Hugo sighed and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Despite the cold water of the river and the slight chill of the cavern, he was still working up quite a sweat. Dredging mud and gravel from the bottom of the large river wasn’t simple work by any means, even with the strange artifacts the goblins had provided them.

On the surface, it didn’t appear like much. It was little more than a thick metal handlebar for pushing the device that ended in a large black wedge with wheels. As Hugo pushed the contraption along the riverbed, it would dredge up clay, sand, and small rocks. Two large tubes extended out of the water to either side. As he pushed the tool through the silt, whatever it picked up was separated into bins: gravel and small rocks to the left, clay, sand, and other such stuff to the right.

Hugo had no idea how it did any of this, of course. The contraption’s internals were a complete mystery to him. He couldn’t even sense any Spirit Energy from the thing, barring the natural radiant energy it gave off, telling it had been built out of resources found here in the Deep Tunnels instead of brought from the surface. Even someone of his ‘meager’ [Silver Spirit] cultivation could ‘taste’ the difference in quality between the Spirit Energy on the surface and the Deep.

There was a reason Adventurers kept wandering into the tunnels, despite the dangers found there. Or why access was so hotly contested.

Hugo sighed and shook his head. So much for turning his luck around. There was nothing he could do about it, though, so he gripped the handlebars and got back to work.

Occasionally, he would encounter a larger rock the device couldn’t handle. These he marked with a bundle of flags strapped to his back. Both to warn other dredgers and to mark them for an extraction team.

Overall, working the device felt similar to the reel mowers his ma used to make him use when he was a kid.

His ma had always claimed the neat little flower beds and tidy grass lawn drew in customers, and to be fair, it had worked. As rugged and hard as some Adventurers seemed, Hugo’s ma’s cafe had always been packed full of the same rough-looking men and women, sitting in her little garden and drinking tea from dainty cups.

And, of course, he had been the one in charge of making sure it all looked nice and ‘high-class,’ as his ma used to say. Sometimes, Hugo wondered what life would have been like if the sickness hadn’t taken her. If the loan sharks hadn’t torn what remained of his ma’s cafe to pieces. If he hadn’t fallen in with Icefinger’s men in desperation.

Would he have inherited the cafe? Would he be pouring tea and baking pastries for high-ranked Adventurers, instead of mugging newbies in an alley for pocket change? Maybe he would have been — while not rich — well off enough to afford to live in a nicer part of Halirosa, instead of so desperate that he was willing to risk going on a stupidly dangerous, unauthorized expedition. One where he would get captured by goblins and spend the next ten years dredging out a river for Celestials-above-knows what reason.

But Hugo had learned long ago that there was no point in wondering about ‘What ifs’ in life. You just had to make the best of things.

“As ma always said, ‘If today wasn’t your friend, it was your teacher’…” Hugo muttered to himself.

“What was that?” Bill asked as he trudged through the river in front of Hugo. The younger, slightly eccentric man looked up at Hugo and tilted his head. He propped the long, metal rake in his hands against the river bed and took the opportunity to rest.

Hugo looked at his friend and shook his head. “Nothin’, just talkin’ to myself.”

Bill narrowed his eyes and stared. “Man, the work’s really getting to you, isn’t it? Take a quick dip under; the water will clear you righ—”

Thunk!

“Ow! What was that for?!” Bill cried in indignation, clutching the top of his head where a rake — identical to his own — had smacked him.

“Shut up, you fool!” Claude said as he stood on the other side of the dredger, opposite of Bill.

Bill glared at Claude and rubbed his head. “Was that really necessary?!” he asked.

Claude returned the glare, “We’ve talked about this, stupid. The others haven’t caught on to the Dragon Pool yet. You go opening your mouth, and everyone will be volunteering for this job! Do you want to go back to the quarry?!” he shot back under his breath.

Bill’s eyes went wide, and he nervously glanced around. Bill could be… loud on occasion, but lucky for their group of three, they were still rather far ahead of the other teams.

They were ahead of the others, partly because the imprisoned bandits considered dredging the river to be one of the worst available assignments. It was dirty, grueling, and rather tedious work. Being assigned to work at the river had quickly become a punishment of sorts, and it didn’t help that the bandits weren’t the most cooperative at times.

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Case in point.

“Get back to work! Ya’ lazy bum!”

Zap!

“Arraug!” a rather large bandit near the back of the line collapsed into the mud where he’d been sitting, shaking as the silvery band fused to the skin of his neck sparked. A smug-looking goblin stood on the shore nearby. In the goblin’s hand, a small, white rod with various buttons was pointed at the twitching man, a single button depressed.

Lowering the rod, the goblin released the button, causing the sparks to instantly cease. The bandit struggled to push themselves up on trembling arms, coughing up water and mud as they glared at the goblin.

The goblin frowned, squinted, and pointed the rod at the man again. The bandit turned, grabbed the large bucket next to him, and hurried over to his waiting team. When the team started moving again, the goblin smirked to himself.

