It takes the better part of a day for me to make it clear of the mycose colony. Running through the infected woods offers me a breath of clean air that was wholly absent inside the dungeon, and I appreciate every second of it. I test my new dragonfire on a few territory bulbs as I race through the forest, but the fire is not nearly as effective against the budding monsters as I had hoped, their enormous limbs being able to pat it out and smother it. At one point I manage to almost set the entire forest on fire. I decide then that the experimentation can wait until I find a place where the forest isn’t covered in dried leaves.

The rot of fungi eventually falls away as I speed northward, the forest taking on a healthy brown and green once more. Every few minutes, a monster jumps out of nowhere and pursues me for a time, but none are even close to matching my speed. I opt to string them along for a time, channeling a Dragonfire Bolt, until eventually blowing them away with raw firepower when I turn to face them. The monsters are only good for meat and coin, only the occasional bit of gold coming from them. That is fine by me, the meat is good for affix absorption, hopefully–many of the monsters I end up slaying I have never seen before–and the coin is a good medium for making enchantable metal. Something I especially need at the moment.

I finally stop when I break out of the trees, finding a prairie of lilies and dandelions that encompass a wide field before a bramble-covered hill. My bare feet cut through the grass and flowers as I bring myself to a halt in front of the hill, taking in the view. There are creatures moving about on the hill. From the distance between us, roughly half a mile or so, I can make out that they seem to be birds of some kind, big ones. Galea’s windows inform me that all of the monsters are only rank one, something that I can deal with.

In the distance, kissing the sky behind the hill that rises in front of me, stretch a range of mountains that shoot towards the clouds, just barely failing to reach. My next destination is finally within sight. That is where I will find them, Kendon and Coriander.

With the sun already behind the tops of the trees, casting a long purple shadow across the prairie, I take the sudden break in the trees as a sign to settle down for the night. I look myself over; I’m a bit sweaty, who wouldn’t be after running for eight hours straight, but my breath is calm and unbothered. The traveling clothes that I pilfered, my very last change of clothing–I swear, if something happens to them, I will lose my wits–held up well from my run. I can’t help but smile. Running for the entire day without growing tired fills me with a sense of power that I have rarely felt.

I burn away a nice clear area for myself before taking out my camp supplies, namely my pallet of bearskins, before taking a rest. A few tall branches that I have picked up over the course of my run through the woods make a square of torches around me as I start a fire to cook dinner on. While roasts of monsters whose names I have forgotten cook above my fire, I pull out one of the crates I looted in the bottom of the dungeon.

The chest is unadorned, a case of what my artificial eye describes as Gangem Iron and is four feet long and about two deep. There hadn’t been a lock on the crate, not any that I could see anyway, but in order to open it I needed to apply my green, corrosive fire around the lip of the crate where I suspected the lid to meet the rest of the metal–there had been no sign of a seam when I first started. Inside, I found a real prize.

Opening the crate again, I find the same three items resting on a bed of black velvet, their metal surface catching the flickering torchlight. The first and largest piece is a breastplate made of feathersteel, hardly weighting a few ounces when I remove it from the crate. On either side of the feathersteel breastplate are a pair of gauntlets which reach all the way to my elbows and are made from the same material. I spend time admiring the pieces of armor in the light of the fire. They are entirely unadorned, simple pieces that look to be suited for those plate-covered monsters. Lucky for me, we have similar builds.

Inspecting the piece in the light of the fire, I find a set of strange latching mechanisms on the left side of the breastplate. I almost miss the latches as they are completely flush with the surface of the armor, but with nothing better to do, I start working at them. I spend more than three hours opening the latches, taking bites of monster meat between sessions of trying to tackle how to open up the armor, tossing away any meat that lacks a useful affix.

Eventually, with the help of a copper coin, I finally manage to get the mechanism open. My glee at my new armor explodes when I understand what I find inside. The armor, as I discover, is divided into three main pieces. With the latch firmly closed, the front and back plates of the feathersteel breastplate appear monolithic, I never would have been able to tell that the thing could come apart if I hadn’t found the latches. The middle piece is by far the most interesting.

At first, the odd blue material that falls into my hand with the jingling of metal startles me. A sheet of springy blue material that feels a bit like rubber and has no rigidity to it, falling limp in my hand as I hold it. Running through the material are a myriad of metals, formed into lines and symbols that have been embedded into the material, creating strange and swirling patterns. My eye identifies the odd, rubbery sheet of blue and metal in my hands as an “Enchanting Tableau,” something I have never heard of, but something I can intuit the purpose of immediately.

“This is what is supposed to house the enchantments and magic inside the armor,” I mumble as the realization comes over me.

