I thanked Cassie for her watchfulness and we returned to our camp, to find that Shiana had finished with her cooking task and that she had left me a wooden trencher with a whole pheasant breast and rabbit leg on a clean blanket. I didn’t usually go for the pure carnivore diet, but considering how much mass I must have lost I appreciated the protein. She was sitting on a broken piece of rock near my lean-to, working on adding some pheasant feathers to some of her arrows. She was careful wrapping some kind of thin thread about the base of each arrow, and it looked like she had used some of the local fir branches to replace her arrows. I wondered idly if, when she helped kill something, Rik’s looting actually returned the metal heads of arrows that got broken. That would make a skill like fletching for an adventuring archer vital.

The blanket I had been laying on was in the fire, now that it was not being used for cooking food. As much as I regretted the loss of a blanket, I could completely understand their desire to destroy it rather than try to get it clean, especially in light of how much scrubbing it had taken to get the crud off of my water-resistant skin and scales. That taint had been nasty, and I imagine because of its magical origin, it had some kind of special, and probably gross, properties.

I found a nice clear patch of ground near Shiana and started up on some old katas I remembered. I was never much of a fan of sitting meditation, and I didn’t want to try to go heavy melee, especially after I realized I could [push] effects through my strikes. It was probably better to go low-profile light melee rather than doing Cassie’s job. I was also one of those guys that thought better and more clearly while performing physical activities like pacing or simple tasks rather than sitting in one pose diving into my belly button.

“Rik left the core alone,” Shiana stated, lifting the arrow she was working on to peer down its length, checking the straightness of the grain after using a small pot of glue on the edges of the feathers.

“Hmm?” I asked Shiana, sliding away a bit more as I took a hand stance to practice my Capoeira tail sweep, which had proven so effective previously. With my tail-tip, I was able to get a very nice distance, and I decided I really needed to lay hands on a bo stick and learn to take advantage of my agility and speed much more than my strength.

“After your fairy appeared and begged him not to take the core, he left it alone. I am not sure if it was part of trying to get her to bond or if he was just being magnanimous, but we left without taking the core. We also have a loot reward for you, although I thought we should wait until you felt better to give it to you. The first clear bonus on a new dungeon is always very nice, but it sometimes cares more about what you need at the moment to survive than what you might really want. There is a magical bag that only you can open, whenever you want it.”

I was a little confused and did a little handstand twirl with my tail spinning around me. This was SO easy, almost like the breakdancing I had played with as a teenager, but I could literally feel it as I created a new kata using the moves, and each one almost clicked into place. It felt incredibly good, and my muscles burned out the lingering aches as I shifted. “How does that work exactly?” I asked her.

“Dungeons have always existed. Usually, they are created by, say, a wizard, or an undead, in someplace with really rich mana of a particular type. I don’t personally know how it works, but cities seem to often work the same way. Dwarves tend to build their cities in places heavy with mineral mana, probably because those are also where lots of metals and wealth exist, and wood elves build in places rich in natural magic, both to take advantage of the magical bounty and to prevent powerful monsters from spawning in them.”

I nodded, discovering with joy that, unlike my prior form, a handplant with MY mass required no extra bracing. Heck, I could probably do one-armed handstand pushups with ease now, especially once I built up some more strength. “I did notice that there were a lot of special herbs that my identify says are magical around here, is that why a dungeon spawned here?”

Shiana shook her head and started stripping another dry fir branch, checking it for straight grain. She had an interesting tool, similar to a cross between a potato peeler and a plane, and I used [observe] while she worked and I practiced. She was using some sort of mana that seemed to spark from her fingertips with green as she worked the arrow, to make them come out straight and true, although she wasn’t sealing them yet, she had four more arrows set beside her as she worked, and I bet she would be sealing them with something overnight. The heads of each arrow were something I had not seen before, jagged and flared, and to my [observe], possessed more than a little glow. Enchanted, I guess.

“The Gods can interfere with a dungeon spawning as well. There’s not that much extra mana here, and no wizard or undead called it up, but there are not many dungeons around Sindaenaway. I am betting that with the influx of human and half-elf immortals to the city, and the halfling immortals in the nearby Mancy Hills, One of the gods decided that this was a good place to set up a dungeon quest. Your fairy also mentioned some kind of test of some sort, but some of the things she said were confusing.”

I nodded, and told Shiana, “Well, my gratitude for hauling me out of there. I actually need to talk to my… fairy, so I am going to meditate for a while, but tonight I want to make something special to eat to try and pay people back a little for the help. By that time I should be alright and ready to find out what is in the bag. Heh, maybe I will get lucky and get a magical frying pan that doesn’t stick.” I chuckled.

