“Mistress! Here, it’s the finest cut of the hard-shelled lizard from yesterday.”
“Mistress, I tried concentrating the mutant’s blood essence. It’s not very tasty, but this contains the most power so far.”
“Please try this! Not much power, but very tasty.”
Plates and dishes are shoved in her face. Dancing through the bustling kitchen, she reaches a stone table and sits down, deftly carrying the plates she is handed. She immediately begins eating, smiling and thanking the dwarves around her, commenting and complementing where praise is due.
The qi in the air is rising, but the power levels are still nanoscopic when compared to the levels she had access to inside Tree. Tess has a single desire at the moment, and that is to grow stronger. The scarce trickle of information coming from the central crystal hanging above the village informed her that only foundation realm students can purchase general information about the other students. Teleportation services are also blocked until she breaches into the next realm. And Tess is still kind of angry at herself for thinking like this, but she misses Ket. Just cultivation by breathing in the qi around her has had extremely limited effect. She would need years before she would have gathered the minimum amount of energy to attempt taking the first step on her path. The non-standard way she is cultivating at the moment isn’t helping her either.
Tess is loathed to admit it, but she is following in Bord’s footsteps. She is eating her way to power, consuming large amounts of qi-enriched meat each day. The forges in the town are working overtime, producing new metal hunting weapons, implements, and traps in order to keep her sated. Tess has seen Teach’s way of doing things – an uncontrolled chaos purely driven by incentives – and she firmly decided that it wasn’t her thing. Instead, she had had a friendly chat with the dwarves in charge. Somehow, they had been extremely amicable and willing to listen to any suggestion she had.
Tess is also sure that the fact that she had been covered in blood while she was casually consuming the flesh of an enforcer mutant had a lot to do with the sudden obedience she inspired in the aged and bearded leaders. Tess had been friendly as she informed the entire village of what was happening. She had offered them her protection, promising to take care of the beasts too powerful for the town’s inhabitants. All she had wanted in return was food – this was her heartcore talking – and progress.
“Thish ish nishe,” Tess mumbles through greasy lips. She licks her fingers clean one by one, nodding at the beaming cook who prepared the succulent meat dish. She takes a sip of the near black concoction another villager put in front of her. Her face twists into a grimace before she takes another sip. “This one is gross, but the qi is pretty good. Maybe add some sugar.”
The man she addresses nods a single time before returning back to his stove. Tess then looks over the large table of steaming food, smiles at the expectant faces of the sweaty dwarven, and slips all the dishes into her ring. “Thanks, bye now!”
“Yes! My dish was chosen! The legs have uplifted me from the munda-”
“She took all of our dishes, you dunce.”
“She drank mine, even though it didn’t taste very good, because I can help her grow in power, so all the universe can observe the glory that is those two majestic limb-”
Tess runs away faster, feeling immensely uncomfortable as she hears the cooks begin to bicker. “Teach, I will fucking kill you, you son of a mutant.”
Just when she was starting to explore her own path, when she was beginning to see the way that she should advance, she was dumped here. Instead of an environment where she could fully experiment with the glimpses of contrast she had seen so far, she was abandoned in this monument to monotony. All the small people – Tess had started calling them dwarves – look the same. All the men wear beards. All the women wear the same rough spun, simple dresses. All the buildings in the town are hewn from stone. All the tools, items, pots, and pans are made from the same black metal. All the men are miners and smiths, and all the women tend to farms or gather plants outside.
“Mayor, if you call me legs, I will beat you,” Tess says the moment she appears in the most central building of the village.
The official leader of the village, a rather wrinkled dwarf, looks up from his desk at the sudden intrusion. He smiles widely, genuine laugh lines appearing on his entire face, as he shows a mouth filled with missing teeth. “As you wish, Mistress.”
Tess’ hand twitches. She barely stops herself from flinging a qi-formed dagger at the old geezer. The way he pronounced ‘Mistress’ was filled with enough meaning to fill a small book. “Stop that. Any news?”
“No. Moving to that fern still takes a million of these points you keep talking about. The option-”
“It’s not a fern. It’s Tree.”
Ignoring her interruption like it’s smoke, the old man continues. “-to bring a mount or pet has gotten a large discount, though. It’s currently the highest priority message we have gotten so far.”
“A mount? How much?” Tess’ tired eyes regain a bit of their fire.
“A thousand of these points.”
“Done. Get that stupid feathered cat in here now! Teach, I haven’t properly slept for a week! Every time I manage to close my eyes, some new horrible mutant has eaten a piece of your guts, and I need to go kill it, nearly losing my own life in the process.” Her rant grows more and more heated as she remembers all that has happened over the past ten days.
“Teach, you better be getting stronger too, because I will murder the shit out of you when I manage to get back to Tr-” She’s screaming at the floating crystal in a blind rage, veins popping up on her forehead, when she is interrupted by a yowling cat in her face. The dark-feathered beast had been sleeping peacefully inside Tree when it was suddenly deposited on top of its owner. It leaps away from Tess before her dagger can find purchase.
