“I wanted to talk with you all today about our mountain problem,” Mayor Charlie began, standing to address the guild hall, “but I suppose Becky won’t make it. We’ve been emptying our brain bottles over this and no whiskey is coming out, if you catch my meaning.”

Galinda said, “Of course we do, my love.”

Hans, Olza, Roland, and Galad nodded as if they did, even if they didn’t.

“I don’t have it all kicked just yet, but I might have the beginnings of something that might work. I think keeping Hans in the guild gives us good cover, but that’s no good if they boot him anyway. No offense, Hans.”

When the group looked at Hans, he said, “I’m fine. Please continue.”

“We should make keeping Hans a better deal than firin’ him. If they’re the ones who choose to keep him here, well, I think they’re less likely to bother us later on.”

“What’s the better deal?” Hans asked.

Charlie tried to suppress a smile but gave it a half-hearted effort. “We say we heard about the petition, and we tell the guild Hans has been doing good adventuring work for us, and we don’t want to lose him. So, instead of giving Hans the boot, we offer to take over paying his salary and still promise to send good guild numbers each year.”

“Would the guild go for that?” Olza asked Hans.

“He’s right that it’s a better deal for them. They save money and get clout for essentially nothing, and they’re rid of me. If the post is filled, they don’t have a reason to send anyone out here.”

“Like I said, I know it doesn’t fix everything,” Charlie said.

Galad assured the Mayor it was a worthwhile idea.

“We should decide on the rest soon,” Hans said. “We can’t start training folks until we can tell them why they need it.”

No one disagreed, but no one had anything to add to Charlie’s proposal either. Frustrated but hopeful, they adjourned. Roland lingered to talk to Hans.

“I’ve been thinking about your cabin,” he began. “I’d like to build it for you. I’m not a master carpenter, but I know enough to put up something sturdy. I have conditions, though.”

“I’m intrigued.”

“Let the boys come with me. Quentin and Kane. You and I both know they’re going into that dungeon when they’re able. It’d be good for them to learn some skills and get to know the area.”

Hans whistled. “Have you played out this argument in your head already?”

Roland chuckled and nodded.

“Do I win?”

“You do not.”

“I’m not going to claim I know better than a father. If you think he’s ready, I won’t tell you you’re wrong. I have my own conditions, though.”

For Quentin and Kane to be allowed to join, they would have to swear to not enter the dungeon. Next, if Hans decided that it wasn’t safe for them to be present anymore, for any reason, they would go back to Gomi. Immediately and with no disputes. Lastly, they were not permitted to leave camp at night.

Roland felt those terms were fair.

“One last question,” Hans said, “What are we going to tell Gunther?”

“Gunther already knows about the dungeon.”

The Guild Master groaned. “Quentin tells Kane, Kane tells Gunther?”

Nodding, Roland said, “You already suspected Kane knew?”

“Him and Quentin have gotten pretty close, so I can’t say it surprises me. Kane’s smart enough to figure it out on his own, and he would have eventually.”

“They’ve grown more than their years, I’m afraid,” Roland said. “I wasn’t there for Quentin as much as I should have been. That’s what I saw with the squonks. Quentin alone, totally alone. If things are going to get hard around here like we think, he deserves a friend like Kane.”

“Gods, Roland. You just needed to convince me. You didn’t need to wrench my heart.”

The hunter laughed.

“You’re not worried about Gunther?”

Roland shook his head. “He gets wild, but you saw how he is when it matters.”

The hunter was right about that. The memory of coming upon Gunther in the winter woods at night sprang to mind. Two of seven gnolls were already dead or dying from a wooden training sword, and the ones that remained weren’t rushing to get near the tusk again.

If hiding the dungeon is going to work, I need to get used to these kinds of risks, and that’s going to be hard.

***

“Hans, I’m not building this,” Roland said, sitting across from Hans at a table in the guild hall. He put the Guild Master’s proposed cabin plans back down.

“Why not?”

“You kid.”

Hans pointed at the plans. “This is a good design.”

“For starters, I’m not building you a cabin with four bedrooms. You get one room. That’s the design.”

