After thoroughly washing myself in the river I left my clothing and armour pieces to dry in the sun while I started to work on the corpses that I had gathered during my dungeon delve. I learned a few valuable lessons. I should always drain the blood out of the corpses before I put them into the bag otherwise the meat will be useless. The useless pieces of the animal I just left here to be eaten by the nearby animals.

There will still be a lot of work to make the leather and other pieces usable, but I won’t be able to do that out here. I relaxed for a few hours and waited for everything to dry up before I started my run back to the village. A big chunk of the materials I’ve gained I gave to the jobs building warehouse where I was given appropriate credit for my materials.

After that I notified the council receptionist about destroying the beetle dungeon and that I was going to plant two of the dungeons where we had previously agreed upon. About a month ago there was a meeting where we decided how many dungeons and where they should go around our capital.

In the end, we decided upon six that would all be a few hours’ walk from here. From the dungeon book, I learned that the location we picked should be quite good for excellent dungeons. They had enough ambient energy and special features to fuel the growth of the dungeon.

The planting process itself was quite easy. I just had to dig a small hole and then supply enough energy for the dungeon core seed to start developing a dungeon there. The locations will need to be quite far from each other so they wouldn't start to consume each other’s energy. With the two planted it was time to run back to my home.

Now usually dungeons need to be planted near each other but there are exceptions. One of the exceptions to that is land ownership. A dungeon will not take energy from another owner’s land. The current dungeon that was on my land is only pulling energy from my land and the free land around it.

Technically this will slow down my own dungeon growth a bit as George’s and Emma’s land that is bordering me will no longer be free land, but my land is big enough that it would never be able to consume all of the free ambient energy on it.

With the two dungeons planted on George’s and Emma’s land the inn named The Dungeon's Retreat now had three dungeons within a stone-throwing distance. For the last dungeon I had to walk a longer distance so I could reach Arthur’s land, but it was still quite close to the inn, so technically this area will now have access to four dungeons.

After planting a dungeon will grow its first floor in two to five months and the second floor in about four to seven months after the first. After that, it varies a lot more and will depend on the structure of the dungeon and what’s inside it. That time could be shorter if there are more delvers, but with the first few floors, it doesn't matter too much. Now I have a basically free winter, so I celebrate it by going to the inn and receiving a nice dinner.

While the inn wasn’t officially open, they were already serving food to the people in the nearby building that was used by the delvers off the dungeon that was on my land. After eating I went and fired up the sauna, but then went back to the inn to just talk to the people there. After a late-night sauna, I felt a lot cleaner and better. Sitting on the outside bench looking at the river going by I started to think about my stat point.

I had been a bit too efficient with my levelling. There were only a bit more than 100 points left to get in vitality before I reached the second rank. If I wanted to, I could probably go out hunting and achieve it in two weeks but that actually wouldn't be a good thing. If that happens before I finish growing it would become much harder to keep training my body to keep my flexibility. This means no more hunting trips or bow-making. Well, a little bit of bow-making will not hurt.

Just in case I will keep my free points unused. There will be another battle with the party members of the slave king, who will come here for revenge. If they don’t it will be easier not to over-level but if they do, I will need to be extra careful about levelling.

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Hopefully, my plan will work which will mean that I shouldn’t gain too much experience, but it would be even better if they just wouldn't come this year. But if they come next year, it will be a lot harder to win against them. I guess it is still better if they come now, I will just have to stay at home until my birthday and work on my smithing skills.

The next week and a half I spent smithing or teaching others. Of course, I also did an unhealthy amount of training, but I was starting to get used to that. It was early morning when a message stick broke that signified that I needed to go back to the village as soon as possible.

While I was running to the village, I was thinking about the ability fresh soil that I got for leveling one of my classes to 20. It was a bit different than I expected. You could not use it on a patch of soil and spend huge amounts of energy to make the soil more fertile. It’s a slow effect that works on a large area to make the soil as good as possible for planting.

You will still need to fertilize yourself for an even better result but it’s an amazing ability that requires a lot of time to make it worth it. The time required is not in spending endless hours every day using it but doing so every day for about an hour for months. This amount of time will cover my current fields so I will not be able to do this on a national level.

In the village, I was quickly brought up to speed. It looks like they confirmed that the slave king’s former party members will be coming here. It was at this point that I finally asked what was the name of the mage that was leading the army. She was called Vivienne “The Slicer” Hearthweaver.

In the end, she did basically kill off everyone who didn’t join her army or who weren’t strong enough to fight. She ended up having a combined army of about 3900. It was an impressive number but most of them only had a few class levels if that. The biggest problem she has is that she doesn’t have any elite troops and our Vikings have grown quite strong. I hope that my plan works so we can gain a lot from this fight. It was at this moment that my pondering was interrupted by a question.

“General Rich, when will we start attacking our enemy supplies and will you be leading that attack?” Someone asked. It took a while for me to focus on the question, so I missed who asked it. I focused on what was going on around me. Everyone was working hard on drawing up battle plans and what we will be doing to prepare. If I told them the complete plan, they would probably protest against it.

“We will not be hitting the supply line and we will not be moving out for quite a while and mobilizations is not needed. Our current forces will be enough.” My statement of course stopped all of the activity in the room as everyone looked at me trying to understand my words.

“There is a larger river with a bridge crossing about a two-week march from here,” I said while getting up and pointing at that location on the map. “We will be using that as a chokepoint so our superior fighters will have the advantage and their numbers would mean nothing.”

I sat back down and continued, “But we don't have enough prepared rations for that long of a stay and I would like to be there a week early so we can start fortifying that place even more. Currently, I want all hands working on our supplies.”

There was more understanding now but I could still see questions in some people’s eyes, but they let it go so we could focus on making sure our army doesn’t starve or freeze. Our enemy is carrying a lot of supplies, almost enough so their entire army could survive the winter. Destroying so much would be quite a waste and I’m not entirely sure the supplies are not trapped. Who knows what those mages can do?

Eventually, we started to talk about the weather and how we needed better winter gear. We weren’t going to be able to design and test new armour meant for the winter. The current plan remains. We were already modifying our soldiers’ armour so they could put them over winter clothing. While this will not be a perfect solution it should get the job done.

The discussion went on for the entire day. Currently, we had almost two weeks to prepare before we needed to march out. I didn’t need to join them for most of the march, so I had almost a month free. During this time, I should be able to help make the Vikings more appropriate weapons and armour.

When I was finally able to leave the meeting room, I found the atmosphere of the village had changed. It was once again tense but there wasn’t the same desperation as last time, which I was glad to see.

On my way back home, I also stepped into the inn where I enjoyed a late dinner. The place was now open but there were still only a few people here. I sat with a few of my apprentices who were here before we all left to get some sleep.

I had pushed this back, but it was finally time to absorb the beetle boss armour. It took nearly until morning before I was finally done. After which I ate quite a lot and finally went to sleep. I was so exhausted that as soon as my head hit the pillow, I was asleep.