“You know, I’m curious if any of those complaining about giving me what I’m due remember a fairly simple but incredibly important thing,” I mused, shaking my head at the various possibilities the locals could do something dumb. “At the moment, I’m their boat, I’m keeping them, quite literally, afloat and out of the water, so annoying me to the point that I might be tempted to break the walls I erected would be…” I tried to come up with a suitable word but, sadly, there were none I could think of to adequately describe that sort of stupidity.
“They might hope to wait until the water recedes; that way, you couldn’t just take away the walls,” Luna suggested in an almost hopeful voice as if I needed the water to devastate the locals if they annoyed me badly enough, something I readily communicated with a mockingly raised eyebrow.
“Okay, I know. If you can protect them from something they have no chance of defying, you can destroy them just as easily, I know. But I doubt many of the locals have such a mindset, I think they are still partially stuck with the mindset from before the change, bound by the common sense and, to a degree, the laws and customs of that time,” she argued, making me consider her point for a moment. And I had to grant her that point: in a fairly remote and protected area like this, the now commonly accepted sense of danger hadn’t taken hold as strongly as elsewhere. To the majority here, the world remained a relatively safe place; sure, there was no more internet or television, nor the modern convenience they had been accustomed to, but I had a feeling that deep down, they still felt safe in this world.
If the worst threat they had experienced after the initial madness of the change when people Shattered and the dead started to walk the Earth had been the storm and subsequent flooding, they couldn’t instinctively recognise that I didn’t need to bother with trying to get justice from some external source like the government if they forced me to, I was readily able to enforce my own justice. A justice without an easy mechanism of appeal and without the usual restraints of justifiable punishments, so if they made me enact my own justice, it could easily become vengeance.
“Maybe I should hope that they try to withhold payment for the quest I completed for them,” I mused, softly chuckling to myself. “I never managed to find out what the system does in that case. Would it somehow transport the materials we were promised into our magical bags, or would there be some sort of punishment for those withholding payment? And if there was a punishment, what form would it take, how many of them would be afflicted, and so on? There are so many questions this could answer, especially with regard to the intelligence of the system. The mechanisms and such,” I explained, getting Luna to join in with soft laughter.
“Maybe we should wait for a few days until the water recedes somewhat before collecting the reward; that might give them the courage to try and keep it to themselves or maybe renegotiate. That way, you would get those answers, even if some fresh supplies would be nice,” Luna giggled, and I had to admit, the idea had a bit of amusing merit, even if it felt a little odd to deliberately wait for the locals to gather their courage so they could, in their minds, screw us over.
“You think they might be that dumb?” I asked, even as a small voice in my mind reminded me that people could always be that dumb. Human stupidity was essentially unlimited, especially when they gathered in groups. I was faintly reminded of some sci-fi novel I had read ages ago. In it, there was a species that gained greater intelligence if its members gathered and connected their minds into a gestalt. With humans, it was the opposite; the larger the group, the greater the mental degradation and the less intelligence the group as a whole could display.
The look on Luna’s face confirmed my thoughts quickly; she had no doubt that people could be that dumb, so maybe this would be worth waiting for. There had to be a reason why the people on Mundus generally trusted the System, and I doubted that it was because the people there were all nice, polite and law-abiding people. If there were an easy way to circumvent the system and its quest rewards, it would be used, especially on a group literally called Travellers, who were most certainly not in the ‘tribe’ of the people giving out the quest. And yet, I had never heard about such a case on the forum. For that to be the case, the system had to have some sort of enforcement or punishment mechanism in place.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
With those ideas in mind, Luna and I remained indoors for the rest of the evening, relaxing and putting some additional effort into the Shrine to Lady Hecate, making it nice and even adding some literature to it. Nobody should be able to claim the shrines we set up were only for our self-gratification. Every shrine had at least the basic guide to elemental and divine magic but the vast majority of them had more, though the additional texts weren’t as standardised as the basic guide. It generally depended on what we had been working on at the time we set the shrine up, leaving behind what essentially was an edited version of the development notes of the current project. Not enough to fully replicate what we had been working on, especially if the project was innately dangerous or had great potential for abuse, but enough to give them a path to start walking on.
Here, those additional lessons were once again focused on what could be called material magic, or maybe physical transmutation. Notes on how to best shape materials, even if one didn’t have the requisite knowledge to create stable structures but also notes on the best ways to analyse materials, though I had some fairly large advantages there, thanks to some of my traits. Either way, the idea was that this might allow me to slowly bridge the gap between Alchemy and the elemental magic I practised, though I doubted it would be that easy. Alchemy was, and likely would remain, a bit of a headache for me, simply because it seemed to be almost parallel to my style of magic, and the problem with parallel lines was, that they would never meet.
Soon, the evening turned into night, and I realised that, finally, the rain outside seemed to have stopped, at least for now. Maybe it was temporary maybe the storm had actually moved on. Hopefully, the water would soon drain further down the valley and make a mess of things downstream.
Given my earlier nap, I remained awake for quite some time, using my Mind over Matter ability to play around with a bit of stone. The current project was to see if I could detect and separate the different minerals in the rock. It was quite challenging, especially as I needed to completely rely on my magical sense;r my mundane sensescould noto register the differences inthe material.
Still, it was a fascinating project—so fascinating that I almost missed the sounds coming from outside. They were not the sounds of the storm returning but a different kind of sound: the sound of people up to no good.
Out of curiosity, I peeked through one of the windows and could easily see four people move towards and around the house, all of them carrying some stuff. They split into pairs, one of them holding a pair of bottles each, the other a torch and what appeared to be stones. Then, as if by arranged signal, they all tried to light some cloth stuck in those bottles, three of the four readily catching fire. The last bottle didn’t catch, while one of the already lit ones burned far quicker than it had any right to, though those bottles were only part of their attack. Given the speed with which that one bottle burned, it joined a pair of rocks thrown by the guys with the torches, aiming to shatter the windows so the bottles could easily make their way inside, though that one bottle shattered against the wall as it had been thrown too quickly. Still, the liquid inside splashed across the house, immediately catching fire, just as the liquid in the bottles flying through the window moments later did.
It seemed that the locals were so unhappy with our presence that they tried to burn us out. Not that they had a chance to succeed; smothering the fire was child’s play for me; though it was a little harder than I had expected, the liquid they used for their devices seemed to be somewhat magical in nature. More importantly, however, was the question of what sort of punishment these people deserved for their unprovoked attempt to murder their benefactor and whether it should include the other locals.
