Book 3, Chapter 27 (Patreon)

“Mages, huh?”

Eggert was a heavyset man with a red face, a big nose, and almost no hair left on the top of his head. He was wearing a plain white apron and had his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. I noted his features, but what really caught my attention was the way he smelled.

It turned out Eggert’s place was an inn, and he himself was a baker. If the flour dusting his belly wasn’t enough of a tell, the big man smelled of bread, which was unusual here. We very rarely had it, at least not the kind that came out in big, fluffy loaves, at home or anywhere else I’d been. Flat breads were far more common.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “We don’t have any of the local money, but I’d be happy to do a bit of enchanting work for you in exchange for a meal and a bed to sleep in tonight.”

“Hngh. Let me think,” he said. His eyes unfocused and stared past me, and I couldn’t resist checking to see what was going on in that head of his.

‘I wonder if he could fix that busted oven. It’d be great to have all four of them running again. But it’d be a pain in the ass to get it pulled back out of storage, especially if he can’t manage it. Maybe something smaller to test and see if he’s as good as he says.’

It was nice to see that Eggert was an honest sort. Surprisingly, most people I’d met had been. The biggest exception had been my time spent in Derro, but then again, I’d been rubbing elbows with the criminal element of the city and fighting against a hostile cabal. Those weren’t the kind of people I normally associated with. In fact, most of the villages were so small that they didn’t have a criminal element. Usually it was a handful of degenerates who were just lazy instead of troublemakers.

“Tell you what. I have an old sound control box I used to use for when a musician would play on stage. It got knocked off a few years ago and something broke in it. Hasn’t worked right since. If you can get that fixed up for me, I’ll pay you fifty velci. If you can do the job and are still interested in a meal and a bed, I’ve got a busted oven in storage that I’ll have drug out. Fix that up and you can stay here for free all week long.”

It was a ridiculously one-sided deal, but I could tell Eggert didn’t realize exactly how much he was asking for. Then again, it wasn’t like I had the first clue how much anything was worth anymore. This was a whole new world, and where I’d grown up, we didn’t even have money. Things I took for granted could be scarce to the point that they were outrageously priced now.

Either way, it wasn’t an issue for me to fix or even make a new sound controller. The worst part of it was going to be pouring some mana in to power it since I wouldn’t be able to get that back with lossless casting, and even that amount was practically nothing compared to what I was funneling into the mana crystals in my phantom space just to keep my core from overfilling.

“That sounds like a deal to me,” I said. “Though we won’t need a full week, just a single night.”

“Well, a night’s stay and an extra two hundred velci then.”

“Deal.”

Eggert broke into a wide grin. “Good to hear. Come with me, I’ll get you a place to work and bring out the old sound box.”

The innkeeper led me into a backroom stuffed with all sorts of random debris. Broken tables and chairs were piled up in one corner, destined to be scavenged for parts and reassembled into functional furniture. A workbench next to them had a few carpentry tools scattered across its surface and a whole lot of sawdust coating everything else.

“It’s in… one of these cupboards,” Eggert said, looking around. “This one… maybe?”

After a minute of rifling around, he produced a small stone cube, about six inches to a side. It was immediately obvious what had gone wrong. It had fallen and cracked, interrupting the delicate structure of the runes carved across its surface. “Well, do you think you can fix it?” Eggert asked.

“Easily,” I said. “It should only take a few minutes.”

“Fantastic. I’ll go get your payment ready then. Just bring it out to me at the bar when you’re done.”

“Of course,” I told the man. He left me by myself in the workshop, though I kept track of both him and Senica with a simple scrying spell in the common area. A single cast of stone shape let me smooth out the cracks in the sound box, which had been inscribed to both direct sound in a specific direction and limit how far it traveled. It also had a function to amplify the sounds coming from directly behind it, which I wasn’t sure was a great idea, but redesigning it wasn’t my job.

I repaired it, gave it a bit of mana, and tested the various functions inscribed into the box to ensure everything was working. Then I walked back out to where Senica and Eggert were engaged in a conversation about economics, of all things.

“-just saying, why not just trade for things? That’s what you’re doing with my brother. He wants a place for us to sleep. You want your broken thing fixed. It’s simpler that way.”

“Yes, and sometimes things work out. But what if he wanted a sword? Let’s say he heads over to the blacksmith and offers to trade some magical repair work, but the blacksmith doesn’t need anything repaired. Now your brother is out of luck and can’t get his sword.”

Senica snorted. “Gravin would just make his own.”

