SB: Chapter 254 – Hell Has Frozen Over (Patreon)

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

It had been two days since I got back and I was physically recovered. My healing points were only at a third, but that was expected. Environmental effects were some of the hardest to shrug off once they dug into the body.

I slowly pried myself out of my comfortable bundle of blankets and began putting on clothes. My last set had ice and snow plastered on them and once I got back, they had become wet. Wet clothes sucked the heat out of a person.

After getting changed I checked the cave’s enchantments and they were struggling. Also, the breathing holes I had leading outside were frozen over. I cleared the breathing holes and then made sure I could move the entrance stone. It took a bit of effort, but I was able to get it to move.

The temperature outside had decreased massively. There was also snow, lots of snow. That was my doing also. Drawing down moisture and decreasing the temperature. While I might not know that much about weather, I knew that clouds were made of water. As the temperature decreased, the clouds were precipitating.

There were a lot of clouds over the beastkin continent, even if they didn’t snow much. They were like a terrain feature in the past. Now I had tapped into them, the amount of snow was immense. Huge clumped together snowflakes.

This would make digging absolutely impossible. Thankfully Ozy was deep enough that it was mostly stone he was digging through and not any kind of soil. Also, he wasn’t truly digging, but using Alchemy. While the temperature could make things more difficult, it was nowhere comparable to digging.

I closed the cave back up and set up another two heating enchantments and a breathing enchantment. I had more than enough Mana cores to use them like this. As for the extra Mana, it was a risk I had to take, otherwise we would freeze and the air would become stagnant.

As for the air in the dungeon, when new chambers were created, the air was refreshed. So breathing was rarely an issue. And even if one did set up a permanent place, fixing the air was easy enough with runic enchantments.

The real challenge during this time was boredom, an old enemy. That was why I focused mostly on leveling up my Cold Resistance. I would spend hours outside the cave, working on Stillness or my anti-divination skills in the extreme cold.

Once my healing points got to half, I would go back inside, keep working on those anti-divination skills while using Empowered Meditation to regain my points more quickly. Occasionally I would take a break and read some of the books I had, but I knew this was the best chance for me to really push my Cold Resistance and then Cold Immunity up a lot of levels.

The big thing was that Empowered Meditation was almost about to be maxed out at Tier 3. Once it was, then I could get the Tier 4 skill Moving Meditation. While one could move slowly at the lower tiers, the idea of the Tier 4 skill was to keep up the state of Meditation even while moving heavily and in combat to keep one’s point regeneration higher than normal.

For longer battles in the dungeon, this was incredibly useful, but as a Tier 4 skill it took a long time to get and level up. I hadn’t asked my mother about the skill and there was nothing at Tier 5. My guess was that once Moving Meditation was maximized one would have to create a custom skill to take it further, which didn’t seem that useful.

Higher tier skills weren’t always better unless they did something specific and useful. Otherwise a person could be pulled in too many directions with their skill leveling. While it didn’t matter as much at the lower tiers, at the higher tiers, maximizing a skill would take a very long time.

Well, perhaps I would get a better idea or the College would come up with something regarding the meditation skill chain once I got back. The College was always trying to develop better skill chains that provided a strong benefit and direct leveling path towards higher tier skills.

A week after it started, the snow finally stopped coming down. There was over 30 meters of snow. I could only tell this with my sensory skills as I trained in the small snow cave I had made outside our actual cave. While I had water, I didn’t carry more than enough water for three months.

It was too bulky for spatial storage and with water purification methods, there was more than enough water in the dungeon. With the snow, that problem was solved as well. While tempting to tunnel up and out to not feel trapped, that would have a high chance of exposing our position.

I had no doubt that the demon was enraged over what had happened and had probably found one of my runic plates by now. Once one was found, the demon would know that someone was sabotaging it. The demon would definitely search the area to try and find where we were hiding.

My guess was proven correct, when I sensed a large source of Mana rush past two weeks after the snowfall had ended. The demon didn’t notice me or my hideout at all. It was probably not used to thinking when dealing with the beastkin and other threats. Just fight and smash, no use of tactics or critical thinking involved.

