Chapter 91
Golden Honey
Hawkin
Brewer’s Reputation: 481.
Winter had never appeared so round as a ball, nor as large as another planet. It rolled on down from the north as if another planet rolled upon the earth. It took nearly a week for it to reach the cabin, and it rolled onto us deafeningly. Its wind was icy and sharp, and it both howled and shrieked. Were birds not prepared, I feared they may have been caught in the blizzard and been frozen in midair. The storm was thrice as fast as birds in haste. It was the first storm I had ever seen of its kind. Snow didn’t so much as fall upon the land as it was laid down in thick sheets. I felt like a mouse beneath a descending white comforter. When it rolled over the cabin, it popped Abigail’s Sheltering attribute effect. We struggled for days to maintain the shelter and remove the snow from the cabin and clearing with the skills Fire and Roast and Brewer’s Bubble.
But with the snow cleared from our camp, we still strayed into the snow, tunneling with our skills.
“The trick is to create a hollow space within Brewer’s Bubble,” said Abigail as she led us north through an old path that Thrush had plowed when he had acquired his goblin ship. “Like a hollow bubble so that we remain dry.”
Our tunnel was as wide as our cabin. As we tunneled along, we exposed many things of nature. Mostly, we exposed the Honey Cocoons. Boy had they grown! Were they not tethered to root or branch or rock, they would be writhing so much that they would be mobile.
We exposed a tremendous root. What I had first thought to have been a fallen tree was in fact a root. We traveled beside it for an hour and it never ended. It snaked through the wilderness. It had broken rock and pushed down trees in its sudden growth. For the root had not been there a few weeks ago. We surmised that it must be the root of one of the trees affected by the Aggravated Wild Growth attribute beers. Would we have to relocate our cabin? Put it up in a tree?
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Abigail and I shared warm-warm beer as we tunneled over the root, leaving it behind, and meandered through the wilderness. As we performed constant discoveries of parts of the wood, our conversation turned to our quest paths.
It was my turn to manage Brewer’s Bubble. “Silver rank is much more brutal than bronze.”
“Gold—obviously—is worse. What’s funny is how close we both are to progressing.”
“I don’t get it. Tediously picking and caring for ingredients the way that we have has substantially improved the quality of beers. I’m at 70/100 Grand Honorable. I haven’t jumped that far so suddenly in a quality tier since I was bronze rank, but none of that is yet good enough to break into gold.”
“I’m at one hundred of one hundred mythic; last level in gold. One more push and I’ll be diamond.”
“Wow! One more push…”
“Oh yeah, one more push, like pushing a tree over with your pinky.”
“Do you think it’ll happen?”
Abigail took a moment for herself. Softly she said, “I doubt it...”
Was she upset that she couldn’t break into diamond? That it was so hard? She had always expressed more of a disinterest in breaking into diamond rank. …She would reveal her feelings in time, I was sure.
I turned us westward. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I’ve returned to brewing attribute beers with things we’ve foraged, and I’ve been working on my Thewwy’s Puncheon shards—currently have one thousand four hundred and seventy eight. …I’m content. All I could ask for was to get as high as I could in gold. Why don’t you take a break from trying to break into gold? Brew something with me. Something fun.”
“…I love brewing with you.”
“What would you like to brew? Something dark? Something so light it floats?”
Suddenly I tunneled upon a sight to behold. I expanded Brewer’s Bubble to get a better look. Snow melted at the edge of the bubble and trickled all around the clear sphere. There were masses upon masses of Honey Cocoons. Not only did they throb, every single one pulsed with a golden light. Some of the giant cocoons glowed with a tinge of green, others glowed with a tinge of orange. Their insect limbs moved beneath the cocoon like bodies tossing beneath sheets.
The symphony of gold colors and various hues reminded me of the color of pale and hoppy beer. The snow crinkled at the border of my Brewer’s Bubble. Snow fell upon the bubble in great clusters of flakes and slid off in heaps that looked a lot like bubble bath foam. The walls of snow glittered in the golden honey light.
With my eyes fixated on the scene, I said, “How about something really really really foamy?”