well what matters is that we lived to tell the tale.” Lucifer said. “But I am fairly sure we are not done yet, come here, we found something while looking around.”
“Yeah, look! Here!” Partner and Lucifer quickly guided me where the tower of the ants was located some minutes ago, there was a massive hole where the entire scorched dirt was, which led to an underground tunnel. The ants were most likely there as well.
“I can’t feel any life forms there, it seems Emeraldine’s attack reached down there and it easily destroyed it all, though there’s no pretty tree left behind the tree itself blow up to cause this much damage. The power most likely spread through every tunnel.” Lucifer said.
“Ah… So even if we took down the damn tower, this thing would had remained, I guess we did it well by going for an all-out attack.” I said while nodding.
Quickly after, I noticed many dropped items spread around, mostly ores, sometimes ant-themed equipment such as Ant Soldier Ring and even Abyssal Ant Necklace, which granted some enhancement to magic, but seemed to be rather weak so they were not worth much. And because they were imbued with miasma, they probably cannot be used by conventional crafters to be repurposed into new items.
Nonetheless, I could either use them as snacks to recover MP or repurpose them myself, as someone immune to Miasma, and use them for new equipment that will be more worth it. I picked everything up, until we reached the underground caves. In there, we found what Partner and Lucifer were talking about.
Countless caverns filled to the brim with purple, red, and black crystals. All of them were… indeed, Demonite. It was a low quality one, but this wasn’t simply growing naturally. It felt rather artificial.
“Demonite? Here? I thought it could only be truly made if someone tampered over miasma…” I said.
“Well yeah, the Worker Ants seem to be able to do just that. they’re an entire Race of monsters that not only have adapted to Miasma and use it to grow powerful, but it is also their tastiest dish. Like how normal ants plant fungus these creatures shape miasma and use their secretions to crystallize it so they can eat it later.” Said Lucifer.
“Woah, so like… Miasma Honey, literally?” I asked in surprise.
“More or less, it is a similar process.” Said Lucifer.
“Ahhh, just being here kind of gives me the chills, all these crystals are filled to the brim with miasma! It could easily bring an entire nation to their ruin if someone used them for some nefarious purpose… Imagine what would the dwarves do if they find this?!” Asked Partner.
“Demonite is an incredible ore due to its highly volatile composition and the immense quantity of power it has. If we let society find such big mines of Demonite, they’ll probably only use it for something bad. Even the dwarves are not an exception.” Lucifer said.
“I see… We better take away all of this and purify the place, and I’ve got the perfect Skill for that!”
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