The next morning Gideon awoke to warm sunlight on his face and a skeleton banging on his door.

“Get up, lazy bones,” Grimsby shouted from the hallway. “We got work to do.”

Gideon groaned, rolled out of bed, and pulled on his spare gray robes. If he intended to live here, he would need more clothing than the few outfits he’d packed.

At some point, he would have to return to Prospera, collect the items he wished to bring with him, sell or get rid of the rest, and tie up some loose ends. But that could wait for now. Part of him was still unsure if things would work out here. Moving from the big city to the hinterlands was a huge step.

He yawned, rubbing his eyes as he opened the door to see Grimsby tapping his metatarsus on the stone floor. The skeleton was carrying what appeared to be a toolbox. “Let’s get to it,” he said.

“I have to eat breakfast,” Gideon said. As if to punctuate his statement, his stomach grumbled.

Grimsby sighed. “And here I thought Sir Clonk was lazy.”

Gideon shook his head. “I’m not lazy. I’m just human. But I don't need to defend myself to you, Grimsby. I know you don’t want me around anyway. Where’s the kitchen? I’ll be quick. I’ve got some hardtack in my pack, but if there’s any chance of a hot meal in this place, I’d much prefer it.”

Grimsby shook his skull, then turned towards the staircase at the end of the hallway. “Follow me, bub. And for what it’s worth, I've got nothing against you. I hate everybody equally.”

Gideon wasn’t sure whether that should make him feel better or not. “How reassuring,” he said, following Grimsby down the stairs he'd taken up to the roof the previous night. Once on the ground floor, they walked down a hallway, took a door on the right, and emerged into a large kitchen.

Like most of the castle, the kitchen was covered in cobwebs and a thin layer of dust. Gideon wondered if Ondine and Grimsby had made him that soup here last night and shuddered to think of what exactly had been in it or how it had been made.

Looking around, Gideon spotted what appeared to be a metal icebox near the far end of the kitchen. So they had one of those, at least. That was reassuring. Gideon hadn’t expected them to have much in the way of amenities.

As Gideon walked towards it, Grimsby’s teeth chattered, and he placed a cold hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Got a few ground rules,” the skeleton said. “Things you ought to know.”

“Uh, yeah?”

“For starters, be careful with that damned thing.” Grimsby pointed his hand towards the icebox. “It terrifies me.”

“The icebox? Doesn’t it just keep things cold?”

“Cold?” Grimsby laughed. “I wish. Then I could climb in there for a nice long nap. That’s no icebox. That’s one of Lord Kelvan’s old experiments. It’s got chronomantic runes inscribed on the inside of the lid. It doesn’t keep food cold. It preserves it by slowing down time inside the box.”

“Wait, Lord Kelvan knows chronomancy? I thought he was a necromancer and a gravimancer. How many schools of magic has he studied?”

“He knows a lot about a lot,” Grimsby said with a chuckle. “You don’t know how lucky you are to have even been in his presence. Anyway, pay attention. If you get frozen in time, I know I'll get blamed for it.” The way Grimsby said it, with a tone of resignation in his voice, Gideon had the impression he was used to being blamed for all sorts of things.

Grimsby approached the icebox—timebox?—and carefully touched the handle. With his other hand, he tapped a glowing rune on the side of the device, and there was a whirring sound from inside. Then he opened the lid.

“So the rune deactivates it,” Gideon said. “Which is important. Otherwise, my hand would get frozen in time when I reached in.”

“But the rest of your body would keep on ticking. Yeah, you got it. So don’t do that. I asked Lord Kelvan if he could add a failsafe to deactivate the spell whenever the door gets opened. But he said, quote, ‘I don’t feel like it.’”

Gideon stared at it for a moment in awe. “That seems incredibly dangerous for a kitchen appliance. Does Lord Kelvan know they make boxes like this that run on cryomancy instead?”