Eggert shook his head and said, “You’re missing the point, on purpose, I might add. Gravin can’t trade his expertise to the smith, because the smith doesn’t need it. But I do. I have something broken that Gravin can fix. And the smith needs things Gravin can’t do, so by the magical power of money, everybody gets what they want.”

I suppressed a laugh at the dubious expression Senica wore. “Money is a very common development in most civilizations,” I told her. “We’re all just such small and self-sufficient villages back home that it was never needed. If you go to Derro, they actually use rocks filled with mana. At least, they were…”

“Ryla says she refuses to do any trading there, that it’s too much of a mess and everyone is always trying to cheat her,” Senica said.

“She’s not exactly wrong,” I said. “It’d probably be better to go directly to the villages that surround the city if she wanted something, but we can make our own food just fine and they don’t do much else besides keep Derro from starving.”

Hopefully, now that the Wolf Pack cabal was gone and their stranglehold on mana had vanished with them, people would start to find new and better ways to use their resources. When I’d begun teaching people how to ignite cores and giving lessons in novice-tier spells, I’d done so with the understanding that the knowledge would spread, giving rise to a new generation of mages.

“Is that my fixed sound box?” Eggert asked. He was eyeing up the stone cube I carried under one arm, and I presented it to him for inspection.

“It is,” I said.

“Fantastic. It looks good as new,” the baker said.

Without another word, he marched over to the stage in the back of the room, set the box down in the middle, and pumped a bit of mana into it. Then he stood there, cleared his throat and said, “How’s this thing working? Everyone hear me alright?”

A few of the patrons sitting at tables eating twisted in their seats to regard Eggert. “Sounds good,” one of them called out.

The reservoir was only good for about three hours if it was fully charged. Eggert had given it enough for a minute or two, though he’d done the transfer somewhat clumsily. It was obvious he had no magical training and his core was still dormant. Once he’d confirmed the sound box worked, he picked it back up and came over to the bar.

“Here you go,” he said, handing me a stack of the cloth-paper. Three of them had tens inked on them, three had fives, and five had ones. Each denomination was a different color, making it easy to tell them apart on sight.

“Thanks,” I said. “Now, about that oven?”

Eggert chuckled and said, “Yes indeed! That thing’s been broken for years. I’ll get my nephew to haul it out of storage and bring it to the workshop. In the meantime, let’s get a meal in the two of you, yeah?”

“Sounds perfect. What do you think, Senica?”

“Depends what we’re eating,” she replied.

“Well, my dear child, let me tell you what’s in our kitchen today…”

  *

I had a scrying spell sitting in Senica’s room, which I’d warded to ensure she slept safely. I, on the other hand, was sitting in the mountains with my boulder, now full-sized again. Every few minutes, I spun out another ribbon of mana, each one using the contents of my entire core. Then I’d drain some mana out of my mana crystals to refill my personal supply and make another one.

I’d need hundreds of these to fully convert the granite boulder into a new mana crystal, but once I was done, I’d have a reservoir almost a hundred times bigger than my original one. Then I could break my connection to the old crystals—they were destined to become teleportation platform batteries—and return to near-perfect transfer efficiency. That combined with the new style of spellcasting I’d learned from Grandfather meant that I’d effectively never run out of mana again.

That wasn’t going to stop me from continuing to advance my core, of course. I still needed to reach stage five in order be able to cast master-tier spells directly from my core, if nothing else. But there were other benefits besides simply increasing my mana storage and regeneration rates. Having a genius loci connection at stage six was essential to controlling my demesne, and regaining my mage’s shadow at stage eight would vastly increase my effectiveness at just about everything I cared to do.

Then, of course, there was stage ten. True immortality, or at least that’s what we’d all theorized. No one had ever managed it, at least not during my lifetime and not according to any of the leftovers from prior civilizations I’d uncovered. I was determined to shatter that barrier this time, and if everything went according to plan, I’d have easily five millennium to work at that goal this time around.

And if somehow, after all that time, I was still stuck with a stage nine core, well, I knew the secrets to reincarnation, though I’d need a lot more than a few decades of prep work this time since my idiot former apprentice had stupidly destroyed one of the moons that powered the lunar convergence after I died. Overcoming that particular handicap was going to be tedious.

After about an hour’s work, I finished draining my accumulated mana and shrunk my boulder back down to travel size. It went back into my phantom space and I flew back to Eggert’s inn. Nobody had disturbed either of our rooms, not that I’d expected anyone to, and I passed through the wall into the one I’d rented. After careful consideration of the bed pushed up against one wall, I shook my head, reached into my phantom space, and pulled out my own mattress and blankets to put on the floor.

There were some luxuries I just wasn’t willing to go without anymore.