There was still flickering light around Apple Gate Farm as we approached and a few people were moving around the property, despite the darkness. It was quite impressive how much they had done in the week since our last visit, there was a whole new building set up. It looked rather simple, just a wooden frame with a sheet metal roof, likely only good to keep out rain and wind, but it was newly made and so without any advanced technology.

We made our approach openly and again, the so-called guards didn’t notice us until we were far too close for comfort. If we had ill intent on these people, I, alone, could have killed them all, though maybe I was a bad example in that regard. If I truly intended to kill them all, I was pretty sure I could manage, even if they knew I was coming. It would just take a lot longer, if I had to hunt them all down individually, if I managed to spread my mist around the property they would all just die.

Shaking off my morbid thoughts, I greeted the guard and walked past, not about to tell them how to do their job. I’d tell the local leader, I think the name was Marcus or something, and he could deal with their ability and attitude. Not my problem, but given that I had noticed it, sharing felt like the right thing. It hopefully was, if I invested time and effort into these people, especially if they joined with the people from the gym, I wanted them to survive, otherwise, all my efforts would be wasted.

“Mistress, I will go meet my parents,” Lia quietly told me, her voice so soft that even I had to strain my ears to hear her. “I believe if they know I’m happy and thriving with you, they will be deeply indebted to you, as you gave their daughter a path forward by creating me.”

“Do so, L,” I interrupted myself, mentally switching gears, “Do so, Chantalle. We will go together, so your mother can show me what room I can convert into a freezer. In the meantime, you can tell them about your training, but maybe focus more on the magical stuff, I doubt that the parents of a teenage girl would enjoy knowing she is trained to fight,” I paused again, thinking about it.

“Or maybe they would like to know that. In this wonderful new world of ours, knowing how to fight is a rather important skill, one might even say it’s vital. Do as you will, you have more information about them anyway and I believe you are more socially adept than I am,” I instructed her as we continued.

Finding Kira wasn’t too difficult, she was talking with a few other middle-aged women, maybe gossiping, maybe planning, we didn’t get to listen in before she noticed us. The moment she did, their conversation was completely forgotten, with Kira almost running over to embrace Lia. I failed to stifle a giggle at the embrace, partially because of the brief moment of stiffness Lia went through when Kira hugged her but mostly because Lia still had the pole we had used to carry the killed pig on her shoulder.

“We thought with this many people here, you could use some extra food, and I can prepare a place where you can store it. We’ll have to see how long the storage can last so I can return to refresh the charge, but it should work out,” I spoke in the general direction of the gathered women, hoping that somebody would supply a bit of direction. I had a feeling that getting between a mother and her returned daughter would be seen as impolite but I also wanted to get the pig off my shoulder, it was heavy, and to get away from the humans. We had things to do later in the night.

“Er, sure?” one of the women replied, looking a little confused at the situation. Not that I could really blame her, I doubted there were many people carrying dead pigs around, at least not without having a previous plan for those pigs.

“Chantalle, why don’t I take your companion and deliver the meat to our butchering station? And what do you mean by storage?” she asked, the last part addressed at me.

“Just what I meant, it won’t be anything fancy, but filling a room with magically created ice should create a simple approximation of a freezer. Let’s you store the meat until it’s needed, or you can prepare some reserves, just in case your hunting is disrupted for a few days,” I explained, getting a frown and a nod in response.

Two of the women took over the pole from Lia, while one of them came over to help me. While Lia stayed behind with her mom, the rest of us moved to the edge of the property, where a shed was located. Behind that shed, they had set up a camping table, now covered in blood, and a couple of hooks set into the wooden wall. It was an incredibly simple set-up, but I could see that people had repeatedly butchered animals here.

“We’ll take care of this, the quicker we cut those up, the better the meat will be,” one of the women assured me, while another one told me she’d show me where I might set up that Ice of mine.

“How much drainage do you need? I mean, how does your ice work?” the woman asked me, as we were moving back towards the primarily used parts of the property.

“No drainage needed,” I assured her, “The Ice doesn’t melt into water it, for lack of a better word, evaporates back into the Astral River. It turns back into the non-physical stuff I use to conjure it in the first place. If I conjure a ton of Ice and simply let it sit, you’ll be left with maybe a bottle of water by the end of it. And even that water doesn’t really stick around in the long term, it’s complicated,” I explained, trying to describe the processes I had observed in terms people could understand. It took me a moment to realise that it was similar to that law of thermodynamics, whatever number it was, stating that energy couldn’t be created or destroyed. It was similar with Astral Power and the material I conjured using it, I was simply changing the state, for lack of a better word, of the Astral Power into a physical version of itself with physical properties that mirrored the element I was using to conjure. At least that felt like the most parsimonious and logical explanation in my mind, though I had a niggling feeling that there was more to it. For now, I managed to give the woman next to me an explanation that was good enough, I doubted she was interested in listening to me ramble on about magical theory and my hypothesis.

“If you say so,” she simply shrugged, before starting to ask how one could learn magic. I began a spiel similar to the explanation I had given with the people at the gym, even showing similar tricks, namely the conjuration of water. By now, I was good enough with the runes and the magic that I could simply manifest a rune and let it flash for a second, making it manifest a floating ball of water. My demonstration made the woman guiding me look at it with a mix of awe and suspicion for a moment before she asked even more questions. Her first, and quite good, question was if the water could be used to quench thirst, or if it would disappear like the Ice.

I had done some experimentation on that and was somewhat confident in my observations. The water could be drunk, and would sustain a person, at least it did for me, because the process of drinking it turned it into something else. I wasn’t sure why that didn’t apply to melting Ice, maybe I had to experiment some more, but it was the best explanation I could come up with.

By the time we got back to the main building, the woman looked quite interested in magic, making me consider giving a few magic lessons here, too. Maybe it would get some more magic users started, which might prove important if the slaughterhouse was only the first location to change. Sure, a lot more beings had been killed there than in town, at least per square metre and over time, but that didn’t mean the dead wouldn’t rise in town.

But that was a problem for another day. We met Lia and Kira back at the main building and Kira guided me to a small walk-in freezer, now completely dark and empty. As we walked in the light of the torches near the building, Kira looked at me with a bit of confusion in her eyes, making me realise that my emergence as a Firn Elf was almost complete, giving me unnaturally pale, light blue skin. In the darkness, it wasn’t too bad, but once I was in real light, there might be questions.

But that would be a problem for another day. For now, I froze over the walls within the freezer, trying to keep the ice focused on the walls so that the people had as much useful storage area as possible.

Once that was done, I pumped out some more Astral Power into the area, filling it with as much Cold as I could. Hopefully, that would increase the time the Ice would stay frozen, giving them a longer-lasting freezer. When I was done, Kira and the woman I still didn’t know the name of thanked me, the woman scurrying off to get some of the perishable supplies.

“Did you tell them that there are undead at the old slaughterhouse?” I asked Lia, just to make sure that the messages I wanted to send were delivered.

Lia nodded and after as little small talk as I could get away with without being highly impolite, the three of us left, making our way back to the dungeon. There were undead to destroy, skills to be increased and levels to be made. I couldn’t wait.