Alister looked over his rewards with a slight annoyance to his expression, nose scrunched. The cloak would be large on him without alterations, though he imagined any of the servants could alter it for him with a few simple stitches. It offered limited flight, more like a simple hovering and gliding spell than true flight. Still, it could be useful. For a system to create something like this… how much energy must it have taken?

The pot of honey was what he expected to get from the loot, and everyone else got at least some honey too, although some of it had healing properties. The thing he was most interested in, out of the things he personally got, was the Necklace of the Werekin’s curse. It was low-grade, which, speaking to the others, seemed to be the highest grade someone could get of an item from a low-grade dungeon. Consumables could be higher grade than the dungeon grade, however.

Looking the necklace over for mana or essence, he found it was mimicking a magic enchantment, though strangely it didn’t seem to be picky about what kind of energy it used. Mana, essence, or even negal energy, it made little difference to this peculiar reward.

As far as he could tell, it could imitate aspects of lycanthropy. At this low grade, it couldn’t do much. His best guess? It would give him claws if worn. He wasn’t a melee combatant, though, and when he had to fight in such close confines, he much preferred a weapon, not fisticuffs - even if that included claws or similar fist weapons.

Wisteria was excitedly ogling her new ring, which she already put onto her left hand. She activated it, and a swarm of small bees hummed to life from the ring, circling around her. She squeaked with glee, waving her fingers this way and that, the bees dancing to her movements.

Both Alister and his father had the expression of “that’s not fair” on their faces.

“What grade is it!?” Alister grumbled, rushing up to her, ducking to avoid the buzzing swarm.

“Grade? Oh! It doesn’t have one. It’s static.”

“...so not fair…”

“What was that?”

“Nothing! It’s just… dad and I did a lot of work and we didn’t get something like that…”

Wisteria smirked, giggling, “You’re jealous??”

“Wha-no! Why would I be jealous?”

“Utterly jealous. I worked hard too, ‘little Alli’. You’re silly,” she held her hand out and recalled the swarm, “Aww… it has a long cooldown.”

“Hmph… It’d make more sense for father to get that…”

“Maybe, but I like it too. It’s funny to hear you call your father dad and then go right back to father. You call him dad when you’re more flustered. You’re so bad at hiding your feelings.”

“Says the girl who just revealed her hair and a whole big secret after twenty minutes with my mother…,” Alister huffed, folding his arms and squinting his grey eyes at her.

“Hey! It was more than just twenty minutes! She was buttering me up for days! Plus my mom said I could tell you guys if I needed to!”

“Oh yes, because you were in such dire need.”

Blas gave a loud sigh, “Kids! Stop bickering. We need to head out!”

“Yes sir…,” Alister grumbled. Wisteria said the same and hurried along but paused to turn around and stick her tongue out at Alister.

Though the major city Ekrin was next, they didn’t spend much time in it. It wasn’t like it wasn’t a decent place or whathaveyou, but they had to keep moving. They stayed at a nice seaside inn that was all too happy to house the Duke for a night. The inn was on the coast in a beautiful bay, with a large port to the south of where they were staying. The city saw a decent amount of tourism.

Umber came after Ekrin, a small town that was steadily growing as more entrepreneurs flocked to the area. Like all of the cities and towns they would pass through in the duchy, it was on the coast.

Alister stretched, sitting on the pavement as his mother and father sorted out some things with the servants. He eyed the guards that stood beside him, let his eyes wander to Wisteria who was yawning and helping another girl move boxes, and then looked to Ode and Jacob. They were bickering about bedding arrangements. Something about a bet. He touched his toes with a stretch as he looked over to his cousin Morgan. She was flirting with a servant boy who looked way in over his head.

Umber looked to be boring in terms of things to do, but it had a lot of nature to look at.

The whole region has a strange fog that came through during the night and left come morning sun. That was normal enough, but the fog felt dense with energy. According to his father, that was due to an ancient skeleton that dotted the region.

Alister looked out to the coast, along the water, where his eyes found a glittering blue island covered in crystals. That was said to be the head of the ancient beast. Until recently, they hadn’t known what to do with the bones, but in the last hundred years or so mining has boomed as skilled craftsmen found use for the material.

His father said it was a giant corpse many kilometers long. Ribs taller than buildings sat further north in the main mining area. He couldn’t see them from here. It was said to be the bones of an eldritch creature, summoned from a powerful eldritch lord that once held dominion over the land. Heroes, backed by an army, felled the beast.

Much more dangerous alive than it was now, the bones of the eldritch creature only held danger because of the Black Brain disease miners could get from inhaling too much of the dust.

Alister desperately wanted to go out to the sea and investigate the glittering skull island - dubbed Madquartz Atoll. Not only did no one allow such a thing, however, they couldn’t because of their time schedule.

Black Brain, Maddening Miasma, the Grinning Rot, the Charcoal Shadow. It had so many names, but it was, regardless, an illness he found most fascinating. Over time, miners could lose themselves to madness if they didn’t protect themselves properly. A risk apparently worth the value of the material.

It was said to be most useful in the creation of high level enchantments and magitech, which turned the skeleton from a spooky source of local superstitions into a mine worth more than gold more or less overnight. This was, of course, not considering the insidious effects of the disease the bones carried when the dust thereof was inhaled by miners.

In particular, it caused a slow incursion of a static-like noise in the mind of the person involved, like psychic tinnitus. It started as only static, anyway, but the more that was inhaled the stronger one could hear sounds that were almost words, and the more one wanted to be near the bones themselves. That was where it got its second name; the Grinning Rot. It took a long time, and could be prevented with appropriate protections, but the urge to be near the bones grew and grew until one spent all their time on the worksite, even setting up homes nearby it. When it reached the point that anyone attempted to intervene, it wouldn’t take much to set the victim off into a bout of violence, before running away to other locations with bones where they could mine until they inevitably reached the point of madness where they simply starved to death while working.

Unfortunately, that was hardly the end of things. Not only did it take an exceptionally long time for them to die, but they didn’t stop when their pulse did. They continued as a living dead, mining and mining without rest or recovery, with only enough intelligence to create rudimentary mining tools. They weren’t aggressive, not innately, but if disturbed would become extremely violent very quickly.

There were grim rumors as well that the bodies themselves became partially composed of the bone. But even once disposed of, it wasn’t the end; animals who ate bones and got a hold of the bones of the once-undead would become a menace, seeking out sources of bone dust and terrorizing miners who dared try to collect the stuff.