Chapter 600 - The Harvest (Patreon)

AN: Syl! It's a book I'm publishing through Mango Media, and it's one of my favorites!
I'm mentioning it here because I unwisely said I'd eat my hat on stream if it got 1000 reviews on Amazon in the first week.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Syl-Nucleus-Lunadea-ebook/dp/B0DJY8MXZW

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Everyone and their brother was curious about the fight that had just occurred, and quite a lot of people were going to have a really bad day. Fenrir and Kangrim hadn’t exactly been keeping things contained when they wrestled on the ground, and quite a few fields had been utterly wrecked, to say nothing of the final farm where dragon’s blood was dripping onto the fields. In small amounts, it was a potent catalyst, but the dose made the poison. There was a good chance the fields would be unusable for a long time.

Nina came rushing over and threw up a huge illusion over us and the remains of the dragon, cutting away the farmers from the view. The base was a solid dome of bright red covering the entire place, then various rotating symbols went all along the edge. Skull and crossbones, ‘ick’ faces, black cats, broken mirrors, red flags, raised rattlesnakes and more were all moving and animated on the surface of the dome, a dozen different symbols from cultures around the world saying STAY AWAY. She had another neat trick - we could see from the inside out, but I doubted people could see from the outside in.

Iona and Fenrir gently disentangled themselves from the dragon, as Auri hovered over them protectively. Nina marched up to them, and I drifted a little closer so we could all talk.

“We cannot let this get out.” The kitsune said. I nodded in agreement. Fenrir and Iona were still both coming down off the battle-high, plus the dragon's heart was one heck of a stimulant. Auri landed on Iona’s wobbling helmet and tilted her head.

“Brrpt?” Artemis stepped in as Auri asked her question.

“The story is, we slew a wyvern.” Nina stressed, somehow managing to speak only the truth while crafting a thousand lies. “Fenrir’s territorial after all. We’ve all seen it. Just another scuffle, another monster slain.”

“You know what happens when we say their name.” Artemis agreed. “I propose the same thing that we did in Remus, and possibly for the same reason. Total ban, total secrecy. Not a word gets out about this, not a mention of them to light a flame in their mind’s eye.”

Huh. I suddenly wondered if Night had managed to kill a dragon in Remus at some point. It wasn’t something to brag about or even mention, but it would explain why the ban was so harsh when mentioning it once or twice didn’t cause any problems… and if we’d managed to kill a dragon back then, there was no way Night didn’t have a dozen kills under his gem-studded belt already. Plus, that was when Night only had two classes.

Iona slowly came out of her daze.

“What are we going to do with all this?” She gestured to the body, Fenrir already looking like he wanted to take a bite. “It’s a treasure trove, are we just going to let it go to waste?”

Everyone except Fenrir shook their heads, the wyvern growling unhappily at the idea.

“Harvest it, store it in Elaine’s [Tower]. Hide most of the evidence. Elaine, you can run preservation on it, right?”

“Yeah, that shouldn’t be a problem.” I said.

Raccoon came running up a moment later with the three Rangers. Artemis started barking orders.

“This is top secret. Don’t breathe a word to anyone. We need Skye, the most discreet person with the [Butcher] skill, and a [Tanner] that’s worthy of gaining 200 levels. Go.” She ordered the three, who saluted and vanished. My mentor turned to me.

“Elaine, got a good knife or, even better, a skinning setup in that [Tower] of yours? Learned enough about field dressing animals from all the years… all the years we spent in the Hunter’s Guild.” Artemis almost broke down in the middle there at the mention of Julius.

“I don’t know, I’ll see what I can grab.” I promptly vanished into the [Tower], grabbing heaps of sharp tools, and a couple of blunt ones. I then thought about what else we needed, and started to grab as many empty barrels and casks as I could find, debating emptying some of them for more storage. I reappeared a minute later, and Iona, Nina, and Raccoon were already working on manually stripping off the scales and tossing them into a pile. I rolled up my sleeves and joined in.

The System was no longer reinforcing its body, which made the harvest far easier.

“Raccoon, I need more barrels, casks, anything that can store liquid. Beg, borrow, and buy as many as you can get and bring them here.” 

The crafty goblin nodded and sauntered off at a slow pace. I shot a questioning look after her, which was picked up by Iona.