Cat, girl, and old dwarf all look at each other for a few moments. The old man clears his throat. “So this is you-”
“ALARM, ALARM!” Loud bells ring through the village as the scouts sound the alarm. “FOUR LEGS AND WINGS, ALARM!”
Tess drags a hand across her dark-rimmed eyes. She’s nearly resigned herself to having to fight another of the freaks when she spots her mount. A manic smile on her face, she appears next to the weary beast instantaneously, grabbing it by the scruff of its neck. “I nearly forgot! You want to get stronger, no? Getting dragged around is no fun, right? So listen here, my feathered friend. I need some time to rest. You are limited to my power level, so the fact that I recultivated must not have been fun, right?”
The old dwarf watches on in a mix of confusion and fascination, seeing the girl and beast converse through whispered threats and anxious head nods or shakes respectively.
“Now I want to beat the shit out of Teach, and I’m pretty sure I’ve found my path, so it’s a straight shot to the foundation realm for me. This means for you too! But first, before we both can leisurely enjoy being free of earthly bonds and responsibilities and involuntary teleports, we need to grow stronger. You are limited by me, so it’s in your best interest to help me. And I need to sleep and eat.” Here Tess starts walking to the large door. She waves at the stocky guards standing next to the room’s entrance, who hurriedly follow her orders and start pulling the heavy door open.
“So we can help each other here. I will become stronger, and you will facilitate that. Kill all the strong beasts around and bring their bodies to the kitchens. And off you go!” And Tess hurls the half tonne animal through the opened doors, waving happily at it as the cat soars through the enormous opening, into the coming horde of mutants. Her mount has such a wronged look on its face, everyone except Tess herself feels immensely sorry for the beast.
“I’m going to sleep,” says Tess while dusting off her hands. “Cover the crystal. It’s been an hour.” She waves towards the old dwarf and disappears in a black flash.
The old man stands there for a long while, pondering and questioning
when the world has become such a weird place. Shaking himself from his musings, he turns to the crystal hanging in the air next to him. Below the crystal is a circular opening, allowing the large group of citizens below a direct line of sight to the slowly spinning rock. The old man slides the metal slab across the floor, hiding the crystal from below by covering the hole.
For some reason, access to an information construct does weird things to his villagers. He had seen it during the initial rampage that mistress Tess had gone on. While one half of the village had seen her blood-covered form return from the battlefield, casually snacking on a mutant strong enough to kill his entire village a hundred times over, the other half had been entranced. They had started looking at the suddenly-materializing gem hovering in the cave above all the buildings and hadn’t stopped looking until someone broke their line of sight with the shining gem.
They had all stumbled around in a daze for a bit before starting to rant about something they had learned, somehow. So a new building had been built, one designed to accommodate ‘gem learning,’ as it is known. Once every hour, he or another official on duty covered the gem, allowing the people below to process what they had learned. A new batch of people will enter before the gem is uncovered again.
A clear mind and a desire to not learn anything specific – harder than it seems at first – is needed to perform this task. Demanding the gem only to provide news, and not any of its myriad of immensely fascinating sources of information is near impossible for the younger generations, but the mayor himself managed quite easily. He had lost himself once in the gem’s web of data, and only once. Metal is all, after all, and being the most proficient and gifted smith for years has left him with all there is to know about metal, heat, the hammer, and the forge.
There is no way to precisely measure temperature in the village, so the complex charts of quenching and tempering data are useless. The ideal steel composition made from a carbon and iron mixture is something every novice blacksmith learns, theoretical drivel. The only information new to the old man was the existence of other metals. The lack of means to refine them through complex processes means these discoveries are equally useless to the old man.
Sighing at how much the world changes yet stays the same, the most proficient smith on the entire planet, halfway into the eon old Dao of the forge turns back to his small smithy. The only thing that has changed for him is that forging has become a tiny bit easier. “Using qi to clear away scale is a mighty innovation indeed,” he thinks while picking up his hammer. He doesn’t even notice as the qi swirls around his hammer with every strike.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Supposition 1
Re-Haan is in a pickle. She’s tied up, her arms and legs bound to cold corners of a stone slab she’s quite unable to break, and access to her cultivation is blocked. Her thoughts are about to slip back in time as she wonders how things had turned out this way, but the rustling of brush nearby is enough to snap her wandering mind back to the present. A rhythmic crunching of branches and trees has her training her eyes at the shaking undergrowth. A cloud of leaves comes down in a green rain as the ground shakes, and one of the bloody things has the nerve to land right on her nose.
Twitching her face into all kinds of distortions to get rid of the falling itching irritants, she tries to keep track of the direction the sound is coming from. She tries shaking her head again, but she’s bound up in a very interesting way. In short, she can’t move a single muscle but feels oddly comfortable despite the many metres of rope digging into her flesh.
Then a hundred-metre-large tree comes crashing down, its furthest branches missing the trussed-up woman by mere centimetres. The silence that follows the rumble of broken branches is interrupted by a chittering roar. This is then followed by the cause of the sudden deforestation itself, a fifteen-metre-high combination between a chicken and an octopus. It slithers and struts closer to the bound woman, clucking in a rather slimy manner as it crushes all underfoot.
