7.19

  “Think of the hardworking undead who defend our dungeons and the common goblins who drive back the adventurer scourge! Everyday they languish, guarding our treasures, worried that they will never be replaced by immigrants!” - High Prince Aksum, during the speech that would make him Dread Emperor Accidental of the Dread Empire.

  Celine, Tai and I left the house to buy potion ingredients and some small supplies we had forgotten the previous day. Though Yong Chun Lin wasn’t made of glass, steel and concrete, the more I inspected the place, the more my mind began to consider it ‘modern’. Working taps and plumbing weren’t unique to this world, Taebut had it as well, but it was implemented in an expected way. Systems of sewers and underground pipes pumping water, just because it was pushed with magic didn’t make it special.

  Here water was siphoned from the living tree’s own systems. The magic made to grow buildings within the great tree’s bark and branches were dually utilized to weave the tree’s veins into a working water system. Xylem and phloem if I was being pedantic, which I always am. The water here was clean and had a sappy sweet after taste.

  I kept observing with my manavision as we visited store after store. Trying to figure out if this relationship was parasitic, or if the tree benefited somehow from the people living upon it. Gradually our arms were filled with a small mountain of ingredients that Celine had picked out. The woman was possessed, glancing at various strange herbs and dried fungus once before tossing them onto one of our piles.

  “Logistics are surprisingly streamlined here,” I observed.

  Tai shifted the small mountain of shopping boxes she was carrying to glance towards me. “Hmm?”

  “The Wayshards, we don’t have them where we’re from,” I explained. Noam at some point had given them a run down of our reality, but had been met with disinterest. Certainly given the amount of elemental planes and Fey realms and Circles of Hell here, the revelation that there was another plane of existence where Traveler’s are from seemed mundane and entirely expected. Even if was the true reality to the virtual reality here, the distinction was meaningless to them.

  “We have to transport everything by hand where I’m from.”

  Tai looked at me like an idiot from behind the shopping pile. Sure she had a good argument given that we both had our hands full with Celine’s shopping, but I continued explaining. “It’s the degree of mobility. We only need supplies to last until we get to the next Wayshard, and can get restocked at any major trade center we’ve visited, we don’t have such luxury back home. Not to mention the ease of global trade.”

  “You use boats for everything don’t you?” she asked, recalling some things that Noam had told her.

  “Massive metal ones. Cargo ships larger than this city even,” I agreed. Sure even here they couldn’t teleport extremely large things, since Wayshards were somewhat limited to what you could carry, and there was the risk that a transporter would just teleport to some distant or unknown location, stealing all the goods they were carrying. But it meant that as Celine was working down her shopping list- which I had naturally read and memorized- she was able to get ingredients from extremely distant locations or get someone to deliver them fairly quickly.

  Celine paused in shopping, her face conflicted as she stared at an ingredient on display. A red beetle the size of a basketball with incandescent wings the length of my arm. She glanced at her shopping list, then felt her wallet.

  “How much is it?” Tai asked.

  Celine shook her head, “No! It’s alright, I don’t need it.”

  I glanced at the price tag, then peered into my own wallet with my manavision. “We have enough.” I scooted over a bit towards Celine, carefully balancing the ingredients I was already carrying. “Can you grab my money pouch for me?”

  “It’s really alright!” she frantically gestured.

  “Celine, you’ve been using your money to supplement our potions,” Tai stated.

  Indeed, we currently worked off an x+1 share system. The rewards from any quest was split six ways, one for each of us and the final one went to a communal fund for potions and the like. After I looked at Celine’s shopping list and the prices the ingredients were, I knew the extra communal share wasn’t enough for the potions she had been feeding us.

  “We’ll have to discuss a new pay system, maybe three shares for the party fund?” I suggested. That meant splitting all rewards eight ways.

  “Well we obviously don’t earn enough to be salaried,” Tai quipped, she put down her boxes, and began counting her coins to Celine’s increased protest.

  “What are you planning on making with this?” I asked.

  Celine slumped in defeat after we made it clear her objections went unheard. I didn’t understand why she was so against us spending money on her, she was the most vital member of the team, most requiring an upgrade, and the one who had been spending extra money on us. This was payback if anything.

  “There’s various fire type potions that can be made with each part,” Celine explained. She gently spread the dead beetle’s wings, catching light off its incandescent scales. “The wings can be used for heat and light reflection, the shell grounded to an explosive powder, and its hemolymph works well for general fire resistance potions.”

  “I’ll make it a tax write off,” Tai said.

  There was a pause.

  Then we both incredulously blurted out, ““You pay taxes?””

  “You don’t?” she asked in turn.