“If Raccoon shows up exhausted and demanding to buy all their barrels, she’ll get ripped off.” Iona explained. My wife moved up to the jaw and started defanging the dragon, one massive tooth at a time. They’d make really nice long knives, or perhaps slightly short shortswords. Maybe the tip of a spear?

“All this material is great, and I know we’re getting a neat [Tanner], but how are we going to plausibly assemble all of this without including so many people that the secret’s out?” I asked. “Like, it’s all very well and good to prep and assemble all of this, but if everyone knows, people are going to talk.” 

“Elaine’s right.” Artemis eyed the claws, then decided she liked doing exactly what she was up to. “It’s an entire logistical supply chain we’re talking about here. Butcher and tanner to start, then we need to carve the weapons, get a tailor to stitch them together, explain to the Rangers not to look too closely, explain to the farmers why we sent Raccoon to get barrels, get several crafters to work the material…”

“Which is why the story is we killed a wyvern.” Nina stressed. “We’re not going to hide the operation, it’s not doable. We need to simply hide the obvious evidence. The scales are sewn into the armor because we don’t want to have them easily peeled or flaked off. Their blood is better than wyvern’s blood in many ways, but as long as nobody makes [Princess]-detecting arrays, who’s got the ability to compare the effects of one wyvern to what we’ve got? Fangs are fangs, scales are scales, we’ll just have to be a little careful with the claws. People can count. We just need to not be flashy about it. Don’t stick the skull on a pike. Don’t. Brag. We’ve got unlimited storage with Elaine’s [Tower] skill, let’s use it.”

I grumbled under my breath.

“It’s not unlimited and I’m going to have to take so much out of it.” I was already mentally rearranging everything. Sure, I’d cleared out a bunch of ‘survival’ floors, I’d leveled up and gotten more floors, but dragons were big, and I was imagining we were trying to keep every broken scale. I was going to have to take out most of the ‘extras’ in my [Tower]. I’d already evicted most of them, pouring them into the community, but this was the death-knell of storing a thousand different knick knacks. I suppose the Immortal War had come and gone, and I had some time to store a few other things before the next one kicked off, some thousand years or so from now. Hopefully longer. 

“You two.” Artemis pointed at me and Iona. “This includes the gods. Don’t tell Selene. Don’t tell Lunaris. Don’t tell Ciriel. They love to gossip, and they will tell the other gods or angels what their favorite [Paladin] has been up to. Those people will talk. This. Is. Secret.”

I hadn’t thought of that at all. The odds of the Moon Goddesses not watching Iona were slim to none, but divine communication was odd. I knew enough to know I was completely ignorant about them, but it boiled down to ‘not all words were the same’. There were different ‘prices’ for communicating, even among the gods themselves. It was possible that Iona telling the goddesses about the event changed the ‘price’ of the information, and… I was going to stop there before getting a migraine. 

Every part of the dragon was a treasure, and I was starting to think up of a dozen things we could do with it. Iona had a beaten up undervest of wyvern scales which could possibly be replaced - it was possible her wyvern rider class would approve of wyvern scales over dragon scales. I tended to favor laminar or scaled armor, and a suit of dragonscale armor? Well, if the Rangers were getting outfitted with them - and I was going to stuff Artemis into one to keep her safe if it killed me - getting a bit for myself didn’t seem out of the question. Dragonbone swords, spears, and daggers promised to be stronger and sharper than steel, and given the current state of our metallurgy, that was an extra bonus.

It didn’t have to all be weapons and armor. I imagined plows made out of the bones - or even plows tipped with the bones - would shear through rock and dirt like it wasn’t there, irrespective of skills getting involved. We were trying not to flaunt things or be flashy, but I had dreams of a dragonbone throne for Skye, anvils made out of the hardest materials, great ships with sinews for ropes. The maintenance would be hell, and making mundane things like rope that got used, abused, and thrown away out of priceless materials seemed like a poor idea, but my imagination was running wild.

“We should make a “wyvern” blood bath as a Ranger initiation ceremony.” I suggested. “And a Valkyrie one.” I hastily added on, recognizing who my audience was.

Then there were all the organs! Iona had already taken a bite out of the heart - very elven of her - and I’d destroyed the eyeballs beyond recognition. There was still the rest of the dragon. Most of the parts were best when carefully preserved and stored and handed off to a strong [Alchemist] who could turn the raw potential into miracles. From the brain to the lungs, liver and kidneys, from the flame organ to the viscera, every part of the dragon could be put to good use. 