“Hah!” Grimsby said. “If we had one of those, you’d be shit out of luck, kid. The crap in there is like two hundred years old. We don’t have much need to stock up, as you might imagine. These are just the ingredients we forgot about.”

Gideon’s stomach turned as he looked inside. Had he eaten two century old food last night? Still, if this box worked like it was supposed to, it should have been perfectly fine. There were some stacks of cured meat and salted fish, a bag of potatoes, and a small box of eggs, among other things. As his eyes scanned the items, they fixed upon the bottom shelf, where he saw a bag of flour, a glass bottle of milk, and a tin of sugar, among other baking ingredients.

Suddenly, he had an idea. He smiled, despite himself. Perhaps living here wouldn’t be so bad.

After confirming with Grimsby that the range was just a plain old wood stove and did not run on dragon flame or something, Gideon kindled a fire, cooked himself a stack of pancakes, and grabbed some of the salted meat for protein. After digging through the timebox, he found some butter to go on the pancakes, but no syrup. He would have to pick some up.

Still, the pancakes tasted delicious, especially for being made from two hundred year old ingredients.

Grimsby watched him eat without speaking, which would have been unnerving if the food hadn’t so fully absorbed Gideon. He wolfed it down, appreciating every bite. Only after he finished did he realize how hungry he’d been and how good he now felt. Renewed and ready for the day ahead of them.

“So what’s on the agenda?” he asked. “Fixing the roof?”

“Unfortunately,” Grimsby said. “I was hoping to make that Sir Clonk’s problem, but you just had to survive, didn’t you?”

“How rude of me,” Gideon replied as he stood and took his plate and cutlery to the wash basin. He looked for a lever to pump water but instead saw a faucet on the wall next to a dark, deactivated rune. “Uh, is this a sink?”

“It won’t bite,” Grimsby said. “But I can’t work it. You have to power it yourself with mana.”

Gideon reached out with his finger and pulsed some of his mana into the rune.

A grinding noise came from deep in the pipes, and then a brown sludge sprayed from the faucet, splattering over the sink. Gideon pulsed mana through the rune again in a panic, but the stream refused to shut off.

After a moment, the sludge stopped, and brown, filthy water sprayed out instead. But the noise from the pipes continued on. Gideon took a deep breath, cleared his mind, and tried forcing more mana into the rune.

The noise stopped suddenly, and the flow of water ceased. Unfortunately, the dishes Gideon had used for breakfast were now even dirtier than before, and a pile of muck was sitting in the sink. The muck bubbled, releasing a noxious smell that caused Gideon to gag and step backward.

Gideon sighed, looking around for something he might be able to use to clean the sink but finding nothing.

“You can worry about that later,” Grimsby said impatiently from behind his shoulder. Gideon jumped at how close he was. The damned skeleton had snuck up on him. “Let’s get to work.”

“Uh, are you sure?”

“Yeah, no one is going to use the kitchen besides you, anyway.”

With one last look at the horrific sludge, Gideon turned and followed Grimsby out of the kitchen.

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An hour later, Gideon stood on the castle's roof as the wind whistled around him, prying up cracked pieces of clay tile. Behind him, Grimsby was replacing the clay tiles with plain wooden shingles, rough and uneven, as if they’d been cut by hand. Gideon was no roofing expert, but he’d been a little suspicious about replacing clay tiles with wooden shingles, so he’d asked Grimsby about it.

The skeleton had only shrugged and said, “What can I say, bub? We’re on a budget.”

It was still morning, and the sun was rising above them, gradually getting more intense as time passed. Thankfully, with the wind up here, it was not as hot as yesterday. As Gideon looked down the slanted roof, he could see the mountain pass below. There was no sign of the spiders. Grimsby had told him they were sensitive to sound and vibration and would only emerge when they sensed prey.

Gideon knew physical labor was not his strength—he still remembered when Kelvan had pulled up his sheet and revealed his [Might] of 9, which was slightly below average. Like the rest of his stats, it hadn’t changed in years. But he tried to focus on his task as best he could.

