It had now been an entire two years since Iris Hart had first transmigrated to the beastworld. She had long since grown used to having a system that issued her quests on behalf of the Beast Deity and had even completed an entire ten quests, thus far. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no sign of the quests stopping and Iris constantly worried that one day she would fail one of the quests and all of her efforts would go down the drain. While she was, somewhat, hopeful that the quests had a limit and would cease altogether, one day, it wasn't like she had any way of knowing when or even if that would ever happen.

Still, Iris and her family had accomplished quite a bit in the time she had been in this world. They had gone from living in a tribe with a rather selfish leader who would rather brush his daughter's poor actions under the rug to building their own city. Their move had brought many of its own issues, but they had successfully overcome even those. Basil had helped to ensure everyone remained in good health while Iris's dimensional space bag and their family's wealth had helped to ensure they had enough food to not lose anyone on the trip over.

The biggest obstacle their city had to face had been a group of rather powerful wild beastmen. They had appeared one cold season and had just barely been fought off due to how organized and strong the group was. It certainly helped that Blue Spring City had been so new and lacked strong males, especially with Ember incapacitated at the time. If they hadn't had strong males temporarily staying in their city thanks to Ash, who was more than a little interested in Iris, they likely wouldn't have been able to have as few lives lost as they had. However, even then, it was hardly a successful defense of the city as they had only just barely managed to chase the enemy away, not defeat them.

The following year had then been spent improving the city's defenses as well as improving the lives of the people living within it. Iris encouraged her friends to open their own businesses and worked on many community projects from a huge livestock sector to a park for all to enjoy. However, the biggest deal was, of course, the city walls, guard towers, various traps, and the significant progress made in training the males in their city. When the next wild beastman attack overtook their city, they were prepared enough that they could not only push the enemy back, but completely decimate their group.

A few stragglers might have been still out there, but they had done their best to follow things up and eliminate every wild beastman they found within their city's vicinity. It was certain that there wouldn't be any more large-scale attacks on their city from wild beastmen anytime soon. As they were hardly going to just sit idly by and wait to be attacked, it was likely they'd be even more prepared in the future and it would be difficult for anyone to harm their city anymore.

However, that didn't mean that Iris didn't have anything to worry about anymore. She was once more pregnant and things hadn't gotten any easier since the last time she had to carry so many cubs to term. She was healthy as far as her or Basil, her witch doctor mate, could tell, but carrying anywhere from one to more than a dozen cubs or hatchlings at a time was never going to be easy. That wasn't even to mention just how unnatural it was for Iris's body to run the course of a pregnancy in a mere six months rather than the nine months that was customary for humans, like herself.

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Besides that, she had received a new quest from the system shortly before the cold season had begun. She had been discussing her plans with her mates for officially opening the school in the inner city when the quest had shown up.

System316: Great job taking the initiative to educate your citizens! Knowledge is important for advancing civilization, for some extra motivation, here's an official quest!

Info:

Educate a minimum of 10% of your citizens to read, write, and count.

Time Limit:

One Year

Reward:

(Final) System Shop Upgrade

Penalty:

Host permanently forgets how to read, write, and count.

As for why the system had to be so severe with the punishment for something she had already been planning on doing, Iris wasn't sure. She was almost entirely certain that the Beast Deity wasn't nearly as cruel as the system tended to be with its penalties. She tended to seem like a much more gentle and caring being, but it wasn't exactly as if the Beast Deity was completely free of blame since she had been the one to design the system.

Iris did have to say that it was also quite curious how this was only the eleventh quest she had ever been issued, yet she was being offered a system shop upgrade. Normally, the shop upgrades were offered for every third quest that she completed. The fact that the system also specified that this would be the final system shop upgrade was, of course, even more intriguing. Did this mean that she'd soon be done with system quests altogether? Otherwise, would she be getting some other sort of reward in the future? It was difficult to tell and the system didn't seem to want to divulge that information, no matter how much she asked.

Ash had been informed about Iris's secrets not long after they had mated. Despite how on edge her mates had been, fully prepared to intervene and hold him back in case he lost his mind worse than Birk had, Ash had easily accepted the news. Apparently, he had suspected some of the things that they were informing him of, such as the fact that Iris was the one who taught everyone else how to read or the fact that she was special due to her light magic abilities. The rest was, apparently, of no consequence to him. He had chosen to dedicate his life to Iris and there was no use regretting it now that he had.

However, he was no better than Ember when it came time to explain the new mission she had been given. Well, that was, perhaps, a bit generous of an explanation. Ember had come a long way from losing his temper and storming out whenever he couldn't get his way. Ash didn't exactly have an anger problem the way Ember did, but they had both been more than a bit frustrated on behalf of Iris. They couldn't really comprehend how the Beast Deity could be so cruel and constantly threaten Iris, even after all she had done to prove herself a loyal follower and a motivated messenger.