Daniel and I get back to work on our respective tasks shortly after I get my new hand. Duncan is working on the schematics for the devices he wants Daniel and I to craft and says he won’t have them ready until tomorrow, so once Daniel and I finish our work, we decide to leave the Necromancers Guild and explore the city some. We say goodbye to everyone with a promise to return first thing in the morning.
“A whole afternoon ahead of us in a medieval fantasy city! How exciting. Anything you want to do now that we have some free time? Maybe hit up a few taverns?” Daniel asks as we leave the guildhall and enter the street.
“Didn’t we get into enough trouble last night?” I respond.
“We barely even remember last night. It hardly counts.”
“Let’s take it easy until Clark is back among the living. And I don’t think Corvax can take another night like that for a little bit. Big guy looked pretty fucked this morning.”
“Yeah, he did, didn't he?” Daniel chuckles. “So what the hell do people even do for fun around here? Watch combat sports and plays and shit?”
“Who knows, but I bet there are some pretty kick-ass shows with magic being real and all. Let’s just wander around for a bit, maybe find a nice restaurant.” I suggest.
We walk through the streets of the city with no particular goal in mind. We stop in a few interesting looking shops to peruse their wares, but don’t buy much, as we have no consistent way of making money yet. We still have a lot of money looted from the city, but it won’t last forever, and I’d rather not sell most of the stuff we have until I get a chance to really study it.
While wandering around, I notice a ton of things about the people here that I was too busy to see before. Almost everyone is walking around armed to varying degrees. Most people seem to at least have a dagger on them if not a sword or spear or something bigger. Some of the more mage-oriented people also have magical fields around them, preventing my spatial senses from getting close to them. I have to stop myself from subconsciously changing my spatial perception field after a few people give me the stink eye for accidentally breaking through their protections. I also notice a few people with an energy distinctly different from mana, much like Corvax’s sunlight energy. I can’t tell what the energies are other than that they are not sunlight.
While we walk, I continue to experiment with my new hand, getting more and more used to it. The look doesn’t really bother me at all, despite a few people clearly staring at it. I’ve seen a few other people walking around with prosthetics, but none are made of pearly white bones like mine is. After about two hours of walking around, I start to feel the familiar pain of my body straining against the mana it contains, and I know I either have to vent some mana or use it soon.
I start to let mana seep out of the bones and form a skin around my new prosthetic, growing it thicker and thicker as I release more mana. By the time I finish, my new hand is about the same size as my natural one, albeit very green. It’s also much easier to keep the mana in the shape of a hand when I have some nice bones to anchor it to instead of just creating a free-form arm.
Eventually Daniel and I find ourselves in some kind of market square with stalls set up all around selling everything from food, clothes, and books to weapons, mana stones, and a few enchanted items. Daniel buys some new clothes and a few other things, which he stores in his bag of holding while I walk over to a familiar face at one of the stalls, Selle.
Her stall is selling a few different things, mostly spices and textiles, but one section catches my eye. She has several items I recognize from Earth, namely a bunch of clothes, but also a few other things, like electronics.
Selle walks over to me as soon as she finishes a sale with another customer. “Missing a taste of home? Also, nice hand. I see you’ve got some bones in it now. Getting chummy with the Necromancers Guild?”
I shrug my shoulders. “You gotta do what you gotta do.” I point at a pile of cell phones, tablets, and laptops, four in total. “How much for those?”
“All of them? Two hundred and fifty gold.” She replies promptly.
I pick up one of the phones and try to turn it on, finding out it’s dead. The rest are all the same. “Two hundred gold, I’m going to have to figure out how to charge them to make them work.”
She stops and thinks for a few seconds before smiling and accepting the deal. I hand over two hundred of my quickly diminishing gold and put all of the electronics in my storage core for later. Hopefully some of us from Earth can figure out some way to charge these, maybe a guy with a lightning skill or something?
“You still interested in going back to that city for an expedition?” She asks me before I leave.
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“Yeah, if it pays well, but it’s going to be a little bit before I can leave. I have some stuff to finish up here.”
“Understood. I’ll come find you when I have more of a plan.”
Finding my way back to Daniel is pretty easy, as his mana is easily recognizable after all the time we’ve spent around each other. I tell him about the Earth electronics, and he obviously offers to help find a way to charge them. Soon we find ourselves back at the inn with Corvax and his family, eating dinner and catching up. Daniel and I decide to go to sleep early, as tomorrow is another day full of crafting more components for Clark’s resurrection.
I wake up a few hours before the sun rises, mostly due to my body needing less and less sleep as I level up, and get dressed and ready for the day. I walk out into the common room of the inn, already finding Daniel at a table eating breakfast. I walk over to him, getting myself a bowl of some kind of oatmeal with fruit in it from the innkeeper before sitting down. The innkeeper also gives me a letter that arrived last night, with my name on it.
The envelope is a pristine white with red wax sealing it closed. The wax seal is stamped with an image of a man stepping through a doorway, which I realize is actually a portal, not a doorway. That means this is probably from the Spacers Guild. I was told they’d probably reach out to me as soon as they could. I’m kind of impressed they managed to find me so quickly.
“Secret admirer?” Daniel says as he nods to the envelope sealed with wax.
