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Edgar told me about how Elio, the guild leaders, and himself had done battle against the handful of truly power beings on the island. They’d fought a peak sixth gate slaughter spirit that simply evaporated everything around it in absurdly hot temperatures, a cabal of three supercharged necrotic t-rexes, and an old and powerful frost and death spirit that seemed to have a hatred for any living creature larger than a coyote and would work to systematically eradicate any life – including trees – that got larger than that size. 

The strongest had been an occultist level wasp queen with a half-formed title, and that had actually required Orykson to step in. 

Now, there was only one major threat on this scale left, but it was proving elusive. If it weren’t for the fact that it kept kidnapping people, spirits, and animals to dissect them, the being would have been left well enough alone, but as it was it presented a threat to the lives of everything on the island. 

It wasn’t all bad news, of course. Even with the death spirit, things had concluded by setting up the protective zones and barriers around her territory. In a way, it reminded me of the logging rules and rights that I’d worked with Ivy on when I was still a first gate mage. 

Some were outright positive. A colony of giant frosted flatworms had been found. Their numbers had been dropping for years, so finding a natural group of them would Edgar to keep an eye on them, like he did with the temporal tortoises. A false seventh gate aurora bear had shown a vested interest in the destruction of slaughter spirits, which helped keep the area around it completely clear, while also making a great area to allow nature to continue to thrive on the island. Idyll had made contact with a group of unicorns that had been in dire straits, and could now be protected. 

Eventually, though, my spell completed and I said my goodbyes to Edgar. Dusk offered one last time to tuck him away and bring him along, but he refused. He promised to see us soon, since he’d be back in Port Ruby once he finished up his current job. 

It took me a few Seven League Steps and some of my air-running to get back to the camp, at which point Dusk, Dawn, and I poured power into the yellow teleportation slab and made our way back to the teleportation hub. It was getting late, so I headed to the public housing, where Liz, Ed, and Octavian had claimed one of the dorms. The rooms were meant to fit four people, but Octavian’s multitude of bonds had allowed them to skip over that requirement. We ate dinner together, a spicy potato, spinach, and fish dish, and I turned in. 

The following morning, after some oatmeal, I left the public housing. I thought that I might have caught the guy with the puzzle cube watching me again, but I wasn’t sure enough to actually make a big deal out of it. 

“Alright team,” I told Dusk and Dawn as I walked towards the customs house. “We need to start earning some points. I know Ed’s going to be joining the Brighteyes, but I can’t necessarily rely on him getting the land and building a house first, even with Liz acting as an independent and helping him rack up points early. After the portal’s up and running, I can look at going after the Song of Spring’s array and climbing the central mountains.”

Dusk suggested that I could just go out into the wilderness and we could start building the teleportation platform there, and I made a so-so gesture. 

“Unlike the territory outside of Delitone, which is completely unregulated, and isn’t even part of a migratory people’s path, this will all be eventually claimed by the Crysite government. Even if I picked a spot that was out in the woods, like the forest outside of Kene’s village, it would still technically be illegal to set up an international teleportation platform there,” I pointed out. “And besides. Who knows what’s going to wind up being built and not? I don’t want to set up a gateway into what’s going to become someone’s house or something.” 

Dawn sent me the odd sense of confusion, as if she couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to do that. 

“Don’t you have a portal to your dad’s?” Hannah asked from where she floated in the air beside me. 

“Okay, that’s a little bit different. I wouldn’t mind it if it was Ed’s place, but I need to get a gateway up sooner.” 

Someone gave me an odd look as I walked by, and I just waved. 

“Ghosts,” I said by way of explanation, before resuming my conversation. “Anyways, we need to get some points.” 

Dusk whistled, asking how healing worked on the island. Sure, we’d passed by the field medicine headquarters, but that didn’t mean we knew how it worked. 

I paused, then nodded. 

“Good question.” 

Instead of going right to the customs house, we headed to the Hyacinth Heart guild. The entire place was more like a miniature, overstuffed hospital than anything, with nurses and healers running around, green light flowing out of their hands. I caught a whiff of echinacea, breath-aster, and dewdrop feverfew, though, and slowly navigated my way through the bustling hall to one of the back rooms. 

The guild had set up seven large cauldrons in a row, and they had different mixtures brewing away in each one, while a group of alchemists worked. It was a little bit calmer here than it had been in the hall itself, so I approached the person that looked the least busy. Judging by the feel of the liquid rolling around inside of the thick black cauldron, he was brewing some sort of spiritual healing potion. I was uncomfortably familiar with those. 

“What did you need?” the man asked. “If you were infected with spellthief, you’ll need to sign a waiver that you’ve already purged it, and that you don’t hold any liability towards the Hyacinth Heart guild for your failure to do so. Otherwise this potion–” 

I interrupted the man’s rote speech. 