  After the shopping was done and we were in the final preparation stages, Tai’s grandmother met us for farewell. Though she still looked old, there was a more spirited glint in her step. She carried two wrapped packages.

  “This is for the journey,” Tai’s grandmother passed one of the packages, which wafted the delicious scent of her dumplings. “Stay safe, know your limits and how to flee.”

  “That’s the opposite of everything you’ve taught me so far,” Tai grumbled.

  “And I mean it earnestly. Power is not worth the cost in life, so carry prudence in your heart,” she glanced towards me, “Though I suppose you will have it in spades. You are a well balanced party, listen to each other, don’t fall into the extremes of a single member’s personality.”

  “I think she just insulted us,” Noam whispered.

  Everyone ignored him as Tai’s grandmother handed over the second package to Tai, “These are your books, I found them in storage.”

  “My books?” Tai blinked in confusion. “I don’t remember any…” her voice trailed off, as her face suddenly reddened. She hurriedly tossed the books in the back of the cart, then covered it with other various supplies. “Alright! Let’s go!”

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  “Stay safe,” Tai’s grandmother repeated as the platform descended. “Make sure to eat properly, and sleep plenty.”

  Tai nodded, and even as the platform descended out of sight of the branches above, kept her eyes glued to her home.

  Meaning Noam had free rein to peek at those books. I tried to as well, naturally as it passed my sphere of manavision, but that sense worked on a shape basis, it could see each individual page but not what was written on them. Braille would be a work around, same with slightly indented words, but they were ink printed books.

  Noam pulled one of the books out and quickly scanned it. I read the title with the eyes I got from the symbiosis with Yellow.

  ‘The Fallen Prince and his Incubus Harem.’

  Huh?

  “This stuff is vanilla,” Noam remarked as he flipped through the pages. His words shot Tai out of her moment, her face red as she spun towards him.

  “Not sure why you’re embarrassed, I’ve seen worse on AO4-” Noam couldn’t finish his appraisal before Tai drop kicked him off the platform. His words trailed off into a scream as he free fell.

  “Celine, can you save him?” I asked.

  “On it,” Celine answered with a tired sigh as she knitted another parachute for Noam’s doll.

  A decent way into our journey, before we left the skyscraping trees of Yong Chun Lin, Tai brought up a problem.

  “I’ll be weaker while I retrain,” she stated. “And I don’t even know what path I should be pursuing.”

  I’d been considering this as well. “You can remain a dedicated front-liner, we’re lacking in the damage department but it’s not a crippling weakness.”

  “Yeah but what if we have to finish a fight quickly?” Tai asked.

  “Ideally we don’t take those fights,” I answered. “This isn’t unworkable, Noam and I have been dealing with more restrictive conditions. We’re significantly weaker than all of you.”

  Tai looked befuddled, and Celine crawled to the front of the cart to hear better, “Huh?”

  “You haven’t noticed?” I fiddled the reins of the cart, “Both of us heavily rely on conditionals to give us large spikes of power in critical moments. In a fight without ideal conditions, Travelers are weaker than natives of equivalent level.”

  I had observed this earlier when I noticed the large stat discrepancies between these three and us. They had on average a higher stat total. Without Analyze I couldn’t confirm the current state, but I assumed these stat differences had only grown larger.

  “Utoqa was able to go toe to toe with the entire Samsara Guild for a while, and Celine is able to do a massive variety of things with just her sympathetic magic. Currently you two are our strongest members.”

  Celine pulled down her hood, though glancing back I could see she was blushing. She whispered something.

  “Sorry, could you say that louder?”

  “Can you repeat that?” she asked.

  I raised an eyebrow. I thought I spoke clearly the first time. “You are currently facilitating long range communication, and healing. You plan on implementing your potions into more uses so your utility will only increase with time and funding. You are currently one of the most valuable member of this party.”

  Celine retreated entirely into her robes, though I could see clearly with my manavision she was grinning wildly under her hood.

  Deciding to contemplate that for another time, I turned back to Tai, “You’re currently lagging behind in terms of pure combat ability, but I don’t expect it to last long enough for it to be a problem.”

  “When he says long enough, he really means long,” Noam called out from the back. “He’s probably worse than you with his time.”

  I scoffed, “I’m just patient. Nothing compared to an elf that lived on a different timescale. And if you are terribly worried about our current power level, there are ways to go around it.” I gestured to the swamp elemental pulling the cart. “I can contract more elementals and summons for a temporary power boost, and I’m considering recruiting more Travelers.”

  Noam poked his head out into the front, “Mort?”

  “Ideally Alex, though Belle would also work as well,” I answered. Their skills weren’t in question since we slew Vek’Na together.

  “She’s gonna throw a fit when she hears she’s second choice.”