Shiana nodded, “That would be very nice. We used the experience bonus from your meal in that dungeon. Rik is pleased as punch at being level 6. He’s not the highest level new immortal, he says there is one guy that is level 9 already, but he’s on something called a leaderboard and claims to have the highest income already, probably from the value of the things that have been collected. The stuff you and I forage up or create, because we are both bonded, count towards his total. I don’t get why it’s important, since it’s just a pittance compared to what wealthy people possess, but immortals seem to compete over stuff like that, and it’s important to him, so it’s important to me.”

I wasn’t really worked out, but I felt a nice level of tiredness in my muscles that seemed to have worked out the pain from my transformation quite well, and I was stretched out and flexible. I considered asking Cassie if she wanted to spar, but wasn’t sure how it would be taken, so I resolved to ask her about it later. For right now, though, I assumed my tripod meditating position and nodded to Shiana. I whipped out the burgundy garment Cassie had given me and found the sewing tools in my backpack. I was going to try an experiment, working on a minor repair while I delved into my soul space at the same time, and a bit of needlework seemed like the perfect idea.

The edge of the tunic was not very damaged, it looked reasonably new like the actual stitching was ripped rather than the woven linen or cotton. I knew how to fix tears pretty well, but I wasn’t really that competent at knowing cloth compositions. I did know it wasn’t made of wool, silk, or nylon, though. I started hand-sewing tight stitches on the inside edges, overlapping the edge of the cloth to bring the overlarge garment a little narrower to fit my frame better. I suppose it would be called a Leine, or saffron shirt, even though it was burgundy instead of yellow, but it was just an edged tunic with puffy sleeves to me. I was going to sew and reinforce all of the edges, rather than just the ones that had been torn, which should make it considerably more durable. Once I finished, I planned to ask Rik about the leather so maybe I could create a doublet or something for protection.

Not to mention, Shiana’s leathers were not very high quality, and now sported a very large hole. If I could create some sort of improved armor for her, she was a lot more of a target than I was. I was unsure about how to tan Seeker leather, though. Whatever space Rik was using to carry the loot, I envied.

While I was sewing, I dropped into my soul space, trying to keep track of both at the same time. It wasn’t that difficult, a lot like thinking about song lyrics while you washed dishes.

My space was much, much larger, with a lot more of the park visible than before, and the plasma lamp in the middle had almost doubled in size. Mnemosyne smiled sadly at me as I entered, and had been waiting for me.

“I am so sorry!” she exclaimed, “The Quintessence load was burning your core and smashing the foundation you built so far, and it would have raced…”

I kind of shushed her a little, “It’s okay.” I stated, “I forgive you. You did what you had to do to keep me alive, and I am very very grateful. It hurt, a lot, but the pain is part of living. If you hadn’t done what you did, I’d either be dead or some great hulking beast of a kobold right now, farther away from human than ever.”

Mnemosyne nodded, and I noticed that, apparently, with her new materialization ability, a pair of gossamer dragonfly wings came with it. I sort of gestured at the wings curiously.

Mnemosyne nodded excitedly, “When I materialize I have a little bit of mass. Not much, but enough to be seen and to inhale air to talk with others. I am not very loud, but loud enough to be heard, but with the mass I got these wings to hold me up in the air, too. If something tries to hurt me, I can vanish back easily, but I don’t have air or kinetic mana, so I couldn’t hover without them.

She beamed, “I was almost four inches tall! I am not used to being so big. When I traveled before, I was just a mote, all energy, and illusion, but no body at all. I feel HUGE. If I can ever stay out for more than a few minutes, I might even have to EAT. Can you imagine that?”

I nodded. “Considering that I need to eat every day, yeah, it’s pretty easy to imagine.”

She giggled, and I decided, right then and there, that all women should be born with wings, like gelflings. I shook my head, to try and ease the distraction she caused and then smiled at her. “So I suppose I am a bit tougher now?”

She nodded, and then said, “Yes, much tougher, you are much harder to poison, have a lot more strength, and can probably take hits that would have stunned you before. You are also probably a lot faster and more coordinated now, and if you noticed your senses have improved. Do you know how you could push mana and quintessence before? Well, now, you can start channeling quintessence into your meridians and limbs instead of just outside your body for healing. It sort of burns quintessence if you do it now, but once you establish a pattern to cycle the quintessence, you can start adding it to your dantian and use that as the source. It’s going to take another evolution to get it started, but then you can begin looking into cycling patterns or techniques, and that should make you much tougher!”

I nodded a little, as if I wasn’t lost, and then asked, “That sounds amazing. Umm. First, what is a dantian?”

