The palisade build progressed more quickly than Hans expected. When a retired Iron-ranked knocked on the guild hall door, he learned why.

“Sorry to bother you, sir,” the man, about Hans’ age and with a similar build but his hair was blonde and his face shaved, “The guys and I can’t seem to find the tavern.”

Ah. One of the builders then.

“Isn’t one,” Hans answered.

When the man realized Hans wasn’t joking, his face fell. “Oh man. I told them that if anyone knew where to get a drink, it would be an adventurer.”

“Did you learn that from experience?”

“Yes, sir. Got to Iron and decided the life wasn’t for me. Made me realize all my drinking buddies were adventurers, though.”

“Technically, you weren’t wrong. I have a small stash, but I only have enough to offer you a mug.”

“I bloody knew it,” the man said, stomping a foot to celebrate. “I won’t tell a soul. Promise.”

Hans poured a mug for both of them. It was deep enough in the afternoon for that to be reasonable, he told himself. The retired Iron introduced himself as Samson. A kobold job went bad, and he couldn’t do it anymore. Ended up in the military and did several missions in the frontier.

“Most of the guys with us here were military,” Samson said. “We built these damn walls anytime we were bedded down for more than a week, and we had to be fast. This one time, we had to dig while orcs shot arrows at us. One guy shoveled, the other had a tower shield to keep an arrow from killing either of them.”

“Sounds like you should have stayed in the Guild.”

“Right? It would have been less dangerous and pay way better. Could be a bigshot by now and retire to a little mountain town.” Samson smiled at his own joke as he took a drink.

“Nah, it’s not like that,” Hans replied with a smile of his own.

“Come on. I saw one of the fliers. If you can afford to do that, can’t tell me you haven’t done well for yourself.”

“You saw my fliers?”

“Yeah. Is there… Is there more than what’s outside?”

Hans laughed. “It needs some work, but no, that’s our training dungeon. We simulate dungeon scenarios so adventurers can practice the hard stuff safely.”

“Makes sense. Would have done us some good. That’s for sure.”

“I’ve got a question for you,” Hans said. “How’s Osare doing with this orc stuff? Not a lot of news out here.”

“It’s a little ugly. It’s brought out the bad apples, you might say.”

Hans nodded.

“Well,” Samson said, looking sadly at the bottom of his mug. “Anywhere I can get food around here? If I don’t come back with beer, should come back with something.”

“There’s a bakery. Actually, I’ll walk you. I need to talk to the owner anyhow.”

Charlie came out of the back when Hans opened the door and called in, asking if they were open. After Hans did the introductions, Charlie and Samson bantered for a minute before settling on an assortment of muffins and donuts. The mayor filled four bags. When Samson asked how much, Charlie said twenty coppers.

The deal was so good that Samson stayed to talk longer, the three falling into a conversation full of shared laughter. Samson had visited many of the same towns as Charlie, and apparently, a few of the other builders had spent time in the Guild too. The Iron was inviting Hans to join him in the builder camp to swap more adventurer stories when Galinda came down the stairs.

Samson stood stone-still as Galinda entered the room, kissed her husband on the forehead, offered the two adventurers a small wave, and went back upstairs.

The Iron, mildly astonished, looked back and forth from where Galinda exited to where Hans and Charlie stood. Samson pushed the bags of donuts and muffins back across the counter toward the Mayor.

“You let that thing near food and still serve it to customers?” Samson asked.

Hans released a long, disappointed sigh and broke Samson’s jaw.

***

Charlie entered the guild hall late that night. Hans made good progress on his fifth beer.

“Talked to Deeker,” the Mayor said, sitting on one of the hall benches. “Price went up. No surprise there. We also had to cover the costs of a healing potion and give up a few additional silvers for restitution.”

“I’m sorry,” Hans said.

“None of that,” Charlie retorted without hesitation. “I’m glad you socked him. If you hadn’t, my hand was already on the bread knife. Never stabbed a person with a bread knife before. Was about to see what that felt like.”

“Don’t blame you.”

“My point is that I would have been worse, and thank the gods Galinda didn’t hear him. We’d of had to mop for days. Either way, consequences would have been worse, and Deeker said it wasn’t the first time his men were banned from entering the town that hired them.”

So it could have been worse. A fistfight was easy to explain. Not that Samson participated enough to call it a fight. He mostly lay on the ground making strange noises.

Charlie shrugged. “Fights happen in small towns all the time. I think we’re fine.”

