《Fantastic Advancement》6 - Materialistic Accumulation
Advertisement
I wake up as gracefully as can be accomplished given my sleeping arrangements being what they are, and after my morning ablutions make my way downstairs, hearing the clicking and ticking of my waiting homunculi. Seeing the seven little mutants in their clockwork harnesses and their diligently obedient faces picks me up way more than it ought to. I even notice that one of them -- not that I can even tell them apart -- has already prepared a meal for me. Just shelfruit hashbrowns sprinkled with different herbs, but it’s warm and pleasant. I need to find some sort of oat or something. There’s plenty of grasses around but they don’t really seem to go to seed the way I’d need for rice or oats. Maybe … hrm.
“Alright... today I want one domestic worker as always, one farmer and one gardener. I want one of you working on creating bolts of reed linen using an upsized loom now that you guys have reasonable reach. I want another of you creating burlap bags to better store the stuff in the root cellar. I want another of you to work on cultivating a domesticated grass. Focus on the seeds being large and plentiful. We’re going to need a lot of this so it should have double the farm-plot space as the carrotatos and shelfruits. The last of you will be domesticating the clusterberries, and building a juicing station and barrels to store them in. This will all begin once all seven of you have completed building a dry-goods warehouse adjacent to the greatoak and connected via tunnel to the root cellar. Also; new general rule: if there isn’t already a building to house the work or product of work for whatever you’re doing or making, there needs to be one. This obviously excludes “naturally outdoors” things like farming. Got it? Okay… break!”
My minions scatter off in a whirring and clicking chaos that somehow manages to come across as orderly. As they do, I set myself to extracting the numbing moss’s essence of exhaustion and, well, numbness. The basic idea here being to create a tonic that I can deliver via splash over a couple of blackbirds in order to capture them and work on extracting from them their essential intellect. My Primitive Biopunk knowledge tells me that once I have the essence I can use a similar method to what I used on the homunculi and basically culture it in vats. That will be … useful.
The work of actually creating those growing vats requires imbuing quartzite crystals with basic sanguinism “grow/heal” essence so that they can accumulate natural or directed light and redirect it down with a low-grade “grow and be sustained” beam of energy. What I wind up with after most of a full morning’s work is little better than an infrared lamp over a bunch of petri dishes, but not having to go through the full process of extracting essences in the future will be a life-saver for repeated work, like the domestication essence that I use as a testing option for the system. My little guys will be able to simply scoop up essence from the correct dish and let it regenerate rather than have to go through multiple alchemical steps to obtain it from the raw source. That should speed up the work significantly.
I also extract the stamina-negating essence from the numbing moss into another dish, clearly labelling both by way of scratching out the essence name on the side of the stone dishes before placing them on the new shelf under the grow-lights. The stuff doesn’t exactly accumulate instantly, but after a few hours the amount I have left over after harvesting for my knockout potions should be enough to make four or five more of them.
Advertisement
I quietly gear up in my “adventuring” gear, again looking like some kind of swashbuckling steampunk pirate, but this time carrying a pair of easily broken clay vials. The nice thing about the knockout potions being drawn from that numbing moss is that the enhanced volatiles will disperse their scent through the air and even if I don’t directly hit the birds they should still wind up falling asleep. It doesn’t take me long, once I go out the pondward gate, to find a small cluster of the birds roosting on a tree. What takes a little longer is tying one of the vials to the front of an arrow so that I can fire said arrow at the branch the birds are on. I don’t want to get too close to the little bastards; they can be vindictive when they are messed with. I’m banking on their simply not having evolved in tandem with human or tool-using beings to fail to associate the arrow with me.
I miss my first shot wildly due to not having the balance correct and not guessing the distance I can fire the arrow correctly, but luckily the vial was sturdy enough that when it landed in the soft dirt it didn’t break, so I still have another two shots left after that first one. The second still largely misses -- I don’t get any of the tincture itself on any of the birds, but one of them actually winds up hopping closer to where the vial had broken to investigate it, and winds up essentially chloroforming itself out of the tree. This, for me, is a wild success.
I quickly dash forward, scoop up the fallen bird, and make a sprinting run back towards the manor even as what seems like half a murder caws and chases after me. I’m careful to carry the little guy in the crook of my arm so as to avoid injuring it as I run and squeeze myself through the gate, but the focus on getting away from the birds causes me to fail to think through the fact that animals that can fly can, well, fly over walls.
