157, 1/2

The first night of his tenure as clanfriend had gone… not so well, Erick thought as he laid in bed, unable to sleep.

Dinner had been a large, whole clan affair, with most everyone dipping out of the same cauldron, and taking rice from the same large pots. A few people cooked their own meals elsewhere, and ate elsewhere, but most of the clan ate together, with more than a few families pulling their yurts around to form a loose ring around the cooking yurt. Poi was even able to help cook, though he was kicked out rather quickly for reasons Erick wasn’t quite sure of.

Erick and his people ate their meals at a corner table, while everyone else stayed away. The few times he had gone to talk to people or tried to be friendly, he had gotten stonewalled with silence, or polite nothing answers. The people of Clan Pale Cow were polite about their refusal to interact with him, but they did refuse; there was no doubt about that.

To be fair, Erick had made a mistake in the beginning of the night. Ophiel had been out on patrol, and he pinged Erick that he saw some monsters. A quick check showed that, yes, those were monsters. Lizards, five of them and each as large as two cows put together. They were still about five kilometers away, but they were headed this way from the south, and they were downwind of the spread out caravan and all the cows.

And so, Ophiel [Luminous Beam]ed them, lighting up the southern horizon with a quick squiggle of brightness.

It wasn’t halfway through the brightness on the horizon that the entire caravan rapidly caught on that something was happening down south. Conversation faltered.

Erick spoke up, trying to calm them all by saying, “It’s just some lizards. They’re gone now.”

And thus, the shunning, which was already rather bad, was cemented, and no one wanted to talk to Erick except to excuse themselves to go elsewhere. Erick had been meaning to talk with Yorila and Amasar, but after his display of power, those two didn’t want anything to do with him, for now.

The next time Ophiel found some monsters Erick had them use [Flying Striker]s, conjuring up about five flying swords per Ophiel. Spinning blades of Force were a much less visible display of magic, especially when it was done five kilometers out from camp—

Laying in bed, trying not to think about the shunning, and mostly succeeding, Erick got another ping from Ophiel. Monsters.

Erick checked on what Ophiel had found, and discovered rats of unusual size. The main one was rather large. It was five meters fat from fangs to butt, with three more body lengths of tail beyond that. The smaller rats all around it were only the size of small cows. And… Yup! Cores in the body, near the heart. They were all monsters. Despite the size of the main rat, it was still just a normal monster; no grand rad there.

Ophiel made quick work of the monster rats, mulching them beyond most casual attempts at identifying the bodies, and then [Cleanse]ing the remains away.

It wasn’t the first time Ophiel had interrupted Erick’s attempt at sleep. Perhaps that was more of a reason why he could not rest. There were monsters out there, and Erick wasn’t comfortable with the power of the guardians on duty. He had seen them work, of course, and Clan Pale Cow had survived all this time without Erick’s intervention, but there were no walls around the clan, and that set him a bit on edge. It was an irrational fear, for sure, but it was still a fear.

Erick wasn’t actually ‘on guardian duty’ right now, either. He was just killing monsters because they kept him awake. He might have been on duty, but he had never managed to talk with the woman in charge of putting people on guardian duty. At dinner, Forage Leader Ibahka had taken her dinner and rushed away, into her yurt, shunning everyone except for the few people who went with her.

Erick would need to seek her out tomorrow and claim an actual assignment.

But, for now, Erick was on duty ‘whenever he felt like it’, according to Niyazo.

And so, for now…

He laid in bed, on the bottom floor of his [Obscuring Redoubt], still awake.

The Redoubt was a pretty nice spell. The first floor was invisible to outsiders, while the basement was well defended with nice, thick doors between the exterior and the sleeping area. The walls of the place were dense stone, without a speck of stray dirt anywhere. Erick had thrown some thin lightwards along every upper edge of every room, giving a diffuse glow to the entire interior, while the lights in the bedrooms were much dimmer, but still allowed visibility.

