Ah yes, breakfast

You do feel a bit hungry, so you eat the rest of your black- and honeyberries on the way up the mountain. Yes, up the mountain, today you go up instead of down, as you're more likely to find the necessary ressources there instead of in the woods.

As you make your way up the mountain you take care not to go too far, there are many dangerous npcs here, like harpies, griffins and even a few giants. But the most thought you have to give to the kobolds living on the mountains, they are genarally not too badly levelled (around level ten), are quite numerous and adapt with fire magic, but the perhaps greatest threat lies in the fact that they are not simply dumb beasts, they might not be the smartest fellas, but they are absolutely capable of thinking for themselves.

But luck is with you and you run into no troubles, thanks to that, your travel is short and you soon reach a small plateau with multiple boulders. From past lives you know that these boulders are not ordinary ones but in fact ressource nodes, most ressources have to be harvested through such a node. You step to the first boulder and, after one more look around, begin hammering yet again,

Remaining harvests: 5/5 (???/???/???/???)
Harvesting: Non-applicable skill, -80%. No Tools, -50%. Total build speed: 2%

The speed could be far better but it looks like you don't really have much of a choice, you have no idea how to get a corresponding skill and crafting a hammer would definitely need wood, or would it? What if you just take a stone and use that as a tool, it wouldn't be as good as a hammer, but better than nothing. Motivated by that thought you tap away faster to get the stone necessary for your idea. With the amount of taps needed it takes you a good minute to finish, but eventually you finally read

Remaining harvests: 4/5 (stone/???/???/???)
Harvesting: Non-applicable skill, -80%. No Tools, -50%. Total build speed: 2%
Harvested: 3 stone

Relieved you open your inventory to take one of the stones but don't find any, it looks like harvested ressources are directly added to your stockpile. Slowly you open the building menu, hoping to access your stockpile from there, and indeed, it works, you might get a bright red warning at the menus top that you can't build outside your dungeon, but you can access the stockpile and transfer a stone back to your inventory. Now that you finally have the stone with you, you take it out and give an experimental tap on the boulder

Remaining harvests: 4/5 (stone/???/???/???)
Harvesting: Non-applicable skill, -80%. bare stone-tool, -25%. Total build speed: 4%

,well that's twice as fast, let's do this! You spend the next maybe two hours completely emptying out any boulder on the plateau, after each harvest pausing to listen for any unwelcome sounds and catch your breath. Just as you finally reach the very last harvesting charge of the last boulder you pick something up during your your small pause. You carefully survey your surroundings and soon find the source of the sound, a blue clay. Clays are small humanoid figures made from hardened clay, hence their name, they normally have legs without discernible feet, hands with five fingers, a simple belt, some kind of chestplate and a slightly decorated helmet, all that in a brownish/greyish colour accompanied by a yellow plate in place of a face, the most easily visble difference between the different kinds are the colour of the tunic-like "cloth" (it's also made from clay) that keeps the rest of their body out of sight, and the weapon that is specific for each colour. As this one is a blue clay it's tunic is blue (how surprising) and it carries a sword with one serrated and one straight side. Clays are normally not exactly peaceful, but this one should be manageable, it's alone and only level three. You pull your sword from the belt, readying yourself for defense, almost like it waited for exactly that, the clay sprints forward, the malicously sharp tip of its sword pointed right at your gut. You manage to sidestep and evade the attack, granting you an excellent angle to see the sword sawing back and forth where you just stood, that would have hurt. The clay launches it's second attack, swinging the sword in an upwards arc towards you, the straight side ahead, this time you meet the blade with your own, stopping it in the air and making the clay tremble from the collisions ****. Before your adversary can react your left foot kicks him in the torso, taking away his balance and making him fall. Now it's his turn to endure an attack as you swing your sword down on the small earthen body beneath you, CLANG! the clay managed to block your swing by holding his sword horizontaly in front of himself. You take two steps back, allowing your opponent to get back on his feet, almost at least. As the clay is still trying to stand up you rush back forward, using your sword not to attack but to keep away the enemies sword away as you deliver another beautiful kick to the clay, this one even with a little wind-up. The clay flies back a few meters, it manages to land on its non-existent feet however. Man of flesh and man of clay eye each other, one unhurt, they other at maybe at two fifths of life (blue clays aren't known for the their toughness), both run at each other and exchange a few blows, but the duel doesn't take long. The clay was a better sword-fighter than you, but that doesn't matter when you not only have the level-advantage but also that of size, and of course being still unhurt, in the end you won while having received only a single punch by a small hand of clay to your leg. Sadly the clay offers literally no loot. After spending a few minutes listening and looking for more enemies you direct your attention to the boulder again, bringing it to read a nice message,

Node Depleted: 7:59:59
Remaining harvests: 0/5 (stone/crude iron/coal/gemstone)
Harvesting: Non-applicable skill, -80%. bare stone-tool, -25%. Total build speed: 4%
Harvested: 3 stone, 1 coal

And now that it is about noon, you go on the way back to your dungeon, you dont believe you have enough stone yet, but it should allow to make some nice progress, you'll just exclude the upper floor for now, the crude iron part however should be met now, which means you just have to take care of wood as well. But before you go to the forest for that, you want to check in on the elemental and the dungeon itself.