Frowning, Hans looked back down at his drawing. “How many of the other elements can we incorporate into a single room cabin? I took my inspiration from dungeons, and I don’t want to lose that.”

The hunter scratched his head. “I’m not dragging a bathtub up there. If you want to haul it, fine. I can’t build you tripwire crossbows. I think those are trapdoors over here. Also no. We’re going to assume the moat was a joke and move past that. A porch would be nice but we’re building in winter on a mountain, so also no.”

“Can we keep the secret passage?” Hans pointed to a bookshelf that hid the doorway to another room.

“No.”

“Wouldn’t we want to disguise the dungeon entrance in case someone visits the cabin?

Roland rubbed his head with both hands now, his eyes closed. “Okay. The secret passage is actually justified. I don’t have the skills, but I bet you Galinda could do it.”

“Really?”

“Definitely. She’s sold a fair amount of furniture to the merchants for good coin.”

Hans considered the plans. “Don’t tell her about the secret passage yet. I might think of something cooler than the bookshelf door.”

New Quest: Pick a secret passage design for the cabin. Bonus Objective: Make it cooler than a bookshelf door.

Chuckling, the hunter agreed to not spoil the surprise for Galinda until Hans had decided on a direction. The two agreed to head back to the dungeon in a few days, and Roland departed.

Hans assumed the one room cabin with a trapdoor leading to the dungeon was the design they’d use from the beginning, so he drew the map as a joke. Pointing out the secret passage was him pushing the bit, but now that it was an actual option, he was excited. Very excited. That excitement began to wane when he struggled to rise to his own challenge.

Hiding a dungeon under a cabin posed more obstacles than he anticipated. The cabin needed to be livable, which meant no space could be wasted in the one-room building but still comfortable enough for long stays. Nothing made more sense than a trapdoor, for now. But in all seriousness, a convincing disguise for the entrance would be a necessity when they were regularly running the dungeon. The other known dungeons had ended up with small towns built around them because dungeon crawls were resource-intensive endeavors. The best treasures were found deep within, requiring great effort and planning to acquire safely. That translated to coin for merchants and craftspeople.

Assuming the dungeon core grew to that point, of course. With its current rate of monster creation, they wouldn’t need more than three or four people posted at the dungeon to keep it controlled.

Active Quest: Design a dungeon cabin.

With so many unanswered questions, he couldn’t consider this quest complete. In fact, he realized he had a new question:

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Am I hoping it becomes a full-fledged dungeon in my lifetime?

These were difficult emotions for Hans.

***

“By law, you can’t cast by yourselves until you’re sixteen.”

The guild hall full of children groaned with disappointment.

“Spellcraft can be extremely dangerous. Who here has tried to hold the leash of a dog bigger than you?”

A few hands went up.

“And what happened?”

“Pulled me down and drug me in the mud,” one of the children said.

Hans nodded. “Same thing happened to me once. Magic can be like that if we aren’t careful, and if it was our job to keep the dog from attacking the neighbors, then losing control is bad for us and the people we care about. Does everyone understand?”

Several small heads bounced excitedly.

“If I hear you tried to cast a spell, you’ll be in trouble with me. I’ve kicked kids out of class permanently for being reckless.”

The faces turned serious and frightened.

With the warning speech thoroughly complete, Hans continued the lesson. Casting a spell was possible through mana manipulation, and there were four ways to accomplish that: Incantations, hand gestures, spell components, and the mage’s will.

Advanced mages could cast with will alone, but that was more difficult to accomplish as the spell complexity increased with each tier. Incantations, gestures, and components acted as casting aids, simplifying pieces of the spell so less work needed to be accomplished with will. In practice, most mages varied what aids they used based on preference and ability. Hans, for example, could cast his spells without spell reagents, but he still needed gestures and incantations.

The kids’ class was too young to cast, but they could begin to perfect their spell gestures. Though they were meant to make casting easier, the hand dexterity and manipulation required could be incredibly challenging. The bends and contortions had to be precise, and most were not intuitive.