In the original casting of the spell the Redoubt had enough rooms to hold ten people, but Erick had Shaped this one to only have three rooms. Two common rooms, and one bathroom. There was no running water and [Cleanse] was the only way to get clean around here, of course, but a separate room was nice to have, just for the privacy of the space. That smaller room was basically just a hole in the ground, though.

The bedrooms were spacious, but [Obscuring Redoubt] didn’t come with furniture. So Erick, like everyone else, was using [Conjure Item] in order to make themselves a bed and covers and everything else they needed to get a good night’s rest.

As Erick’s mana sense wandered, he saw that one of their party was not used to this kind of sleeping arrangement.

Nirzir slept lightly in the other room, but then she turned over a bit too fast and her conjured bed popped underneath her, returning to the manasphere as sparkles of violet light. Nirzir yelped for a fraction of a second before she landed on her spread-out extra set of clothes.

It was the second time that had happened, which was the reason for the clothes spread out under her conjured bed.

Nirzir cursed softly and then. Just lying there, she accepted her fate. For three more minutes she tried to fall asleep, but it wasn’t working. The young girl rolled over to stare at ceiling as tears—

Okay! None of that, now. Erick got up off of his own bed and then he stepped around the wall that separated his and Poi’s room from the girls’ room.

“Hey,” Erick whispered, trying not to wake the others. “Let me make a bed for you.”

Nirzir froze on the floor. Then she raised her head and looked past her feet, to see Erick standing a few meters away. Before, she had insisted on making her own bed. But now… Her lips pulled down and she scrunched her face hard as she could, but she did not cry; she would not let herself. She just nodded.

Erick gestured for her to get up.

Nirzir did so, rolling out of the way.

[Conjure Item] was a funny spell. The resulting item always had 50 ‘Health’, and the harder an item was, the easier it was for it to suffer damage, but if you made a really soft item, then it could suffer catastrophic damage with as little as a gentle poke. The secret to making a sturdy conjured item was to make an item that could deform and not care about being deformed, because it would always spring back. The standard [Conjure Item] bed was made with this working in mind. It was a 500 mana spell of a hundred thousand smaller parts all contained in a wrapping of hard cloth; a chicken down bed, with feathers that could crush, but were slightly curved so that they could spring back. Theoretically.

Most people failed at properly making a bed. The down feathers would crush and then break. The outer covering could tear. The standard ‘Adventuring Bed’ was a work of a thousand failure points.

Some people tried gel-based bedding. The most popular one of that was a working that involved Elemental Ooze and [Force Platform], to make a bouncy, floating bed. That sort of working was much more resilient than a standard bed, but since [Force Platform] lasted 100 minutes, baseline, most people weren’t able to make one of those that lasted long enough to provide actual, good sleep. And besides that, most people did not like ‘ooze beds’.

But if one was born on Earth, and if one had gone through years of trying to find a nice bed that allowed one to recapture some of the easy sleep they used to have when they were younger, one might remember a bit about polyurethane, and memory foam. Past that, Intelligence helped to fill in a lot of gaps.

And so, Erick cast a spell, imagining that he was conjuring polymer chains in an open matrix, which let in air, and which never truly broke. It was a variation of chicken-down bouncing-back structure, but done in a much more high-tech way. It also worked rather well, as Erick’s own bed could attest to.

A white rectangular prism of foam flopped out of the air, on top of Nirzir’s extra clothes. A second casting conjured up a pillow of the same stuff, while a third and fourth casting conjured up a pair of blankets, with one to lay on, and one to lay under. The blankets would mitigate some of the damage the other items would incur through casual sleeping use, but they were also a major failing point, as most soft things were.

Erick was still rather proud of those blankets, though. They were modeled after the mist rabbit fur blanket that he had gotten for Jane, from Arbor O’kabil, but with a bit of polyester ideas thrown in to give them some strength. Erick was using the same setup in his own conjured bed, and it felt great.

Erick conjured up a second set to the side of the room, whispering, “In case the first one fails.”

