“Nuh erries. Im hine.” Erik waved his hand to show that he was okay even with a useless tongue.
He opened another salve bottle and consumed a fingerful of the contents. Mistress Luo and Kun Luo looked to each other but said nothing as Erik moved to a chair, sitting down and consuming the different poultices and apothecary items.
It wasn’t long until Fairy Luo returned with a storage ring. She bowed and handed it to Erik.
He took it with two hands and looked inside. He smiled as he looked at the collection of potions, pills, and powders. There was some one hundred or so different concoctions. Erik rose, nodding to them all, and started to leave.
“Healer Grandmaster! If there is anything that we can do for you in the future, please do not hesitate to ask.” Kun Luo cupped his hands to Erik.
“Iah’ll eee oue ater.” Erik smiled and turned to leave. He pulled out a powder container, taking a bit of the powder and tossing it in his mouth.
All of the Luos looked to one another, not understanding this man anymore.
Erik received a sound transmission from Hiao Xen. As the guards escorted him off the Luo family estate, he turned down the offer of a carriage.
“Well, at least that is one problem dealt with. Time I got back to making concoctions.”
Chapter: Hidden Strife
Jasper returned to Alva Dungeon with all of the merchants. The pace they set was a lot slower than Roska and her team had set on the way out.
Still, it only took them a few days to get back to the dungeon.
“It’s good to see you back.” Blaze appeared from behind a tree. He was chewing on some grass, wearing a collection of different armors. Although each of them was different, all of them were well maintained.
“Looks like the beard is coming in well.” Jasper got off the panther. Although they were fast, they were still not the most comfortable things to ride.
Blaze laughed as the two clasped hands.
“Good to have you back—got me a bit scared there,” Blaze admitted.
As Roska and the merchants started to get down from their rides, people came out from the underbrush to take their panthers and greet their friends.
The group headed toward the entrance into Alva Dungeon.
“I wasn’t feeling the best about it, but if they wanted to make a fight of it I was sure that we could hold our own for some time. I might have argued against the fighting training before, but I understand it now,” Jasper said.
“Wish you didn’t have to.” Blaze looked sideways at his friend.
“Anything new that you didn’t send to me via sound transmission?”
“Same old, pretty much. Good work with Lord Aditya there. Having such an influential figure in a high position under our command will make things easier. Now we’ve got the problem of trying to control him,” Blaze said.
“It won’t be that hard. We should set up the city as a base of operations. Roska has already informed me how he wants to heal his missing leg. That gives us leverage on him. We can use drops, placing storage rings with goods at different positions; then he leaves storage rings in locations we pick and we continue trading like that. Gives him less ability to try to understand us. Also, when Erik and Rugrat come back, they can figure out how to deal with him.” Jasper grinned.
“Putting it all on their shoulders, huh?” Blaze laughed as they walked ahead of the others. “I wonder how their task is going.”
On the outside, he sounded confident but Jasper knew through their talks at the council table that they had all been making plans in case Erik and Rugrat didn’t make it back in time, or didn’t come back at all. They were in the Second Realm, after all; they didn’t have a means to get a message across that distance.
Without the information from the teams that they had sent out, or Erik and Rugrat, they had held back from sending more people to the Second Realm.
Blaze pulled himself back together as they were walking through the small pass that led to the main entrance. “We lost seven more people.”
Jasper nodded. “It was bound to happen. I’m surprised that we have been able to keep so many people up to this point,” Jasper admitted.
“Yeah, though the problem is that while there are people, there isn’t anyone new coming in. We need to look into recruiting new people. Erik and Rugrat sent us Qin Silaz and her tagalong brother, as well as Tan Xue and Julilah, but we can’t rely on just them to bring us more people. The problem is that people are going to find it hard accepting more people, especially in light of what happened with you and the other traders.” Blaze looked at Jasper with meaning.
“You want me to bolster the recruiting position, put people at ease?” I’m not against the idea. We need more people if we want to grow. We’ve got a lot of positions and not many people to fill them. Though we were a small village from the start and we relied on ourselves, having our protection oath broken hurt people. Erik and Rugrat were a pillar for us, but now with all of the things that we have, there will be people trying to just maintain their control, instead of sharing and growing others of strength.
“You’ve got it,” Blaze said.
They entered the main entrance, passing the guard post there. The defenses had grown, becoming more substantial and harder to break. They passed through the guards and continued on their walk.
“You’ve got my support. I agree with you—just let me know how you want me to pass the word.”
“Well, umm…” Blaze coughed with an embarrassed smile.
“You want me to go to something right now?” Jasper’s shoulders slumped. “I just got back!”
“Best time to hit is when the hammer is hot!” Blaze clapped Jasper on the shoulder before a thinking expression appeared on his face. “Or is it the metal that’s hot?” Blaze shrugged. “Whatever—you should ask Taran when you see him. He’s having a meeting with all of the people from the academy. They’re looking at everything that has happened and plans for the future. Just calm down their nerves. Also, I’ve been hearing that they’ve got more goods to sell and need new supplies!”
