The two glass beads were handed over to Little Black's delighted little hands.
Little Black clutched them and scampered back to the mushroom house in a flash.
After sweeping the glass shards aside with her tail, Little Black gathered all the glass beads beneath herself and began counting them one by one.
Then Lin Jun watched as she counted... counted a few, then returned to the first bead to start over again...
Perhaps he should spare some time to teach her how to count properly?
That would probably be quite difficult to accomplish.
Little Black was rather resistant to any learning activities that required mental effort.
Just thinking about how to teach her already gave Lin Jun a headache.
As for hiring a "mathematics tutor" for her?
One could only say that such a profession would be far too dangerous—it would be hard to find anyone capable of long-term employment in that position...
After creating a new folder for Little Black's education plan and setting it aside, Lin Jun now had to test the new puffshroom variants first, otherwise he wouldn't be able to advance through the sixth floor.
Upon the mycelial carpet of the mushroom forest, two experimental puffshrooms of different forms writhed and detached themselves.
One had eight special tentacles on its body, while the other's surface continuously secreted mucus.
Let's start with the sucker variant.
The sucker puffshroom quickly received its orders and ran to the rock wall, expanding the ends of its tentacles into bowl-shaped suction cups that went *plap plap* as they adhered to the stone wall.
At first, things went quite well—the suction cups had enough strength to support the puffshroom climbing upward without any pressure.
However, problems soon arose. When it moved continuously, several of the fungal tentacles somehow became tangled together.
The puffshroom tried to separate its tentacles, but the knots only grew larger and larger, until finally it became a complete ball hanging on the rock wall. When the remaining two suction cups could no longer support it, it fell down and splattered into a puddle.
Lin Jun didn't experience much emotional fluctuation over this—experimental subjects having problems was perfectly normal.
This one's issue still stemmed from the puffshroom's intelligence. Eight fungal tentacles were too many; it couldn't coordinate them all. The suction cups' adhesive force was greater than he had anticipated, so the number of tentacles could be reduced.
Soon, a second puffshroom was born under the catalysis of magical power, this time with the number of tentacles reduced to six.
Although this puffshroom still needed to occasionally pause and untangle its tentacles while moving, at least it didn't encounter the knotting problem.
But when it clung to the rock wall and fired its mushroom cannon at the designated target, the recoil directly flipped its entire body upside down.
Lin Jun watched the puffshroom swaying in mid-air and noticed that its mushroom cannon shot had missed the target, instead hitting the mycelial carpet more than ten meters away.
With fewer fungal tentacles, it couldn't maintain stability...
Lin Jun decisively had this failed specimen drop down voluntarily, returning to the mushroom garden's cycle.
Plan one abandoned—next was the mucus puffshroom.
The puffshroom covered in green slime successfully climbed the rock wall, but encountered a small problem when firing.
The cannon muzzle couldn't be raised high enough.
The puffshroom needed most of its body pressed against the rock wall to maintain sufficient adhesive force, so the mushroom cannon could only be tilted up slightly.
There wasn't enough elevation angle to hit the originally designated target...
After trying a random shot, the adhesive force that had been a concern actually wasn't much of a problem.
It felt usable, but the flaws were also very real. Moreover, continuously secreting mucus for climbing had unexpectedly high magical power consumption.
As expected, in the end it still came down to setting up fixed artillery positions on the walls...
No sooner said than done.
On the mycelial carpet of the sixth floor near the outermost layer, every forty meters, a puffshroom began to gestate.
The first batch of puffshrooms was quickly produced under Lin Jun's lavish expenditure of magical power.
These puffshrooms were slightly different from ordinary puffshrooms—they were very round.
After being produced, they began devouring the rocks beneath them on the spot, then covering their body surfaces with the stone.
This process lasted approximately two days.
Two days later, round stone artillery platforms had taken preliminary shape.
Learning from the experience of the mucus puffshroom's shooting angle limitation problems, the round stone surfaces had appropriately sized circular holes that allowed the mushroom cannons to extend out for attacks, while not being so large that the round puffshrooms inside would fall out.
The appearance of these fixed artillery platforms immediately helped Lin Jun eliminate all the constantly emerging slimes that had been harassing from afar, allowing the mycelial carpet to continue spreading outward. After extending another hundred-plus meters beyond effective firing range...
