My Dungeon Life: Rise of the Slave Harem

Chapter 1391

Betting all of the resources of the deep dwarves may seem like a dumb decision, but I had thought about it considerably. The basic reality was that the treasure wasn’t mine to take. It belonged to the deep dwarves, and just because he handed it to me didn’t mean he intended it for me. I was starting to think he had intended the entire package for Sapphire. She was supposed to Soul Merge with it, both unlocking the treasure and her memories of her father and mother. If he realized I had just fed it to my dungeon to crack it like an egg, he’d probably be angry.

That said, the deep dwarves had a lot of uses, and the only place they had to go was Chalm. At this point, I had already accepted various animalkin slaves, the osterians, and the foxkin. Adding the deep dwarves to my growing territory would only be a plus for us. Whether I owned the resources or the deep dwarves owned the resources, the benefit would be to my territory, which could export expertly crafted goods no one else could manage.

However, the deep dwarves were a stubborn lot who would likely see those resources as theirs. If I just took them and held onto them, that was bound to breed discontent. They would come to resent me and see me as a thief. They might even consider me an enemy. That’s the second reason I had initiated this challenge. They had a great deal of faith in their blacksmithing, and this particular guy, Gabbro, specifically.

In short, this was just a way to pass on the resources without anyone being unhappy. That’s not to say I didn’t wish to win this competition. If Gabbro won, I could pace the resources onto them peacefully, and we’d need to pay more for their services in the future. If we won, they’d still see their princess winning, and would at least feel like there was a fair reason that that the king gave the resources to me. After that, I’d negotiate a good deal with them to get them to work with the resources for me, and I’d have some kind of relationship with Gabbro too. Thus, there was no losing.

However, since there were no forges up to Gabbro’s standards, they were being constructed now. It would be two days before the competition could begin. That left only three days left for the blacksmiths to work. I hoped there would be enough time. Since they couldn’t work until the forges were made anyway, it wasn’t like this was lost time. I had gotten the deep dwarves to make the forges, so already I had succeeded with my goals.

That’s why I had decided to focus on other tasks that needed to be done before Twilight attacked. I had gathered Terra, Sapphire, and Alyssia up and headed out. We were walking through a dark corridor, very reminiscent of the ones I had started in when I reached the deep.

“Master, where are we?” Sapphire asked.

“We’re on the edge of my dungeon, where the territory infringes on the territory of another deep boss,” I explained.

“Are we going to kill it, Master?” Terra asked.

“No, we need to capture the boss and make it one of the dungeon bosses. The only chance we have of mounting a proper defense with Twilight comes is to unite all of the strength in the deep against her. When it was just me and Alysia, I wasn’t confident in fighting their bosses. However, with you guys here, I feel like this won’t be a problem.”

“H-hey! I’m not a fighter!” Sapphire cried out. “I’m just a blacksmith.”

“Yet, it’s most important that you do the fighting.”

“What? Why?”

“Because the competition with your uncle will be tomorrow night. That means you and I need to level up in our blacksmith jobs as much as possible to give us the best chance of outshining him!”

“Geh! You’re still seriously going through with that? Just give up already, uncle won’t lose!”

“I’ve ended up in a lot of situations where my failure seemed assured, and I managed to pull through… most of the time.”

Chapter 1392

{Apprentice Blacksmith had increased to 25.}

{You have learned the basics of blacksmithing. You have unlocked Blacksmith.}

I once read a theory that stated that information could be exchanged from one person to the next. In that way, it acted a lot like the inheritance of genes. Certain information, like fire, was hot, was remembered generation after generation. Meanwhile, other information was quickly forgotten. That wasn’t to say the information was bad or good. You could have something bad that spread quickly and was endlessly repeated, but in general, it wasn’t the most spreadable information, but the most pervasive that survived generation after generation. These packets of memories were given the name memes, and this theory was the source of that name.

In this world of lore and dungeons, I had come to understand lore as essentially a type of meme, one that was more literal than what we understood from my old world. Your soul was the lore of your life, and as you acted out your story, it grew attracted to certain bits of information. If you were an author, these books might be considered reference material. They were distilled lore, chronicling skills and abilities refined by thousands if not millions of users.

Some people completed that lore, absorbing it until it was indistinguishable from their own story, and adding their twists and turns on it. Others never finished the lore in their lifetime. I believed this to be the essence of jobs. The thing that made me special, other than my experience boosters and advanced learning, was the ability for me to connect with so many jobs, so many reference materials, which I could use to enrich my lore and the lore of my slaves.

