Chapter 36: The Abble Tree Root Cellar, pt. 1

  Item: Adolescent Abble T(r)een Abble (Red)

  “It’s edible?” Theo asked, catching the abble in his hands.

  Grace answered with her mouth full of delicious-sounding juice and fruity meat. “Yeth, it’sh gathe.”

  That last word she attempted to say wasn’t entirely too clear, but Theo tried it anyway. He bore his teeth down into the juice flesh of the red abble, tearing its thin, crispy skin to reveal another patch of cloudy white fruit that nearly spouted clear, delicious juices. The meat itself was hard and in the tunnel they were in, a resounding echo of his tearing into the thing could be heard. His throat, entirely by itself and without any input from his brain at all, let out a soft moan as chewed meat and delectable liquid ran down his throat. It was likely the best feeling he’d experienced since arriving in this world.

  “Oh thith, thith ith gathe!” he exclaimed as watery abble juice dripped down his moving mouth.

  Grace’s face flashed with another grin and then she turned to start harvesting more fruit from the shattered monster.

  “Ith… Is that allowed?” Theo then asked, swallowing the rest of the large bite he had taken into it before being able to talk more clearly.

  “Of course. This is what the dungeon is producing, after all. It’s called loot. Vanquish an enemy or even without any enemies, make it out alive and you’ve earned the dungeon’s loot and treasures. If you die, well, the dungeon just takes it back and you along with it.”

  “The dungeon takes you?”

  “It absorbs your energy and grows from it. That’s part of its growth type; cultivation. It absorbs your energy, circulates it throughout the entire dungeon to change its affinities to something it can take into its core, then it processes and adds it as its own power. Consider it; in a decade or so, you’ll have an entire abble orchard down here with the best of the best of abbles on the entire continent! Maybe.”

  “A decade?” asked Theo. That was quite a while to wait.

  “Unless you use the dungeon as a mass grave or something, they usually grow rather slowly. Though… Wen did tell me about the massive boost in mana regeneration offered to the villagers from that effigy you created…”

  “I didn’t create it,” Theo groaned.

  “Sure. A +1 mana per minute is pretty big. Maybe not for an expert mage or anything, though it is surely a relatively high percentage of an increase. Consider what would happen if you got this dungeon within the confines of your town, then.”

  Grace beamed intelligence, which in turn radiated wisdom. Together, they conjured a radiant glow around her, unseen to most. Theo didn’t quite get it. What did mana regen have to do with a dungeon’s energy absorption? He shrugged to let her know he was clueless.

  She scoffed, though Theo didn’t think she meant it in any aggressive sense. “Mana is regenerated from your own body’s mental energy, a direct consequence of your mental stat.”

  “I figured,” Theo nodded, showing off his own logical mind’s ability to process information. He knew, deep within himself, though, that there wasn’t a child over the age of five that didn’t know everything Grace was about to spoonfeed him.

  “So, mana regeneration equals mental energy. A dungeon given more mana regeneration…?”

  “Gets more mana regeneration?” Theo attempted. His voice was awkwardly high-pitched for some reason.

  She scoffed again, this time with a slight edge as her eyes rolled into her skull. That was an exaggeration, but, well, you know. “Yes, which is mental energy, which is one of the types of energies it absorbs and grows bigger and stronger from.”

  Congratulations! You have gained the Level One skill Dungeon Lore.

  Dungeon Lore (Level One): Studious in thine endeavours of holes most dank, thy mastery of musty shafts and misty chasms hath emerged. All stats +5.

  “Oh! So the dungeon will get that bonus as well? Are you sure?” That seemed too good to be true, though it was only a single mana per minute. Then again, and Theo rechecked his current stats to be sure, that +1 mana regen from the effigy was more than double his normal regen. It had gone down from 1.93 yesterday to 1.04 currently. He had already gained two skills since he checked last, though, meaning it had probably risen along with his mental stat.

