Chapter 26

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Chapter 26: Keeper

Tasha woke up from a deep sleep, feeling like something had changed.

The red gem above the Magic Pool shone brightly, more dazzling and beautiful than ever before. Upon closer inspection, the cracks and debris that were there before had disappeared, the garnet shell seemed to have been expertly repaired and polished, smooth as a mirror. The Dungeon Core in front of her slowly rotated, like a tiny planet.

But Tasha couldn’t sense much increase in power, she thought.

"Awake? You’re finally awake!" Victor’s voice sounded slightly hysterical, "Do you know what you’ve done? Oh, of course you do! You are the damn dungeon itself!"

Tasha felt inexplicably guilty for a moment, almost suspecting that she had slept away half a century. She quickly scanned the dungeon interior and the ground visible from the watchtower, everything was calm, and the people inside hadn’t aged much since she fell asleep.

"You use Core Strength to ignite the remnants of the Will of Nature here," Victor explained in a bunch of terms Tasha couldn’t understand. "You really set off a ‘I am here’ firework in the sky! Any creature with a bit of nature affinity higher than an Orc from eight hundred miles away can see you, not just Druids, even any cleric among humans…"

"The Abyss and the Heavenly Realm are both isolated, and it seems humans will not be associating with other races," Tasha reminded him.

"So you think you’re safe now?" Victor said angrily. "Let me put it this way, a perceptive wizard can see the source of magical outbursts, a summoner making pacts with nature creatures can infer the presence of the Heart of Nature from demon pet movements, experienced alchemists just need to activate their compasses, and wise sages, the kind of high-end scholars sponsored by every major country, can even deduce the existence of a damaged dungeon here! Well done, Master! Let’s see when your army comes knocking at your doorstep!"

"Worrying won’t help," Tasha said. "Besides panicking and screaming, do you have any useful suggestions?"

"I am not panicking!" Victor insisted. "I am just emphasizing to make you understand the seriousness of the situation!"

Tasha remained noncommittal.

When Victor was making a fuss, she asked the Craftsman Dwarf and Amazonian if they had heard of wizards, summoners, alchemists, and sages. They hadn’t. When she inquired about "powerful humans," the Craftsman Dwarf mentioned pistols and other weapons, while the Amazon warrior disdainfully stated that humans couldn’t compare to them in a fair one-on-one duel. Even though their information was not accurate due to their limited knowledge, one thing was certain: the professions Victor mentioned and the variety of adventurers Tasha saw in her dreams were no longer the common human forces.

Things hadn’t reached the worst point yet, Tasha wasn’t prepared to "set off fireworks," but if this was the dungeon’s response to her actions, she would accept the risk.

Tasha wanted to see the scenes from her dream again.

She wanted to preserve all kinds of creatures, whether good or bad, beautiful or ugly, strong or weak, and capture the fleeting meteors in the river of history. She thought of stamp albums filled with sold-out stamps, museums carrying countless specimens of extinct species, and botanical gardens growing plants from all over the world… She wanted to build a place where various intelligent beings could coexist, different civilizations could thrive and prosper endlessly.

Tasha’s mind cleared up suddenly, just at this moment, the confusion that lingered when she first woke up faded away.

It felt like a near-sighted person putting on glasses for the first time, like wiping off the mist on a window. Tasha could clearly feel the changes happening within herself. Her thinking became clearer and quicker, the part managing the dungeon seemed to have turned into some kind of intelligent system that could easily quantify magical power, calculate income and expenses, and simulate consumption. She could do some of it before, but now it felt like upgrading an old XP system computer to the latest alien version, the deduction process was effortless, running multiple systems simultaneously was a breeze, in the dungeon she not only had all-seeing vision, but also the mental power to analyze this "all-seeing."

She quickly organized the existing information, sorting the covenanter cards and dungeon buildings into categories, compiling this information together, turning it into Tasha’s own character card.

Broken dungeon-Tasha

Attributes: Abyssal Breath Severed – a powerful force cut off your connection to the abyss, the Dungeon Core comes from the abyss, but you don’t belong there / Natural Aura Affinity – the keeper of the Heart of Nature signed a contract with you, the Will of Nature once glanced at you, owning character cards: clever gnome Ahuang, Book of Dungeons Victor, mixed-blood Worgen Marion, Oak Guardian contract group: Craftsman Dwarf, Amazonian

Buildings: Kitchen, Residence, Watchtower, Forging Room-Workshop, Cemetery, Training Ground, Medicinal Herb Garden Skills: [Master of the Dungeon] [Suspicious Salesman] [Magical healing spell] [Full Moon- Call of the Wild] [Heart of Nature (False)] [We Workers Have Power] [Excellent Reserve Soldier] Among these skills, the effects of [Suspicious Salesman], [Full Moon- Call of the Wild], and [Excellent Reserve Soldier] remain the same as when just obtained, unchanged, while others have new content.

[Master of the Dungeon]: You are all-knowing in the dungeon, your good urban planning and soil exploration abilities prevent you from building structurally unsound buildings. You can move any item in the dungeon, the magic consumed is proportional to the quality of the item – high consumption, not cost-effective, so if you can command a servant to do it, don’t do it yourself.

[Magical healing spell]: Magic can only repair Abyssal Creations, if creatures from the Primary Material Plane want this treatment? Sell their souls to the dungeon.

Heart of Nature (False): The feeling of nature surrounds you – under the influence of your inner strength, this feeling stands out like a beacon to certain groups.

We Workers Have Power: They say knowledge is power! Your power is mostly from ancient times, but you also have some understanding of magic weapons.