There was a big difference between tactics and strategy. In terms of individual or small group combat, the demons had strong tactics and decent combat intelligence. This made sense since the beastkin were the same way. But in terms of strategy, they were completely lacking. If there had been a legend from the Eldarin continent out there instead of a demon, I would have had no chance with this strategy.

The gaps in their education and skills were just too great. Even the biggest brutes on the Eldarin continent had a lot of supporting skills. When I had talked to my mother about Blood Gore, she made it clear that his combat intelligence, including both tactics and strategy were quite high, which was the only reason he had survived for so long with his fighting style.

That was the power of civilization, triumphing once again. The collective knowledge of millennia allowing me to beat a far superior opponent I had no business fighting. While my weather alterations weren’t something that would be repeated, it had worked.

The fact that the demon was searching showed that it had been completely stymied with no ability to respond to what I had done. It could just mindlessly search across the massive snowfall, hoping to find any kind of trace of me and my hiding spot.

Ozy had also transitioned the tunnel from an angle to horizontal. Going down the rock tunnel, was a bit claustrophobic. The walls were incredibly solid and there were regular rings jutting out of them for hand holds and foot holds.

While I would have liked the tunnel to be bigger, any larger and it would have taken far too long to make and then there would have been waste material. Currently Ozy was compressing the rock that used to form the tunnel space into the sides of the tunnel to support it.

At the bottom of the angled tunnel there was a small room, enough to turn around and maneuver in before another tunnel began horizontally. I had the tunnel downwards be at an angle, so it was easier to get in and out of.

The biggest issue was sound echoing through the tunnel. Moving Boris and the sword case would be a huge problem. While the man could barely fit into the tunnel, he wouldn’t be able to do it with the sword case on his back.

Lowering the case via rope was impossible. While I had some long lengths of rope tucked away, there was nothing that went over the length of a kilometer. Tying coils of rope together wouldn’t be enough and even if it was, the rope itself would pull on itself. While this wasn’t noticeable over small distances, over a large distance the rope’s own weight would cause itself to snap. The sword case just helped it reach that failure point more quickly.

At least for traveling on the surface, I had prepared in case we ran into regions of a lot of snow. Snowshoes were webbed platforms one could wear on their feet to stop themselves from sinking deeply in the snow. I also had a wooden sled I could assemble and harness to help pull the sword case.

While I hadn’t thought there would be a lot of snow, it was the most basic of preparation before leaving the College. The White Waste was mostly ice and the mountains nearby were rocks and ice. But with the constant cloud cover I had seen before, I knew that one snowstorm could be a disaster.

Making some basic preparations for something like that had been easy enough with a bit of foresight, unlike preparing potions for the extreme cold. It basically came down to the cost of the preparations. The snowshoes and wood sled wouldn’t hold up under combat conditions, but they were needed to let me move.

That still left the issue of how to get the sword case down the tunnel. Or I could ignore getting the sword case down and bring the sword up. The second idea seemed much worse, since the longer the sword was exposed the greater the chance the demon or something else that was troublesome would lock onto its location.

And even if the sword case was brought down, I had to get it back up, a considerably harder task. Widening the tunnel wasn’t possible without creating debris that would need to be disposed of. Ozy could only compress the stone so much and was already at that limit.

While it was tempting to go out and take a look to see if the demon was still out there, I had no doubt it was waiting for someone to emerge and kill them. There were only so many places to hide at the edge of the White Waste. If I was the demon, I would take a spot to keep watch over a large area at a long distance.

I doubted the demon would give up and just leave. If anything, it would be quite angry and infuriated at being blocked from its goal. I would need to think on the matter of moving the sword case. Perhaps tie it to lots of rope and then that rope around Boris’ body? It was something to consider.

For the horizontal portion of the tunnel, a sled like system could be used, since Ozy had made the floor flat but the roof curved and ribbed, unlike the almost vertical tunnel which was ribbed on a regular basis and completely circular.

Time to talk to Boris and work out with him what was possible.

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter