Early in the morning, Avery put her plan into action. First step was to get to work on enchanting the best of the adventuring cast-offs and deboning the newest batch of meat. The taverns would send over the fresh product each day before they open for new business, and expect their supply of protein to be delivered before it was time to serve their customers supper. Both tasks dovetailed into each other nicely, as the animated skeletons produced during the deboning process could be tasked with the more time consuming and boring labor of assembling the enchantment layers, tools, and materials for the final steps of the process. Avery starts by placing a gem of onyx in each body's skull, and channels the mana stored in each small rock toward the spell of animation. Over the course of performing the ritual daily, she had built up enough mana reserves to raise up to fourteen kobolds, one after another, every morning. Usually, there weren't that many, as adventures tended to only go after those reptiles that left their burrows to raid more successful creatures homes. As the bands sent out rarely contained more than eight members, and most groups of warriors knew better than to try and chase after the ones that fled, a party collecting on a bounty would usually only have six or fewer kobolds, of which some were not in proper shape for processing. Those ones would generally be resolved to the vendors with food carts.

That left Avery with plenty of mana left over to do projects, or jockey for position in what teams she could sneak a place into, or sabotage the candidates that looked like they're getting closer to securing one of the elusive spots on the first floor. After the tasks for the day were finished, she could come back to an enchantment all set up, other than the final steps. At that point she could dump whatever mana she had left, and whatever she had recovered over the day, into whatever armor or weapon was the special du jour. Today though, she would be relying on her family to finish the work, because the spell set out in the botany book was far more powerful than anything she would be able to normally cast on her own. Fortunately, the gem used to store the displaced souls was the main focus of the spell; a good portion of the mana spent would be used to supplement the base capacity of the item for a limited amount of time, just enough to keep whatever creature the caster displaces trapped within the item until the invested energy is depleted.

With this massive black gem she had recovered yesterday, Avery estimated that she could maintain the spell for an entire hour, if she spent enough time preparing the site and spell for her entire mana pool to recover. Black was a good color for what she intended. Onyx, moreso than any other gem, lent itself to necromancy. Mana invested into the crystals would fill out the stones reserves as normal for the precious minerals, but when extracted through the medium of a necromantic ritual, a corpse would rise more easily and last longer, cold would chill beyond the expected limits of a spell, fear would pervade ever stronger minds, and any effect intended to drain some aspect of life from a target would have just a little more bite. Not that Avery could afford to use large, flawless gems as mere spell empowerment tools. Most uses of the rocks were regulated, specifically to avoid the scenarios in which someone like Avery gains a massive amount of power easily.

The crown had instituted a somewhat interesting method of deincentivising the use of the more dangerous magical storage containers. Rather than simply allowing the free market to take over distribution of the useful, but non-rare, stones, the king decreed that distribution of the items fell under the purview of the organizations which most represented their use. Other than diamonds, this lead to any magically capable jewels falling under the direct control of the wizard’s tower. With that authority in hand, the king built a system with the archwizards of the kingdom to limit the distribution throughout the organization. As ones rank within the tower grew, so did the power of the gem one was authorized to purchase. However, this would continually leave the stones available to purchase at a level below the point where it would actually be useful for the person doing the buying. Avery’s family having access to the smallest of onyx was the limit the tower would authorize non-members; they would do the same with other associated gems necessary for craftsmen to perform their duty, from rubies for fire resistance (or infliction) enchantments, to opals for completely normal earrings.

On the other hand, the churches were somewhat generous with their monopoly on diamonds. The gems were available to anyone who wanted to donate an exorbitant amount of money. What was most unfortunate about this was the simple fact that only the most useful spells utilized diamonds, and they required extremely large, near perfect jewels, which would explode into a fine mist of carbon when the spell completed. Combined with their high mana cost, only the members of the clergy ever actually used any of the healing arts. Most services were relatively inexpensive, but the major, miraculous acts, binding a soul to a detached body part and regrowing the entire rest of a person, for example, would obliterate a non-noble household’s finances.

Anyway, after setting a few skeletons to do work, and one to do chores, Avery puts stage two of her plan into motion. Putting a small blanket inside the cart, the necromancer models a small nest for her prize to sit upon. Security of gemstone achieved, she covers it with another blanket, making it only a suspicious blanket-covered lump, rather than an incredibly illegal enormous magical artifact.

Having set a precedent over time of taking the cart down to the canyon to dump it, Avery goes through the town with a minimum of human interaction. A nod to the baker she gets cookies from, a smile toward the tavern owner who always thanks her when she delivers the meat, a middle finger raised toward an adventuring group that had tried to sell actual lizards as kobolds, and she was was out on the road again.

It was a boring trek to to the canyon, but the fact that it had changed dramatically since the last time she had been there, one day ago, was anything but. For one thing, there was a cave, perfectly suited for what she had in mind, right out in the open where before there was nothing but cliff. Originally, Avery was going to cast an earth shaping spell to do the same thing, hide the gem in it, and cover the entrance to continue moving things around at a slower pace, but a place perfectly suited to her needs popping up out of nowhere would shave a day or so off the checklist. Granted, it was on the other side of the canyon, most of the way up, but adventurers went up and down the switchback trail to the slime pit all the time. If they could do it, so could she.

About an hour later, lugging a watermelon sized chunk of rock up a mountain, she decided next time she’d waste the extra day.