“You’re sure this is going to work?”, Ephi chimed, giving a nervous glance over her shoulder back towards where she knew one of my eyes was, carefully placed into the bark of a tree near the stream.

“I’m not sure of anything, Ephi,” I admitted, giving the empathic equivalent of a hopeless shrug, “But we’ve prepared about all we can for something like this. The rest is just going to have to come from us being careful and trying to stick to the plan. We’ll improvise if we absolutely have to.”

Even calling it a plan was a bit of a stretch. It was more like a network of contingencies that we could fall back upon rather than a single, clear cut path.

It had taken a little while for me to settle my thoughts down onto a single option to ascend—for now, anyways. There was a price to be paid for this: mana, time, attention, all things that I only have so much to spare. If ascension traits truly were random like I expected and my choice behaved similarly to what I had come to expect, then I’d need to manage to get two ascensions into fostering intelligence.

Knowing how random chance worked, this was a scary prospect without knowing how wide the pool of traits to choose from was. At the very least, I knew it wasn’t endless thanks to my experiments with the plants, since I’d seen several traits pop up multiple times, spanning across different species of crops.

All of that for a chance to pitch my case to someone capable of understanding it.

If I was going to do this the right way, the moral high road that I deeply hoped I’d be able to find a way to stick to, then I needed to make sure my pitch was airtight.

So, I focused on the hierarchy of needs. Being able to provide shelter from the elements and predators to any potential recruit was a huge leg up for survival; even if it wasn’t enough to earn their trust, I doubted anyone would turn down a warm place to sleep and an effortless source of food in the middle of the winter here. Aside from that, I could promise growth—physical and intellectual, so I could appeal to those who just wanted to get stronger or those who were simply curious to learn.

Hopefully it would be enough.

The pine marten, while it seemed like it might be useful, overlapped quite a bit with Ephi as far as usefulness went, with its main draw being its variety of skills and potential to hunt. Similarly, the sparrow’s stats were fairly low and it seemed that it would be best served as a flying scout. While this seemed useful, it lacked durability and seemed like it wouldn’t be fit to do any other work without struggling greatly.

I chose the fox, in the end. It wasn’t a flawless choice by any means, and I already figured that I’d need to set some ground rules between it and Ephi, but we’d make it work.

With that in mind, our first step was the preparation of bait. Given the fox’s nature as a scavenger and omnivore, it would eat just about anything; however, I figured that if I put something particularly enticing out, it might not be able to resist going for it. To that end, I build off of the pipe leading down into the reservoir from the river, using it as a point to branch off and construct a net in a sort of closed funnel shape.

A minnow trap.

Woven from plant fiber, I figured it would work similarly to ones I’d gotten to use in my childhood back on Earth, so I left it to sit for a few hours until a few small whitefish had gotten stuck within. Given that I couldn’t exactly kill the fish myself without setting up a convoluted machine or dropping something heavy on them, I simply brought the funnel up to the surface and had Ephi take care of them. They weren’t any trouble at all for her, though I took note of the fact that I could have resynthesized one of them, too.

Taking care of fish seemed like it was outside my capabilities for now… though admittedly I might have just been biased. I’d had a fish tank once, ages in the past.

Dogs were simple. You feed them, groom them, and play with them and they’re happier than you could ever imagine. But fish? Their entire environment had to be carefully-controlled, and the smaller that environment was the easier it was to throw it all askew. If a fish was surviving somewhere already, it was because it was evolved to do so; taking it from that place and trying to replicate it was just asking for trouble.

I briefly tried to walk Ephi through the process of gutting and filleting our catch afterward.

“You… want me to drain its blood, remove its scales and bones and organs, then remove its head? That sounds barbaric,” Ephi recoiled, staring down at the small pile of silver-scaled fish we’d collected.

“It’s called cooking, and it’s an art, Ephi. Not everyone is satisfied with eating whatever they find on the floor.”

“Boss, you were literally just telling me that the plan was to leave these on the floor as bait.”

I paused for a moment. Technically, she had caught me there.

“Right. Well, cooking food makes it easier to eat and easier for your body to extract the nutrients from. More importantly, it tends to amp up the smell quite a bit, so in our case it’ll help catch the attention of our wily friend-to-be.”