He wondered when he’d get his first magic lesson, though. Kelvan had talked a big game about becoming the most powerful wizard, but so far, talk was all it was.

Grimsby didn’t seem one for conversation, and hours passed where their only communication were grunts, rattles, and Grimsby pointing at the most damaged parts of the roof. After all that time, they had only managed to patch a few of the worst areas.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Frankly, Gideon thought the whole roof should probably be replaced, but he didn’t speak this out loud. He didn’t want to give anyone any ideas.

At last, as the sun passed directly above them, Grimsby put his hand on Gideon’s shoulder. Gideon didn’t jump this time. He was starting to get used to the skeleton’s presence. So far, Grimsby was all bark, no bite.

“Let’s take a break, kid.”

Gideon stretched his arms and wiped the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his robe. “Don’t have to tell me twice,” he said. “So, Grimsby, do you get tired?”

“Only psychologically,” Grimsby said dryly. He was already walking back to the roof's edge where their ladder rested. “The monotony gets to me. But physically? Nah. I figure you got to eat by now, though.”

“Yes,” Gideon said. His stomach grumbled in agreement. “I think I probably should.” He remembered the terrifying mess he’d left in the sink and sighed. “I should probably clean the kitchen while I’m at it.”

“If you want,” Grimsby said, shrugging.

As Gideon was climbing down the ladder, he heard a high-pitched scream from one of the open windows. It echoed from everywhere at once. Gideon looked around, trying to identify the source of the sound.

“That’d be Ondine,” Grimsby called out from below. “She usually only wails like that at night, though.”

Gradually, the scream dissolved from a high-pitched wail into words, however. “Grimsby!” she screamed.

“Oh, shit,” the skeleton said. “I’m in trouble again.”

Reaching the bottom of the ladder, Gideon followed Grimsby back into the castle and around a corner. As they drew closer, Gideon got a bad feeling about where exactly Ondine was and what she had found there.

The two of them entered the kitchen, only to see that it had changed quite a bit from this morning.

Ondine was floating near the ceiling, pointing down at a giant slime that had filled the sink and was now beginning to ooze across the countertop.

“Oh, gods. It was much smaller this morning,” Gideon said defensively.

Ondine turned to him, her eyes glowing with a piercing white light as she floated downward. “Gideon, dear, do you know what that is?” There was a crazed grin on her face that sent a chill through his body.

“It was, uh, a clog in the pipe? That seems to have grown?”

“It’s a viscous amorph,” Ondine said. “Also known as a slimefiend. And you just left it there so it could spend all morning absorbing your food scraps and whatever stray water it could slurp up.”

“Ah,” Grimsby said, his jaw rattling as he shook his head at Gideon. “Guess you should’ve cleaned up your mess, eh, bub?” He slapped the young mage on the shoulder. “I told you Ondine would not be pleased if you left the sink in such a sorry state.”

“Grimsby, you were the one who—” Gideon shouted, just as Grimsby clapped his hand over Gideon’s mouth. Though he had no eyes, Gideon thought he saw the skeleton pleading with him.

Ondine turned to regard both of them. “Don’t worry, Gideon. Grimsby has been minding you, hasn’t he? He should have known better. Well, you’re both idiots.” She crossed her arms and pouted.

“So, what do we do now?” Gideon asked.

“I'll go get Lord—” but her words cut off suddenly.

“It’s time for your first lesson, Nephew,” Kelvan said from behind him. His mirror had floated into the kitchen. As he did so, the ooze burbled near the sink, and a jet of noxious brown goo fired out, landing on the floor. Where it touched the stone, it sizzled.

“My first lesson?” Gideon asked.

“Yes, it’s the perfect time. Grimsby, Ondine, you may leave us. We’ll take care of it.”

Grimsby didn’t need to be told twice. He practically ran out of there. Ondine scowled, muttering that her beautiful kitchen had been damaged, but she floated out soon afterward.