Yet, when it came right down to it, I had absorbed a lot of lore, and none of it was me. My story was so short and uninteresting, and it was the lore that made me who I am. It was like being skilled at everything, but master of nothing. If I was to describe myself in a few words, I wouldn’t be able to. Was I a White Mage? I certainly started with that job, but I also fought and did damage. True Dungeon Diver was my highest level, but I was also a Dungeon Master and a Dungeon Builder. I created unfinished lore as often as I conquered it.

I wasn’t someone so full of myself to declare I was a hero, despite having two hero-related jobs. Was I a Master Swordsman? I was just as good with magic as I was with swords, so a Magic Swordsman? My levels were still rather low, and I never built a solid foundation. I could fight pretty well, but an experienced swordsman, one who had trained from the ground up, would defeat me every time. I was a little bit of everything, and at the end that made me nothing.

In that respect, someone like Sapphire who was far more selective in her jobs truly could manage something great. I had high hopes for her. She had come a long way by the time we reached where I believed the boss was being held up.

{Name: Sapphire

Class: Smith

Job: Magic Blacksmith (LVL 35), Blacksmith (LVL 70)

Rank: Slave

Unlocked Jobs: Commoner (LVL 22), Basic Magician (LVL 28), Weapon Smith (LVL 20), Armor Smith (LVL 15)

Race: Deep Dwarf}

I didn’t have an opportunity to check Gabbro’s status, but we might have an honest chance against him yet.

Chapter 1393

“Aiiiii!”

“This guy is fast!” Sapphire cried.

“Isn’t that because you’re not looking at him?”

“Ahhh! Stay away!” Terra created walls keeping him away from her. “Nooo! He got them again. Pervert!”

I studied the boss monster, feeling incredibly complicated. He was fast and very difficult to handle, but that was a different problem entirely. His identification was merely an Apeman. He had a hairy body with two arms and two legs and no tail. His face was that of a monkey. He could jump around and swing from the vines hanging over the top of the boss room, and also come down for a strike. His strikes were swift and brutal, and he already fled by the time you could react.

From the moment we had opened up his door and entered his lair, he had been toying with us. I’d like to say there was a warning that the boss of this area was an apeman, but the enemies we had been leveling up against before this point had mostly been snakes, bats, and carnivorous plants. The Apeman seemed to be the first mammal I had encountered that was considered living.

If his speed and ingenuity were the problem, that would be one thing. The real problem was that other than being extremely hair and having a monkey face, his body was very human. That was to say that he was naked, and he had his thing hanging out. Whenever he jumped up, it would swing around. It wasn’t big or anything, but it was enough of a distraction that the girls couldn’t mount a defense against him.

In the heat of the moment, maybe they would have been able to ignore the thing, but when he got onto one of his fines, he would touch it, making sure to show it to the girls. With a perverted monkey grin, he would stand over us touching it, and when the girls looked away in embarrassment, he would make his move. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was ultimately how he attacked the girls.

Terra looked at me tearfully. “He got my panties again!”

Looking up at the Apeman, he made that same perverted grin, but this time he lifted a small pair of pink panties. I had naturally bought a lot of girl’s clothing on my last trip to Earth and had many spare changes with me in my soul world, so those were fine panties I had specifically given to Terra since our escape from Twilight. They were now being sniffed by a drooling monkey man.

“He also took my bra!” Sapphire added.

“Y-yeah! I also wore a bra!” Terra shouted awkwardly.

We both glanced at Terra, whose face went red, and then up at the Apeman on the ceiling, who gave a confused shrug, and then put then strapped Sapphire’s bra onto his chest while rubbing Terra’s panties against his face.

“This guy must be a level 100 Pervert!” Sapphire huffed.

Was it a problem I felt a little jealous I was only a level 32 Pervert? No, wait! That was the answer. I needed to tame this monkey, but right now he was completely mocking me. For a monster that valued strength, you needed to use strength to tame them, but I learned from the former Sapphire, that monsters could be tamed by appealing to other parts of them, such as when I bribed her with candy. In this case, I’d have to take drastic measures.

“Master?” Terra asked.

“Bear with me…” I declared, putting my game face on. “I’m going to need to fight fire with fire.”

I equipped Pervert.