She sat upright for a moment, actually shrugging her shoulders in a movement that actually caught me off-guard. “Just seems like a lot of work when it would probably follow just about anything we laid out for it. It’s just a wild animal, right?”

“I’m not even going to try to approach this subject,” I surrendered, “What’s with the shrug, anyways? That’s not even how I’ve seen you shrug before—that’s a human shrug.”

“Oh, that?”, she snickered, looking proud of herself, “I saw the people in that camp doing it while they were talking!”

“Ephi, please,” I sighed in exasperation, “Don’t copy the humans. They’re bad role models.” She really did learn quick, even if it caught me off guard far too often for my liking.

We eventually reached something of a compromise: since Ephilia really didn’t want to have anything to do with gutting the fish, we opted to just… cook them as-is.

Somewhere, a classically trained chef wept.

We skewered them—by which I mean I constructed skewers right through them—and we moved them to the boiler room to borrow their fire. The managermite in charge seemed a bit suspicious of Ephi’s intentions as she hauled the stick over to the fire, batting a few of its legs in her direction as if shooing her off, before giving up and begrudgingly returning to its duties as overseer.

They didn’t cook very nice, I’d fully admit to that. I’d roughed it plenty of times in my life, but never ‘roughed it’ to the point of smoking a whole, unprepared fish over a subterranean firepit. Still, as Ephi had said, it was a ‘wild animal’, so I hoped it wouldn’t be that much of a stickler for fine cuisine.

Setting the bait came next. My goal was to create a sort of breadcrumb trail towards the pit trap using our bait, having the manamites dice the fish into smaller chunks to be split up between Ephi and my horde. I handled the half of the path closest to home while she went abroad, carrying hunks of fish out of one of our many exits and spacing them out along the forest floor.

The trail was about halfway finished when I stopped myself.

“Hey uh, Ephi? Don’t be mad, but… all of this might have just been for nothing.”

“…What do you mean? What’s going on?”, she asked, tilting her head and slipping into a hidey-hole while we conversed.

“So, hmm… well, I’ve been approaching this problem the way a human might. I’m pretty sure there’s a way easier way to do this. I’m going to get to work on that, but would you mind gathering all of the fish we laid out and bringing it back to the cage?”

She sat entirely still for a moment, before tilting her head back and letting out a squeak of frustration.

The ‘dungeon method’ of solving this problem really seemed like it would be easier, faster, and way less prone to failure.

I was just going to build a cage around the damn thing and call it a day.

Since the fox was nice enough to pen itself into a burrow, it was almost comically easy for me to expand outwards closer to it, enough that I could actually get a sense for the tunnel’s layout.

Three exits, with the fox sleeping down in a hollowed-out chamber towards the center of the mess of burrows. I waited until the fox fell asleep, then got to work at barring off the exits, anchoring the grates to the stone below and forming a large cage around the animal. Next, I began to hollow out the area beneath it into a small chamber connecting to a narrow, hastily dug tube connecting right into the cage through the wall.

Chipping the earth out from beneath the sleeping vulpine was simple enough—and more importantly, almost entirely silent as the manamites ate their hearts out. The ground gave way a few moments later, leaving the fox in for a very rude awakening as it plummeted a short few feet onto a pile of dirt below. I capitalized on the time that it was disoriented to seal the way back up as well, leaving it a single direction to move: forward, right where I wanted it.

It seemed shocked and confused, though after the initial moment of terror passed and it realized that it hadn’t been caught asleep by some hungry predator it assumed a posture that would better be described as ‘wary’, with its tail hanging low and its ears swiveling about in search of any noise. It glanced upwards to see a stone grate where it had only just fallen through, standing up against the stone wall beside it to bat a paw against this obstruction overhead.

Eventually it seemed to realize that it wouldn’t be leaving the same way it came and began to cautiously traverse the tunnel I’d made for it, squeezing through towards the faint light of my core room.

It finally reached the exit a moment later, perching atop the ledge leading down into the enclosed floorspace I’d left for the cage, hopping down and landing gently on its paws.

I sealed the exit without a moment of pause.

