Hour 44: The Sunken City

I'd previously cleared the outer ruins of bandits in a bitter fight, so we enter the ruins without trouble. We quickly spy the Black Book, but it's restricted by Dwemer mechanical artifice and Neloth informs me that we need to collect several power cubes to restore power to 4 boilers so we can drain some of the flooded chambers and restore power to the room where the Book is, or something. To be honest, I can't really hear him and am not listening. Get the cubes, he says, so off I leapt.

I probably should have listened, because I don't really know where I'm going or why. In addition, because I have the 'Big Jump 5x' mod, I'm able to simply circumvent some of what I presume are supposed to be puzzles, by simply jumping up to ledges instead of working out how to activate bridges, etc.

The end result is that I get a bit ahead of myself and have to backtrack several times, getting lost and confused in the process. There are a couple of intimidating Centurions to fight along the way, but Neloth makes short work of them. Eventually, through sheer bloody-minded trial and error, I collect the required cubes and we're able to unlock the Book, but due to my scatterbrained approach the whole things takes about an hour.

The book is freed and Neloth bids me read the unholy text within.

One other thing of note is that during this dungeon I decided to make my Conjuration skill Legendary. I'm constantly summoning and since the skill hit level 100 I've noticed a marked slowdown in my overall leveling up. Resetting it to 15 will allow me to start leveling that skill up again which will help with increasing my level. However, it does mean drastically cutting down on my overall number of summons, until I've got it high enough to re-buy some of the Perks. Currently, my army has been reduced from 10 to a measly 2. Neloth is quite powerful and has been able to do a lot of the heavy lifting in this dungeon, but I hope I'm able to get it back to at least 3 or 4 summons by the time I face Miraak, otherwise I could be in trouble...