The Adept - Days 17 to 22

  Tiller had a harvest due on Day 21, the plants that had survived Gronk’s stomping during the battle that had nearly killed his sorry ass. He had another harvest due on Day 25, the seeds he had planted the day after his failed trip to the bank.

  Tiller yearned to explore the possibility of the mushrooms in the kobold dungeon. He held off on making the journey, however, as he had a simple substantial problem. He knew nothing about mushroom farming. He had a notion that they preferred to grow in the dark and that alone was a challenge he wasn’t ready to surmount. Instead, Tiller invested the days chopping trees. The work was incredibly laborious. He suspected that he was suffering because of his path. Cutter had probably been right, his farming sigil made him more suitable to the task than the fighting or adept paths might have, but he also expected that there were paths like lumberjack that would make the work easier and the harvests more substantial. Still, he needed the ground cleared for the next round of planting. And, for his willingness to forego comfort to accelerate his motion towards his goal of making it home, he knew that sleeping unroofed was taking a toll on him that would eventually compromise his effectiveness.

  So Tiller watered, and Tiller chopped.

  Reader’s time was spent at work. He had no need to travel back to Medley for books with the wealth of information that was stored in Grim’s archive. He had a levitation weave, an illumination weave, and an on/off weave. Studying the books stored in Grim he began focusing on two projects, and a third secret one. The first project was motion.

  The motion weave was problematic. It seemed that he couldn’t defy the laws of conservation of energy. He couldn’t make a weave that produced something that created energy out of nowhere. He needed an energy source and this added another step, the requirement for an energy consumption weave. It seemed the levitation weave didn’t breach this as, rather than producing energy to stay aloft, the weave simply lessened the effect of the gravitational force.

  Reader began work on the motion and energy conversion weaves. For the time being he was content to use the spare log that Tiller had given him, as well as some rocks and boulders. The substantial plus was that he learned the weaves faster than before. There was skill to weaving, a knack, that he was gaining. It didn’t take him days to have a rudimentary ability to produce the weaves. It took him one day. The result was still a little rudimentary, but he was able to tie them up and make them work. Their permanence was another issue, and would become another project on his list of projects, but for now he could make them and they seemed to work. The next issue was testing them.

  The energy consumption weave was just that, it consumed available energy. Most energy was not available. It was locked up in forms that were far less accessible, like chemical bonds or the simple reality of matter.

  On the 18th day, Reader learned a little more about the energy consumption weave. In the early morning the levitating log barely moved. He kept practicing on the stones and boulders, unwilling to dismantle the successful weaves he had laid on the log. At midday, as clouds passed from the sun, he straightened from his task, enjoying the sensation of the warmth on his back. At this moment, he happened to notice movement.

  The log was accelerating. He was too pleased and amazed to act in time to save the log. He spent those moments connecting the dots. The sunlight was radiation, and when it struck matter that produced heat from the vibrations of the molecules receiving the radiant energy. Either the sunlight itself, or the heat it produced, was energy free enough to be funneled by the energy consumption weave into the motion weave.

  The log drifted, levitating parallel to the ground, and began to move at a walking pace.

  “Grim! Grim! Look!”

  The book creature raised himself up from his position, dangling his legs in boredom as he lay on a levitating boulder. “Big deal.”

  As the heat built, the log accelerated. Reader’s eyes widened, “Oh, shoot, maybe I should…”

  He moved to run after it, gaining at first. After another few moments he realized the log was still accelerating and he wasn’t going to catch it. He jogged to a stop and watched the log fly away from him, getting smaller and smaller as it fled across the white.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Reader glanced around, shoulders hoisted. “Okay… let’s just pretend I didn’t do that.”

  The green line that measured his path progression rose noticeably and the line around his weaving sigil filled some more. He reckoned himself to be 60% of the way to Iron and maybe… 50% of the way to upgrading his weaving sigil.

  So, he could make motion. He couldn’t make energy. The carts would need an energy source.

  Exhausted, and honestly quite bored, of dealing with the same weave over and over, Reader decided on the 19th day to invest some energy into his second project.