FOX KIT LVL: 1 NAME: undefined

Skills:

[Stealth I]

[Evasion I]

HP: 9 / 9 CATEGORY: Animal MP: 0 / 0 SPECIES: Fox SP: 5 / 5 SIZE: Small XP: 46% GENDER: ♀ STR VIT DEX INT WIS PER 3 3 4 4 4 7

A common red fox. A creature revered for its cunning and stealth. Paradoxically, it is also a symbol of deceit in many folk tales. Force Level-Up Cost: 15 MP Resynthesize:

Cost: 30 MP

It was in range now, glancing around this alien new environment it found itself in with cold, curious eyes. Then, it stepped towards the bars, and actually began to slip through between them.

I’d barely left more than a few inches of gap between the bars—even then, it seemed like it would be far too narrow for it to fit through. Yet it had clearly proven me wrong, getting about halfway through the gap before I panicked and hit it with resynthesis, its eyes struggling to stay open for a few moments as its entire body grew heavy, falling onto the floor with a soft thump.

FOX KIT RESYNTHESIS IN PROGRESS

Please choose one of the following paths of ascension:

➤ Paw Setae

➤ Gigantism

➤ Eagle Sight*

➤ Enhanced Regeneration*

➤ Kindled Intellect

[Biology I] options are marked by *.

“Ephi, help me push her back into the cage while she’s knocked out,” I asked, already starting to beef up the bars in the other parts of the cell. She hurried over and planted her front paws on the sleeping fox’s face, its tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth as she pushed with all of her strength, scooting it back in while I finished dealing with closing the place off.

I’d wanted it to not feel claustrophobic, ideally to make it feel less like a trap. Safety had to come first, though.

I’d gone into this nearly full on mana, but the costs would add up quickly I knew. At the very least, I needed [Forged Sapience] and [Core Link I], ideally [Core Link II] though.

Experience Requirements Bypassed.

FOX KIT has increased to LVL 2.

FOX KIT has gained 2 skill points.

INTELLECT has increased by 1.

1 skill point spent on [Core Link I]

1 skill point spent on [Core Bond I]

This was a good start—and [Core Bond] would even allow me to mooch even more experience off of the fox. Even if she didn’t decide to stick with me, at the very least I’d get some experience occasionally as a consolation prize.

Ephi left once I had that sorted out—for as intensive as this process was to me, there wasn’t really much to look at aside from our potential employee lying on the ground out cold, drooling on the stone tiles.

Forty-five mana gone already—this fox’s ascension costs hit hard, far harder than Ephi’s had.

FOX KIT RESYNTHESIS IN PROGRESS

Please choose one of the following paths of ascension:

➤ Aquatic Mobility*

➤ Mana Processing*

➤ Fortified Immunities

➤ Iron-Infused Fangs

➤ Scentless*

[Biology I] options are marked by *.

Hm. Not seeing [Forged Sapience] in the running certainly hurt a bit, and I couldn’t help but feel like I’d wasted my mana because of it. None of these choices were a smoking gun like that one was—hell, at this point I’d have even settled for [Gigantism] or [Enhanced Regeneration] if they were still an option.

[Scentless] sounded like it might have potential if I used her as a scout—it would play well with her skills in stealth, but at the same time I felt like she’d be better served doing other things. [Iron-Infused Fangs] was an offensive option; while we weren’t exactly well off if things broke out into a fight, having a fox able to bite slightly harder seemed like the wrong way to go about fixing that. [Aquatic Mobility] seemed worthless in my situation, and [Fortified Immunities] was vague.

[Mana Processing] sounded promising but suffered from being vague as well. Just about anything involving mana seemed like it had potential to help us out tremendously and open up the possibility for a proper magic user that didn’t tucker herself out after using it.

So that was what I picked. The fox's body glowed with my power briefly, indicating that the ascension was taking place right alongside the first one.

⧱ Mana Processing ⧱

This beast's body contains adaptations to its digestive systems to allow it to extract significantly higher quantities of mana from food and drink than average. Common among magical beasts like unicorns, dragons, and phoenixes.

TYPE:

Trait

Well, that was a complete waste for now, then. While it sounded like it would provide a boost to her regeneration later on, her capacity was zero, just like Ephi—and that meant it was dead weight. I'd sincerely been banking on this trait being one that might actually 'unlock' the ability to have some amount of mana capacity.