She opened her eyes a little more widely, and then nodded, pointing at my core. “See that thing around your core? The kinda hazy part that the little energy lines travel through before getting to the outside of your core? That’s your dantian. It’s sort of like a battery, but once it is running, you can connect your meridians to it and set up an energy flow pattern, which will charge it much faster and also let you channel more quintessence without having to draw it from your soul space.”

she shrugged, “As I said, I am still trying to figure out how this works, but once your Dantian is fully activated, you can start building the next part of your core foundation instead of just accepting Quintessence, you can meditate to drag more of it in. That will give you a big bonus to the Quintessence you gain whenever you draw it in, from a kill or being in a high-energy area, but by that time you might need it to keep advancing as the energy demands get higher.”

She looked a little worried, “From what I have figured out though, other people who can do this can [push] their own claimed quintessence into you and sort of smash all of this, permanently damaging you or forcing you to start over, until we can build a better defense for it. I wouldn’t go telling other cultivators you can do it unless you know they won’t hurt you, because if they can kill you or smash your foundation, they could pull ALL of your quintessence out for their own use, and there’s a word for that in draconic, for people who make it a habit of smashing people’s dantians and draining them, so it is probably a risk.”

“Speaking of draconic, what is the new verb?” I asked her curiously, noting that I was done stitching the outside of the shirt. I had to rethread the needle several times, which was challenging with a split attention span, but far from impossible with my new dexterity. Curiously, I started gently feeding a little bit of my quintessence into my skill as I worked, and started sewing little patterns around the bottom edge of the shirt where I had to fold over the bottom so it would stop at my knees instead of dragging on the ground.

“Oh, [alter]? That’s a neat one I was able to figure out because you already know all about it. It lets you slightly change the state of what you are working with. Everyone knows that you can turn water into steam, burn wood, or melt a solid if you get it hot enough, but [alter] is available because you know how it works. It should link into your knowledge of… physics very well.”

I nodded and spoke [alter]. She was right. The term was not painful at all, matching up with my knowledge of how molecules worked, and the motions and changes needed, I should be able to change lots of things! I was excited because this really felt like magic.

I started spinning the bands of illusion and sonic into their own little orbital mana rings and thought about the ramifications. I was an ice kobold, so pushing or altering the band of frost mana should be easy if it didn’t change too much, but with alter I could change it at my surface into heating! It wouldn’t work that well, because I would lose the ice bonuses, but it should also let me change the illusion mana from a simple push into an actual decision about what illusion it would make, and the sonic could be altered into sounds rather than just producing a tone. I had NO idea what the temporal and animation essence would do, but I was going to experiment!

I fiddled around for a little while with the bands, not letting them out, and discovered that I could use the fine strands of quintessence leading to each ring to ‘knot’ the mana strands themselves into a glyph that matched the verbs in question, and that based on how I knotted them, and in what order they were knotted, I could evoke different effects in my soul space. Because I was practicing here instead of projecting it into the ‘real world’, the mana produced an effect, and then was reclaimed into my core.

“Bran?” Mnemosyne asked after I had been practicing making knots for a while.

“Yes, dear?” I asked her. Right now I had very very small amounts of flavored mana, so the effects I could produce were very minor, except for the frost mana. I could, at will, flash freeze or even, with alter, freeze-dry several pounds!

“You have kind of gone a little crazy on your shirt, and Shiana is trying to get your attention. It’s also dark now.”

I started and blew Mnemosyne a kiss before leaving my soul space. She wasn’t kidding. I had, for some stupid reason, stitched hundreds of little knots along the edges of my tunic, matching my experiments. To [observe] they were glowing with the little bit of quintessence I had invested, but Shiana was distracting me. Little bit? Oi, I had invested 50% of my potential evolution fund into the thing! I finished it off, tying it off, as Shiana spoke.

“It’s dark now.” She was right! I had spent the entire afternoon and early evening playing with my new knots and magical potential. I looked guiltily, or at least as guilty as my face could manage, as she continued. “I built the fire back up. You wanted to make dinner tonight?”

I noticed that Mnemosyne had sent me another message while I had been fooling around.

Congratulations, Bran! Due to your hard work learning a mana manipulation technique, you have increased your spellcraft to apprentice fair, and your essence manipulation to journeyman great!

Wow, I had jumped from novice poor to apprentice fair in a single afternoon? Just from tying knots? Knot-tying was something every Boatswain’s mate learned before he could even advance to full seaman, and as a rigger, I had to admit I was very good at it. I started collecting ingredients to make a special meal for the team, wondering what I could potentially do with more complicated knotting, splicing, and lanyard rigging techniques using mana?

Frederick grinned as he watched his pet idiot-savant literally create a new technique for using magic. Flame was going to shit a brick when she found out, and owe him big time.