“All right, I’ll go and check it out,” Jasper said as they passed through another checkpoint.
Standing there were Elise and Glosil.
“Jasper, good to have you back!” Elise hugged him.
“Good to be back.” Jasper smiled and then looked to Glosil.
“When I heard the plan you had for turning the tables on Lord Aditya, I thought it was ballsy. Hopefully you’re not looking to take over my job. That was a damn good idea.” Glosil held out his hand.
Jasper smiled and nodded. “To be honest, I was nervous as hell, but it was one option that meant no one should have been hurt. And it would have allowed us to stay hidden away from the people’s eyes.”
“I know that if I was in your shoes, I wouldn’t have thought of it,” Elise said.
Glosil and Blaze nodded.
“Guess it was just the traderly instincts I’ve been building up.” Jasper laughed, trying to break the growing tension. The others quieted down. Seeing that they didn’t have anything else pressing to say, Jasper clapped his hands together.
“I hear that there is a meeting going on with the academy heads and that they might need a trader to talk on a few things. I’m going to head over and see what’s happening with them.”
“I wonder where you heard that from.” Elise gave Blaze a pointed look. The latter coughed and looked away.
He might have been the leader of the village previously, but Elise had stepped into her role as the leader of the dungeon fully.
She shook her head and smiled to Jasper. “I know that once you’ve said you’ll do something that there isn’t much to stop you. Just make sure that you get some rest and some food in you,” Elise said, her tone softening.
“Will do,” Jasper said with a warm smile, touched by her and the others’ concern.
***
Taran looked at the p
eople in the room. Other than him, there were four others plus four more empty seats.
The empty seats were meant for those who led the Alchemy, smithy, formation, and architectural departments.
Taran had wanted to give the position of smithing department head to Tan Xue. She had refused but agreed to be a teacher. Taran spent most of his time in the forge or dealing with paperwork so he had effectively turned into the department head.
Egbert held the position of librarian but he was multitasking, teaching on formations and Alchemy. He also assisted a great number of people in finding information that could benefit them.
His memory was incredible, allowing him to recall entire books and in his free time, he recorded down the different books he thought might be useful. It was a slow process but Egbert didn’t need to rest, so his library’s walls were quickly filling up with more books.
Though he keeps forgetting about his romance novels. Taran raised his head to the ceiling, trying to find strength there as he thought about the latest time he had sent people to go and find the basics of smithing book and found a romance book hidden within the large book.
Egbert was embarrassed and quickly took back the book.
A smile appeared on Taran’s face. After all, a new weapon had fallen into his hands to threaten Egbert into line with.
Taran cleared his throat, bringing everyone’s attention on him. “All right, first, let’s go through the reports. Jia Feng, if you’d like to begin?”
“Certainly. We have five people who have a sixty percent chance to make meals of the high-Apprentice grade. Of that, three have a chance to make Journeyman-level meals. Unlike some of the other departments, we’re going in blind. We don’t have a great number of recipes that are safe for human consumption. The gnomes Egbert were around had a different palate and dietary needs, so what we can eat and they can eat aren’t necessarily the same thing. We only have a limited number of ingredients here. We need more ingredients, recipes, and other items from the outside world as well as cookbooks.
“Right now we’re reaching out into the dark as we only have two Journeyman-level meals—though with just two of them, we’re quickly running out of supplies to make both. Most of the cooks are spending their times on making Apprentice-grade meals to increase the rate that one’s Stamina is regenerated. The military is still buying these up by the bundle and most of the people in Alva Dungeon are coming to us rather than buying ingredients themselves as it saves them time to get meals from us and they recover at a greater speed.”
Taran didn’t miss the pride in her voice. The cookhouse was one of the most liked departments. Who didn’t like food?
“Okay, we will need to look into getting more supplies for the cookhouse, specifically cooking manuals. This might be a request that needs to go to the special teams when they move to the Second Realm,” Taran said, making a note.
“Barring that, I was wondering if it would be possible for people in the department to go on leave.” Jia Feng’s tone changed as she looked at Taran.
“Leave?” Taran asked.
“We have a certain amount of ideas here, but there are other places in the First Realm that we might be able to increase our knowledge. In the imperial courts, desserts and food can reach the high-Journeyman stage. These cooking manuals are only passed down to special chefs, but being around that high-class food, it could improve my students’ knowledge,” Jia Feng said.
Taran took a deep breath and sat back in his chair. Just as he was about to respond, there was a knock at the door.
“Come in.” Taran frowned. He wasn’t sure who else might need to come to this meeting.
The door opened and a dusty and dirty-looking Jasper walked in and closed the door behind him.
“I heard that you might need my expertise in trading?” Jasper smiled.
“I thought you just got back?” Taran asked.
“I have, but sitting on a panther the entire time, I wanted to do something with my brain!”
The others in the room returned Jasper’s smile.