To make matters worse, just as I’d feared, one other pattern stayed true.

The cost increased, and it added requirements as well. Same as Ephilia’s had been: level three, and the mana cost had doubled.

So I’d need fifteen mana to level her up one more time, and then sixty to actually roll the dice on another ascension.

At least she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I moved the prepared fish onto a platter in her cell, the manamites dragging the fish-chunks in through the bars and assembling them alongside a few assorted berries and nuts. Probably the closest thing to an actual meal I’d made in ages. I also took a moment to create a trough of water from the zen waterfall all the way to her cage, slipping under the bars so she’d have something to drink at least.

Sitting at about fifteen mana remaining, it didn’t make much sense to give the fox another level-up without being able to push into her next ascension right away, so I didn’t bother. Having some liquidity was useful—it allowed me to be flexible with my plans and not get caught off-guard.

All in all, the biggest hitch we’d run into had been pure, random chance, and that was something we couldn’t ever entirely mitigate. Not a bad run all things considered.

CORE-TOUCHED FOX KIT LVL: 2 NAME: undefined

Traits:

[Kindled Intellect]

[Mana Processing]

Skills:

[Core Link I]

[Core Bond I]

[Stealth I]

[Evasion I]

HP: 9 / 9 CATEGORY: Employee? MP: 0 / 0 SPECIES: Fox SP: 5 / 5 SIZE: Small XP: 0% GENDER: ♀ STR VIT DEX INT WIS PER 3 3 4 5 4 7

A common red fox imbued with the auric touch of a dungeon core. A cunning and playful beast that's known for causing mischief. Force Level-Up Cost: 15 MP Criteria for Next Ascension Tier:

Cost: 60 MP

Level: 3

The fox herself would be out for a while I figured, so I took the time to examine her a bit closer to make sure she was in good shape. I didn’t see any wounds or scars, and for the most part she seemed hale and healthy, if perhaps a little malnourished. Her rust-colored fur was matted with dirt, dull and glossless. We’d bathe her another day once we could trust her enough to roam freely around the dungeon.

She slept, while I returned to tending the garden and checking on the tea leaves. My mana was well and truly stretched thin at this point, between my desire to expand the garden, grow my horde, push Ephi towards that ‘primal ascension’ on her tooltip, and now the fox as well. We’d definitely need more money sometime soon.

Thankfully, the tea would be our salvation to that. I already had a plan forming.

While Ephi returned to foraging, I retreated to the sealed-off icebox, using it as a temporary laboratory for a new experiment. Product was important, of course, but the storage, transportation, and presentation of that product was almost even more so. Tea leaves were one thing to sell, and I wouldn’t be putting any frills on Cheshire’s order; he was getting bulk leaves, plain and simple, just as we’d agreed upon. For my other potential customers, I had far grander plans.

Tea bags would certainly be popular, assuming they weren’t already known in these parts. Given that Cheshire seemed to prefer to prepare his tea ‘barbarian style’ by simply putting leaves into his cup, maybe this world didn't yet. But, there was an idea even a step beyond that.

Pre-brewed tea.

Delicately, I used my manamites to conjure the crystal from my hoard, materializing it into a vessel, trying to get a feel for how to finely manipulate a material that seemed to actively resist any attempt to curve it. It took me several tries, half-finished bottles of varying shapes and sizes littering the ground, until I finally settled on a design that felt simple to create. It wasn’t much to look at—shaped like a soft-cornered cube with a neck extending out from the top, made of translucent crystal, but it surprised me with its efficacy. For starters, it seemed more durable than glass. It didn’t shatter when I knocked it over or had the manamites drop it. Capping it would be fairly simple as well, I hoped: while we didn’t have cork and I lacked the precision to make twist-on caps, making a copper bottle cap was almost too easy for me.

It wasn’t even full and it looked like it would be right at home in a liquor store, which was just what I was hoping for. A bit of fine-tuning and this could very well be a luxury product, after all.

With tea, sugar, and ice, I could create a refreshment this world truly wasn’t ready for.

As for marketability, well... it would probably sell better in a place that wasn't a boreal taiga.