Nirzir was still sitting on the floor, seemingly not able to touch the bed he had conjured, but at his words she put a hand on the fabrics, feeling their softness. Her face lit up with a wordless thanks as she dried her tears with one hand and pushed her other hand into the fabric, and into the foam bed below. It was like touching a solid cloud, and Erick could tell she liked it.

Erick whispered, “I like this kind of bed, but Poi and Teressa don’t. Let me know if you don’t like it tomorrow, but for now, it’s good enough to sleep on. Good night.”

With a tiny smile and averting her eyes, Nirzir whispered, “Thank you.”

Erick went back to his room.

Nirzir climbed into her bed.

Ophiel informed Erick of more monsters, this time to the west. More rats, but smaller; the size of dogs.

And so, Ophiel tumbled through the air, slashing his swords this way and that, ending the threat before it got anywhere near the cows, or the caravan.

With all these threats ended, Erick tried to sleep…

But it wasn’t working. Nirzir had managed to fall into slumber in her new bed, finally sleeping the sleep of the dead. Even when Teressa’s bed popped and the woman slammed into the ground with a heavy crunch, and Jane laughed, only to find her own bed popped in a mysterious coincidence seconds later, Nirzir slept.

And.

Yeah.

This wasn’t working for him.

So Erick sent Ophiel out, far away from the caravan, and had him cast an Imaging into the sky, targeting every single small core within 100 kilometers. Then Ophiel killed those monsters. Then, Ophiel targeted every medium core. Erick got a lot more hits this time, since the medium cores were normal-sized cores. After Ophiel killed those monsters, Erick targeted grand cores, and found three in the area. All three belonged to giant underground plants, each of which laid at the bottom of a large hole of their own making. The top of the hole was covered up by mucus and dirt, but anything could fall through those holes, to fall into the vats of acid that belonged to the plant below. A few of them had cow bones in their gullets, but no people bones.

Erick killed those plants with a heavy dose of [Luminous Beam]s.

According to their kill notifications they were called Abyss Drinkers.

By the time Erick had finished it was three in the morning. He had also spotted no less than three other caravans within a hundred kilometers, each defending themselves from the predations of those who hunt in the dark.

And with all those monsters now dead, Erick felt safe enough to sleep.

– – – –

The day dawned, and Erick did not wake till hours later, when the smell of coffee and streams of sunlight invaded the darkened sleeping space underground. As he got up, Erick took quick stock of the space. Everyone else was already awake and gone from the bottom floor, their beds dispersed and their stuff picked up and taken upstairs. Nirzir’s bed was still there, though, along with her extra one; she hadn’t burst the one Erick had made. He hoped she liked it.

Erick’s daily routine was much shorter when he was out camping. He just got up, went to the bathroom while Ophiel hung out with Yggdrasil’s eye outside of the closed room, and then he [Cleanse]d himself, all the while recasting his daily spellwork.

By the time he got upstairs he was feeling good, but it was a shame there were no showers out here. There had barely been any showers in Songli, either. That was just the culture, for you.

Poi sat by a table, sipping coffee and talking to other people through [Telepathy]; Erick guessed twelve people, based on the number of tendrils coming off of his head.

It had to be at least ten in the morning. Everyone else must have been awake, and Poi was actually drinking water. The smell of coffee in the air was coming from a pot of the stuff that Poi had likely just made, perhaps in order to wake him.

“You are correct,” Poi said, smiling to himself.

Erick asked, “So where is everyone else?”

“Jane is out learning how to wrangle cows from cowback, with Amasar and the other cowherds teaching her what she needs to know. Nirzir is learning to cook at the kitchens. Teressa is a guest speaker at the children’s yurt, telling them of monsters the world over. Breakfast was great. Lots of interesting conversations, too.” Poi gave Erick a look. “Everyone on guardian duty was talking about how few monsters tried to attack, while every old hand was talking about the dangers of complacency. A few quiet people even floated the idea that you might have had something to do with that.”

Erick smiled innocently, saying, “I only killed a few hundred monsters. Besides! What did they expect me to do? Leave the threats alone?”