“Perfect time?” Gideon repeated. He stared skeptically at the slimefiend, which still appeared to be growing, albeit slowly, and was now spilling over the edge of the counter and dripping onto the floor. “Maybe you should just, uh, get rid of it?”

“And rob you of this valuable learning experience?” Kelvan laughed. “No, Nephew. That kind of thinking is why you’re still level four. Listen, you mentioned that you’d practiced [Quake]. I didn’t say it then because I didn’t want to insult you, but that was a foolish move. [Quake] doesn’t really build on [Hail of Stone], does it?”

“It doesn’t?” In the book on geomancy that Gideon had been reading, the spells were listed right next to each other.

“No, not at all.” Kelvan tut-tutted and shook his head. “Yes, [Quake] is a little more complicated. However, [Quake] is a spell you cast at the ground, causing it to rumble, whereas [Hail of Stone] is a spell where you sculpt the mana in your hand before shooting it. The mechanism of the casting is different. The spells do not build upon the same fundamental techniques.”

“Oh,” Gideon said. He hadn’t thought of it that way, but it made sense now that Kelvan had explained it. But Gideon also knew why his book hadn’t contained a spell between [Hail of Stone] and [Quake]—he didn’t know of any spells that would even fit the kind of progression Kelvan seemed to suggest. “So, uh, what should I try learning instead?”

“Simple! Entomb!”

“What? That spell wasn’t in my book.”

“Of course it wasn’t. They taught it to us at Ebonreach, my lad, but it's probably too macabre of a spell to be common knowledge. But if you can cast [Hail of Stone], you can cast [Entomb]. Instead of forming the rocks in the air and launching them at your target, form them around your target directly, encasing them. You’ll have to form much more material, and you’ll have to bind it tightly together, but your skill in manasculpting should be sufficient to do so. Give it a try.”

Gideon sighed. This was not how he’d imagined his first magic lesson under Uncle Kelvan would go. But he took a deep breath and walked closer to the sink. Based on how his [Hail of Stone] spell worked, he’d have to get pretty close to cast [Entomb] as Kelvan had described.

As he approached, the slime made a hissing noise from the sink and reared up, stretching higher into the air. Gideon watched a bubble forming within it.

“Don’t just stand there!” Kelvan shouted, and Gideon jumped to the side just as another spray of the sizzling ooze flew past him.

Gideon stretched out his hands, imagining the feeling of [Hail of Stone] in his mind. This was the same, he thought, just like Kelvan had said. This time, the stones would form around the slime and fuse together. He pictured the spell's effect in his mind as he breathed deeply and focused his mana through his hands.

“Entomb!” he shouted, feeling the power of the earth surge through his fingers as the stone began to form, first in small pebbles, around the slime’s gelatinous surface. The rocks grew larger, merging together into fragments, then more significant shards, as Gideon willed them into a solid shell.

I’m doing it! he thought. It’s working!

The stone formed a solid wall between Gideon and the ooze, which gradually expanded until the creature was entirely encased.

Then there was a sizzling sound, and the stone began to crumble. Oh no, Gideon though. It’s eating right through it.

“Oh, that’s a tough one,” Kelvan called from behind him. “Looks like it ate through your [Entomb]. Too bad you don’t have any other spells that could help.”

“Wait, what?” Gideon called back, just in time to turn and watch Kelvan’s mirror floating out the door. “Uncle, where are you going? Hey! Come back!”

The door slammed shut behind him, and Gideon raced to it, only to find it locked.

“Don’t worry, Nephew! I’ve got some other business to attend to, but remember, the best way to learn is under relentless, life-threatening pressure. You’ll almost certainly thank me for this in the long run, provided you survive!”

“I highly doubt it,” Gideon screamed, grabbing at the door handle and tugging on it with as much force as he could muster. But it wouldn't budge. “Let me out!”

“Don’t worry,” Kelvan said. “It moves extremely slowly. You have at least fifteen minutes before it eats the rest of the kitchen, even with all the extra food you just gave it. Plenty of time.”

