Chapter 113
Goblins?
Brewer’s Reputation: 413
[El Delta Mist.]
[Gold rank. 99/100 Lesser Chimeric.]
[Pale and biscuit malts blend crisp and sweet into a crystal smooth body. El Delta hops color the beer hazy gold. It smacks of resin and grated limes. Tinges of garden green appear when sunlight squeezes through the belly of the ale.]
[Attribute: Mist Hidden; Supplements: Attribute Permanence.]
The liquid that flowed out of the weird bottle seemed to glow like sunlight striking a green pond. The Mist hidden wall flapped, and wisps lashed out on selfish adventures. The bioluminescence colored half of my body and made a purple homey haze beneath my irises. As the new beer fell and splashed as though it fell from the mouth of a fountain, the libation location lightened in color. It went from phosphorescent blue and purple to an almost colorless fog. The Mist Hidden wall grew higher. It was done, another libation location was made permanent. No more annual upkeep. Although the hike was soul-touching. The same corner of woods was never really the same corner. Growing did that.
“So, one more eastward,” said Abigail.
“The furthest one,” I said.
We hiked eastward. The number of white oaks dwindled until the number of larch trees proliferated. Abigail snapped her fingers every dozen paces. Without a doubt she was working on her quest.
“You’ve got to be making strides on your quest.”
“Just about two thousand more to go.”
“And you'll be getting a puncheon barrel right? With the tap in your inventory? What are you going to do with it?”
“Maybe fill with Anti-gravity beer for quick refills when Thrush needs more? Maybe just store mana beer? I'm still considering the best way to use it.”
She’d been working on that quest for nearly a year, it seemed. If she had any other quests, she never mentioned them. The higher the rank, it seemed the fewer quests came along. That certainly was the case for gold rank. Quest notifications were more infrequent. There was a backlog waiting for approval or denial. With Abigail hard at work, there were fewer better times to see what quests had been accruing.
[New quest! Brett Collection.]
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[Travel to the Granite Spires mountain range. Seek out Henrietta's 3 famous Brett Ales: Gallop Delight, Barnhouse Rafters, Sweat & Saddle.]
[Reward: 100 Gold rank Brewer's loot chests.]
Travel? No.
…I paused. Abigail had been so distraught—heartbroken—to have reached diamond rank. I replayed our conversation. She was going to outlive me. The love of her life would grow much older than her and die in her arms.
Declining these quests was not only saying no to travel. It was now also saying no to a chance at reaching diamond rank with the love of my life, saying no to a chance at longevity with her…
Sweating, I declined the quest.
[New quest! Navigate the swamps of Mordutha in search of Lutumcress. Brew and sell a beer using Lutumcress.]
[Reward: 1 legendary Gold rank Brewer's
Loot chest. 10 Bronze Rank Forager's loot chests.]
I sighed deeply and declined. There had to be more which didn’t involve travel! C’mon…
[New Quest! Locate the lost Beer of Kel Androus in the catacombs beneath the ghost city in the Vale of Teth.]
[Reward: 1 Diamond rank Brewer's loot chest. 30 Adventurer's loot chests. 5 Gold rank Brewer's loot chests.]
I blew a raspberry, pinched the bridge of my nose, looked somewhere inward, and declined.
I felt heavy, and the walls of my heart felt stiff. My pace had slowed. Abigail was twice as far ahead of me as before. She hummed cheerfully and snapped her fingers. How strange it was to think that I was going to be the one to miss her.
Ah, there has to be more local quests! But going through quest notifications yielded nothing helpful. I punted coltsfoot flowers. My leg arced to chest height. Yellow dandelion lookalike flowers rained. Blades of grass twirled and tumbled down.
But up where the flowers had been kicked, over the mist wall, columns of smoke were rising high.
“Abigail.”
“I see them too.”
I jogged over to her side. The columns of smoke were white and contained. Clean wood was burning, most likely in rings.
“Brush fire?” said Abigail.
“This early in spring?”
Our gazes met, and then we were off down the trail. We gradually closed in on the smoke, though it was always on the other side of the mist. Just when we neared, a tree on that side toppled over. The canopy arced down, leaving a clone of leaves and debris and pollen for nary a moment.
“Goblins?” said Abigail.
Nodding at the wall of mist, I said, “Shall we?”
Abigail first offered me a sip of her Chameleon Stealth beer. We then sipped from my inferior key beer.
The mist felt like it should have doused us in a spray of water. Dew should have collected on our eyelashes and tendrils of hair, but we remained dry. The sounds of the birds and rustling canopies behind us began to fade away. Before us, the sound of saws and voices began to assault us.
We came through the mist, transparent but more a faint outline. We stopped as one. I stood agape. It wasn’t more than two dozen downed trees that shocked me. It was the nearly one hundred people. Log houses were under construction. Tents were halfway raised. Cooking fires were as big around as my cabin. Axes tattooed into wood, saws slept through trunks. Horses whinnied under the care of several young men and women.
Nearest the wall, a failed ladder lay in splintered pieces. It lay as though it had been abandoned in favor of the catapult beside it whose construction was nearly complete. Folk were fusing rope together.
A man in scholastic robes pinched his chin. As if addressing only the catapult, he said, “What’s the chance of success?”
An older fellow stepped out of his shadow. He gazed up at the heights of the mist wall. “Do you mean going over, or surviving?”