There is no magic left inside of the metals that run through the blue material, whatever preserved the armor inside the box apparently failed to keep those enchantments running. The intricate dance of the metal through the fabric of the tableau is far beyond me, and I don’t have any good affixes for enchanting at the moment either. I put the breastplate back together before I inadvertently lose a piece, inspecting the gauntlets and finding more latches set into the metal on them as well. It would appear that I know what my next project is going to be.

Setting aside the armor and storing the crate away once again, I retrieve the other box I found in that underground cavern. The metallic box itself is far smaller and had been far more difficult to open as well. Opening the lid, I lift free the loop of gold inside. I hold the unadorned crown of gold in my hand, turning it over and studying the inside of the band where intricate patterns create a weave in the surface of the metal so detailed and small that I cannot see the smallest parts with my naked eye. Magic thrums inside of the crown, more potent magic than I have ever held before. Whatever enchantment had been on the chest had done a magnificent job at preserving this piece.

Crown of New Lineage(Mythic):

???

Enhancement: +120 attribute points, able to be distributed at the discretion of the wearer.

The weight of the crown in my hand is a profound thing. The simple band of gold hides a tremendous power, a power that even Galea cannot describe to me. “Have you made any further progress trying to understand this?”

The spirit manifests in front of me, sneering at the crown in my hand. “No, and I won’t either. This piece is of a higher thaumic quality than the Eye of Volaash currently, the most I can glean is the magic it possesses that is within the bounds of the first rank.”

“Then you cannot access its further features,” I say. When I first showed the crown to Galea, the spirit had been giddy with excitement. As she told it, the Crown of New Lineage is of such a high quality that she cannot even evaluate it effectively, and its magic is sophisticated enough to require an administrative assistant like herself to control it adequately. She had expected to make a new friend, but when she made her first investigation of the crown, she found any such spirit absent.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Galea went on to further detail to me that enchanted items possess an involved system of qualitative steps similar to the ranking systems employed to delineate the differences in magical potency between practitioners of the magical arts. As the fey spirit bound to the artifact in my head, both the eye itself and Galea will grow in their potency alongside me; that was the entire purpose of an artifact after all. However, with me still being stuck at rank one, the quality of the magic Galea can employ to effectively utilize the crown is extremely limited. She believes that the crown itself may be something that she will not fully be able to unlock the potential of until I reach the fourth rank. Even the idea of climbing that high amid the ranks of magicians seems ludicrous to me, but I feel an attraction to the idea that I hadn’t before.

“Is it safe to use?” I ask Galea, flipping the crown in my hand.

“I do not have any idea, Mistress Charlene. I have no knowledge of what exactly that item is capable of. Honestly, most of its features are hidden to me. There is no guarantee that won’t affect you in some unforeseen way.”

I stare into the magical aura peeling off the item between my fingers, the coolness of the metal like water on my skin. The aura of the thing is both the purest white and the most insidious black. I wonder, not for the first time, what kind of monsters had been inside of those tubes if they were potentially powerful enough to wield such a thing that even Galea doesn’t think she will be able to crack before rank four. In the end, my mind is made by the sheer power of the item. This is obviously something that I should not have managed to get my hands on. That fact alone is enough of a temptation for me.

The crown sits on my head, a cool band of metal fitting perfectly in place as if it always belonged there. Warmth comes over me as Galea activates the enchantments she can inside the crown, integrating their working into herself. For a moment, I hear a long creaking sound, as if someone was opening a great door behind me. Then, it is over, and a window appears in the air before me, asking me how I would like to distribute the attribute points stored inside the crown. Deviating from my chosen path no longer occurs to me, and I split the points evenly between Magic, Speed, and Recovery.

Then, with my spoils thoroughly inspected, I begin to pull spawn seeds from my inventory, popping them in my mouth like the bite-sized morsels of sweet goodness that they are. I end up wasting one of the fruits when I over-indulge, finding the limit for the magic I can pull out of them at the moment. The limit was never quantified in any of the books that I stole from Arabella. I really need to find one that integrates the Faethian approach to magic with what the rest of the world uses. Who knows, maybe I will write such a thing one day, to help the next confused girl that has a creepy black and red eye shoved in her head. I discover that the amount of attribute points I can extract from natural treasures equals twice my level, meaning that I will need to find more natural treasures before I reach rank two.

I spend the night reading. Many of the books still on my stolen bookshelf are a mystery to me; in the past week and a half I have concentrated all my efforts on what I found to be the most important at the time, things that would help me not die to some strange monsters as I was all on my own in the wilderness. Now, having conquered that makeshift dungeon–if it can even really be called that–all on my own, I find enough confidence to start looking through some of the more obscure books. The histories that I find, while incredibly boring to read, offer me insight about the world that I had never even suspected before. I find the sun already rising over the treetops before I make it halfway through even one of the books.