The contents outlined on the card appeared clear at a glance, but ultimately, it was just a sorting of past information. When it comes to real new things… Tasha glanced at a corner of the card and saw content she had never seen before.

Title: Keeper

Tasha was unsure how to interpret this deep vocabulary. Translating it to "keeper" in English seemed more suitable, as it could be understood in many ways. Caretaker, keeper, guardian, supervisor, master…

"I think it means caretaker," Victor, who spoke the language of the deep, said ominously. "Since you have been lavishing unnecessary excessive kindness on creatures of the earth."

"Clearly there are many things between catastrophic destruction and excessive kindness," Tasha responded, with little interest. She looked below the title and felt her heart suddenly race.

Keeper, title effect: Extracting subordinate elements to form the body.

Form the body?

Tasha didn’t hesitate to use her title effect, and the Dungeon Core spun rapidly like a top being whipped.

The blue liquid in the Magic Pool also started swirling, forming a vortex quickly. The thin magic in the dungeon rotated, gathering towards the center where countless invisible "threads" connected to Tasha, like an invisible whirlwind. At that moment, Tasha’s consciousness passed through the entire dungeon.

*

Groups of Craftsman Dwarfs hammered the remains of the Magic Cannon. Its power had been absorbed by Tasha long ago, and its complex internal structure had been destroyed beyond repair. However, the skilled craftsmen were still able to find ways to repair its appearance. Through the efforts of the Craftsman Dwarfs, the salvaged pieces of metal slowly took shape again and soon it would probably regain its previous unique appearance.

*

A young brown-haired girl named Atlantic sat by her mother’s bed, next to her father. She was the youngest among the Amazon warriors, who had complained to Marion before the battle that she could only use a short bow. Her injured arm was bandaged and hung around her neck, while her other hand held her mother’s hand on the bed. The injured warrior woman remained unconscious, locked in a struggle with the god of death.

"Do you want to eat something?" her father asked.

Atlantic remained silent until her father gave up on getting an answer. He hesitated for a moment and said, "Your mother doesn’t really think you’re not worthy of being a warrior. She’s just too worried about you, just like me… We have always been proud of you."

His daughter still didn’t move. He sighed quietly, stood up, and walked towards the door as usual. Before closing the door again, he heard Atlantic say softly, "I love you too."

*

On the Training Ground, Dora shot another arrow. She had been here for too long, sweat dripping from her nose and chin, feeling more and more tired and sore, affecting her aim. The last arrow missed the target, Dora let out a frustrated growl, threw down her bow, grabbed her sword, and wildly attacked the training dummy.

Someone walked up behind her, kicked away her sword. "Find a sparring partner who can fight back," said the Amazon Queen, giving Dora a glance and taking another sword from the weapon rack.

Gasping for air, Dora picked up her sword from the ground, gritted her teeth, and charged at the queen.

Exhaustion slowed down the warrior’s movements, while the queen was the strongest among the Amazons, the outcome was clear. The battle quickly ended with Dora’s defeat. She charged again and again, until the queen stepped on her sword, preventing her from picking it up. "Is this what you want?" the Amazon Queen’s voice was stern. "To destroy yourself in this way, to repay those sisters who fought and died for us to survive?"

"No…!" Dora shouted, her voice choked, "It’s me, I was the one who…"

"It’s them!" the queen interrupted her. "It’s those humans who attacked the Amazons, those despicable ones who killed the weak, who set traps and wielded swords against us! Dora, do you want to wait for revenge or continue to wallow in self-pity here, being a coward?"

She tossed the sword back onto the rack, her golden headpiece gleaming in the candlelight. Dora half knelt on the ground, her shoulders trembling slightly. Suddenly, cheerful footsteps approached from outside the Training Ground, a dwarf peeked inside, saw them, and happily ran in.

"Good evening, Queen, and this lady!" he exclaimed cheerfully, placing a large pillow into Dora’s arms, completely oblivious to the tense atmosphere. "They said you haven’t been back to your room to sleep these past few days. I understand you! Take this! It’s a pillow made of duck feathers, made by me, the best pillow in the entire dungeon—Tuck makes the best pillows a thousand times better than the ones in the rooms! Oh, don’t worry, Queen, I’m still rushing to make pillows for others, forgive me, we could have started earlier, but we didn’t know who the new residents would be, you need to know the size of the person’s head to custom-make a pillow, you can’t just make one without meeting the bed owner, that’s not the attitude of a good craftsman!"

He chattered on and on about the care instructions for the pillow (like airing it out and how to keep it soft by fluffing it), then left satisfied. The Amazon Queen subtly smiled, glanced at Dora, and also left the Training Ground.

Dora held the pillow blankly and couldn’t get up for a while. The pillow was really soft, she licked the blood on her lips and started to feel tired.

*

Marion is on the ground.

By the time Tasha reached this place, her body was already complete. Some consciousness was poured into it, feeling somewhat ghostly yet completely different. Her feet touched the ground, feeling the gravity after a long time. She raised her hand, clenched it, feeling the hard nails pressing against her palm. It was a feminine body, tall like she used to be, only healthier and stronger.

Wait, there was one difference.

Inside the Dungeon Core’s mirror-like shell, Tasha saw her pale reflection. Instead of a human face, there was a bony skull—it didn’t look human, more like the skull of some kind of beast.

"Removing the vital head part? The chance of obtaining this undead talent is less than one percent, you only have a Skeleton Soldier!" Victor said enviously, "You are really lucky."

"…"

Tasha sighed deeply in front of a makeshift mirror, tapped her head absentmindedly, feeling nothing. She shook her head, grabbed a random piece of clothing, and walked towards Marion on the ground.