I’m screaming about Alfred Hitchcock being an asshole even as I make a mad dash back to the alchemy lab while trying to cover my head from the buggers. Once I’m in, their pecking and pestering at the windows and door of the shed takes an annoyingly long time to taper off -- and I’m fairly convinced it only happens when one of my homunculi “checks in” to see if my shouting had been about changing my orders. One thing’s certain: blackbirds really do not care for giant spiders. I cannot claim this doesn’t endear them to me.
I’ve never actually extracted essence from anything living that wasn’t myself before, and I’m not altogether certain how to go about doing it with the blackbird without injuring it before I finally decide to give up on that agenda and simply start whipping up a sanguine healing tonic to feed to the critter after taking sufficient samples to get what I’m after. Once I get that taken care of, I sit down to start attempting to extract from blood and quill samples what I’m after from the bird, and despite what I’m expecting to begin with the process of identifying the exact traits I’m after for extraction is actually quite intuitive. After alchemically rendering down the blood and feather scrapings together, the fluids seem to part into a colorful mixture in the cauldron and I just know which blots to extract with the pipette to get the essences I’m after. Specifically; the intelligence and social behaviors. After giving it a little thought I realize that it’s a synergistic overlap of the Standard Alchemy and Primitive Biopunk knowledge. As I realize where that synergy is coming from I also notice that my mana bar is filling back up -- and I hadn’t even noticed that the process of extracting those essences from the lavalamp-like psychedelic fluid filling the alchemical cauldron had cost me MP in the first place, though given the sheer intensity of concentration necessary for it I can hardly claim that is surprising. I take special care to start culturing more of the essences as there’s so little to begin with and I don’t want them getting contaminated.
Advertisement
Once I actually heal the bird, it shows signs of starting to wake up so I carefully give it a small dose of knockout tonic again, and now that I’m finished with her I arm back up and climb up a tree near where I originally found her flock and set her down on a branch to recover on her own, hopefully in familiar enough territory that she can go back to her life without incident.
It’ll take a little while for the tiny essence samples I’ve acquired to actually grow into a sufficient size, so I spend that time making larger clay pots to use as grow-vats for what will become my security “dog” workforce. The most difficult part in that all things considered is that each one will require its own dedicated grow-light focused inside of the vat, and the process of infusing sanguine growth essence into quartzite is delicate and therefore not really amenable to any kind of bulk operation. By the time I’m finished with the production of the clay jars and their blood-red quartzite lamps, I check on the intelligence and socialized essences and decide that there’s enough for maybe three attempts at what I’m about to do.
For this work I intend to return back to the stock spiderzilla, and after a bit of fertility-inducing sanguinism get a clutch of healthy egg-sac from a female. This process is made infinitely easier now that I have access to the knockout tonic, mind. Bringing the egg-sac back with me to the alchemical lab, I physically remove a small group of four or five eggs at a time out of the several dozen in the sac and begin the process of infusing them with the intelligence, flocking, and domestication essences. I also add just a bare drop of my own and homunculus essence to the mix on momentary thought. Each of those three small groupings of eggs are then left to slowly mature in the growvats. It’s my hope that by not using my sanguinism directly in maturing them they won’t count against my mana cap. They also won’t be connected to me as completely as my homunculi, but by having included my own and the homunculus essence I should automatically get instinctual acceptance as part of their ‘flock’.
After this, I scribe down everything I’ve done throughout the day back at the research bench -- sadly this fails to unlock anything -- and carry the new journal back over to the study’s library. Rather than sit around and watch my minions work -- and let me tell you, it’s surprisingly soothing to watch a bunch of adorable horrorbeasts clanking around in walker exoskeletons like mutant Tachikoma -- and head over to the weaving area. I snort when I find that it’s actually a tent made of burlap. This won’t do long-term but for now it adds “color” to the place so fuck it. After looking around and seeing that there’s sufficient tools and workspace to do what I intend to do, I head over to the dry warehouse -- much more ruggedly constructed -- and pick up a pair of bolts of reed linen. I can tell they were made today because they are as wide as the previous loom was tall. I then proceed to allow myself to go into fugue-state again with the intention of sewing up a set of three sets of shirts and double-layered pants, with scalehide elbow and knee patches for durability, as well as proper boxers. On the assumption that this won’t take all that long to complete, I also decide to set up a proper pillow and mattress for at least myself, using the collected reed-tuft as a “pillowtop” stuffing.