Hans taught the first three motions of Create Water and set the children to practicing. He walked between the benches in the guild hall to help and coach when one of the kids’ struggled.

These lessons never lasted very long. With swordplay, the banality of repetition could be hidden under the fun of hitting your friends with wooden sticks, but learning spellcraft meant hours of intense focus on small details. An eight-year-old could only handle so much of “close, but your pinky is just a hair out of position.”

“Will we learn to cast spells like Miss Mazo?” Loddie, one of Hans’ first students when he arrived in Gomi, asked from the back of the room.

Oh, please no. I don’t have the fortitude to train Blue Mages.

“Maybe we can ask her when she visits next,” Hans deflected.

Olza arrived when the children’s attention began to sputter. She had a satchel over her shoulder and two potted plants in her hands, both covered with cloth. Hans was thankful for her timing.

Calling for the class’s attention, he introduced Olza and her lesson and ceded the floor to her.

“Mr. Hans told me you were studying spellcraft today, which is a nice coincidence because alchemy and spellcraft are similar in a lot of ways. We still use mana in our work, but we do more with manipulating and processing components. That lets us do different things from spells, and unlike a spell, we can hand our potion to anyone to use.”

The alchemist set a few bottles on the table in front of her and gently removed the cloth from the two pots, revealing tiny white flowers, their blossoms smaller than a copper piece. One pot had five or six of the flowers, while the other had several dozen, by Hans’ estimate.

“Who knows what these are?” Olza asked the class.

“Starcups!” several children yelled without raising their hands.

“Very good. These are common in clearings around Gomi, and I’ve been conducting a little experiment to keep me busy during the winter. We’ll come back to that though.”

Olza demonstrated picking a petal from a starcup in the less crowded pot, processing it with a mortar and pestle, and using a special spoon–with an absurdly small scoop, akin to the pin-head crack she claimed to see in the dungeon core–she measured out a dash of the ground petal. Given the size of the flower, the amount of material was already quite small, making this measurement incredibly precise. She deposited the material on a glass plate.

She held up a bottle filled with yellowish white powder. “This is sulfurous ash,” she told the class. “This ingredient is usually found near volcanoes, so I had to place a special order for us to have it here in Gomi.”

With a clean spoon the same size as the first, she measured out a pinch of the powder and held it over the ground starcup petal.

“Never mix ingredients you haven’t researched first. Plenty of alchemists have blown up their labs and half a city block because they weren’t being safe in their practice. I already know what this reaction does, and I’ve been careful to use only a small amount.”

The alchemist dropped the barest dusting of sulfurous ash onto the ground starcup petals and the mixture flashed, bright enough to leave everyone in the room blinking. Naturally, the children erupted in cheers at the reaction.

“Want to see another?” Olza asked, already knowing their answer. Once the class returned to their seats, she held up the other pot of starcups, the one overflowing with the small flowers. “Miss Mazo told me about some earth magic tricks for growing plants. I can’t cast spells, but alchemy requires mana, so I have a lot of practice injecting mana into a reaction.

“I planted both of these pots at the same time, so Miss Mazo’s advice definitely helped them grow. Do you think that will change the reaction?”

The students disagreed with one another, some certain it was the same and others equally certain it would be different.

“Then let’s test it! Before I came here, I tried this in the safety of my lab with protective equipment. What I’m doing here is not the way to test new ingredients, understood?”

Heads nodded throughout the room.

“Good. So again, we are using a small amount. Let’s see if it’s different…”

The new mixture flashed as well, but it was so bright that Hans needed several seconds for his vision to return to normal and longer for the circles floating in his eyes to fade. The kids were more excited about this reaction than the first, but they sat momentarily stunned for a few seconds before beginning their celebration.

“If anyone wants to learn alchemy, I’m thinking about taking on an apprentice in the spring. If that’s interesting to you, come talk to me. I’ll tell you more about what my day to day work is like, so you can decide if you really want to apply.”

Hans asked the children to thank Miss Olza for her demonstration. After a few questions–mostly about what things exploded when mixed together–class concluded. Olza spoke with a few children who were too shy to ask their questions in front of the group, and soon they departed as well.