“Never heard of it. I just wanted to know how healing worked here, I’m new on the island.” 

He looked up at the first time and squinted. 

“Ah, okay. The government’s still working out healthcare for citizens, so I can’t answer that. For right now, combatants get free healing, but it’s in order of priority and time. If you’ve dislocated your shoulder, you’re going to take longer to be treated than someone who got an ear burnt off.” 

“Makes sense,” I agreed. “How expensive is it?” 

“Depends on the way you got hurt and how bad you are,” the man said. “Elio is personally subsidizing most of the healing related to missions, but we’re also limited. If we have to use some of our limited stock of higher gate potions or treasures, or if you have to be portaled all the way back to Mossford, you’ll pay for the cost.” 

He still sounded like he was speaking from a memorized script. 

“Understood,” I said. “And what’s spellthief?” 

“Spiritual parasite that slips into your mana-garden, latches onto your spells, and absorbs a portion of your mana,” the man droned on. “It steals mana, lays eggs, dies, and then those eggs steal more of your mana. They can be worked out with similar techniques to removing excess trimmings from a mana-garden, and their corpses are useful, but they do damage your spirit.” 

I thanked the man, then left the guild and began heading to the customs house. I’d need to be careful, then. I could use Starfish Regeneration, of course, and it sounded like they’d be able to heal minor to moderate damage, but I was still without Kene. They might not have been a doctor, but they were still a competent and caring healer, and one who I could trust for things like relocating an arm. 

When we arrived at the custom’s house, we made our way over to the board, and I cracked my knuckles, then popped my neck. I didn’t really have the best understanding of just how much a point was really worth, but this should hopefully at least give me some idea. 

I skipped over the missions that were meant for practitioners, which felt… Strange. It seemed like I’d been in the practitioner stage for a long time, and almost all of the missions I’d completed with the Spiritwatch and Wildwatch had been from the practitioner board. 

I shook the sensation off and started reading the jobs for spellbinders, checking over the ones that were recommended for both third and fourth gate. Maybe it was arrogance, but I thought that I should be able to take on a fourth gate mission, as long as it was a decent match up for my skills. 

The first mission that caught my eye was an incredibly dangerous hunt for a peak fourth gate slaughter spirit that had already killed three peak fouth gate mages sent to hunt it. The rewards were great, but I reluctantly decided against it. I was good, but I wasn’t that good yet. 

That led me to looking at more jobs, and the first reasonable one I spotted actually wasn’t too far from where I’d met Edgar. About sixty miles north of Port Heliodoor, members of the Candleseer Guild had been scouting for what seemed like a fast-growing vein of gold. They had managed to confirm the existence of a powerful telluric energy nexus underground that was causing the gold in the region to grow quickly, and had been planning to mark it as a potential spot to set up a gold extraction team, when they’d been attacked. 

The details were strange. The Candleseers had noticed a lot of telluric based giant ants in the region, but hadn’t thought anything of it. The ants had completely ignored them at worst, and been actively docile at best. Midway through their scouting of the area, though, they’d been attacked by a group of ants that looked identical, but were glowing with desolation mana. 

The desolants hadn’t attacked the docile ants, but they’d been incredibly aggressive against the humans, and forced the guild team to pop one of their emergency escape bracelets. 

Resolving the problem with the desolants would be with a minimum of a hundred points, depending on what transpired and how it was resolved. But even coming back with more information and the situation unresolved would net fifteen. 

I put that as a mental maybe, then moved on to read some more missions, looking for any that were interesting. 

There was a standard bounty on slaughter spirits that varied depending on the gate of the spirit. First gates were worth a single point, while second gates were worth three. Third gates were worth ten, fourth were worth fifteen. Sometimes, if they left particularly powerful remains that could be used for crafting, the Brighteyes would offer an additional reward on top, but that wasn’t guaranteed. 

Hunting slaughter spirits might not be the most glamorous thing in the world, but it was an undeniably good action. Kind of like how I felt a bit bad about killing non-sapient bugs or working as a butcher, I doubted that killing a slaughter spirit wouldn’t give me the warm fuzzies, but I could still do it. 

I hummed, tilting my head one way, then the other, then kept looking.

Near Port Emerald, there was a family of aurora horses – one second gate, two third gate, and a fourth gate – that needed to be relocated closer to the central mountains. They were apparently quite playful, but completely unaware of their strength, which resulted in them breaking two people who’d tried to take the job, so it was recommended that someone with a lot of either frost resistance or general defensive magic.

Successfully relocating them was worth seventy five points, a lot less than the ants, but not a bad start. It just might take a while to herd them back towards the floating mountains.

I squinted and thought it over. None of these were especially bad choices for me, and I was confident I could escape if I needed to. I glanced at Dusk, Dawn, and Hannah. 

“What do you all think?” 

Comments

Lola

Eww, parasites freak me out!