When I come back from the fugue I find that surprisingly this time what I made was exactly what I’d envisioned, though the mattress wound up being much more like a bedroll due to not having enough of the tuft stuffing material. Still, laying that over the straw-and-burlap mattress will give me the most pleasant sleeping experience I’ve had in months, so I’m not going to argue about it. Rather than sit around and closely investigate my memories of the fugue state, I simply enjoy the feeling of well-fitted non-scratchy fabric -- especially given that it’s been getting hotter of late during the days and the linen is much lighter than the burlap ever was. It actually feels weird to have sleeves again, though. But hey, I’ll get over it.
Heading down to the back wall of the alchemy lab where I arranged the growvats, I crack open the seal on the first just enough to investigate what’s inside, and find myself bombarded by three fist-sized furry spiders. In their juvenile eagerness they escape through the crack rapidly and crawl up my forearm with their abdomen waving to show their joy.
I should really be worried about the fact that I both am not bothered by the babies crawling over me and have intuitive understanding of what their behaviors mean. Somehow, however, I’m not. I had originally intended to harvest the first generation I’ve created to try to make a more sophisticated generation but after seeing the sweet little things I just can’t bring myself to do it, and instead crack open the other three seals as well, netting myself a total of 13 of the spider pups.
It isn’t until I start feeding the little things on live fish that I notice that their forelegs actually have what appear to be multi-jointed tripartite claws rather than what spiders normally have. My mind immediately fills in that this is a product of the influence of my own essence being added into the mix that produced them, and isn’t all that surprising. It will be, however, useful in that it means -- however basic and undeveloped -- these little guys could be trained to be tool users. Watching as they voraciously dig into the fish I’ve given them -- one trout to a pair -- I nod to myself in affirmation that despite their increased domestication compared to the feral spiderzilla, they still have the aggressive instincts of a predator. This is critical to my plans for them. Leaving them to their vicious repaste, I make my way over to the pond-side gate after gathering up a sampling of the enlargened reeds and another bundle of burlap, and start to dig out and construct a basic den for the little guys. Once they fully grow they’ll need more space, but that will come later. After finishing my construction I return back to the lab, where my new miniature murderbeasts are lazing with “the itis” after consuming their first meals. Picking up the dessicated fish corpses and moving them over to the designated rubbish bin for later cleanup, I carefully avoid disturbing the little things as I bring them over to the temporary den -- den or nest? I’m going with den -- for them to sleep in properly.
No real idea if they’re truly going to work out as I hoped, but at the very least I’ve now got my own small pack of highly social subsapient tool-using giant spiders to train into a guard force for my home. My Primitive Biopunk knowledge tells me that they’re going to wind up growing to about 15 to 18 or so pounds when fully mature. Slightly larger than ordinary spiderzillas and my homunculi but not incredibly so.
Advertisement
Wildling
Blurb: Silas--a scavenger living off the ruins of humanity--has spent his entire life fighting tooth and nail to provide for himself and his crew. But when a scavenging run goes awry and he's snatched up by an android patrol, he finds himself thrown into a cage and priced to sell as a pet. And when a suitor comes calling, he fears the worst: that he'll be turned into a Domestic, a human lapdog brainwashed into total obedience. Instead, he discovers an equally disturbing truth: that the creatures who stole his world have created a videogame the likes of which Earth has never seen; a sprawling, game-like theme park where humans are the Avatars and androids are the players who control them. And to make matters worse, his android guide is as hopeless as they come, having gotten all of her previous Avatars killed in record time. So if Silas wants to regain his freedom, he'll not only have to fight his way through a world that was specifically designed to murder him in brutal fashion--he'll also have to convince his android guide that he should be the one calling the shots. FAQS: Q: Who are you, handsome stranger? A: I'm Kyle Kirrin, the author of Shadeslinger, book 1 of The Ripple System, published by Portal Books, and I write crunchy LitRPG. Q: What is Wildling? And is it complete? A: Wildling is a crunchy LitRPG mash up of Fantasy and Science Fiction. And yup, Wildling is already complete at 64 chapters, or about 120,000 thousand words. You're looking at something like a third draft here--it's fairly polished, but it hasn't been picked over by a copy editor yet nor has my developmental editor seen it. Q: Upload schedule? A: 5 initial chapters today (2/15/2021) and one chapter a day for the next month. After that I'll probably slow down to 2 or 3 chapters a week until the story is complete. Q: How crunchy is it? A: It's pretty crunchy. I'd put it on the same tier as Ascend/The Land/RSSG, but it might be a bit crunchier