In-game, Suchi, the bunker dug earlier.
Henry's character stood inert in the dimly-lit underground space, illuminated by a glowing stone, whose light shone upon a stack of books old and new, random papers, Memory Spheres encircling him, along with three barrels filled with multi-coloured bricks in the bunker's corner.
These supplies had been dropped off by his busy helpers. While he'd been doing the tutorial, they'd scrambled about gathering information on the curse, borrowing copies of any books the Earthfriends had found in the dungeon where it'd originated, along with other materials used while preparing for the expedition. Additionally, the helpers had conducted structured interviews with the afflicted, noting symptoms, life history, etc.
The barrels of multi-coloured bricks were unrelated - those were power-up foods for the donkey, Henry wanting to make his shabby mount stronger and faster.
His character suddenly began to blink, as he logged back on, the animation of sense and thought possessing his blank features.
Henry didn't move much, however. Since his character had finished absorbing his minion's collection, he immediately leapt into his Mental Library to complete this noobie curse quest, using his Scholar skills.
He'd be happy to have this little thing done with. The tutorial about to grow out of hand, it would be nice to prune one of the irritating branches he could control.
Henry started with collating a formal course description of the curse's symptoms. In addition to fever and fatigue, the afflicted Earthfriends experienced rashes on their shoulder blades and slowed heart rates. Symptoms also differed by tier, with victims above Tier-2 entering a deep coma, while those below stayed awake but shed their fingernails. At a more subtle level, the curse appeared to be progressive in nature, the rash growing more intense with time.
From there, because the curse arose from a dungeon, he searched for any mentions of similar afflictions in his database of historical medical documents, which might lead to a cure. To begin, he limited the inquiry to texts relating to the era of the dungeon’s construction. Its era, he recognised from his minions' descriptions of the dungeon's architectural style. With pumpkin-shaped columns and murals of an eight-legged lizard, the place had been built by the Delinese people, who'd lived in the upper region of the Suchi river prior to the conquest of the area by the present occupants. More precisely, the architecture corresponded to the style of the Delinese Eftik Dynasty, which had reigned from 3770 to 3591 years Before Present.
After chasing a few false leads, he discovered a fitting entry in an encyclopaedia of infectious diseases, composed in 1994 B.P., for a 'disease' called 'Delinese Narcoalopeciosis'. The encyclopaedia failed to note a cure, but it did reference several extra sources. All these Henry traced back to a travelogue by a wandering Volefan doctor written in 3388 B.P., a copy of which happened already be in his possession.
The doctor had learned of the curse from a descendant of the Delinese medicine man caste, who’d sought to preserve the knowledge of it for the sake of future generations.
The transferal process had been complicated somewhat by a language barrier. Neither the doctor nor the medicine man could speak each other's tongue, so they'd relied on the medicine man's granddaughter as a translator, and she herself didn't understand the obscure medical lingo. Thus, the recipe for the cure was written in Delinese hieroglyphics, which the medicine man had drawn and which the vagrant doctor had copied directly without comprehension beyond what the granddaughter could give him.
But Henry, his character having learned Delinese, could understand the hieroglyphics.
Ignoring the doctor's faulty translation and reading the medicine man's words directly, he learned that the curse had been created by an enemy empire's Bloodmancer named Sikarmilki. The curse had been specifically produced to target Earthfriends because the Delinese army had a special retinue of them, on which they were heavily reliant. It was a sort of magical biological-warfare - a practice Bloodmancers still engaged in today and, due to which, along with necromancy and demonic summoning, the Class had been outlawed in most countries, including Suchi.
The curse's cure was a potion, which required 51 ingredients and would take a Tier 3-2 Alchemist about twenty minutes to brew. A detailed recipe had been provided by the medicine man, including indicators of success at each step and methods for procuring ingredients.
While Henry was copying the recipe, a hurdle arose in the form of a nonsensical passage:
"...how to process the giraffe. After sun-drying, strip off the lateral root hairs and steep them in tea for sixteen seconds..."
The word 'giraffe' continued to be used in place of the name of the herb. Henry guessed the doctor had misdrawn the hieroglyph.
Saana's game system often threw in such errors in historical documents to complicate affairs, to give the researcher a challenge. There would be multiple methods for tackling this same issue, depending on one's speciality. From a linguistic approach, he could search manually for similar hieroglyphs or dive into the etymological past for obsolete meanings. Alternatively, a seasoned Alchemist might be able to guess the mistaken ingredient based on its function.
Henry had a simpler, quicker Method than any of these.
He selected one of the pesky lines containing the giraffe error.
Universal Comprehension (Method - Authorial Intent) activated.
On Methods: most Civilian tasks, from sowing seeds to forging swords, had multiple magical techniques or 'Methods' for accomplishing them. Different Methods varied in terms of processing speed, failure rate, special effects granted to final products, amount of player input, rate of Universal Production consumption, and type of crafting materials required. Methods were the treasure of Civilian classes. While Martial classes hunted for stronger weapons and armour, Civilians hunted down and invented more efficient Methods.
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Naturally, for a Tier 5 Scholar of Henry's position, acquiring the best was no problem, his character blessed with thousands of advanced and secret techniques.
As this one secret technique initiated, Henry underwent a sensory shift similar to entering the memories of the rabbit.
He found himself in a different place, in a different time, squatting in a run-down shack, the voice of a young woman translating beside him, and a stooped elder before him scribbling in the dirt with a weathered stick. In his own hand was a piece of paper, onto which he was studiously copying, his gaze—out of Henry's control—flicking between the dirt figures and his imitations. When he glanced at the medicine man's drawings, a subtitle popped up for Henry, 'How to process the Longstem grass. After sun-drying...’
Universal Comprehension (Method - Authorial Intent) used. 752 Universal Productivity consumed.
