I awoke lying on my back in the dirt, staring up into a cloudy sky. My head was pounding, and sitting upright caused bright bursts of pain to ripple through me. The container that housed my forge sat a few paces away, and my lean-to wasn’t far off.

I climbed to my feet, blinking against the pain, and walked over and flopped onto my bedroll. A pair of notifications were glowing red in my peripheral, so bright that they hurt my eyes. I opened them just to get rid of them.

Quest Failed: The Wayward Son

Penalty: -400 Experience and -400 Renown.

You died.

All Renown and Experience gains have been zeroed out.

Damn. I Pulled up both my renown and experience bars and saw that each of them had indeed been zeroed out; I’d lost more than a half-level worth of experience, and while I was still level five, the renown loss was particularly galling.

Renown:

Current level: Unknown

Progress to Unheralded: 0/2000

A whole day of progress, wasted already.

Even worse, the notification I’d received meant that Faye’s husband and son were almost certainly dead. At the very least, they were beyond saving.

I looked down at myself and panicked in earnest, my skin flushing hot as I realized that all the gear I had been wearing was gone, and that a notification had gone out saying I’d dropped several items.

I checked my Constructor’s inventory, frantic, and was relieved to find that I could still print a full set of copper armor. All I seemed to have lost was the bandit gear I’d been wearing. No, that didn’t seem right. I scanned the patterns again; both of my daggers were missing. Shit.

The loss of the blades hurt. But with nothing else to do, I had the Constructor print the sword that the Chainkeeper had dropped. I waited for it to complete its work, then caught the weapon by its hilt as the Constructor released it.

{Poisoned Shortsword}

Grade: F

Item level: 6

Quality: Uncommon

Damage type: Slashing

Physical Attack: 15

Magical Attack: 7

Speed: Fast

Durability: 45/45

Effect: 25% chance on hit to inflict 30 poison damage over 30s. Target is unable to regenerate while under the effects of the poison.

It was a simple blade, if a bit unwieldy; its single-edged copper blade was about a foot in length, with a four-inch hand guard beneath. The hilt was wrapped in smooth, well-worn leather, and the very edge of the blade shone with faint green light. Throwing the blade didn’t seem very doable, though.

I grabbed the point carefully between thumb and forefinger and held it up, but as I’d thought, the weapon was far too heavy for me to throw it with any accuracy, and the risk of cutting myself on the poisoned blade seemed pretty high.

Plus that shit had already killed me once. I dropped the weapon into the dirt point-first and laid back down. The headache, at least, seemed to be going away.

Then I noticed that the invasion timer was still ticking:

Time Until Invasion: 66 hours, 34 minutes.

That actually cheered me up; if I still had that much time, it meant that I hadn’t been asleep for very long. I sipped some water out of the pond and just laid there a while, and when my headache finally cleared, I headed over to the glowing circle in the center of my plot, though the cloud was nowhere to be seen.

I stepped into the light and waited to be picked up, but a message popped up instead:

You recently died and require time to recuperate. You may rejoin the greater world at first light.

I groaned. First light? It couldn’t have been much later than noon; first light had to mean tomorrow. So on top of everything else, I’d lost a full day to prep for the invasion, plus yesterdays renown.

It just didn’t seem fair. It felt like this whole game had been designed specifically to screw its players over. Maybe that was the point.

A quick glance at the builder tab revealed that I had a couple hundred coins to spend, but after all of my recent screw ups, I didn’t have the heart to build anything, knowing that whatever I built would probably end up being the wrong thing in the end.

So I headed over to the forge and opened up the equipment tab, then swiped over to shields. I had some copper to work with after killing the Chainkeeper; the Constructor must have sent the ore straight to the Coffers, because I hadn’t seen the ore drop. Then again, I’d also been busy dying of poison.

Recipe: {Copper Shield}

Requirements: 20 Copper Bars, 6 Weak Flux, 8 Leather Scrap.

{Copper Shield}

Grade: F

Item level: 2

Slot: Offhand

Quality: Common

Armor: 20

Durability 30/30

Modifier available: Mysterious Scale

Result: ??

Chance of Success: 50%

Chance of Failure: 40%

Chance of Catastrophic Failure: 10%

I figured I’d—wait. I doublechecked the recipe; I’d glanced right over the modifier tab. There was a little thumbnail of the scale floating next to its name, and I recognized the item as the glowing scrap of leather I’d looted just before the Chainkeeper’s poison had finished me off.

A fifty percent chance of success seemed decent enough, too. And I couldn’t help but feel that I’d after so much bad luck, I was overdue for a score. I confirmed the prompt and watched the forge go to work.

Twenty copper bars dropped from the bin on the far of the wall, while the scale dropped out of another nearby container. The conveyer belts fed the two items towards the center of the room, where they were dropped into a large metal funnel. The central furnace warmed up, kicking and knocking about, then the printing arms beneath it went to work.

A progress bar popped up in the bottom of my screen, and I waited with clenched teeth as the bar filled, expecting it to fail at any moment.

10%

35%

80%

Success! You crafted {Icescale Shield}!

Your skill in Armorsmithing has increased by 5!

Progress to Intermediate Armorsmithing: 60/100.

My Constructor dinged again, just as it had in the Chainkeeper’s room.

You procced a random upgrade!

{Icescale Shield} has increased in quality to uncommon!

The Constructor dinged a second time.

You procced a second random upgrade!

{Icescale Shield} has increased in quality to rare!

I dismissed all the prompts with a wave and examined the resulting shield, whose outline glowed with an icy blue light.

{Icescale Shield} (Touchstone) (Binds on Equip)

Grade: F

Item level: 9

Slot: Offhand

Quality: Rare

Secondaries: +20 frost resistance

Armor: 30

Effect: As long as this shield is equipped, player is granted the ability: {Ice Reflect I} (Touchstone Ability)*

*A Touchstone Ability may be permanently learned by fulfilling certain requirements. You may only know six Touchstone abilities at a time, and deleted abilities will be permanently lost.

Touchstone cost: Reflect 10 frost-based spells.

Durability 50/50

{Frost Reflect I}

Description: Grants the user an icy shield that lasts 6 seconds. Shield grants 30 frost resistance and will reflect one frost-based spell. Only projectile spells may be reflected, and reflecting a spell will instantly consume the shield.

Cast time: Instant

Cost: 20 stamina

Cooldown: 30 seconds

Next level: Icy shield is no longer consumed after reflecting a spell (but shield will not reflect subsequent spells).

“Huh,” I said, as the shield rolled to the end of the line. I picked it up and slipped my left arm into the straps. The Frost Reflect ability seemed a little niche, but the shield was deceptively light, and the armor alone was worth more than fifteen percent of additional mitigation.

And the shield definitely stood out. It was maybe two feet across and three feet tall, rectangular with ice-blue scales covering its surface. The metal was slightly cold to the touch, despite the heat of the forge it’d just rolled out of. I had the Constructor strip it down and away.

All in all, my gear was appreciably better than it had been before. But at the same time, I had virtually no experience using it. At least with the daggers I’d already known my way around the blades. I headed back out to the lean-to and plopped down on my bedroll, scrolling through the menus of the builder tab to kill some time.

Ezzie said, making me jump.