Well. According to questionable sources. Dragons just didn’t die often enough for their uses to be well-known. For example, many stories had a potion of languages that could be brewed from a dragon’s tongue. Except… how would anyone know? There wasn’t a formula for it in any of the books I knew, then again, who’d bother to write it down. Might as well include a dozen other impossible ingredients. The Big Book of All the Potions You Will Never Brew somehow failed to be a bestseller. 

The known properties of several parts of the dragon were epic enough that I believed the rest of it was just as valuable.

The sun rose, the sun set, and we worked our asses off. Sinew was separated from bones, both of them stacked in neat piles. Organs went into blood-filled casks, then were sealed off by hammering it shut and tracing an array onto the top. One by one I transported them into my [Tower], multiple huge kegs getting filled with priceless blood that was also smeared all over me.

It was fairly lucky Amber wasn’t around - she’d die of an aneurysm seeing all the incredibly valuable blood being carelessly spilled around. I didn’t need to have a dragon’s blood bath on top of the wyvern’s blood bath I’d already had! Field dissecting a creature we couldn’t lift and wanting to keep the blood was a messy, messy job.

We weren’t able to remain entirely professional. Raccoon secured one of the claws for herself, and kept swinging it around like it was a stick, making swishing noises. Didn’t matter that she was getting old for a goblin, didn’t matter that she was the respectable [Constable] of Orthus Town. She was swinging the dragon’s claw like a teenage boy with a particularly nice stick. 

Auri snuck into the dragon’s mouth and pretended to breathe fire. Made half of us jump out of our skin, thinking there was one last effect, or we’d screwed up the flame organ. She laughed and laughed, rolling over in a little flameball. Artemis was laughing, and I muttered something about ‘surprise sugar shortage’, which had Auri pretend to shrivel up and turn into ashes.

As we were handling the dragon’s internal organs, Iona came across one in particular. She looked at it with a lecherous grin, then looked back at me, then back at it, her idea very obvious.

“No!” I protested. “No way!”

I couldn’t get the image out of my head.

Nina had fun scaring people that weren’t quite getting the hint away with her Mirages, intervening before the Rangers had to step in and physically bar people. With the size of the body and the space we were occupying, they had to walk briskly to maintain the perimeter.

“Hey foxy!” Artemis called out. Nina whirled, and unfortunately didn’t know Artemis well enough yet to know that grin meant Trouble. I’d run screaming if Artemis was smiling at me like that.

“Yes? Can I help you?” She asked.

“We’re all going to take a dip in the wyvern’s blood, yeah?” Artemis asked. “We’re already halfway there, be a shame not to finish the job.” My mentor looked pointedly at all of Nina’s blood-matted fur.

“Yes…” Nina cautiously agreed, having some minor self-preservation instincts. She couldn’t have lasted this long as an assassin without a good gut instinct.

“Well, way I see it, you’ve got all that fur, and it’s going to cause you problems. It’s great stuff for keeping the water and the rain off you, but with how it’s getting all clumpy, there’s no way all the blood’s making it to your skin. It’s a huge waste!”

“Right.” Nina agreed. “I was thinking something similar. Any ideas?”

Artemis managed to smother a wicked grin, and I was starting to think it was time for another [Tower] run. Make sure everything was well organized. Check nothing was going to tip over. Triple-check the enchantments. Then again, I probably wasn’t going to end up as collateral damage to this prank, and while we were rebuilding civilization, entertainment was in short supply. 

“This is a rare and valuable resource, a once in an Immortal lifetime opportunity. Fur grows back, wyvern’s blood doesn’t, we should shave you to make sure there’s no huge hole in the protection given.”

How the fuck did Artemis manage to keep an entirely straight face? Iona’s neck was bobbing with her suppressed laughter, one hand gripping Fenrir’s leg a little too tightly. Auri was whistling, beak in the air. 

Come on, Auri. Don’t give away the game. That looked even more suspicious.

The best way to not be collateral to one of Artemis’s pranks was to lean into it.

“I completely agree.” I piped up. “Sure, you’ll look silly today, but two months from now all you’ll remember is your skin being harder than steel.” 

Nina looked to Iona, who managed to pull herself together in a flash and nod in a stately way.

“Artemis speaks wisdom.” She said as the woman in question drew a knife.

“Now, hold still, this will only take a moment.”

Oh gods, Artemis was right. Shaved kitsune looked hilarious.