The brambly hill stands like a dark shadow in front of me as I stand to continue my trek north. I fit the armor over my clothes, finding the shape not exactly flattering but comfortable enough. My camp disappears into my inventory once more and I make a breakfast of monster meat. The meat of an odd ferret-like monster I obliterated the day before holds a hint of magic to it, though I do not immediately recognize the symbol that appears on my Affix Index. As I chew, I continue to contemplate the hill in front of me. In many ways, it seems like the mud-forest that we found out in the middle of the shallow lake, something placed here by the Willian guild for the participants in the Passage to test themselves against.

Swallowing the ferret meat with a gulp of water, I stare at the odd birds moving along the hill. My eyes flick past the hill towards the mountains in the distance. That is where I need to be, where I will find the people to exact justified revenge upon. I have no idea exactly what form that revenge will take, but I know that not falling behind in this competition is vital to reach it. Licking my fingers, my eyes can’t help but moving back towards the hill. If it really was like the mud-forest, there will be treasure on that hill. I do need to start hunting monsters for their affixes again too. Besides, it was on the way. How long could it really take to burn up some birds?

----------------------------------------

The heat of the burning brambles gives a cozy atmosphere to the prairie as I dig through the five chests that I found on the hill. Behind me, the hill itself has become a mass of fire that burns smokeless like a second sun fallen to the earth. No monsters scream any longer from their thorn-ridden nests, spitting globs of caustic bile at me from their perches. The flightless birds that covered the hill had been huge, but only one had been above rank one. Of course, that bird had been guarding the largest chest inside its nest when I torched it.

Burning the hillside to its rocky foundations had only taken a few hours; looking at the sun overhead, I doubt that it is even noon. I won’t truly know how profitable the short adventure was until I have cooked up some of the monster meat to try out, but so far, I have found it marginally worth my time.

Inside the chests I found a mess of copper, bronze, and silver coins, only the largest one containing any gold at all. That is nice, I will never turn down money, but the items inside the chests are a bit disappointing. Most of the chests contain magical weapons: a bow, a spear, two daggers, and an odd weapon that looks like an oversized fork. I also won’t turn down free magical items, but since I have no idea how to use any of them, I can’t bring myself to be too excited about them. The two best things that I find are a piece of heavy armor which I steal the battle skirt off of to help make me not look so ridiculous, and a pair of boots. The battle skirt itself is a gorgeous piece of strong red fabric inlaid with rings of steel, while the boots are a familiar construction of leather and metal.

Boots of Striding(Rare):

Your classic boots of striding, a mainstay of any well-prepared adventurer. These boots were crafted in the Wall City of Grim, a collaboration by guild artisans to produce many such beneficial items for the upcoming Passage of Rising Tide.

Enhancement: +25 Speed

The descriptor of being rare does not seem as apt as I once thought it to be. The boots are identical to the ones that I found inside the first dungeon I visited, though they require a good bit of grunting and stamping to finally get on. Even walking through the brambles, the thorns hadn’t bothered my bare feet much, but it is a tad unladylike to go walking around without proper footwear. Finally finished with my inspection, I adjust the armor into laying in a more flattering position, looking myself over with a grin.

Chests of coin sit in front of me, no doubt a temptation placed in the forest by the Willian Guild to see who would slow themselves down with the extra weight. Likely, there is supposed to be some kind of lesson in it, but as each disappears into my inventory, I abjectly avoid any such lessons.

With the light of the still blazing hillside at my back, I prepare to turn my attention north once more. I stop before I can even begin, seeing a figure standing silently in the swaying grass of the prairie not even twenty feet ahead of me. The man’s bare chest sports a myriad of cuts and bruises, his white hair unkempt and frizzy. His eyes bore into me with a predatory danger that pushes the thought of danger and violence into me. The last few weeks have not been kind to him, but I can see that he hasn’t lost a single step.

“I was assured that you were dead,” Jor’Mari says, his sharp teeth almost luminescent in the glow of the burning hill.

“Sorry to disappoint you, my lord.” Fire begins to pool in my hand. Arabella Willian warned me against fighting this man, but I won’t let anyone stand between me and what I am after any more. I am going to rejoin this competition, and if I have to do so by bullying my way through this man, so be it. I am not the same girl that I was before.

Charlene Devardem

Human(Level 32)(Rank 1)

Emperor Conflux

Attributes

Vitality: 47(59)

Strength: 36(48)

Magic: 316(378)

Defense: 47(57)

Magic Defense: 40

Speed: 207(292)

Recovery: 297(419)

Perception: 37

Presence: 0

Healing Points: 590

Mana: 3780

Stamina: 1540