Skills, though omnipresent, still seemed full of mystery to Lin Jun.
Take this [Nightmare Incarnation], for example.
When that half-vampire used it, it was clearly a transformation skill, but after installing it on a puffshroom, it became a fixed form instead.
However, the half-vampire obviously utilized its own blood power when transforming. Lin Jun could only speculate that since the puffshroom lacked blood power, this skill only retained partial effectiveness.
He'd encountered skills that mutated due to different inherent traits before—the most typical being [Assimilative Absorption], which changed from absorbing flesh and blood to absorbing mycelium.
This should count as some kind of adaptive mechanism.
Then, regarding flight, Lin Jun conducted some additional experiments.
Two identical puffshrooms with bat wings stood together.
Though they looked no different on the surface, checking their status panels revealed that one possessed the skill [Nightmare Incarnation LV1], while the other was a blank puffshroom.
The blank puffshroom was something Lin Jun had painstakingly molded over half a day, creating an exact replica of the bat puffshroom.
He had no ulterior motive—he just wanted to see if it could fly without relying on skills.
Lin Jun first controlled the skilled puffshroom to fly a circle, then, riding on that feeling, attempted to control the blank puffshroom.
After several failed attempts, he actually managed to get it airborne!
But he could clearly feel it was much more laborious—each wingbeat required considerably more effort, as if lacking some kind of assistance.
Moreover, if Lin Jun didn't actively control it, the blank puffshroom simply couldn't take flight no matter what.
Puffshrooms had low intelligence and acted mostly on instinct. Being unable to fly meant they lacked the flying instinct.
From this perspective, skills could endow puffshrooms with this flying instinct—similar to how possessing the [Precision] skill made it easier to hit targets.
With this understanding, he could probably create some non-skill-dependent tricks for his own amusement, but for large-scale deployment among the puffshrooms, skill support remained indispensable.
Of course, these theoretical applications were limited to relatively simple domains. Trying to create something like a mushroom cannon without skills would be pure nonsense.
After completing these small tests, Lin Jun checked the construction progress of the trap room—it was nearly finished.
The so-called trap room was the loving little nest Lin Jun had specially crafted for the Yellow Book.
Previously, Lin Jun's plan to excavate an underground city had failed when he encountered the transparent wall. This time, he decided to make use of that transparent wall instead.
Since the transparent wall was immune to collapse and couldn't be blown up no matter how hard one tried, he might as well use it as a trap room.
Now a small construction crew of puffshrooms was making final adjustments in that transparent wall area.
The originally cramped space had been expanded into a complete basement structure. The arched walls, where mycelium and rock perfectly fused, were embedded with luminescent spores that bathed the entire space in a pale cyan glow.
The basement had eight pillars.
The transparent wall serving as the ceiling didn't actually need pillar support—these pillars were naturally camouflage. They were actually composed of self-destructing puffshrooms covered with stone shells, with four self-destructing puffshrooms in each pillar to ensure sufficient destructive power.
At the very back, on an altar-like stone pedestal, the Yellow Book rested peacefully, looking exactly like a reward item after defeating a boss.
The stone pedestal was naturally also made of self-destructing puffshrooms—cheap and effective after all...
The Yellow Book probably had no objections to its new home.
Of course, he couldn't rely solely on self-destructing puffshrooms. Lin Jun had also stationed several newly created elite puffshrooms as guards.
Compared to ordinary puffshrooms, elite puffshrooms differed mainly in attributes beyond having additional skills.
For example, melee-type elite puffshrooms had their Strength, Agility, and Constitution attributes raised to 40 by Lin Jun.
Ranged types had Intelligence and Agility at 40, with Constitution pulled up to 30—that was sufficient.
Three or four elite puffshrooms in the trap room would be enough.
When the time came, the entrance outside would be sealed with a layer of stone, turning the entire trap room into a hidden space.
Adventurers mixing around in these caverns wouldn't be too high-level. Even if they stumbled into the trap room by accident, they'd be driven back by the guard puffshrooms.
If demons came knocking and the elite puffshrooms couldn't handle them, he'd have the self-destructing puffshrooms blow everything to smithereens.
Even if that didn't kill them, the time it took to retreat would be enough for Lin Jun to mobilize puffshrooms to block the entrance outside the cavern.
The reason for going through all this trouble to relocate the Yellow Book there was mainly because keeping it in the mushroom forest meant demons would come causing trouble every few days, and it wouldn't be good if they eventually destroyed the mushroom forest that served as the staff rest area.
Lin Jun's trap house plan and elite puffshroom plan were both progressing smoothly. However, the plan to spread mycelium mats from the sixth-floor ravine directly to the deep zone wasn't going as smoothly.
The ravine's rock walls were extremely hard. The mycelium couldn't extract any nutrients other than magic power from these walls, so extending downward required the connected mycelium mats above to transport nutrients to sustain them.
This problem wasn't unique to the ravine walls—even on the fifth and sixth floors' rock walls, the mycelium mats couldn't absorb basic nutrients.
It was just that they weren't far from the surface and ceiling, so transporting some nutrients over wasn't a big problem.
But here in the ravine, the wall length was simply too long.
The distance over which mycelium mats could transport nutrients was also limited.
Without proper conditions, Lin Jun had to create them himself.
First, he molded some hollow tubes made of mycelium, using these tubes to pour soil down and spread it on relatively flat areas of the rock walls, forming supply points one after another.
Using the nutrients in the soil, the mycelium could extend a bit further, then use tubes to spread to the next platform. Extending node by node like this, they managed to successfully spread downward.
For this purpose, the sixth-floor ravine maintained a permanent crew of soil-digging and transport puffshrooms, plus three treants responsible for pathfinding assistance.
During this mycelium mat extension process, Lin Jun discovered a problem.
This ravine... didn't seem to connect with floors seven, eight, nine, and ten?
At least Lin Jun's mycelium mats hadn't found any entrance leading to other floors.
Could it be that the other floors happened to be separated by stone walls?
This question would have to wait until he conquered the seventh floor to investigate further.
The mycelium's spread stopped after finally entering the deep zone.
It wasn't that Lin Jun didn't want to continue extending—he'd encountered familiar figures once again.
[Race: Thousand-Pivot Mayfly]
[Level: 22]
[Race: Thousand-Pivot Mayfly]
[Level: 31]
...
In an area crisscrossed by countless thick white threads, large numbers of Thousand-Pivot Mayflies lived.
Unlike the level 62 big monster they'd encountered when the puffshroom fell down that time, the highest level visible in this vicinity was only around 40, but there were quite a lot of them.
And they had extremely strong territorial awareness.
When the extending mycelium approached their thick threads, they would come over to scrape the mycelium off, or directly spit out acidic fluid to corrode away large chunks.
Simply put, it seemed impossible to go further down without eliminating them?
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