As she situated her materials for the trip back to her shop, Hans said, “I didn’t know you had experiments going.”

“I do have a life outside of researching the mountain,” she replied with a grin. “I try to always have at least one experiment in progress. Keeps me sharp.”

“What earth magic did Mazo put you up to? I’m almost afraid to ask.”

She looked around the corner to the guild hall door to make sure no children were present. “Mazo and I got to talking about her alchemy adventures, and she couldn’t answer questions I had about growth rate and potency changes from her methods. Hans, I’m amazed she didn’t flatten Hoseki. She did nothing by the book.”

Chuckling, he said, “Yeah, that’s Mazo. Taking direct hits from the world’s strongest monsters has warped her idea of ‘dangerous.’”

“One of her earth magic techniques is pretty simple. The mana piece of it is close to how an alchemist uses mana, so I was able to figure it out with her help. This was my first test.”

“I take it a brighter flash is a good sign?”

Olza nodded enthusiastically. “The test batch of starcups grew far better than the control, and you saw that the reaction was stronger. It’s a promising start. Lots of testing to do yet though.”

Hans scratched his beard. “If the results are that good, wouldn’t that spell be more popular?”

She looked around again. “According to Mazo, it’s not well-known, and many people would frown upon the method. The technique requires my blood.”

“Olza,” Hans groaned. “You’re seriously playing with blood magic?”

“It’s not blood magic. It’s earth magic that requires blood. There is a difference.”

“Sure.”

“I’m serious!”

“If you say it’s safe, I believe you, but please be careful. I’ve read some awful things about blood magic gone wrong.”

New Quest: Research blood magic.

***

As soon as Olza left the guild hall, Hans grabbed the few books he owned on spellcraft and checked their indexes for entries about blood magic.

The beginner primer on spellcraft might as well have just written “No” on the one page it contained about blood magic. Other than listing dangers and warnings, it shared no actual information about that particular school of spellcraft.

The guild’s book on alchemy had ingredient entries for various types of blood, from animals to monsters, and a strongly worded caution to never use human blood in alchemy, ever. The author used words like “barbaric,” “unethical,” and “beyond the pale.” Warnings aside, the book shared no information about its actual application.

The only place he found any concrete information about blood magic was in his bestiary. A few high-level monsters were known to practice blood magic–liches, hags, goblin shamans, and so on–so while the bestiary didn’t share how blood magic worked, it did share the potential effects of blood magic spells.

Liches had been known to use blood magic to manipulate victims, from mind control to puppeteering. Allegedly targeting an entire noble family at one point, the lich turned their family bonds into a path for treachery. In another case, it was believed the spell of a lich “boiled” the blood of an adventurer. Such a thing was difficult to confirm or study, but the party who witnessed it was deemed to be a reliable source.

Hags typically used blood magic to increase the potency of curses, weaving the spell through their victim’s circulatory system. Blood curses, according to the bestiary, were incredibly difficult to break because blood magic used the victim’s own body to replenish the strength of the curse.

Goblin shamans had been observed using blood magic, gathered mostly from ritual sacrifices, to summon demons, but the average shaman used blood magic to enhance the strength of their minions. With blood, they could imbue a goblin with boosts to strength, speed, and several other buffing effects.

He found nothing on blood magic being used with plants in any of his books.

I have to keep Mazo away from Gomi. She’s a bad influence.

Quest Complete: Research blood magic.

***

Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):

Progress from Gold-ranked to Diamond-ranked.

Mend the rift with Devon.

Complete the manuscript for "The Next Generation: A Teaching Methodology for Training Adventurers."

Expand the Gomi training area to include ramps for footwork drills.

Design a system for training dungeon awareness.

Research the history and legends of the Dead End Mountains.

Protect Gomi.

Train Gomi adventurers to keep the dungeon at bay.

Design the ultimate strategy for hunting squonks.

Solve the town secret problem without being a conspiracy weirdo.

Design a dungeon cabin.

Test Quentin’s siren-squonk theory.

Pick a secret passage design for the cabin. Bonus Objective: Make it cooler than a bookshelf door.