  “It’s pretty common that all establishments that can be affected by a bonus in a city, get that bonus. Besides, that effigy you made up there has to be really high-tiered, so it might have a bunch of other bonuses your town just can’t receive yet.”

  Theo’s messages about the effigy had mentioned that more bonuses might become available later, he agreed. Though, one word she’d said stood out to him. “In a city, you said. But what about a town?”

  “They’re generally the same thing, but cities are of a higher tier. Yours is technically not even a town yet, but a starting village. You can’t increase this tier before your first ranking, normally. Passing the ranking will automatically upgrade the ‘village’ to a ‘town’. The next tier is ‘large town’, then ‘regional hub’, ‘city’, ‘grand city’ and, lastly, ‘continental hub’. Ercheat is the only one to stand at that last tier, though we all just call it a city anyway. It’s easier.”

  “Huh.” Theo did not know that. The Town Management System hadn’t mentioned it, either. It was named the Town Management system, after all, so why… Well, if it automatically became a real town after the two-year immunity was up, then the downgrade was technically always temporary. Any and all villages that survived their first ranking became towns, after all. The ‘village’ tier was a trial tier. Good to know, though there wasn’t too much he could use that information for.

  “Anyway, this tree is barren, now. Let’s continue,” Grace suggested, catching Theo’s attention and focus. He nodded in agreement and followed her through the rooty tunnels. Where were all the abbles, though?

  It was another few minutes of rather slow progress through the tunnels where Theo once more continued his tale. He found the conversation relaxing. Grace was easy to talk to and while she wasn’t much of a conversationalist when he told the story, she made her attention on him and the story clear and noticeable.

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  Then another treen was upon them, this one standing ready around the bend. It must’ve heard them approaching, whether by their footsteps or Theo’s voice, it didn’t matter. Grace easily caught the red orb the treen had shot toward her. It vanished with nothing but a flick of the woman’s wrist, then she disappeared entirely from Theo’s eyes. Next thing he heard was a resounding crack of wood, then the hollow sound of wooden debris falling onto the hard floor below. Theo rounded the bend, finding Grace sitting low over its bushy crown with a single fist extended into its head, or, uh, the top of its trunk. The treen had split from the middle down in a neat, almost entirely clean cut. Only a few sections of wood had splintered off of it and been blasted away this way and that.

  Theo instantly knew that she’d only been showing off earlier. She’d gone easy on the first treen. This, the sorry excuse for a broken tree he was seeing now, was utter annihilation.

  “You disappeared,” he breathed in surprise.

  “Magic,” she said exuberantly.

  “But you didn’t cast a glyph,” Theo noticed. She didn’t do that earlier either, now that he thought about it.

  “Nice of you to notice,” she beamed again, this time a bit more smugly, if that was possible. “There are a few types of spells available. You’re likely thinking of those that are most similar to your own, the weaved ones. Weave a glyph in the air and a magic circle will appear. Not much is known about those, but it seems to complete the spell for you and the intended effects are resolved after that. Am I right?”

  That was the only magic Theo had ever seen despite his own sigils, which seemed like a branch of the glyphs, if not the other way around. He nodded to show that that was his understanding of spells as a whole.

  “Okay. As you might expect, not everyone wants to take the time to draw some complicated drawings in the air and wait for an effect to occur if you did it well enough. Consider this, then. What if you were the spell circle? What if you could activate a spell by channeling mana into an already finished spell circle? Of course, this can’t be done with many of the externally driven spells like the wind blade, but the point stands.”

  “There’s a difference in spells? I thought they were all shooty stuff, maybe.”

  Grace laughed at the weak smile Theo gave, and he was glad she took it as the half-joke it was. “There are a large variety of effects. My teachings often refer to them as internal and external. External is-”

  “Fireballs and the like? Wind blade?”

  “Correct. Internal means effects that do something to your body, though not just internally. It’s a flawed concept, and I apologise for that. My blink step spell, for instance, is a short-range teleport. It is internal as it doesn’t act on outside concepts like fire and light.”

  “But can you be the spell?”

  “Easy. A very, very painful process called engraving. I’ll let you consider what that means for yourself,” she teased.

  Theo had enough to go on to make a good guess. If she was the spell circle, for all intents and purposes, due to engraving… Then had the spell circle itself been carved into her? Was that even possible?

  “Can I see?” he then asked. Surprisingly, Grace’s face grew a slight shade more flush in response as she finished harvesting abbles from the broken tree.

  “You clearly don’t know what you’re asking,” she stated matter-of-factly, though with a twang of laughter underneath her voice. “Maybe another time.”

  Theo smiled. “So you just activate a mana b-, uh, a mana channel in the same area and it activates, then?” He had been about to call it a mana blaster, a term he was 100% sure wasn’t a colloquial term.

  “Yes,” she agreed with a nod, then flashed away again as Theo heard a slight rustle approaching from further into the tunnel. Another tree shattered an instant later, then she became visible again, this time dragging a broken treen along with her. It was just the emerald top hat littered with shiny, red balls.

  That was good to know. Having Grace around could prove all kinds of useful. He rather enjoyed her company as well, and with her and Wen seeming more… hesitantly friendly with each other, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Right now, she was his greatest source of knowledge regarding magic, as well, which was too valuable to let go of.

  “Now, you take a moment to figure out how you can use that magic of yours to fight. From what I understand, there might be one of those ‘sigils’ that cause movement. You have the most basic building blocks of glyph-based magic circles, by the looks of it. I want you to fight the next one,” she grinned.

  “It takes quite a bit of mana to experiment even with the book showing me the rather random sigils without any explanation,” Theo growled, not at her, but at the magic system he had been granted. “It would be easier to just get the fire affinity skill and cast a fireball,” he added.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are to be able to say it will be easy to gain fire affinity,” she countered as she let go of the green harvestable object and bent down to pick her some red abbles. “Try searching for something with variables, like your loop sigil. If there’s a vector or direction sigil, it should have variables that are different from that arcane numbering system the loop uses.”

  Theo considered this, then asked: “You know maths?”

  She eyed him as if stating that was a given. He shrugged, then thought some more. Something clicked in his head when he considered Grace’s words. What was it though? He felt he’d seen a message mention vectors, but which one?

  He scrambled, searching through his logs. The past few days had been so full of messages, so it took him quite some time to go back through them in reverse order. The Sigil system, the traits and Boon, the effigy, then Arcana’s notes about his work ethic, the-... He scrolled back down, reading Arcana’s notes again. There it was!

  Congratulations! You have been granted notes on how to be a better servant to Arcana.

  #1: Always consider your main Target T.

  #2: Increase your Range D of skills and abilities.

  #3: You are on the correct Vector K, but don’t stop now.

  Arcana has decided to grant you Boons for your excellent performance. Two Boons have been personally picked out for you.

  Yes.

  Arcana has decided to grant you Boons for your excellent performance. Two Boons have been personally picked out for you.

  Shush! Arcana has granted you Boons for your excellent performance. Two Boons have been personally picked out for you, so you better pay her due respect.

  Arcana has granted you Boons for your excellent performance. Two Boons have been personally picked out for you, so you better pay her due respect.

  Theo was a bit embarrassed now that the logs were laid bare in front of him, but without his, as far as he could remember, very well-reasoned fears of dying laid bare and slipped in between the messages, they were a bit repetitive. He decided to ignore the latter part and focus only on her notes. He didn’t think he’d noticed earlier, what with skimming through most of the messages in a sleepy haze.

  He saw three words that were a bit different than the rest, capitalised and oddly phrased. Then there were the small symbols following them. Sigils, he just knew it. One sigil for ‘Target’, one for ‘Range’ and one for ‘Vector’. With these three sigils, he just knew he would be able to fight!