“Niyazo spoke of how you were on guardian duty, when you felt like it. A lot of people then decided that you must have felt like it.”

“… And what did they say to that?”

“They don’t like being coddled.”

“Ah. Well. I can see that.” Erick grabbed himself some coffee and poured in some milk, saying, “Thanks for the coffee.”

“You’re welcome.”

Erick shifted half his sight toward Ophiel, looking around as he asked, “So how was your reception at breakfast? Better than last night?” He asked, “You did go to breakfast with everyone, didn’t you?”

“Jane and Nirzir went and got it, to bring it back while you were sleeping.” Poi began, “They told me that everyone seemed a lot nicer, and that…”

– – – –

With knife in hand, Nirzir Void Song stood over the corpse of her enemy and stared down at her own defeat.

She cried a little.

Waveni, her current instructor on the ‘fine art’ of cooking, also stood over the corpse of Nirzir’s defeated enemy. The older woman frowned at the mangled onion. Then the old woman laughed, loud and boisterous, and said, “Looks like you ain’t never done this before, girlie!”

“I’ve chopped an onion before!” Once. Literally once before. “But this was different.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve, saying, “And it never made me cry so much. I swear, I can do this.”

Waveni and several other nearby cooks laughed at that.

After breakfast, which had been so much better than the stew— The stew was good! But Nirzir knew she would be eating that stew a lot, and she did not look forward to that.— Nirzir had inquired after learning to cook, from the cooks themselves. Waveni had taken an instant liking to Nirzir for her desire to help, and so, here Nirzir was, in the kitchens between mealtimes, learning how to make the stew that she was already dreading. And she was failing at this very first step. Chopping onions shouldn’t be this hard!

A little while ago, Waveni had shown Nirzir how to chop up an onion, properly, and then told Nirzir to try. The old Cook’s onion was perfectly minced to pieces no bigger than her pinky fingernail. Nirzir’s onion was chopped unevenly, with each piece varying from thumb sized to fingernail-clipping sized.

Waveni chuckled and glanced to the mountain of onions left to chop, sitting in a large stone bowl to the side. There had to be a thousand onions there! And then she laughed louder when she looked to the empty stone bowl that was meant to hold the final chopped product. Nirzir stood in between the bowls, with her own table, and her own cutting board, and her own problems.

“My oh my! You have a task, if’n I do say so.” Waveni smiled wide, saying, “You’ll learn eventually. Just try not to cut yourself. I got faith in you, girlie, so go on, and keep chopping!”

Nirzir Void Song knew of the philosophy about cooking. She knew the recipes to some of her favorite foods. She understood the ideas behind feeding a hundred people from the same pot. But what she didn’t understand was the idea of not using magic to chop, or to mix, or to do anything except for heating, and even that was kept to a minimum. Mostly, they burned wood to heat their ovens, but Nirzir could tell there was magic in those metal boxes, stirring the air, or something.

And so, with knife in hand, and knowing that even if she slipped, the knife they had given her was very much not sharp enough to actually injure her, Nirzir said, “I can do this.”

Waveni smiled, then swiped off the mangled remains of Nirzir’s onion into the final product bowl, saying, “It don’t gotta be perfect on your first try, but I expect near enough to perfect by the thousandth onion. Just remember, you gotta chop off the roots and the head and take off the outermost skin, too. Can’t be getting that trash into the stew.” She walked away, saying, “Keep at it!” And then she gestured at another mountain of vegetables, saying, “And then you can move onto the white root!”

Nirzir paled a little. She cried a little. She told herself it was mostly the onions.

A crazy question struck her in that moment: Why would anyone create vegetables that made you cry when you cut them! Some sadist archmage, no doubt. Erick wouldn’t make something like this, for sure!

That, and many other questions filled Nirzir’s mind as she proceeded to learn how to handle a knife. It was much more difficult than learning how to handle a [Flying Sword] spell. She had skill with magic! She had no skill with this… this mundane shit!

… But she would learn, dammit. She would learn.