than those three? Q: Is this the first book in a series or a web novel or what? And what are your plans for it? A: It's currently a standalone with series potential. Full disclosure: this story may head the way of my publisher eventually, but will be available on RR for quite a while no matter what. Likely several months after it's complete with plenty of warning before/if it's taken down. Q: What kind of build does the MC create? A: Sword and board! Q: Crafting? A: Plenty! Crafting isn't as center stage as it is in The Way of the Shaman, but it's close. Q: Base building? A: Two fully separate, distinct bases, both of which play a major role in the story. Q: VRMMO? Portal? Reincarnation or what? A: This one's a bit tricky. Basically an advanced race has created a game-like world that closely resembles a theme park. Think Westworld but with copious amounts of loot. And the MC has to fight his way through that to earn his freedom. Q: Permadeath? A: Nope! The MC gets 3 lives to play through the entirety of the game world, and death is extremely punishing, but not fatal. Q: Harem? Or romance? A: No and no. Q: Cursing? Blood? A: Quite a bit of cursing, yeah. There's blood, too, but it's not a gory book by any means. Q: How can I support? A: Instead of a Patreon/donations etc, I'd ask that you consider giving my debut LitRPG Shadeslinger a chance. It's free on Kindle Unlimited and the audio is already out narrated by Travis Baldree. It's an epic fantasy VRMMO where the main character gets 3 days of exclusive access to a new game plus a snarky, talking axe to guide him through it in exchange for agreeing to become the target of a serverwide manhunt once the Head Start period ends. Q: How's it similar to Wildling? And how's it different? A. The crunch level is very similar, but Shadeslinger is a much lighter, epic fantasy take on the genre. It's also VRMMO, but without any real world components aside from the first chapter. The MC is very different--he comes off as a bit of a jerk early on and can take a bit to warm up to, especially before his backstory is revealed--but he's also got a talking axe that constantly puts him in his place. Shadeslinger's a much more humorous story in general, and it's a great deal more polished as well. Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy Wildling!
8 319PK
Unbeknownst to the peoples of the Nine Realms, Ragnarok is approaching. Relationships between the rulers of the Realms have been deteriorating for millennia and are nearing their breaking point. A last ditch effort to suppress hostilities has resulted in the formation of a grand contest between champions of the respective Realms. The Wild Hunt. Can the champions of Midgard triumph and avoid Ragnarok, or will the world end in war? PK is a LitRPG lightly based on Norse mythology, with a small amount of inspiration coming from the lost RPG series Too Human as well.I’ll be uploading a chapter every Monday. I hope you enjoy, and don’t hold back telling me how much you hate it. (Please don’t hate it.)
8 213UnderWorld Mafia System
What would a girl do with a Mafia System? Would she become a Powerful boss? Will she die in the process? Would she become an empress of the UnderWorld? Stay tuned and found out.
8 205Broken Core (A Progression LitRPG)
The world has been shattered, shifted, and rebuilt with the passing of each era. Long dynasties, continental empires, heroes among heroes, felled by the Champions of the Beyond to usher change. An era dominated by true monsters, an era where power is absolute, an era where humanity is at its edge from the apex predators of the period. Monsters unlike anything that the world has seen, machines of precision; merciless with endless ambitions — Dungeons. Once again, a new Champion is selected by the now fading power of the Beyond. Leah. A just formed Dungeon with fragmented memories of a different life and world, a Dungeon with the memories of a human of a different realm. She must learn the harsh reality of what this new world is while trying to stay alive, and more importantly, find out what she is.
8 161Spirit Dragon
Alex had always wanted to be an adventurer. The money, power, fame, and thrill of battle drew him in. Finally, he completes his training at the guild school, top of his class in almost every subject, and starts off his new life of protecting villages, and rescuing innocents. But rather than waking up in a tavern after his first job, he is in the entrance of a cave in the middle of nowhere. Not only that, but his perfectly trained adventurer body has been replaced by a baby dragon! Now, he must join an unlikely team to find out what happened to him and find a way to restore his lost humanity.
8 164My hybrids✔️
𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚒𝚜 𝚊 𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚛𝚢 𝚊𝚋𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚊 𝚐𝚒𝚛𝚕 𝚠𝚑𝚘𝚖 𝚏𝚒𝚗𝚍𝚜 7 𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚖𝚊𝚕𝚜 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚢 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚑𝚎𝚕𝚙 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚐𝚑 𝚜𝚝𝚞𝚏𝚏 𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚖𝚘𝚜𝚝𝚕𝚢 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚢 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚋𝚎 "𝙼𝚈 𝙷𝚈𝙱𝚁𝙸𝙳𝚂"Highest # • hybrid #36(7-3-19)•hybrid #35(7-8/9-19)•hybrid #16 (7-10-19)Started:December 8th,2018 Finished: July 16,2019
8 103