After getting Mircha’s approved I immediately went to check out my cave, not exactly the dream house I imagined as a child but it's more than a campsite for now so I was more then happy.
Walking in I noticed that the cave wasn’t that deep, it had a wider open section for about five metres deep before the roof sharply came down from being around four metres high to a little over two metres high. Dividing it up there were functionally two rooms, a large entrance space that was about six metres wide, four metres high, and five metres deep. The next portion was only a bit over two metres high but was at least twenty metres deep and about five metres wide.
“First things first, time to draw up a plan then see how you even convert a space like this into a healing house” Settling down with a bit of charcoal and the back of the map for my area I drew out the division I think that needed to be made. The very back space would be a storage space for any items or healing materials we gathered. The other half I would need to divide into small rooms, maybe two rooms one as a bunk room for anyone needing shelter and the other as my own room. Then the front would be set up as a treatment area, it would allow plenty of room in case there were multiple patients but also have room to be decorated with something to make it look the part of a phoenix cave. Whatever that ended up being, I still wasn’t entirely sure phoenixes were real beyond a child's story.
Hopefully one of the guards or workers had an earth manipulation ability, if not I might be joining the loggers and learning how to build some walls myself. Sighing I climbed up and moved back to where I had originally set up camp, packing down my tent and filling my small fire pit back in. Moving back into the entrance of the cave I set up my bedroll near the wall, and dug a small fire pit with my trowel. After lining its edges with stones, I would rather not set my bedroll on fire thank you, I looked around and realised I looked like a mad woman setting up to be a hermit in here.
Wandering over through the camps I spotted the overseer chatting with some of the hunters, and made my way over waiting for him to finish “Mircha, just quickly, I know coin isn’t useful to a lot of people right now but is there anyway I can trade or pay for someone to help me make some walls in the cave? I think I can flesh it out but walls are a bit beyond my abilities right now”
“Well I believe one of the hunters who came along is actually an earthen mage, his actually taking the founders quest as well, his plans were to try to build his class towards town building long term so he would likely be pretty happy to help. You just might need to help him with his own levelling or quests, maybe even just some training together. If you want when I see him I can send him over? Also make sure your set up for healing, knowing our luck you're likely to get some hunters in on the first day”
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“Thanks, that would be great, I will make sure I’m around in case anyone needs fixing. Let me know if I am needed and when you organise the levelling schedule too. I am very keen to get some further levels earlier rather than later” waving goodbye to Mircha I made my way back over to the cave wondering what to do while I waited for the earthen mage to have some spare time.
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Reading through the guard guide I was given when I officially finished training by Raz I realised I should have read this as soon as possible, as two things were clearly spelled out that would completely change how I viewed progressing my card.
Firstly, apparently most people were born as a standard human which was considered a “G tier” race. This could be upgraded but only by refining your body. There were two ways to achieve this for most people, one was to use skills consuming mana and have them infuse your body, depending on the skill this could be barely effective or incredibly fast. The other way was via learning a skill that allowed you to intentionally take in extra mana then push it through your body.
This was important news for a few reasons. Initially because according to this guide racial information only displayed after you learned about it, either by upgrading it or by being informed of it. Otherwise the best skills for refining your body is meant to be passive physical healing that consume mana. I literally always had this on, so I should have a strong advantage in this, on top of that the main prerequisite to learning the manual refining skill was meditation which my trainer had been trying to teach me before being assigned this trip. It seems the guard intentionally lined things up to ensure their members would be able to refine as quickly as possible, even though according to this guide few people in our part of the world have ever surpassed D rank for their race.
Focusing on where it should be I managed to get my racial prompt to appear, surprised at how close I was to reaching G+ already.
Racial rank: G (Human) Progress to next tier: 68% to G+ (2% chance of mutation)
Based on what the guide said some forms of refining or classes, even bloodlines if an ancestor had mutated previously, could give you a chance of mutating. These were meant to be always beneficial to your growth but could vary so widely that there was no real specific advice a generic guide could give beyond encouraging it as generally a good thing.
Realising the best way to work on this would be to trigger self healing and the best way to do that was with some exercise, unless I suddenly developed an interest in some less savoury hobbies which I had been assured was a fast way to get a permanent room at a hospital. Sighing to myself I got up and started looking for rocks around the base of the cliff face the cave was in, stacking them near the entrance so the earth mage would have some raw material to work with when he came.