“I think that your expertise might be required.” Taran waved to the formations seat.
Jasper nodded and headed over to it as Taran cleared his throat and looked back to Jia Feng.
Taran went through the remaining department heads, with Egbert giving a report on the Alchemy and formations department that he was overlooking.
Finally, Shi Wanshu spoke up.
“Look, we’ve been skipping around the issue, but here it is. We’ve got people who want to learn and they know that there is more to learn. So when they’re hitting the ceiling, they’re looking for new avenues to pursue—looking to other departments, leaving to venture the Ten Realms, or gain information from the outside world in some manner. We got some more, here and there, out of what Erik and Rugrat sent with Tan Xue and Julilah, but that wasn’t much. Egbert is a wealth of knowledge but he doesn’t have all the answers and a number of the books and information he has we don’t know how to interpret. We would be hard-pressed to find a group like this in the First Realm, with so many powerful crafters by the First Realm standards. There are going to be some who want to go and search out fame and fortune in the First Realm as there is nothing left here for them to do.”
The other department heads pursed their lips, but they didn’t argue the point.
“Three, nearly four months—I didn’t think that we would go through so much material in such a short period,” Taran said, agreeing with Shi Wanshu’s assessment. “The smithy lucked out with having Tan Xue join us and then the alchemist department and farmers under the cookhouse department got more to work on.”
Being a Novice was like being able to read and write. Apprentice was being taught how to learn and the basics of a skill. Journeyman was where the person made the knowledge their own, researching and gaining a greater understanding. Expert was where they combined research and testing with theories they or others had and started to test out different things that they had learned of a high difficulty. At the Master realm, they knew an incredible amount of information about their skill; they conducted more experiments instead of creating actually finished items.
“We need to come up with plans to allow our students to experience the world to gain a greater understanding. We also need to find more skilled people to increase our knowledge and possibly take over our positions,” Taran said.
“We must not forget that we already have a conduit to the Second Realm. Special Team One are all in the Second Realm. Part of their mission was to get forging blueprints, completed products, and more to bring back. With forging designs and new items, it gives us more paths to increase our knowledge. The gnomes, with their time spent underground, there were only a few of them and their population tightly controlled. As time passed, they made the dungeon, but they regressed—there was nothing to work toward. Some of the students under your tutelage might not increase in their skill level after a period. There are some who don’t have the motivation or don’t want to push any further. The academy system is to provide them with the knowledge and tools they need to increase their understanding and then let them discover and create on their own. It’s not to pull them in and hold them in the academy forever,” Egbert said.
The hall was silent as everyone stared at Egbert.
“What? Is my head on backward again?” Egbert grabbed his skull.
Taran and the others shifted their eyes to the young woman behind him with a proud smile.
Jia Feng went so far as to give Qin Silaz two thumbs up, getting a dry cough and a look from Taran.
Qin Silaz smiled and looked at the department heads, who all looked somewhere else.
All of the department heads cowed by a single girl. If this was to get out! Just how did she make Egbert reasonable? Is she a Master tamer?
***
Jasper and Taran were the only two in Taran’s office after the meeting.
“Looks like Qin Silaz has Egber
t wrapped around her finger,” Jasper joked.
“Well, she’s looking into spells. The girl is a prodigy. She’s quickly advancing her knowledge in spells and Egbert is hopeful that she can start learning about formations. The theories between them are similar but the scale and the way that they’re carried out are the only great differences,” Taran said.
It was one of the things that everyone knew in Alva Dungeon but didn’t talk about: the other floors.
What’s really down there? They haven’t been touched in hundreds of years. Creatures that were down there have nowhere to go—did they die off, did they survive? The entire dungeon was supposed to be one big ecosystem, but now we only have access to a tiny portion of it. Teleportation formations, Mana gathering formations, controlling formations. Will we really be able to take control of the dungeon back?
“She’s made advances in the area of Mana gathering formations,” Taran said.
“Do you think she would be able to link us with the lower floors if she got the chance?” Jasper asked.
Taran let out a derisive snort. “The more I learn about the Ten Realms, the less I think I actually really know.”
The two of them drifted into silence.
“You okay?” Taran asked.
They might be the council members to the others, but behind private doors they were just people who had the mantle of leadership placed upon them and they’d had to run with it.
“I was scared out of my wits, but it worked out in the end,” Jasper said.
Taran let out an understanding noise. “After it all, what do you think about allowing even more people out of the Alva Dungeon?”
Jasper saw in Taran’s eyes, it was no simple question.
“I think that if we want to develop, then we’re going to need outside help. Look at Tan Xue and Julilah. They’ve brought in new ideas and ways of doing things. If we start telling people that they can’t go outside, we’d be nothing more than tyrants trying to exercise our own rule. We do our best to protect Alva Dungeon and the people in it, but those who are going outside of our borders, although they are still our people, we can’t be expected to save them from everything. They need to make their own mistakes.” Jasper looked away, becoming thoughtful at his own words.
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