After everybody woke up and we all had breakfast, we prepared to leave the inn after apologising one more time for the damages. Strangely, all of the formerly-broken chairs and tables now seemed to be intact, as if they had self-repaired overnight, and I could bet that this was one of the Innkeeper's skills at work.
After we left the inn, our whole group headed back towards the donkey market, to verify the health-state of the Donkey that we had cut open last night. I was hoping that no complications had occurred while we had been away, like a sudden embolism, septicemia or any other nasty post-op medical issues that can manifest after any major surgery like the one we had performed. I wished that the animal would live unhindered from now on, even after we had literally gutted it the other day. Fortunately, once we got there, we found Khong the Donkey (F.you Momma System, I'ma INTENTIONALLY avoid yo' blatant naming scheme) hungrily chewing on some soft grass that the kids had brought, so it seemed that the creature would be alright in the future.
After the three kids cried and clung to the midget some more while still trying to convince him to remain, we were almost ready to leave. Just as we were walking out of the family's shed, we saw the Father of the household bring up Khong the Donkey out of the stables and then promptly gift it to Yi Gore as a sign of affection, friendship, and as a reward for all of the work he had performed for the donkey-rearing household while he had been together with the family. Plus, the Donkey would have died without our intervention, so there was no “real” loss for the household anyway if they now had one animal less.
Personally, I was glad that we had received the pack mule, because it could act as an useful disguise and easily-understandable explanation as to why a group of Monks had enough wares with them to trade left and right for all sorts of other items. Strap a few empty chests on top of the Donkey, and people would find it easier to believe whenever we pulled out tradeable stuff from the “insides” of the chests, even though we were retrieving the items from our space rings in actuality. It made it much easier to explain the presence of larger items like carpets or vases, which were among the many misc. items that we had pilfered from the Imperials when we had looted their warehouses.
Usually, we traded only smaller items that could be somehow explained as originating from a Buddhist temple, like pottery, small bolts of cloth, small decorative stitchings, hand carved wooden household items that ranged from wooden plates to bamboo candle holders, and other assortment of items that would not look suspicious into the hands of random Monks that were traveling on a road. Sure, the Donkey might attract the attention of the "unsavoury" types from now on, but I was hoping that any wannabe thieves would be lazy enough to not bother our group for only a single donkey's worth of randomly-assorted priestly loot.
After trading back and forth a few more items with the local merchants, since we were already in the market district, we then decided to head towards the local Buddhist temple and regional Weirdwood Tree, so that I could convert our Party Group into a Raid one by extending the Chat function to more than five persons at a time.
Since our entire group was formed out of nine persons at the moment, if we were to also include Mr. Nobi which was still out on the delivery errand and little Will-E the Automaton, we could most certainly have used the bonuses that the Raid Chat's unlimited range communication brought to the table, at least when it came to the flow of information from one place on the map to another.
I wished that we could have done this earlier, because that way we could have remained in permanent contact with Mr. Nobi, but there hadn't been any other Weirdwood Trees along the path of our journey. The main reason why this town had an Adventurer's Guild Branch inside of it was because of the presence of that Weirdwood Tree within the borders of the city in the first place, as most of the Inter-Guild communications were performed by using the ley line connections that the Face-wearing Tree possessed with the rest of the world.
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After I had paid tribute in the form of a few Grand spirit stones to the old humanoid-faced Tree, I had extended the number of persons that could be invited to my Raid Group to 50, and had also left a large enough spirit stone "deposit" to fuel the "server" for almost 10 years in a row from now on.
After we had finished our business at the local Buddhist temple, our whole group headed towards the gates of donkey-town, to begin the next section of our journey.
About an hour later, we finally passed through the gates of the city and then back onto the rough road towards the wilderness, to resume our traveling.
Except that we now had an extra donkey-midget combo in tow, as Yi Gore had simply jumped on top of the Donkey once we had walked out of town, and kept driving the beast of burden like he had been born on top of the critter. I couldn't really blame him for that, since his legs were very short, and he would have probably slowed the entire group down if he were to walk on his own two feet.
The entire next week had proven to be rather uneventful, as the only thing we did was walk, talk and camp, walk, talk and camp.
During the whole journey, I had noticed that Liliam was now getting all touchy-feely with Jin, and I could see that something was developing over there between those two. I was a little bit undecided whether I should go and warn the girl about how Heroes like Jin functioned on the overall, and what his "Harem Protagonist" tag entailed, or just let her enjoy her blooming Puppy love.
I could still remember even now my first high school crush from planet Earth, and all of the awkward attempts and "first times" that had resulted from my bumbling before both of us had realised that we liked each other, and then all of the dating and fornication that had followed in the wake of those exposed feelings. Of course, my former girlfriend and myself had drifted apart in the following years, when horrible and stinky Miss "Real Life" had come and had washed the both of us away towards different directions like a merciless tidal wave, but I wouldn't trade the memories of those clumsy Puppy-love years for anything else in the world.
In some way, I wished that I could experience all of those sensations all over again, but my current bodily context made it rather difficult for that sort of thing to happen. Being an Old Dude that was stuck into a young girl's body felt like a rather messy business, as I could indeed sense the influence of the female hormones acting upon my mind. While my Soul definitely still identified itself as a Male, my body was most certainly a "straight" female from a hormonal point of view, with all that entailed, aka the oogleing of good-looking boys on the road, which I had found disturbing from my own mental point of view, since I did not use to "swing that way". Therefore, I had been forced to abstain myself from going in either direction, as it was all quite a risky business, plus I did not want to get romantically involved with anyone at the moment, be it male, female or anything else inbetween, since the Mother System would most likely find a way to transform such a romance into an exploitable vulnerability against me in some cruel way, aka deploy another plot-device that could screw me over.
Still, I don't think that anybody would be able to blame me for wanting to fondle Liliam's peaks whenever I could, even if I was a girl.
Heck, I would do the same even to the dwarf lady, if the beard wasn't getting in the way so much. I wondered if she would ever shave that off? I knew that the preference for female beards in the dwarven world was about half and half, with the more traditionalist houses preferring to sport the long beards, and the more progressive ones choosing to shave it off as to better integrate themselves with the other races.
Without that menacing beard, I think that Carmine would be indeed quite lovely in appearance, since she did not have that standard unsightly-large dwarf nose, nor the square-like skull structure of the head that her kin usually displayed, pushing her closer in appearance to that of a rotund human-like face rather than that of an angry dwemmer descendant.