Maybe sensing the three of them staring at him, the goblin turned and frowned. Just as they were about to raise the rod, Hugo turned back to the dredger and began pushing it forward. Bill and Claude swiftly resumed their work, using their rakes to extract the thick aquatic plants that grew abundantly along the river bed.

The reason why the three of them were so determined to endure such a miserable job was actually quite simple. Hugo was genuinely surprised that no one else had caught on yet. But then again, it was something that they had only realized themselves thanks to Claude’s previous experience in the Deep.

The twitchy, paranoid man was frustrating sometimes, but even Hugo had to admit he knew his stuff.

Ironically, it was also why they had to keep removing the plants daily.

The Dragon Pool.

Whispering over the sound of the dredger, Bill asked Claude. “How do you even know it’s a real Dragon Pool? Sure, there’s the Mud Drake, but a drake ain’t no dragon. Besides, I thought no one knew how they formed. What makes you think this is one?” he asked.

Claude tsked. “No one will say how they’re formed. That’s different. There are plenty of theories, and I’m sure some ancient bigwig has figured it out. It’s just no one’s going to go telling nobodies like us anything.”

Hugo nodded his head. There were theories, of course. Some people thought dragons — and dragon-related creatures — instinctually created them. Some people thought the Dragon Pool created the dragon by infusing some lucky reptile with draconic might. Others still thought the pools were simply natural treasures unusually suited for draconic creatures, and thus naturally attracted them.

It wasn’t like dragons were willing to say for themselves. In fact, speaking to an outsider about Dragon Pools was one of the highest forms of taboo in their entire culture. Oddly enough, that taboo didn’t extend to actually using them, or even studying them. In fact, most large clans or sects controlled at least one Dragon Pool somewhere. The taboo only seemed to extend to those already in-the-know speaking about their nature. Anyone who’d ever tried — and those they’d told — had all simply… vanished.

Even the theories were whispered about in no more than hushed tones.

Bill raised a brow. “You sure about that? I mean, I’ve heard of Dragon Pools before. Who hasn’t? But aren’t they supposed to be things of legend? Like, ‘Cure any diseases, heal any wound’ kind of thing? I don’t think relaxing some aches and boosting our stamina qualifies.”

Thunk!

Claude whacked him on the head again. “That’s why I said forming, fool! As for ‘proof,’ all you have to do is look around us.” He gestured to the surrounding river.

Hugo glanced at the river and had to admit that the water was oddly clean and clear, even this far away from the Dragon Pool. Far more than one would expect such a slow-moving river to be, and doubly so given their current task. With half a dozen teams dredging the river, it should have been a muddy, swirling mess. Yet Hugo could have reached down and scooped a handful of water and been none the worse for wear.

In fact, that’s exactly what he did.

As the cool, crisp water hit his stomach, he shivered. A weak yet soothing chill rushed through his body, and his aching muscles relaxed slightly. It wasn’t quite at the level of a good break, but it helped. What’s more, the effects seemed to compound. Each day, the three of them worked a little further and did a little more. Hugo could tell his Cultivation itself hadn’t really moved, but it was hard to deny the fact that something was happening.

Suffice it to say, all three of them had started volunteering for dredging duty shortly after descovering its effects. If any of the other Adventurers were aware of what they knew, Hugo didn’t know. Though it was unlikely that anyone had connected to the Dragon Pool, likely attributing any refreshing effects to simply being ‘Deep Water.’

Otherwise, as Claude said, more of Bosco’s group would be volunteering as well. As it was, the goblins were already suspicious that they even wanted to, but Hugo had spun it as a desire to say ‘sorry’ for their part in Bosco’s reign of terror.

It helped that it was mostly true. Hugo’s companionship of necessity with Bill and Claude during the trip to the cavern had quickly turned into something more genuine, as all three had found the way Bosco was doing things… unappealing. They might have been street thugs, but even they had their lines.

Instead, the three of them had spent most of their time scouting and patrolling the forests before the goblin’s raid. They might not have actively helped any of the goblins, but they hadn’t made life harder and hadn’t made any enemies, either. That really helped during their trials.

As a result, all three of them had walked away with some of the lightest sentencing out of the bandits: ‘only’ ten years of hard labor.

None of that would matter, though, if the goblins suspected they were somehow benefiting from their task. They’d be blacklisted from the job and watched far closer than they were now.

Bill and Claude’s arguing broke Hugo out of his ruminations. He knew he should probably speak and break it up. For as much as they got along sometimes, both men had abrasive personalities and would often butt heads in circular arguments that didn’t really go anywhere, leaving him to mediate.

Before he could speak, however, a loud, warbling whistle echoed through the forest.

Everyone in the immediate area froze.

Hugo’s gaze snapped upstream.

“Crap!”

That single word broke the silence. In an instant, everyone in or near the river made a mad dash for the nearby forest’s edge.

Hugo, Bill, and Claude were among the last inside the shelter of the trees, being the furthest out and having left the dredger where they had stopped.

Just in time, too, as not long after they crossed the treeline, the clear river suddenly turned murky. A massive shadow swam through the deeper part of the river, churning calm river waters into a raging torrent.