The ancient scene, manifesting between one blink, vanished after another.
Henry, back in his underground bunker, noted down the correction and continued along with the translation, the error that might've stumbled newbies bypassed in seconds.
Similar misdrawings arising afterwards were solved as easily.
The final step for Henry, after writing the complete recipe, was to modify it so that it could be reproduced in the present day. 3500 years was a long time and not all the ingredients would still be available.
In total, he discovered 7 ingredients that came from extinct sources.
For substitutes, he dived into Alchemy manuals, ancient and modern, which noted the active components of the ingredients and a bunch of other stuff. He also checked detailed lists of what could be purchased today in Suchi.
Here, he arrived at a wall. Exact substitutes were available for 4 lost ingredients, and, for 2, he had refined down a list of likely candidates. But the last ingredient was not so simple.
It was the carapace of a beetle that’d lived in a single grove and had only been used in a single recipe, this cure - no other Alchemy manual mentioned it. By studying related insect species or the geographical conditions of the insect's living environment, it should be possible to find a substitute. However, this would require extensive trial-and-error experimentation across thousands of test batches. Henry was a Tier 4-2 Alchemist, and, with his skills alone, he estimated based on the number of missing variables that he'd need to burn weeks of Universal Productivity to explore all the possibilities.
"Wow." He exited his Mental Library, filling the empty bunker with a surprised murmur. "Interesting."
It seemed he’d underestimated this curse side-quest a little bit.
Given the sizeable workload for fixing the problem, the quest had probably been designed to impact not just the residents of Suchi but the entire Kanaru region of which it was one part, covering about 50 million NPCs. It seemed to be a national-level crisis, on the scale of a volcanic eruption or an invasion from Interplanar demons.
At least, this theory would seem to fit with the severity of a later stage of the curse noted in the hieroglyphs. Sometime after entering the coma, the Earthfriends would start experiencing horrifying nightmares. Following that, they would metamorphosise into giant moths and fly around spreading a sleep-inducing neurotoxin. Their knocked-out victims would then be abducted and have their bodies drained of their blood and lymphatic fluids.
This final stage had gone unnoticed so far because the first Suchi Earthfriend wasn’t scheduled to transform until—according to Henry's calculations—approximately six in-game hours from now. Soon after, however, the pristinely clean blue skies above would be marred with vampiric moths, swooping down and gobbling up the terrified citizens.
Like the noob tutorial, this minor event was also about to grow much more complicated, the plot not simply thickening but spreading like the brambly gorse that smothered the farms of his homeland.
But none of that stuff should be Henry's problem. Retirement also meant retiring from saving the world from catastrophes - the world of Saana, it should be emphasised, Saana the videogame, where nothing ultimately mattered. Hell, could you really call vampiric moths a significant change from this shithole's current situation? Why, just this morning, a cannibal had tried gobbling him up.
The only way this affected him was that, amongst the swarm of vampiric moths, would be all the Earthfriend trainers necessary for him to unlock the Class he'd wanted for participating in his duelling tournament.
But this wasn't a real issue, either, was it? It might be strategically optimal to use an Earthfriend, but he'd concocted plenty of alternative schemes with different Classes. He could effortlessly switch. At this point, having not even yet acquired the Class, he'd formed no significant attachment to that option. He didn't even like Earthfriends, their hippy vegan aesthetic disgusting him.
He'd put in his best effort, he'd failed for silly reasons, now he should move on.
"Change of plans, then," he announced out loud to drive his convictions to Not-Do home to himself. "Now, I'll become a Beast Tamer and create a dazzling, innovative technique for fighting alongside a loyal animal companion specifically against noobs. Wolf, gorilla, sabre-tooth tiger, eagle - oooooh, which pet will I choose? How mysterious and intriguing is the future. Maybe, I'm holding back on revealing a secret, overpowered pet: a perverted parakeet with the perfect parameters for pecking plebs in the privates...painfully. Or maybe, I've found a super-competent monster that can handle 92.3% of the duelling while I chill at the back of the arena reading comic books, smug at the success of my new non-martial-art, The Strategy of The Nepotistic Manager Hire. Boy, I can't wait to find out what happens!"
While spouting this absurd drivel, Henry'd not smiled once. With each word echoing in his own ears, his face had sunk a little further, declining beneath its habitual flatness like the sun descending into the horizon.
When he was done, he tilted his head back, his tired gaze seeming to bore through the dirt ceiling of his bunker to the universe beyond.
Something, rising from unknown depths, flickered in his eyes, a feeling between hunger and hostility. Its origin would be impossible for even himself to say. Henry was a teenager. Perhaps the source could be found in that fact about him, the impetuosity of youth, the heedless, immature side of young men his age that prickles when brushing against too much opposition and that refuses to submit at any price, including the price of self-annihilation.
"Annoying," he said.
It was very annoying.
He sighed
Then, he returned to his Mental Library and conjured up the quickest solution possible.
When he found an adequate plan, the dark void of the Mental Library brightened slightly as dozens of stars seemed to appear in the distance. Bringing any of them closer, one would see they were documents - mostly timetables for himself, his minions, and random members of the Slum Empire.
He ordered the system to create one more document from a template for forged theses, titling it 'An Incomplete Treatment for the Dread Curse of Sikarmilki', by Dr Oba Iskander, his spoofed ring identity.
As another star flashed into life, books started pouring out from shelves, flying to Henry, and stacking in a circular formation around him, the stack growing so high it passed over his head.
Rapid Composition (Method - Heartspeech Language) activated.
Completion Time Parameter set to 0 hours.
Following that, from inside of the resulting well made of books, an almost imperceptible sound was heard.
Click.
In an instant, the newest star grew a hundred times brighter.