Chapter 980 (1/2)

Only a week later, Randidly had a new headache to deal with: the mollusks that had taken up residence in his cold bathing area were on strike.

It wasn’t enough that they swiftly developed enough intelligence upon exposure to Randidly’s Aether that he didn’t really have the heart to try and eat them. So he had expanded the cold pool to give them more space and just watched with mild curiosity as they brought increasing numbers of shells from god knows where to make a crude village. And besides, Randidly hadn’t really been very appetized by the thought of eating snails anyway; it wasn’t a big loss to let them do whatever they wanted.

But now they had created small signs with driftwood and were demanding… something. Although they possessed intelligence and the System would translate their whistling speech, the strange trails of ooze on their signs weren’t enough for Randidly to intuit what they wanted. But they had begun sending their old and weak to die in Randidly’s hot tub. Which they very well knew Randidly did not like.

Nothing was more obnoxious than sitting down for a soak in a hot tub after a long day of training and realizing that it smelled like old, dead snail. Randidly immediately wanted to clear the rest out so it was no longer a problem.

Randidly thought through the ethics of eliminating the tribe of mollusks quite seriously. They had grown from Level 6 to Level 15, and there were now about a hundred in his expended cold water pool, but it would have been simple to just shove them back into the underground river.

But Randidly was in this Dungeon to train. This might be weird but… this could be considered a test run for his leadership abilities. If he wanted to lead Erickson Steel, he would hopefully have enough charisma to handle some snails.

After chuckling dryly at how strange his life had become, Randidly dunked his head underneath the water of the mollusk’s pool in order to hear their language.

Immediately, he was inundated with their high pitched voices.

“Let us sleep!”

“More shells!”

“Oozeless one will listen!”

“Kamiumi!”

Very soon, they noticed Randidly, and one rather large mollusk with several long tentacles drifted up from the shell village to speak with Randidly. “Great Oozeless One! We demand that you cease with your rumbling punishment! The eggs of our young are too weak to withstand your the great sea thunder!”

Randidly frowned. This was a profoundly strange experience. But at least they articulated a concern that Randidly could actually do something about. “How long do you need for your young to… grow strong enough?”

For several seconds, the leader mollusk was silent. Then it said. “Three full cycles!”

Randidly pressed his eyes closed. Perhaps he should have expected something like this to crop up. “How long… is a cycle?”

This seemed to throw the mollusk. “Well… a cycle is how long it takes for the rumbling to start, then stop, then start again. Obviously, a cycle is a cycle!”

...which means about a day. Randidly translated inwardly. I guess it makes sense, they only developed enough intelligence to understand concepts like time after they came here and by then, I had already started using Infinite Fingers of Yggdrasil to forge… But it’s actually good timing. I’m basically out of ore to forge anyway…

“It will be done,” Randidly said majestically. Then he thought of something a produced an item from his interspatial ring. It was one of the interspatial watches produced in Zone 1 and possessed the added bonus of being waterproof. After dropping it into the pool, Randidly explained the basics of how to tell time to the mollusks.

Immediately curious, dozens of small mollusks began swarming the object Randidly had added to their shell village with obvious interest. Relieved, Randidly pulled his head out of the water and pushed back his dripping hair. He scratched his beard.

Maybe I should take some time to shave-

But a mental probe from his Riders pulled Randidly’s attention away. Randidly’s shook his head and threw water across the surrounding stone ground and then softly padded toward the entrance to his base. Why do I have a bad feeling about this?

After slapping his cheeks to restore his spirits, Randidly walked up to meet the Riders outside of his dome.

Because Randidly had a weird, nagging intuition that if he created more Riders a third faction would form, he had kept their number at thirty-two. The two groups of sixteen faced off against each other right in front of Randidly’s mound, derision and pride radiating off of both of them. Beside the two groups were two large corpses of monsters.

Level 70 monsters.

Randidly twisted his mouth. They are hunting Level 70 monsters now…? And also… why are these monsters so weird…?

The medieval castle crew had brought him a large wolf with crimson fur. But strangely, three miniature wings were growing from the wolf’s back. Meanwhile, the silk canopy trope had brought Randidly an emerald eagle that had six tentacles growing out of its chest. Although there had always been strange monsters in Dungeon, these seemed a bit…