Apparently, Erick liked cooking—

And let’s just ignore those slippery, flighty feelings. Think instead about how living a life without magic could lead one to more power than any other public archmage to ever come before! (Except for the Headmaster; he didn’t count in this scenario.) Erick had flown to the top of the world, to become a dominant power. And he built his entire base on the basic building blocks of this New Cosmology. He spent his entire life doing things the mundane way, listening to the world around him, and paying attention to the details. And if that was all it took to become an archmage, then others would have come first, and so, there was something special about that man.

Maybe there was merit to the mundane, beyond the obvious.

Or maybe it was just as simple as what everyone in her family had said: Once you learn about the mundane, then you can learn how to make magic influence the mundane, and end up with massive multipliers larger than ever before. It was all about forming the spell just exactly right, like drawing a perfect circle with a sweep of the hand, or telling a person the exact right thing they needed to hear, or parrying a sword with your own and then counter attacking…

It was about holding the knife, just right, to inflict the maximum amount of change, using the least amount of power, so that when you did use all of your power, the stroke of the knife would be massive.

But maybe the truth of Erick’s power was more how Nirzir imagined it to be. Maybe there was something more important than mundanity. Maybe, the most important thing was about doing the right thing, at the right time. Maybe, the best magic came about from connecting with others, and from not retreating from the world.

All magic came from everyone, after all, so therefore it made sense that it was easier to connect to magic when you connected to others. Maybe, the truth of it all was that mana liked connections. You never heard about archmages past when they make their grandest magics, or after they set themselves up for life with their small deeds done out of sight. (Again, the Headmaster did not count.) Erick was obviously just getting started with his grand deeds, and everything he did was more impressive than the month before.

And it was very nice when he came into her room last night and made her a bed just like his—

Nope.

Put those thoughts away, Nirzir. Remember what Poi said.

She cleared her mind. She focused.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

And so, Nirzir chopped onions, slipping every so often, but learning how to hold the knife better each chop. If it wasn’t for her spellwork she would have lost thumbs and fingertips, many times over.

Waveni came by after Nirzir had gotten through twenty onions, and saw that Nirzir was having trouble. “I know you ain’t used to this life, but I see you trying, and I like that.” She glanced around, and noticing no one nearby, leaned in and whispered, “You can use magic if you keep it small. I won’t tell if you don’t.”

Nirzir felt a great appreciation for the older woman in that moment. She said, “Thank you, but I want to do it correctly, and that means no magic.”

Waveni broke into a wide, happy smile, followed by a laugh. “Good for you! We’ll make a Cook out of you, yet! How many levels you got, girlie? You need it, I can get the guardians to get you in on some monster kills.”

Nirzir felt even more appreciation for the woman. All of Clan Pale Cow seemed to be a lot more welcoming than she had expected.

But she couldn’t take that offer. Nirzir said, “Thank you, but my brothers took me out for some monster kills almost a year ago. I’m already Classed.”

“Well you just work on them onions, then.” Waveni said, “We want to have the ingredients in the cauldron before we hitch up the cows and get traveling again. I reckon we gots about three hours before that happens.”

Nirzir nodded—

She readily asked, “Do you eat things other than stew? I liked the fried bread this morning!”

“Oh my yes!” Waveni laughed, and the other nearby Cooks joined her. “We eat more than stew. We even had rice last night, though I prefer it the way I make it— nothing against your man, though. What’s his name? Poi?”

“Yes; that’s his name.” Nirzir did not say how every meal should have good rice, and that rice didn’t count as ‘other things’, and that the way Pale Cow made rice was an abomination. Seriously! Who boils rice in a bucket and calls that ‘rice’! But Nirzir held her tongue.

Waveni smiled, saying, “We make everything you’ve ever had! Dumplings, pies, pastas—”

An older man exclaimed, “Curries and steamed rice! The boiled stuff can’t compare!”

Waveni turned on the man. “You cook rice your way when I’m dust, and not a moment sooner! You understand me, Jorn?”