  Reader wanted an offensive capability. Or a defensive capability really, but in the NRA sensibility of defense. He started leafing through the pages in his shared mind with Grim. He had planned to pursue a fireball, that seemed to be a logical and fundamental attack. Fireball, however, required energy. He had seen the Finality Soldier wield fireballs with a sigil. He pondered. Did the sigil simply defy the rule of obeying conservation of energy? Or did it include a mechanism, like fission or something, that provided the energy? Whatever the case, Reader’s weaves still seemed to be bound by conservation of energy and he wasn’t even willing to consider exploring weaves that involved converting matter directly to energy yet. Tiller wanted mushrooms, not mushroom clouds.

  Reader discovered that some forces seemed to be less energy dependent. He discovered a weave that, while more complex than he might have liked, seemed to be less dependent on energy generation. It was a lightning weave. The weave seemed to harvest energy from its own actions, creating a potential difference and stimulating electrons to motion. The motion of the electrons, between air molecules even, produced energy, which in turn, produced more motion. The result was a weave that could produce a small bolt of lightning after a few seconds.

  It took him three hours to produce the first lightning bolt. It lashed out from the weave that was suspended in the air and promptly set a tree on fire. An outraged Bean leapt from the undergrowth at the base of the tree, yowling angrily.

  It took another hour for Reader, Tiller, Maeve, and Norris to put the fire out with buckets of water from the pool. Reader determined that further lightning practice should be conducted out on the white with less combustible opportunities in the vicinity.

  This rhythm continued until Day 22. Tiller had made a deliberate decision not to harvest the first round of crops. He had a theory that bigger and bigger harvests would count as achievements to advance his farming path and maybe even the sigil. He decided to forego claiming his profits for a few extra days to make his biggest harvest to date on Day 25 and potentially trigger an increase.

  On the morning of Day 22, the island of land awoke to sound. Heavy, thumping sounds. The sounds of the feet of large individuals moving without the benefit of stealth sigils.

  Tiller stirred in the early light of the morning to the noises. His first impulse was to ignore them. He was comfortable. He lay on the ground, wrapped in blankets, under a mostly completed roof. He was tired from long days working in field and with axe. He enjoyed, as most of us do, the vague disturbance that roused him only enough to increase his awareness of his comfortable and sleepy state. It was the sound of a shovel in earth that prompted him to leap to his feet.

  His motion roused Norris, who had been sleeping under the same roof during his stay on the earthen island. The assassin was swifter to wake and swifter to react than Tiller. He practically flew through the door of the hut. Before Tiller reached the door, he heard the goblin’s voice.

  “My fine fellows, it seems we have something of a problem.”

  Tiller heard the deep thread of threat that ran through the goblin’s well-delivered words.

  He rushed through the door, blinking in the light of the early morning. Everything was damp with dew and the bare skin of his face and arms reacted to the pleasant cool of a day not yet born.

  The scene Tiller arrived upon was just a few notches short of his worst-case scenario.

  Two ogres had crept in during the night. He saw them, standing on the mound that was Bonk’s secret grave. One held a shovel and he could see the meager beginnings of digging there. Norris stood between him and the ogres, completely at ease.

  Tiller recognised the clay ogre as Tonk, the ringleader during the last encounter. He was the one with the shovel. Behind him loomed Donk, the largest ogre he was yet to lay eyes on, the sledgehammer drawn and held in two huge hands. He remembered that Donk was a rancher or something of the sort, Tonk was on a clerical path of some description.

  Tonk said, “We know what’s under here. You think we’re a lot of idiots because we’re big and green and eat whole cows for breakfast, but you’re way off. I know what it is I’m standing on.”

  Tiller’s blood ran cold. When had they seen it? Had there been other nights when the ogres had crept in to snoop as he slept?

  Norris said, “My boy, my boy, I know it as well. It is nothing less than the most aesthetic of arrangements. A tribute to nature’s beauty my good sir. A tribute to nature’s beauty.”

  Tonk locked eyes with Norris. Tonk set the blade of the shovel against the earth once more, then rested a huge foot on it, ready to press down. Donk growled slightly, looming forward, that sledgehammer a threat in its own right.

  Norris swept a hand over his brow and back over his head. “Oh… my good sirs…”