“More like some Game of Thrones shit, probably.” I say as I sit down and eat my breakfast, watching Daniel squirm as he clearly wants to know what’s in the letter. After savoring my meal, I can’t hold back my own curiosity anymore and break the seal on the letter.
Inside is a folded piece of paper with a very neatly written message inside. The language is not English, but I can read it regardless, thanks to the [System] translating things.
Dear Initiate Ray,
I hope this letter finds you well in this confusing and chaotic world you now find yourself in. I am Loranor Hargreeve, the guildmaster of the Barad branch of the Spacers Guild and the patriarch of House Hargreeve. I write this letter to you as an invitation to come and discuss certain matters that I believe will greatly benefit the both of us. I have heard of some of your exploits, and I have to say I’m very interested in meeting someone who can accomplish as much as you have in as little time as you have. Please come and visit me at the Spacers Guildhall at your earliest convenience.
May the Sovereign show you the way.
Loranor Hargreeve.
Huh, very polite and cordial, makes me think he’s up to something. And I don’t like how he knows so much about me. Something feels fishy. And who is the Sovereign? Another Great Being, perhaps. I pass the letter to Daniel and watch him read it before he hands it back to me.
“This is some Game of Thrones shit.” He says immediately after reading it. “This guy definitely has some sort of scheme. I wouldn’t go. Especially after you broke past their barrier the other night, he might know about that.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too. I’ll ask around a bit first to see what kind of guy he is before making a decision. And I’d appreciate if you went with me, maybe Corvax too, just in case.”
“I’m in. But we should head back to the Necromancers Guild now and get an early start on the day.”
Ten minutes and a few portals later, Daniel and I are being led back to the undead workshops by a receptionist. We walk into the room holding Clark’s body, finding everyone else already there and working. Duncan hands us a set of schematics for something called a Soul Harness and tells us to be extra careful and precise when making it, as it’s what will keep Clark's soul tethered to his body.
The device itself is three concentric metal rings embedded with several dozen crystals, making use of a plethora of enchantments and skills in tandem. Several of the crystals being used in this will be enchanted by people from other guilds, as I don’t have the necessary skills to create the entire item, just most of it. Apparently this is pretty common, and almost every guild offers some kind of enchanting service based around that guild's specialty.
The smallest ring will be about four inches in diameter, and the largest will be almost eight. When I ask how that will fit inside of Clark, Duncan and Mordak inform me that he won’t need nearly as many of his organs as he did when he was alive. I just shrug and do the work as I’m told. Necromancy is not my forte, and it never will be.
As Daniel and I walk back into the workshop we’ve been using, I get a chance to look at Clark’s body and all of the work that Mordak and Stella have put in to restore it. The right side of his body, which was formerly crushed, is now looking nearly as good as new, with a few large scars across where the worst damage was. His right leg is still missing below the knee, but it looks like they’re getting ready to attach a new one, or maybe just a prosthetic like mine.
They’ve also started implanting the hair-thin wires and crystals Daniel and I made yesterday using small incisions and a magical tool to guide the wires into place. I want to stay and watch more and ask a few questions of the currently very focused Mordak, but these new schematics look pretty complex, so I hold back my curiosity and follow Daniel to get to work on the Soul Harness.
Daniel and I work for about twelve hours with small breaks to eat and rest every now and again before we decide to pack up and call it a day. In terms of personal progress, today was the first day in a little while I actually made some decent gains. All of my skills and passive skills, except [Space Control], gain at least one level, and my level increases to thirty-one after the completion of a particularly difficult part of the Soul Harness. I take a look at my stats for the first time in a little while as we leave the guildhall, deciding to save my stat point selection until I know a little more about each stat.
[Ray Alder] - [Self-Made Space Mage] lvl 31
Race
[Human]
Active Skills
[Space Control] lvl 21
[Mana Shaping] lvl 20
[Concentration] lvl 13
Passive Skills
[Mana Sense] lvl 19
[Mana Stabilization Field] lvl 12
Traits
[Adaptive Affinity]
[Beast mana-heart]
[Mana-Body Synchronization]
Constructs
[Mana Concentration and Circulation System]
Affinities
[Space]
Stats - Body
[Strength] - 32
[Dexterity] - 38
[Constitution] - 38
Stats - Mana
[Regeneration] - 127
[Capacity] - 60
[Resistance] - 30
Free points: 3
We pretty much repeat the same activities from the day prior and wander the city for a few hours before heading back to the inn to eat dinner with Corvax and his family. During the day I did end up asking Mordak what he knows about Loranor Hargreeve, the guy who sent me the letter. He’s an entrepreneur who started his own Great House and, like me, is a primary space mage, although he does have other affinities too. Unsurprisingly, he’s not much of a fighter, having made his fortune through moving up in the Spacers Guild as a talented space mage and craftsman. Mordak tells me that while he’s never met the man, he knows that he is quite ambitious and solely focused on pushing his House up to the top of Helot’s social ladder.
I make a mental note to visit the guy soon, but after we bring back Clark. I don’t want to distract myself from this project. It deserves all my attention. Before bed I work through some exercises I made up to try and train my mana skills, mostly involving trying to control a large amount of mana outside my body or by quickly creating and then reabsorbing mana swords. I end up falling asleep with enough extra mana capacity that I should be able to sleep for a few hours before any pain from having too much mana wakes me.