Amy was actually very keen on this idea. This way, she could properly communicate with the dungeon and hopefully teach it sense. Although she was weak, she wouldn't be too pushy.
During the teaching and learning process, the dungeon filled her with its mana, just like the feeling of a warm and comforting embrace that told her everything would be all right. It brought a gentle and mesmerising smile to her face, one which she thought was already lost to her.
Even though it didn't seem to increase her maximum mana any more than the 128 points it capped at, she desperately cherished this feeling. Regardless, this was in fact a monstrous amount for someone who was only
Afterwards, she gently asked for some water in the bucket, which she used with a toilet rag to clean herself off, washing herself a second time with soap.
She then asked to go outside to go to the toilet, which the dungeon surprisingly accepted, removing the bars on her prison and allowing her to walk out without supervision.
Amy walked to a nearby tree, pulled up her skirt, undid her cloth undergarment, and pushed out all the excess dungeon seed while also urinating.
After cleaning herself with the toilet rag, she washed it out in the bucket and poured away all the water dirty with her and the dungeon's filth. The dungeon wouldn't take back dirty water, which she had already discovered even before it could talk to her.
She looked around deeper into the forest, the birds chirping and the underbrush rustling. Even without the teammates she once called family, life carried on regardless. She gave a sad smile toward a bird she saw in a nearby tree, flirting with a potential mate.
The forest, and freedom from the dungeon, was directly in front of her.
There was no guard beside her to stop her fleeing.
However…
She still decided to turn back and return to the dungeon.
It was a terrible place, but it was also the only sense of stability in her current life.
'I will teach it Elvish first. Maybe then, I will be able to talk to it and make things better. He does view me as… his, after all.'
Without even knowing, the type for the Shrooms gnomes to be born arrived.
Unlike the diggers, the two shroom gnomes took an entire night to grow to their adult forms. They were humanoid monsters that stood half a meter tall, with grey skin and a mushroom like growth on their head.
They had powerful arms for manipulating objects, but they were strangely dumb. Whilst they had hands to work with, they were too dumb to use them for complicated tasks.
Seeing this, Zach didn't want to give up and held some faith that levelling them up would mitigate this issue, but that was just speculation at this point.
He finished digging the large stone room behind his current dungeon layout and carved four intricate pillars in the corner, a task that took several hours due to low level mana control.
He made a basic stone storage, which was a standard 90 centimeter cuboid box. This would have had a storage space of 0.73m3, but mana was used to create an expanded space inside of it. Some form of fractal mana engraving was inscribed on the inner walls of the crate, which he had zero understanding of. More mana, meant more of this engraving inside the crate, but the cost increased exponentially.
If only Zach knew that he has subconsciously touch up on the law of space he might have gone crazy or maybe not, after all he didn't know what that means but if the world was to know, they would have gone crazy since his level is too low to reach such stage of manipulating space to increase size.
There were some benefits and cons to the crate. Benefits were such as how crates could be stacked on top of one another, as he didn't need to physically open them to access their stored content or to store materials.
Meanwhile, the expanded space inside them was chaotic and destructive, so he could only store base materials in them, any created product or animal would be destroyed and returned to their base materials. An exception to this was corpses, and by extension, living things.
He had his elf take a dog size lizard corpse from the pitfall trap at the entrance and throw it inside a crate, as it was a creature not a part of him, and as such he couldn't simply transport it inside.
The young elf woman carried a candle while complaining the room was too dark as she threw the rabbit corpse into the stone storage crate. She watched with an aghast face as the rabbit was torn up, shredded, it bones ground to power, blood spilling everywhere, as it turned into a disintegrated pile of flesh and blood.
It was living matter, but it definitely wasn't biomass. Biomass converters were still required.
Over the next day, he created several more storage crate out of stone, even carving intricate designs on them and improving the basic structure of them by adding legs and a frame around them. It was a waste of mana, but it made him feel much more comfortable about their basic structures.
While waiting for his mana to recover, he continued learning the elf's language, even going back to learning the characters in the language and their pronunciation.
He used a portion of the wall in her room to write out the elvish word with the English pronunciation above it, and English meaning next to it. The wall was perfectly smoothed out, and all the writing was tiny, so one had to get very close to it to read it.
He had the processing power of a dungeon core, which was basically a super computer, so he was learning the language extremely fast.
His monsters didn't take any mana, only food, which he had plenty of biomass to make.
He expanded his mineral collection from mining, to also harvesting some wood in the nearby forest, but he kept that to a minimal. The thought of his dungeon surrounded by tree stumps and a forest that was no more was appalling. His OCD for his dungeon looking beautiful and stylish refused to allow it to happen.
He also reworked the entrance corridor, smoothing out the floor and then carving an intersecting diagonal stone bricks pathway into the floor. He built several bluish-grey pillars into the wall out of ardonite at even spacings, covering them in intricate Aztec carvings.
The path didn't extend from wall to wall though, as there was also running gardens along the wall full of dirt, but Zach currently had nothing to grow in them, nor could he with the heavy lack of sunlight.
He hadn't discovered any useful aspects of the stone other than the nice colour it had. He also built a landscape banner along the wall about a meter tall. It ran along the center of the wall, and had fancy patterns cut into it, and carvings of demons, more ardonite inlaid in the pictures for some color contrast.
This design was then extended to the two rooms out back, the original further back middle room now turned into the giant room that was now 40 x meters in size and also held all the storage crates.