Over in the more ravaged area, the kobolds aren’t doing so hot. While the healer has managed to keep most of his team upright, they already had lost two of their numbers. It wasn’t even to monsters, which at this point were well below their level. In fact, the monsters would probably be the easiest part of the entire trip.
No, they were losing in the most embarrassing way for a kobold to lose. To traps. Though to be fair to them, they weren’t technically traps in the traditional sense. Rather, the monster ravaged area was a lot more prone to have things fall apart above or below you with even the slightest of impetus.
In fact, the two dead kobolds had been lost at the sa ti, when an entire apartnt block ca down on top of them. Good thing the rest of the group had waited outside or they might have suffered a party wipe. Not that they got away scot free. The healer needed to spend over an hour getting the others back to full health after being bombarded with debris thrown out by the collapse.
Despite the danger, though, they were doing alright. Sure, most of what they found was broken, but that didn’t matter to a dungeon. As long as it remains close enough to what it was last, a dungeon could grock it. Though that very fact was behind why Doyle was having such a hard ti getting trees. Pre-system stuff was all treated to the point of counting as lumber instead of tree and the post-system stuff was a material used to make sothing, having lost that original connection. It all ca down to intent, concepts, and the universal laws around which magic operated.
And so the shards of Mana cable the kobolds scavenged would count as Mana cable and not whatever material was used to make it. Sa as the quartz bricks would gain him the pattern for the brick itself and not the quartz and polyrs it is made of. Though speaking of polyrs, it is around the halfway point that the truth of such things is finally found out.
Jim and his team had been carefully exploring what was more and more appearing to be the center of a giant collection of factories. The tal was a disappointnt, being so sort of steel alloy, and used purely to support things where those quartz bricks couldn’t. Then, as they reached depths that felt like they had to be into basent levels, even if there was no way to tell, the team found an area devoted to brick production.
And what an area it was! Held up by giant pillars, the quartz bricks production equipnt stretched out miles in all directions with massive cranes strung across the ceiling to move materials and bricks around. The enormous hoppers of quartz, each devoted to a specific size range, were still filled. After all, it was just normal quartz. Maybe a few interesting minerals mixed in, but even if a team devoted their ti to extracting it all, not much would change.
No, the more valuable prize was hidden within the endless rows of molds and quartz, cranes and polyr vats long dried out. When found, the manual wasn’t impressive, just a small little thing. However, within its pages was noted down the thods of creating a polyr that when set correctly, would crystalize in the sa manner that quartz does. Not only that, but in doing so, it would grow off of pre-existing quartz crystals, creating quite an impressive bond.
That was the secret to the quartz bricks everywhere. The polyr was cheap and from earlier books they had learned that quartz deposits literally everywhere on the planet. It would have to be, seeing as the fallen race had used quartz like Jim’s world had used rocks for concrete and such. Except the quartz bricks had a much higher maximum load so they didn’t even have to go quite so hard into steel reinforcent.
Though it was another team from another community that found the last clue needed to put everything together that the system wanted to teach. A bunch of insignificant facts that culminated in a switchover to magic. Not that Jim didn’t get hints of this just from the brick factory.
As while the vast machines deep in the gastructure of a factory were intact, they showed signs of disuse. The great engines of progress stilled for a new way forward. So of the areas even showing signs of conversion where chanical was being replaced with magic.
Of course, since the special lore was being handed out, Jim soon found the knowledge as well and while he couldn’t be sure of the entire story, the warning was clear. Don’t abandon technology for magic. Whoever this place was based on had and the quartz was the key.
While not as magically active as more precious stones, quartz still worked quite well for magitech. And of course, these people loved their quartz and so when they realized it could do even more? They jumped at it.
Electricity got replaced with Mana lines, places began to replace the steel supports with Mana reinforced bricks when possible. Even simple things like pet leashes were replaced with magical equivalents. Except they weren’t ready for it, not really.
In books, clearly not from this fallen civilization, the system made it clear that a magic society wasn’t the problem. Rather, it was their attempt to jump in too fast and too far. A situation which was certainly happening in nurous communities, just as there were as many trying to deny magic. Though the system didn’t have to warn about that second one as it tended to self correct before going too far.
As for what caused the actual fall of this civilization? In replacing the old with the new, years of knowledge was thrown away. And for a while, the new stuff worked. The problem is, unlike their old technology, no one really knew how to maintain the magic.