Hans agreed with that but still felt anxious.

The Mayor excused himself, saying that Hans probably wanted to get to bed.

He did, that was true, but he couldn’t. His mind had raced too hard for too long that day, worrying over every possible iteration of what could go wrong because of his actions. Even though the situation sounded resolved, Hans would need an hour or so to come down. Always did. Gret and Devon could kill a monster and take a nap next to it right there, falling asleep right away. He was still jealous of that skill.

A bestiary or two would help pass the time. Thankfully, his book order had come in with the recent caravan. Part of it that is. Anything related to spellcraft would come in at a trickle. This delivery only had one such book, an Apprentice-level tome on White magery. He flipped through it earlier, and it looked fairly comprehensive and well-executed.

The book was divided by the various schools within that category, with Healing being the largest, which wasn’t surprising. The sections on Barrier and Attunement magic were pretty sizable as well. The latter school specialized in buffs, debuffs, and status effects. A spell that put a person to sleep or a spell that made an ally more powerful–such as the Repel spell–fell under Attunement.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

He liked how the author included a recommended progression for what spells to learn in each school and what spells all White Mages should know regardless of their specialization.

But Hans had nothing for Honronk. The Black Mage Apprentice would never complain, and he might not even experience disappointment, but Hans still felt badly that he didn’t have a new resource to share with him.

Olza’s suggestion that they grow elementals to harvest materials made Hans request a bestiary focused exclusively on hunting elementals. He flipped to the section on earth elementals, a surprisingly broad category. Though a difference in soil composition would technically be classified as a unique species, anything vaguely formed of dirt or rock was a plain old earth elemental to an adventurer.

Earth elementals with any sort of plant matter were actually fairly rare, according to the bestiary. He had never really thought about it, but now that he did, he couldn’t recall ever encountering an earth elemental with any vegetation incorporated into its body. The depth that was common for earth elementals was typically not conducive to plant life.

Of these rare variations, the most likely to be seen were moss, mandrake, and petrified, which meant the plant life in the elemental had essentially fossilized. Recalling the vision the Lady of the Forest gave him, mandrake seemed most likely.

Quest Update: Ask Olza if mandrake is worth the trouble of fighting an earth elemental.

He suspected it wasn’t.

I’m glad I didn’t suggest it to the core.

***

“You made a deal with a spirit?!” Olza was both shocked and concerned.

“A deal, yes, but not an oath. Becky’s known her since she was a kid, however long ago that is. She trusts her. And I probably shouldn’t be telling you, so keep it a secret.”

“If Becky trusts her… Well, extra mandrake root could be helpful,” Olza said. “More so if we want to move forward with testing new recipes. Mandrake is in a lot of potions.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Why do you look upset by that?”

“It’s nothing. Earth elementals are just a lot of work.”

“If it makes you feel any better, we probably only need one elemental to have plenty if the bestiary size is accurate.”

That did make him feel better.

Quest Update: Commission maces from the blacksmith before growing a mandrake elemental.

“So you’ve given the testing idea more thought?” Hans asked.

“Yeah. I think it works with your apprenticeship idea too. I’ll need more hands to run tests with any sort of efficiency. Then if we find a recipe that’s worth it, we’d need help making it. Plenty of work in there to keep a few apprentices busy, actually.”

“That’s interesting,” Hans said.

Olza stopped reading and looked up. “Why?”

“We’ve only thought about using the dungeon for reagents. Could we grow something for a blacksmith? A carpenter? We already can’t figure out how to sell a full dungeon of reagents, and we can’t really have trade apprentices if there’s nothing for them to do.”

“The idea makes sense. What the dungeon could grow is your department though.”

This development might impact two of his active quests, which didn’t happen often.

Active Quest: Rethink the apprentice idea to account for supply and demand.

Active Quest: Find new ways to safely sell a larger volume of reagents.

He combined them into one.

Quest Update: Determine if the dungeon can support enough crafting materials to provide new tradespeople consistent, meaningful work.

“Hans? Did you hear me?”

“Sorry. What?”

“How’s the stress of all of this for you? I’m going a little crazy, I think.”

Hans had to think before he answered. “The plan being absurd helps in a weird way. Doesn’t feel like it’s real sometimes.”

“You’re not stressed?”

He laughed. “I didn’t say that. I’m pretty much always screaming for my life in my mind. I try to just keep moving. If I’m busy enough, I forget how much risk we’re taking.”

