Chapter 57: Farming 101

Thomas stepped through the portal. Unlike in certain sci-fi shows, there was no sense of traveling through a tunnel. Actually, it was as if he hadn’t moved at all. One moment he was stepping through the dark elves’ portal building; the next, his foot landed on dry ground, and he was in the middle of a sea of waist-high grass.

The portal on this end was set up on a marble plinth with a wide staircase leading up to it. From this vantage point, Thomas saw a red-brown forest filled with oddly diagonal-shaped trees. Above, the sky was a reddish gold, indicating either dawn or dusk. He wasn’t quite sure.

The others arrived right behind him, and all took a few moments to take in the view. Unlike the dark elves’ part of the world, the temperature was much warmer. It was a good 70 degrees, just barely below what he would consider room temperature.

“So… it’s always like this here?” Jo asked, nodding upward. “The sky?”

“Yeah, kind of weird, right?” Thomas said. “We’re in the twilight zone. From their vantage point, the sun is always either setting… or rising. I don’t know which one this is.”

That was a fun discovery from the packet that Jo had been given. It seemed that the elf world, Aether, was a tidally locked planet. So as it orbited, it always showed the same face to its sun.

Well, apparently there was a very, very slight rotation, the equivalent of a foot towards the east a year. Though for all intents and purposes, it was always night on the same side of the planet, always blazing day on the other, with two twilight zones like this where the sun hung perpetually between rising and setting.

Apparently, that twilight zone was where most of the population lived, as it was the most temperature stable. The deepest parts of the night side were covered in ice, and the most brilliantly lit parts of the planet were searingly hot.

Even the dark elves, who tended to stay towards the night side, lived more towards the edge of the dark, where the winds still carried some heat over from the light side.

It was weird and alien, which made sense because it was, of course, an alien world.

“You’d think that the night elves would want somewhere more like what they’re used to, like maybe above the Arctic Circle,” Jo muttered. “Six months of winter darkness a year.”

“Yeah, but then a few months of daytime in the summer,” Thomas reminded her.

“Maybe someone already claimed those spots,” Zach said. “Elves aren’t the only ones who will have colonies, and dark elves are kind of at the bottom of the pecking order, know what I mean?”

That was a sobering thought. Their new allies didn’t have a lot of power.

Thomas shook his head and then started descending the plinth. “Let’s get going.”

The Twilight Zone was the most populated area on the planet, but he wouldn’t know it just by looking at this place. A dirt road cut through the sea of grass, leading to structures that looked like mud huts far in the distance. The guide had said the dungeon was located just before the village.

“How do they know when it’s time to sleep?” Jo asked. “If there’s no sunset or sunrise…”

They all looked at each other and shrugged.

“Aliens,” Thomas said, trying to sound wise. “Maybe they don’t sleep.”

“You really think so?” Jo asked.

“No, Akilah had a bed in his room.”

The dirt road was surprisingly similar to Earth’s, though Thomas supposed there were only so many ways one could create a road. However, there were no cars in sight, only literal wagon tracks, which made sense when they passed people heading down the road with wagons.

The animals pulling the wagons weren’t horses. They weren’t… anything he could easily describe other than “green snotty yak.” Each was large, furry, and green, and seemed to be dripping snot from wide nostrils.

He didn’t think they were sick. It just seemed to be how they were. Yuck.

The green yak team was pulling an equally large wagon, loaded down with… uh, Thomas assumed it was some sort of vegetable. It kind of looked like an orange pine cone. Maybe it was a crazy version of elf corn.

The road was narrow, and the wagon was large enough to take up all the room, so the team politely stood aside in the sea of grass as they drove by.

The dark elves on the wagon looked like a mother and three children. They all wore ratty clothing, and one child was asleep, stretched out on the pile of corn pine cone stuff. Thomas got the impression that they had spent the entire early morning—or whatever equivalent—harvesting.

The elves openly stared at them. Zach raised his hand in a wave, and none of them waved back.

No one spoke, and the wagon trundled on. From the back of the wagon, one of the kids stuck their tongue out at them.

“Friendly folk,” Jo muttered.

“I think the Elf city we came from is kind of the equivalent of New York,” Thomas said, “where you see different people all the time, and the citizens are too jaded to care what you look like. And now we’ve arrived in, I don’t know, rural Alabama.”

“Dudes,” Zach turned to them, excited. “We’re probably the first human beings they’ve seen. Did that count as first contact?”

“I think technically?” Thomas mused. “At least with that family.”

“Awesome.”

“Yeah,” Jo agreed dryly. “One day those kids will be telling tales to their grandchildren of the day they met humans. Let’s shake a tail, boys.”