In the distant past, wizards were sages and built their methodology based on the printed and spoken word. They created their spells to match, with patterns and verbiage built around their understanding, creating a powerful magical system. Cultivators, on the other hand, were craftsmen, used to carving fine details into products. Their formations tended to be very solid and could be traced by body movements or carved into items, creating enchantments and formulae much more readily than northern wizards, but requiring vastly more native ability than wizardry. Anyone with proper training could use the most minor of spells, even if they never had the talent for serious magic, and some of it could even be used by non-spellcasters. Formations and essence, however, required real training or talent to ever even be vaguely useful.

This knot-tying magic, however, required both training AND talent, but not the magical kind. Frederick was well aware of the difference in technology levels in certain areas between Earth and Alandia. Because of magic, things like gates and flying, as well as the ability to magically merge substances and healing, certain areas of Alandia were critically behind even what they could be with the current tech level. Except among the gnomes, new discoveries were used mostly as creative fuel for new magics, instead of creating new lines of research. Sailing, for example, was barely out of the stone age with ship design when a spell could make a simple canoe travel as quickly as a galloping horse, and that held true across all sorts of areas where Earth technology excelled.

Navigation, metallurgy, non-magical medicine, hell, most armies still suffered vastly more losses from dysentery and other easily-prevented causes than from actual contact with an enemy. Sure, you could have some high-powered healers along to bless your army, but they were expensive and lives were cheap. Some alchemists could create incredibly complex potions or pills that could literally restore your life if you could afford it, but out in the country, people DIED because they slapped their grandma’s cure-all mud pack on a wound instead of keeping the damned thing clean.

This drove Frederick crazy. He was a God. He couldn’t just hand down techniques from another world, and Librus was very consistent about stealing and stashing lost knowledge. Yes, Librus tended to keep it all in one place rather than allowing it to be truly lost, but what high-powered adventurer was going to raid his library to find a formula for an antibiotic for peasants, when they could easily afford the services of someone that could heal their every disease in moments?

The new ‘players’ in his world certainly had little interest in explaining basic sanitation or plumbing to the local hog farmers, not when they could be off finding magical swords of demon-slaying or ending a necromantic plague with their friends. Never mind that the necromantic plague was caused by all the dead from a REAL plague that could have been avoided if a few more cooks simply knew how to dispose of their waste safely!

It didn’t help that if a player started discussing something too high-tech, like, say, from the dark ages, that damned ‘system’ made the words come out as gibberish to the locals. Sure, some players chose to become crafters, but if you don’t start from the absolute basics, like Earth hygiene, most locals simply wouldn’t know the difference between a cup washed in boiling water and one wiped with a dirty rag.

Why should they? If you got sick, you could afford a healer to make you hale and healthy. If you couldn’t afford it, well, you didn’t matter, now did you? Players usually gravitated towards the Potemkin villages with a local mage or witch and avoided the pestilence filled mudholes, and ‘tradition’ ensured that no one with a band knew, or even cared, about the hamlets that grew the poor-return grain that was fed to the well-bred hogs that graced city tavern stews.

Heck, even COOKING was backward. Why bother creating brilliant and complicated dishes when the flavors could be changed with a simple application of a season spell? Sure, some of the ‘crafting’ players were cooking some nice new dishes, which was a welcome change, but as far as he knew only two of them were doing anything resembling farming, mostly specializing in high-value magical herbs for alchemical and cooking reasons rather than the studied breeding of better grains that could feed more people with less work.

Frederick sighed. He would be tempted to help with relocating dying Earth souls to local bodies, except that Earth souls were too valuable, walking mana batteries with almost no ability to magically protect themselves from whatever magic-user chose to snap them up and put them to use.

He did have high hopes, though. This Brand fellow was far exceeding his expectations and seemed to care more about people than he did about gaining power. He was also learning to protect himself so that he couldn’t be snatched up and controlled by the first blood mage to come along. There were millions of potential ways for magics to be manipulated, but Dragons settled on their language, mages on their glyphs and chants, and cultivators and sorcerers on their formations and techniques. After all, why create something new when you could learn all that old stuff that just works?

And Lily, well, she was still really torn up by what that stupid gnome did to her, but she was a bit of a gardening fanatic. With any luck, she might be able to use her dungeon’s evolution abilities to create better grains and herbs that could help stamp out the constant starvation that plagued his world. He would have to see if he could arrange a ‘gift’ of some sort for her that could ease her paranoia and cater to her natural inclinations. Maybe some new goblin invaders that raided a food caravan?

Frederick started planning and prepared to send a message to Flame that would twist her knickers like they were caught in a power drill. She tended to be a bit too content with the invaders that had infested this world, it was time to remind her of what they were planning to destroy, and gloat over his boy being a better avatar of hers than her own avatars. Maybe he could even use it as an excuse to wager with her. She was always a sucker for a good wager, and he suspected she sometimes lost on purpose. The last time had been amazing.

Frederick LOVED gloating. What else was a hoard for?