So, while they made it pretty far into integration, it was more like they were living borrowed ti. Which ended up being paid back in the form of the more complex magitech beginning to fail. A problem when one of the more complex items was the monster barrier that stopped the formation of monsters inside of it.
Suffice it to say, the area where the kobolds were wasn’t supposed to look like that. Though the large Kaiju style monsters weren’t the biggest threat. Instead, it was the rat equivalent that was easily monsterized. Because all those giant edifices that covered the entire planet? They represented near endless dark corners for the rats to multiply. Then, one day, everything boiled over and rats of so many different types ca up out of the shadows in a feeding frenzy.
Jim, of course sees that last bit as a secondary warning. Don’t let vermin populations build up right beneath you. Though it does give aning to the trope of the rat stomp where one of the first tasks in an rpg or video ga involves killing a bunch of rats.
As for why this isn’t the main warning? Well, that’s more of a feeling Jim and the others get from the lore. While the uprising of the rat-like monsters was fell and terrible, every chance the texts got, it was blad on Mana leaking from equipnt and the wards slowly failing.
Though Jim in particular felt the warning about over reliance on Mana felt a bit forced. Like, sure, this species ended up falling as a result of being fanatics. However, it clearly wasn’t just switching entirely to Mana that caused the problems. If the system hadn’t been so heavy-handed about the subject, Jim would have instead thought it was a warning about using things you didn’t know well enough and keeping the local monster population under control instead of anything specifically about Mana.
Jim also wasn’t born yesterday, so he was more than willing to believe that so would miss the obvious warnings. That so communities would fall to this very sort of thing or sothing similar. Because while having an entire world go crazy for magic is stretching it in his opinion, there will be places that do so.
And of course he isn’t wrong. At that very mont, there were teams discovering the very sa lore fragnts and trying as hard as they can to ignore what is clearly the central lesson. So even go so far as to have team leaders that remove pieces of the various texts to try and alter the ssage. This, of course, just has the system and dungeon forcing those things even harder, replacing other drops with more copies.
Though for teams that got it and didn’t try to hide from the lessons, the final half of the required stay began to really open up the more standard rewards. Whether it was the teams in the more “rural” areas where buildings didn’t cover literally everything or the few groups like Jims that ended up in the middle of one of the sprawls where you could travel a road for days or even weeks without seeing the sky. They all began to find extra magitech wands and similar doodads.
Even the kobold team, still at eight, began to find better materials. Their inability to actually read the various lore ssages not being held against them. Though just as equally, Doyle was going to have to depend on the town to deliver at least so stuff to him. In particular, the kobolds hadn’t managed to find any magitech weapons.
Which is odd. Sure, maybe the magitech chs and other such vehicles might not be functional. Maybe they can’t even be brought through the portals out. But given the location that the kobolds are in, they should have seen so of that stuff, even if just trashed.
Then again, the fact that none of the original monsters from this planet are present points towards how heavily tailored the experience is, especially when it cos to what a dungeon might get out of it. Not just if a dungeon sohow figures out how to send a team in, but also in what ends up being fed to the dungeon after the fact. There would be no new monsters being added to any dungeons.
Though Jim wasn’t going to let things go without at least trying to find so fancy goodies. With his team having found everything they needed, he turned his attention to the extre locations. First heading to the very top, where the air outside of the building was thin and hard to breathe, down to below even the depths were he found the brick manufactory.
And it was in the depths that he started to go off the rails. Though it seed to him that maybe the buildings were taller than he first assud. Because once they got deep enough, the brick walls gave way to stone walls. Well, sowhat stone walls, as the sheer volu of quartz on this world was evident.
Anyway, deep into what seed to be actual caverns instead of planned areas, though altered as evidenced by the occasional quartz brick support pillars piercing through the floor and up into the ceiling, Jim and his party began to find things. If this was the original world and not a replica constructed in the depths of a dungeon, he would have considered it a historical site, like one of those old cave paintings. Maybe it even was and this was just a blind copy paste of the original site.
Except everything they had seen so far denied such a conclusion. The system had gone over everything with a fine-tooth comb. Any hints to the fallen race had been wiped to the point that Jim even questioned if what they saw was actually the original size and shape as things were a bit too perfect for humans. Though with how the universe apparently was, they might have actually been humans or at the very least, quite human-like. Yet deep down below the ground, Jim had found a site with broken stone age tools and strange carvings on the wall.
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