“Can we talk about that? The future, I mean. The builders haven’t even been here for a day and it’s already gone bad. Would help me to hear something hopeful.”

Hans agreed, but he wasn’t sure what to talk about.

“How about the dungeon expansions you’ve been planning? Don’t try to pretend you haven’t mapped most of it out in your mind.”

He admitted she was right, but he wasn’t nearly as far along as she thought he was. He wasn’t sure the dungeon would accept his ideas either.

“Learning to fight in the open is a skill, just like learning to fight in close quarters,” he said. “If you’re hunting something that flies, chances are good it will be somewhere with plenty of room for aerial movements.”

But that felt like a very different kind of dungeon suggestion. All of his previous requests accommodated the dungeon corridor design, the largest room being the undead minotaur lair in the Bone Goblin section. If he wanted to grow a canyon large enough for harpy nests, for example, the dungeon core would have to move a lot of subterranean mountain.

Whether the harpy canyon was a success or a failure, his next request would recreate one of his early Bronze-ranked jobs, clearing an infestation of furious fungi in a mining town. Their spores released a paralytic sleeping agent, which was their most dangerous quality. Once it paralyzed a victim, it eventually became compost for the mushrooms to continue growing. Most of the residents escaped safely, but the dwarf-sized mushrooms needed cleared out if they wanted to return to their homes.

Learning to deal with area of effect attacks was essential to an adventurer’s development, an invaluable skill according to Hans. If they could spare an adventurer to serve as an escort, a single potion of Magic Resistance would make that person immune to the spores. If a whole party was paralyzed–except for the protected adventurer–the escort could chop down the mushrooms and wait an hour for the ailment to wear off. If the mushrooms weren’t alive to release new spores, the effect was temporary.

“I have a few other things I want to test too but haven’t decided how,” Hans said.

“Like what?”

“Can the dungeon grow good creatures? I don’t mean neutral animals. I’m talking something like a silver will-o’-the-wisp or a celestial. Can we alter the behaviors of monsters we grow? Making less aggressive versions of ultra dangerous monsters would be good for training.”

“Interesting,” Olza said. “Any reagents or crafting materials in those plans?”

The truth was not really. Harpy feathers had some value for fletchers, and silver wisps dropped stardust, but they were known for helping lost or injured travelers. Killing one was said to bring bad luck. Otherwise, the monsters Hans felt had the most training benefit typically had few, if any, things worth looting. If they wanted to pursue the most valuable components, Gomi’s adventurers needed those lower tier experiences to prepare for the more dangerous monsters, so he reasoned the tradeoff was worth making.

“I need to do more research on what materials would be best for our tradespeople. Would we be better off growing iron elementals for the bulk raw material? Or should we be more specific and summon something like fallen celestials to get the good stuff.”

“Aren’t those dangerous?”

“Yeah. Challenging for Golds, but many fallens still have celestial gear, which means celestial steel. We got a celestial dagger from the one we fought. The bidding war for it was intense. Every smith and noble in Hoseki wanted it.”

Olza asked if his other choices were that dangerous. Hans answered that every monster on his list was at least Silver-ranked.

“Scarlet steel is highly desired, but you need fresh cyclops blood to make it, supposedly. Carpenters lose their mind over fairy wood, but only two trees have ever been found in the wild. The majority of the kingdom’s fairy wood–and there isn’t much–comes from acorns found on forest sprites.”

“Oh, I know about fairy wood,” Olza said. “If you get a fairy wood tree to grow, it won’t produce acorns unless it’s planted in the fae realm.”

Hans nodded. “Yep. So you get one tree from an acorn, if you manage to get it to grow. And sprites are nasty. They’re small and basically invisible in the forest, so you can’t tell what’s blasting you with spells and from where.”

“You’ve convinced me. Let’s get the apprentice program going. I want to play with new reagents.”

***

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."

Ask Charlie about the history and legends of the Dead End Mountains

Protect Gomi.

Find a way to share new knowledge without putting Gomi at risk.

Determine if the dungeon can support enough crafting materials to provide new tradespeople consistent, meaningful work.

Decide whether or not to pursue silent walking and snow walking.

Commission maces from the blacksmith before growing a mandrake elemental.

Secure interior dungeon doors without trapping adventurers inside.

Find a way for Gomi adventurers to benefit from their rightful ranks in the Adventurers’ Guild.