Elrhain picked up the end of a Lontwood pole about 3 metres long. They were bamboo-like in both feel and texture. Ringed, hollow, and fibrous. But they likewise had differences, such as the colour being a gradient of deep purple and green. Their leaves resembled that of maples, with branches looking more like prickly vines.

He unsheathed a small bone knife but remembered he was a toddler.

So he left shaving of the stray branches and splits to an eager Howell.

He then checked the Zakky vines. They were hairy, the metallic blue outer layer softly reflecting the light. At one end of the vines were large nodules bearing fronds, from the base of which these vines hung down like a horsetail.

Elrhain pulled on one vine with a thickness of roughly an inch. It seemed strong and flexible enough, considering Elrhain’s target prey wasn’t anything more powerful than a bluefin tuna.

“Take this!” He handed the vine to Vesiphis. “Bind one end of the vine really tight to the thinner end of the Lontwood pole. Using glue or sap too would be better, but….”

“Our house has Rubra sap!” Ruba said.

“Good. Bring it. Now, um, uncle Anouk.” Elrhain held out the teeth of the Sawmouth Snapper the village kids had gathered.

These weren’t the jagged edges of the saw-like upper jaw but the actual teeth from inside the gheist’s mouth. They were as wide as Elrhain’s palm, and their menacing edges were hooked inward. But rather than fish hooks, they resembled flat croissants.

They needed to be shaped.

Elrhain drew the general outline of a fishing hook on the sand with a stick. If this were Earth, they would need modern equipment to grind the bone tooth down. Using stones like cavemen did millennia ago would take too long, and the precision would also be undesirable.

But,

“Understood.” Captain Anouk nodded. He had been paying attention to their actions intently. As someone who had seen the whole proceedings in the Slanout settlement, the watch captain had faith in whatever plan the prince hatched up.

He was definitely curious about how the events would pan out and accepted the gheist tooth without complaint.

His hand glowed red as he held his serrated dagger, then gently started shaving the tooth down to shape.

The manna powered labour was no less efficient than a modern-day industrial grinder.

A few minutes later, a shining white fishing hook was completed. There was a hole at one end of the hook to tie the vine, and the angular shape was perfected with the tip curving inward much more sharply.

“Excellent!”

By that time, Ruba had returned with a clay jar full of white tar-like substance, the magical Rubra sap.

“Hold on, Ruba. There’s something we need to do first.” Elrhain checked the shaft where Vesiphis tied the vine, scoring a few millimetres up and down with his knife. From there, he measured the Zakky vine, pointing to a spot about half a metre up from the vine’s loose end. He marked that too.

“Cut off a piece of Lontwood about a finger long. Then insert two narrower twigs, any will do, into the hollow inside, where the thinner of the two twigs should be longer, and the thicker one should be short. Half of each twigs’ body should stick out too. Yes, like that. Okay, this thing is called the float. Tie this to the spot I marked on the vine... That will do. Now attach this tooth hook at the end of the vine. Just loop it in.”

Vesiphis dutifully followed Elrhain’s instructions but couldn’t help asking, “M-My lord, is this some sort of binding weapon, like the chain tendrils Cadfael uses? I cannot imagine how even Ysbail or Cati can use this….”

“You don’t bind, you hook!” Elrhain said. “And it is not a weapon. It’s a tool, an instrument. You don’t fight with it.”

He ignored the winged boy’s perplexed look. In truth, Elrhain himself did not know if this DIY venture would bear fruit. On Earth, he had used a highly mechanical, motorized version of this instrument with a million sensors and sleek artificial intelligence.

He knew the basic construct and design and the purposes of the various constitutive parts. But as for the more subtle significance and nitty-gritty details behind the prehistoric form of a fishing hook, float, and line, he had zero idea.

But Elrhain was confident. If it worked for cave dwellers, it would work for dhionne.

Ruba giddily applied the gunk like glue on all the places the Zakky vines were tied to other things. After that, captain Anouk dried the adhesive using a basic heat spell.

“It’s done!” Elrhain looked over his creation.

A fishing pole.

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A primitive one with no heed paid to physics or mathematics, one jury-rigged together with anything on hand. No line guides, not to mention reels or handles.

But Elrhain reckoned the first one used by his Earth ancestors was surely not any better. Ancient Egyptian anglers didn’t have magic either. At least Elrhain didn’t think so. No one could be absolutely sure what secrets the Pharaohs were hiding in their giant coffins other than onions and beetles, even in the 31st century.

“Ugh, so heavy.” The three-meter-long fishing pole, or fishing rod as some called it, was too heavy for a toddler like Elrhain to lift, and he fell backwards because of the weight of the

Lontwood.

Elrhain stood up again while dusting his behind. He called for Ruba, Cati, and Ysbail. Agwyn, after thinking through a few complications regarding her future steps, also demanded he let her join the fun.

Howell and Vesiphis, along with the village children, looked on curiously, with the shark-eyed boy literally begging Elrhain to explain the ins and outs of this mysterious gadget. But Elrhain refused. He insisted on proving that even the weakest non-cultivators could fish up a fortune with his subsequent actions, not words.