They walked on. About half a mile down the road they came to a fork, and a sign which the System helpfully translated:

Griffin Trials Dungeon <–

Nonstrel Song Village –>

It was pretty obvious where to go.

The dungeon wasn’t far beyond, and the road dead-ended right up to it. To Thomas’s mild surprise, no one was guarding it. But why would there be? They didn’t have the equivalent of the National Guard surveying people with the security theater of keeping peace.

There was also no clock set out to indicate the turning over of a new dungeon instance.

“Okay,” he said, “we’ll all enter together, but just in case someone doesn’t make it into the entrance room, back out immediately, and we’ll try again in a few minutes.”

The other two nodded, and they entered the white and brown flickering dungeon.

As this was a level 4 dungeon, the entrance room could actually be considered cozy instead of tiny and cramped. It had a hard-packed dirt floor, and yet still seemed to be clean and tidy. The walls even had a nice floral design around the borders, and in the corner sat a single chair.

Zach nodded in approval. “I hear that the entrance rooms get way more elaborate the higher levels you go.”

“Beats the closet-sized room on the first level,” Thomas said. “I never figured out how large parties managed that.”

“Oh, they go straight on through the room into the dungeon without stopping,” Zach said casually. “As long as it’s within the same ten-minute instance, everyone can make it.”

Speaking of instances, Thomas pulled out his pocket watch and marked the time. “Starting the minute countdown… now.”

They had ten minutes to kill, as he had been snuck up on in a dungeon exactly once and promised himself he never would again. It was good sense, and it wasn’t like they were in a rush.

Thomas pulled out his guide and flipped through to the illustrations. “Okay. Remember, for the first part of the dungeons, the griffin nests that won’t collapse under your weight are going to look like this, with a little forked branch sticking out the side.” He turned the guide around so everybody could see. It was an illustration of a bird’s nest hanging off a branch. This particular branch had a secondary fork at the end of it with little twigs sticking out.

“Pick the wrong branch, and the whole thing will snap,” Thomas said. “It could be a long fall.”

“Aren’t there different pathways we could take in this one?” Jo asked.

Thomas nodded. “I’m thinking we take the middle pathway for our first run. It’s the most straightforward.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“I’m down with that,” Zach said. “So, I know we’re after Adaptation mana. What else is good here again?”

Thomas tried to set expectations. “The Adaptation mana is a rare drop.”

“Yeah, but is it rare with your Gift?” He wiggled his eyebrows.

He grinned back. Okay, his Gift was pretty awesome. “We’ll find out. Anyway, the main crystal drop is going to be Wood mana and Sky mana, which… I think might be the elfin equivalent of Air mana?”

He looked at the others, who shrugged back at him.

Either way, this dungeon was marked as one of the easier Level Four dungeons they had access to, but came with a lot of monsters. That was the perfect combination for the team.

Everybody else spent a few moments quietly shuffling through their packs to make sure all weapons were out and everything was in order. They were all concentrating, but the atmosphere wasn’t tense.

For Thomas’s part, he felt a quiet sense of anticipation, which was crazy, considering the anxious mess he’d been when he had entered his first Demon Chicken dungeon back on Earth.

Then again, he had been going in alone, and feeling a little stupid that he was taking any of this magic stuff seriously. Now he had two friends backing him up, they had a goal, and a guide to tell them the safest path through the dungeon.

It helped to know that if things got too hot or too difficult, they could always just back out through the entrance door right away. They had nothing to prove, no guards watching them on the other side, or a line of people waiting for the entrance. All they needed to do was get enough mana to pay for their trip back. And that wasn’t going to be hard. There was a System Marketplace stall in the next town over.

They could do this.

His pocket watch showed ten minutes had lapsed, and Thomas was certain that the dungeon had entered a new instance. He replaced the watch back in his pocket. “It’s time.”

Jo gave a professional nod and unsheathed her Blood Thirst sword.

“All right!” Zach said with a fist pump. “Let’s get us some griffins.”

He opened up the door, and they stepped into unfiltered daylight. Each dungeon apparently was its own pocket dimension, and this one seemed to be based on the light side of the planet. The temperature had ratcheted up another ten degrees instantly, putting it into late spring or summer territory, and the sky way, way above was a piercing blue.

They were also assaulted by the cries of birds from every direction: Squawks, croaks, and screeches bounced off the walls all around. It felt almost like a sonic attack.

Stepping away from the door, Thomas took a good look around. It was as if they stood at the bottom of a giant cylinder. The exit door, he knew, would be at the very top.