Extra food I just gave it?

Gideon heard a burbling noise from the sink and turned, only to scream again. The viscous amorph had absorbed Gideon’s shell of earth and was now spilling out of the sink, almost as twice as large as it had been before.

How was he supposed to fight this thing? Kelvan seemed to think he could do it, but what did that old geezer know, anyway? If the slimefiend was going to just eat whatever Gideon threw at it, what could he even do? It seemed geomancy was a poor fit for this particular enemy. Gideon wished he had practiced some basic cryomancy—surely, freezing this monster would have taken care of it.

The slime was slowly advancing, having apparently decided that Gideon was now a threat.

“Uh, Lord Kelvan, are you there?”

There was no reply.

“Great and Wise Archmage Master Lord Kelvan, I think we should revisit this lesson later.”

The only response was another bubble forming in the ooze, which fired out. Gideon jumped back, and the sizzling splatter landed near his foot.

“Hello?”

Okay, Gideon thought. Think. He took a deep breath, and tried to meditate. What could he do? His eyes darted towards the windows. Unfortunately, they were behind the sink, which meant he’d have to get around the slime to get to them. But climbing out the window seemed like an attractive choice at the moment.

Until another idea flashed through his mind. Kelvan’s words came back to him. Too bad you don’t have any other spells that could help. He’d thought his great-uncle was being snarky, but of course, that wasn’t true. He did know a spell that would help, didn't he?

Gideon ran forward, staring down the slime as it advanced towards him. Once again he let his mana flow through his arms and into his hands. Taking a deep breath, he shouted, “Entomb!” The earthen shell formed around the slime. The slime hissed, trying to eat through the spell as soon as it appeared, but Gideon kept pushing more mana through his hands, building the shell thicker and thicker, faster than the slime could absorb it.

As he did so, he stopped the flow of mana in his left hand, while still forming the [Entomb] with his right. It was hard to cast two spells at once, but if one of the spells was an easy spell, or perhaps one you had cast hundreds of times a day for years, it was much easier.

“Toughness!” he shouted, and with his left hand began layering the enchantment onto the shell as it formed. The earthen entombment took on a shiny texture as it began to harden. Gideon continued putting every ounce of mana he had into both spells, thickening and hardening the shell until his head was pounding.

[ Low Mana Warning! ]

He blinked his eyes and dismissed the status, then stopped the spell. His hands fell to his sides, and his head felt dizzy. He stumbled backward into one of the kitchen chairs, listening to his heart pounding in his chest.

He heard a sizzling noise from within the shell, and for a moment he feared the creature would burst through again. But nothing happened. Soon, the sizzling noise turned into a burbling scream, as if the creature had finally realized it was trapped.

Gideon sighed, blinking tears from his eyes, and letting his head hang forward. He’d done it.

After a moment, he felt a surge of energy within his chest as his spirit flared and a stream of notifications flashed across his vision.

Skill Rank Up! Your proficiency in Geomancy has ascended to Silver Rank, Grade D. Skill Grade Increase! Your proficiency in Manasculpting has increased to Copper Rank, Grade C. Skill Grade Increase! Your proficiency in Manasculpting has increased to Copper Rank, Grade B. Level Up! You have gained one attribute point.

“Holy shit,” Gideon said, feeling the energy surging throughout his body. He weakly pumped a fist in the air, then let it fall.

“Don’t get cocky, Nephew,” Kelvan said from behind him. “They won’t always be that easy.”

Gideon hadn’t heard Kelvan come back in, but he wasn’t startled this time. He was too happy to be bothered by anything. After five years of stagnation, he’d finally advanced to level five.

“What about that was easy?” Gideon said, just as he felt the surge of energy begin to fade, and his hunger and exhaustion creep back in. His head spun, and he slumped backward in the chair, utterly spent.

But he’d done it. He’d only been here a day, and he’d finally advanced. It had worked. He wasn’t about to say that to Lord Kelvan, though.

He didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

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