The five toddlers lifted the fishing pole up high under Elrhain’s repeated corrections. The Zakky vine fishing line was a good bit longer than the pole itself, so it left a slithering line on the sand as they towed it around.

“Vesiphis. Hook a small piece of meat on that tooth hook.”

The village kids had brought back a leaf of meat from the butcher about half a kilogram’s worth. Vesiphis cut off a finger-length piece from the chunk and pierced it onto the hook.

“Good.” Elrhain licked his lips, his voice failing to hide his excitement. “Now throw that hook into the water.”

If he could, he would have cast the line himself. But that was impractical in the current situation, where the fishing pole was multiple times taller than himself, and he couldn’t do a good rotation with his toddler's waist.

But that was fine because in his plans, the poles weren’t meant to be manned by toddlers at all.

Vesiphis threw the hook, along with the bait, towards the lake. The line stretched a few five meters before plunging with a plop, everything below the float sinking down.

This section of the water was outside the cordoned off semi-circle. Even in the afternoon sunlight, they could vaguely see the contours of the many fish scamper away from the vicinity as the water was disturbed.

Mortal gheists. They roam in infinite numbers in every lake and river of Earthloch. Seemingly the only beings excused from the wrath of dhionne.

They had manna-poor flesh that was hardly worth wasting a hunter’s time. For he could use the same time, and manna, to hunt land gheists of far higher value, far more quickly. Plus, anything under the Earthen realm could not provide them with enough sustenance. So why should they waste their time fumbling in water for just one arm’s length of carp and trout?

Even mortal men overlooked them. Unlike a rabbit, they could not simply slash a sword at them. Nor could they dig pitfalls or lay rope traps to snare their ankles. Spearfishing should have been possible, especially in lakes with water as clear as Sagathan. But Elrhain had no recollection seeing it done nor reading any mention of it.

Entering the water was an even bigger folly. Because these mortal fish and gheists that make up the beautiful ecosystem of the lake depths were but a smokescreen to camouflage the actual dangers that lurked within.

Perhaps far in the past, the starving dhionne of those societies might have ignorantly swum into the treacherous waters without a high enough cultivation base to try their luck. Only to get bitten by a silk-thin poisonous snake, dragged down under by a behemoth worm, or serrated to bits by a swarm of hungry piranhas.

The lakes harboured stranger dangers than anything a dhionne might encounter above.

On land, they could run away. But in water, they will drown, as most do not have the organs or appendages necessary to adapt to an underwater environment like Howell and Rister.

For a mortal man’s doom, all it would take was one Earthen gheistrum, one beast that could empower itself with manna, one monster who could move faster than his eyes. It would throw even the most careful and daring mortal dhionne far out of his element in the face of such foreign foes.

That is why entering the lake outside the safe Lontwood barriers was strictly forbidden.

Just like how on land, the great majority of the Earthlochian population scoured the mountain forests for edible tubers, plants, berries, and fruits all day long, hoping to fill their stomachs with a day’s worth of food. For the lakes, too, the best they could do was pick up the flopping creels, clams, crabs, and seaweed left on the shore as the tides recede.

Both the quality and quantity were nowhere near enough. Not even for servants, not to mention cultivators.

So even if the bounty of foodstuff was right there under those shallow mirrors of blue, within arm’s reach, waiting to fill the belly of a starving dhionne with no hopes of cultivation. Accepting that invitation was a path not to salvation but to a punishing death.

The art of fishing, or hunting under the relentless waters of Earthloch, was a skill possessed by only a few. They were strong in their element but far fewer in number than the hunters of the land.

Thus, for many millennia, these smaller fish and lake-gheists lived being neglected. That was true even now, in the collapse when the hunting range of each dhionne settlement had shrunk exponentially.

Although the collapse also brought a surge in the number of gheists, it would take many cycles for that to go up enough to support the vast Earthloch population, all of which was now stuffed in the small region of Lochuir.

Everyone looked anywhere they could and exhausted all means to dig out anything edible from under the dirt, beneath the stone, and deep in the rotting wood of dead trees. But nobody looked for the fish and shrimps beneath the lakes.

These creatures swam unabated in their nonchalance, mocking how powerless the two-legged, monkey-like land monsters were.

Wagging their tails with no sense of crisis, big plump catfishes and basses swayed close to the shore, knowing that no land-lubber dared to venture into their territory.

One particularly fat catfish with the haughtiest whiskers around even had the nerve to blow bubbles at the white bone-thing the small swarm of two-legged land monsters threw down.

It had juicy meat attached to it. Why would they toss such fresh food?

The fish cautiously circled the suspicious afternoon snack a few times. It nudged it with its muzzle, then gave it a quick nibble.

Yummy! Manna!

As it gulped down the manna-rich meat, the catfish scanned the area once more. It was the largest mortal gheist around; even the accursed long-spiked-hole-digger that burrowed under that spongy rock didn’t dare to lay claim to anything it wanted.

As for the two-legged ones above? The catfish knew that those monsters only went for the older and more powerful overlords of its kind. Besides, weren’t they the ones foolish enough to throw away delicious meat in the first place?

And once the meat was in the water, it was fish territory now.

So, the snobbish, unsuspecting catfish opened its mouth wide while feeling very pleased with itself and chomped!