“Uhm… Hello, being. As you can see, I’m in no state to welcome one such as you properly. Please free me so I can be a proper host.”
The beast responds to her gracious request by stalking closer and lowering its toothy head. Re-Haan closes her eyes in order to prevent the spray of mucus from entering her orifices, not keen on tasting the mutant’s bodily fluids by any means.
“I’m not tasty, you know. Just nibble at this rope.” Here she wiggles her hips, trying to indicate one of the knots sitting on top of her naked skin. “Just cut it there, and I think I should be able to free myself shortly.” Re-Haan is starting to worry now. The misshapen head – a mixture between a dinosaur and the aforementioned chicken – is nearly touching her tender flesh. Her breath becomes slightly more rapid as her struggling intensifies. “Yes, that spot. No, don’t lick it! Dungeons, stop that!”
Re-Haan squirms like her life depends on it. Honestly, from the way the slimy chicken is licking its beak and herself, it very well might. A furious squawk distracts the large predator for long enough to look backwards, just in time for it to be snatched by a praying mantis the size of a house. The two beasts fight, the chicken using large gouts of water to fend off the fire-using, oversized insect. An epic battle unfolds, and Re-Haan has hope for a few minutes. None of the lethal shards of splintered tree or stray gouts of magic breaks her ropes, though.
All in all, it only takes the large chicken three minutes to peck the shit out of the interloper. It doesn’t even eat the opponent it defeated, merely kicking some dirt over its battered corpse before strutting back to Re-Haan. “I would very much like to be rescued right about now. Why did I-”
Seconds before the large beak tears into her soft flesh, a black flash interrupts the chicken. “Hah, you fiend! How dare you. Have no worry, my lady. I will defeat this vile opponent and get thou down safe-”
“Watch out!”
Despite her well-meant warning, the hooded figure that saved her in the nick of time does not avoid the beasts’ attack. Instead, Re-Haan catches a glimpse of surprised irritation on the shadowed persons’ face before he is flung backwards, a large beak picking him up by the scruff of his neck. “Release me, you savage beast! Hnnng.” The man tries to wiggle around but fails to reach far enough behind him to get free. He is then flung upwards, the beasts’ mouth opening below him. “Shit, shit, shit!”
He manages to get a single finger around the sharp edge of the beak, barely flipping himself from between the chicken’s violently closing mouth. Grabbing hold of a nostril, the dark man holds on tight. The fight that follows is as impressive as it is clumsy. The way he barely avoids lethal attacks is almost worthy of praise if it weren’t for the many, many ways in which he fails to inflict any damage to the beast. The farce is ended when a tree – which had been on the edge of falling over for the last half an hour – falls on top of the chicken.
“Haha! Fear not, milady. I managed to vanquish this foul beast, preventing it from tarnishing your noble self, preserving your chastity and purity.” The man walks over to the still tied up Re-Haan, panting hard as he stumbles closer. “I will have thee free within seconds.” Lecherous hands roam across her body under the pretence of loosening the knots. The malicious smirk on her saviour’s face rivals that of the chicken, in terms of hunger for her flesh.
Re-Haan clears her throat and meekly addresses the hero. “You saved me. I would have perished for sure. How could I ever repay you?”
“Have no worries, my fair lady. I’m sure we can come to a mutually beneficial conclusion.”
⁂
“That was fun,” I smile at Rhea.
“You thought that was fun? I thought it was kind of sad, but I can’t really tell what was so sad about it.”
We’re lying on top of the stone slab, catching our breath. “Limiting our power to match the opponent was your idea, remember? It took me a long time to manoeuvre the stupid, oversized piece of poultry in the correct position. A mere few centimetres to the left or the right, and
it would have seen that falling tree.”
“Then I am impressed you managed to make such a calculated move look like pure, dumb coincidence.”
I mull over her words while stroking her hair leisurely. “Thanks, I guess?”
“So, that was the damsel in distress scenario?”
“It should have been a dragon, not a chicken. And you should have been wearing even less. Also, some anxious encouragements would have been nice. At least you really got into your role after I rescued you.” I wiggle my eyebrows at her and am relieved that I manage to make her blush slightly.
Rhea sits up, stretching her limbs out and showing me another nice sight. “What I mean is, your scenario is done, right?”
“Yes, I guess I would call this done?” We are both sweaty and sticky, and the jungle around us is reduced to pulp for dozens of metres. Why do I feel a sudden cold chill going up my spine? Rhea and I are still not using combat mode as per our agreement, or I would have entered it in order to analyse this weird feeling of apprehension.
“Great. That means it’s now my turn, right?” Rhea grins at me while letting a length of rope run through her fingers.
“Well…” So that is where this creeping feeling of doom is coming from. I surreptitiously edge away from her.
“You let a monster slobber all over me. And you had me tied up for hours. You seemed like you were having fun, so let me have some fun too, okay? Hey, Drew, where are you going?”
“Call me Teach,” I shout back at her. I need to scram, right now. Why did I leave Tree’s necklace behind again?
⁂
“I…” I hold back tears.
“What is it, honey?” asks Rhea with an extremely contented expression on her face.
The Dao of Magic: Book IV Page 6