  “She’s actually much lower,” I corrected. “They won’t have leveled Indiri bodies so they’re a long term investment. I was thinking the Emerald Swords and Complexity Bop, since I know they’ve come here.”

  Noam’s face scrunched. “Those tryhards?”

  “Many would say we are worse tryhards,” I shot back.

  “So the gist of it is you plan on recruiting experienced Travelers?” Tai surmised.

  “More mercenary,” I said. “They have their own guilds and do their own stuff, but I think we can call on them for any large scale operations.”

  “How would we pay them?” Tai asked.

  Noam and I shared a look. “They’ll come running if we frame it as a limited time event,” he explained. Which naturally didn’t tell Tai anything.

  “Or a GDKP,” I added. I had a fairly good reputation leading those. The term however seemed to mystify Tai even more. “Point is we can leverage our connections as Travelers. Payment can be resolved with established lootshare systems.”

  “Just don’t grab someone crazy like Hand,” Noam muttered as he leaned back to sleep.

  “It would be bad for our own growth if we over rely on temps,” Tai frowned.

  “Are we going to become a larger party?” Celine poked her head out of her hood, her face concerned. “I… like what we have going right now.”

  “Yeah we would have to re-establish team dynamics,” Tai agreed. “There’s no guarantee we will work well together.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “That is true…” I hadn’t considered that. It wasn’t a problem for video games because no one’s life was on the line, but three of our current members had no second chances. “But that is all the more reason to have disposable people.”

  Tai gently punched my shoulder, “You would sound callous if everyone here didn’t know you included yourself as disposable.”

  That should’ve been the obvious implication. “But back on topic, Tai you needn’t worry. We’ll just do some easy work while you respec. Worst case scenario, we just run.”

  “Don’t jinx us on this,” Tai muttered.

  I turned back to the front, my hands on the reins. I wasn’t being completely truthful with my assessment. After we killed Glascoin I had confirmed with Keep that our Scales had been in the negatives, for all that the woman did the world viewed her as a net positive. Her extremely weak abilities also meant it considered her killing no great feat worthy of reward.

  ‘But it’s just bad luck,’ I reminded myself. Chance could be worked around, gambles could be folded, worst case scenarios accounted for, and losses mitigated. I can’t risk another glance at our karma, but so long as we continued to do great deeds and help people it will be worked off.

  Plus being a doomer has always been what I was good at.

  While Yong Chun Lin ran the entire elven lands, we had to take a detour out of the primordial forests to avoid a section untraversible this time of year. Tai’s grandmother’s map routed us through the borders between the elvish forests and the Western Kingdoms.

  Trees bled out into rolling green fields, the sun was setting but Betsy still plod on calmly. Now the bison like creature shared her burden with the swamp elemental. Continuing to call it that was a mouthful in my mind, but naming an elemental was apparently an important process, and it felt wrong just casually assigning something to it.

  Everyone was resting in the back, leaving me alone at the front holding the reins. Ahead jutting out from the grassland, laid beside the road was a great stone building. The stones bordering the road led into its construction. At a distance it looked like a heap of pebbles and moss but as we came closer it was revealed that the entire dome shaped building was crafted of pebbles precariously balanced into arches. Rock balancing brought to an obscene degree. Greenery later creeping onto the arches and filling the gaps like a blanket.

  I glanced again at the map. “We’re at the shrine, time to make camp.”

  The party roused from their naps, yawns and stretches abound.

  Celine poked her head out, hair still frizzed and a trail of drool on her cheek. She brightened up as she saw our destination. “That’s a Bundriroc temple!”

  I nodded, “They’re a lot more common in the Western Kingdoms apparently.” Since the religion originated from this area.

  The cart shifted weight as Tai hopped off the side, “We’ve only seen small shrines right?”

  Celine nodded, “The architecture of the temple looks old, did we bring enough tributes? There should be a totem in a temple this large, and we might be able to directly get blessings!”

  “Have you been to one before?” Noam yawned.

  Celine bubbled, “Nope! First time at one! I’ve read about them in books though, the totems take centuries to be carved by followers of Bundriroc, they have to infuse magic into it constantly during the process. They are carved in the image of-” She stopped, “Well you’ll see soon!”

  We did indeed see soon. The totem was a solid stone pillar, each section carved in a stylized depiction of a beast. The design was smooth, each stroke was worn away by the natural streams of a river instead of chisel. Likely why they took so long to carve.

  It was however, only half a pillar, as at the middle, we could see a section that had been roughly smashed off. The smooth water carved totem cutting off right above the eyes of an owl. Instead on top was a bronze placard with elvish writings.

  “The rest of this statue can be found at the Elven Museum of Natural History,” Celine read.

  We all turned to Tai.

  “Ahem!” She coughed and looked away.