Thus, a new round of gestation began.
All told, it took about 2.5 days to advance 130 meters. As for covering the entire sixth floor, well, one could only say the future looked promising.
Puffshroom generation could be forcibly accelerated with magical power, but the [Rock Devouring] transformation into stone artillery platforms couldn't be sped up.
The progress was touching, but without other better options, this was all they could use for now. At least they were making progress.
Honestly, fighting up to this point gave Lin Jun the feeling that there were just too many slimes!
And they kept coming endlessly.
It wasn't as if he hadn't fought slimes on other floors before. Usually the first few days of battle were relatively intense.
After both sides ground each other down for several days, the slimes' reinforcement rate couldn't keep up with the puffshrooms' reinforcement speed, so they would naturally be gradually suppressed.
According to Lin Jun's initial expectations, the sixth floor should have been the same way.
But now, after so many days, not only had the number of slimes not decreased, they actually showed a trend of continuously increasing.
No matter how he thought about it, something wasn't right.
If there had originally been this many slimes, then this floor shouldn't have been a botanical garden, but rather a slime paradise.
Given the current situation, Lin Jun could only speculate that somewhere there was a large stockpile of slimes that were now being released wave after wave.
Alternatively, there was some entity capable of rapidly producing slimes that, upon noticing his arrival, had taken corresponding action to prevent him from occupying the sixth floor.
There was one final possibility.
That Lin Jun's continuous encroachment on the dungeon's territory had activated some kind of emergency response in the dungeon, which was now automatically devising countermeasures to obstruct him.
This possibility was the smallest. Lin Jun had witnessed the dungeon's emergency mechanisms before—that ancient dragon scale struck down by arc lightning was still gathering dust in Lin Jun's little treasury.
Compared to that, generating a bunch of slimes seemed far too weak, too weak to be the dungeon's own methods.
But if!
If!
This really was the dungeon's method, then Lin Jun would have to consider whether he should continue developing toward the lower floors.
After all, what if the dungeon's self-defense mechanism was progressive?
Right now it was just producing some slimes to slow down progress and annoy him, but later when he posed a greater threat, what if it hit him with a few lightning strikes too?
If the dungeon really wanted to deal with him, Lin Jun didn't think it would be unable to find his main body.
When that ancient dragon-killing lightning struck his fragile main body, a fragrant and tender, crispy-outside-soft-inside roasted poisonous mushroom would be cooked up in the underground swamp.
If it was truly confirmed to be a dungeon mechanism, Lin Jun would have no choice but to turn toward full development on the surface.
On the surface side, although the fungal threads had now grown to the great gate and begun tentatively spreading outward, they still maintained a slow and restrained pace.
On one hand, he wanted to take it slowly and test the degree of human attention to this development. On the other hand, Lin Jun's development focus was currently still placed on going downward.
Although the surface allowed for photosynthesis, compared to the dungeon, the magical power concentration was relatively thin, and the number of magical creatures was much fewer as well.
In any case, the cause of the sixth floor's slime explosion definitely needed to be clarified. Without clarification, Lin Jun couldn't develop with peace of mind.
And naturally, this war occurring on the rock walls couldn't be hidden from human adventurers—nor had Lin Jun planned to conceal it.
In recent days, the tavern was full of discussions about the news brought back by adventurers who had passed through the sixth floor regarding the great war between puffshrooms and slimes.
From the magical tide until now, everyone had realized that mushrooms and puffshrooms had become a pivotal presence within the dungeon.
On a small scale, after mushrooms spread to a floor, they would consume all the glowgrass and replace it with luminescent fungi, reducing lighting capability by two levels, making long-lasting illumination tools or magic essential equipment.
On a large scale, if the puffshrooms conducted another extermination campaign like their occupation of the fifth floor, then played mutual protection games on the sixth floor, the adventurers' sources of income would be reduced by yet another portion.
The current situation could be described as every move of the puffshrooms tugging at the adventurers' heartstrings.
Even Norris, a bronze-rank adventurer who made his living purely through mining, was no exception.
However, what he hoped for was that the puffshrooms could completely clear the sixth floor...
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