The next apprentice was a bit of a special case. Tim and I could get along really well, and we were quite good friends, but he's also quite old already. "You see, Rich, I’ve had my own farm for quite a while now, but like most who find themselves in this nation, I had to abandon my home.”

“At first, I thought of nothing else but starting over and making a new place for myself; that’s why I'm here as one of your apprentices. But being here, learning from you and the others, I have come to realize I don’t think that I want to start from the beginning. But I do want to homestead, so I was thinking..."

At this point, he stopped working and stepped closer to me while looking fully serious. "Rich, would you accept me into your clan so I could take care of this homestead when you’re not here and help you when you are?" The question floored me. I hadn’t even considered something like that, but it could be so helpful, and Tim is someone easy to get along with.

"I won’t say no, but let's wait until you have all gotten your full homesteader class, and then you can decide. I won’t lie and say your help wouldn't be welcomed. This would be a huge decision, so don't make it lightly; we still have some time before we truly need to decide."

He gave me a firm nod, and we continued to work in comfortable silence. It was a nice way to spend an evening, and after that, the night got even better. Tonight, we were going to the sauna. It was incredibly fun, with everyone joking around and just having a good time. I was the only one who was able to enjoy the water for longer than just a quick jump in after we all enjoyed the hot steam in the sauna.

Until the end of the week, I spent time with my apprentices, having a one-on-one with each of them. There were only a few who still hadn't decided what they wanted to do, but the rest of them had some idea at least of what they wanted their homestead to look like.

When I’d finished with everyone, I told them that next spring they would be claiming their land and starting to build their own homes. Only a few had expected this apprenticeship to be so short, but they were all excited. I then shared the information I learned in my office and told them where they needed to go to register themselves as future homesteaders, and a little bit about what that process meant.

During the nights, I worked through the paperwork that had piled on my table. Most of it was just so I would be familiar with the nation and the new systems being implemented, but there were a few more important points that needed my input as well.

The most crucial one was information about the meeting that was going to happen next month, where we would discuss and plan the future development of our nation. It will be an extremely important meeting and will probably last an entire week before we can even begin to start making a proper plan for the future.

But now that the most urgent things were done, and with the new week starting, I once again started giving lessons about energy control, this time in a building meant for teaching. So from Monday to Friday, every morning for two hours, I was giving lessons.

The list to sign up for my class was so long that doing just one lesson a week would mean that I would never finish with just the basic course, and I did want to start giving out lessons beyond the basics. By this time, my body had also recovered, and while I still wasn’t at 100%, I felt confident fighting once again with all that I had.

By this time, my hands were also itchy, as I wanted to go through all the loot that I had. But I held back, as I had an interesting plan and I was executing it during the night. It took me a full week to finish it, but just thinking about it, let alone standing inside, made me feel incredibly happy.

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I now had a proper secret treasure room. Inside the root cellar, where I previously had made the secret door and a small hole where I could store some things, I now had a small room, but it was properly strengthened and had stone walls and floor.

I had just finished making a simple table and a chair. Grabbing the oil-burning lantern, I put it on the table and started to take out the pieces of loot that I had gotten from the dungeon. I started with the stolen loot. There were two distinctly different piles of loot.

One, if I had to guess, would be from a delver team that reached around the 60th floor. There wasn’t anything too special in it, but there were some weapons and armor that might be useful for our army officers. However, I won’t be giving them out anytime soon, as I am still a bit paranoid about someone finding out that I was the one who killed them.

There was one exception, one piece of equipment that synergized with myself so well that I could already tell what it could do. It looked like a leather friendship bracelet, and when I put it on, the energy in the air immediately started to vibrate. I breathed in slowly through my nose, and for the first time, I could smell energy. It was like fresh spring air.

I almost didn't even have to think before the energy surrounding me leapt to do anything it could to help me. The bracelet basically extended the inner control that I had over my energy into the surroundings, although it did so only to a small distance of about a meter or two, but it was already exceptionally powerful in my book.

I was a lot more disappointed about the loot that the party I killed must have collected by themselves. They had some armor and weapon pieces and even a few crafting ones, but once again, only one piece of loot seemed to resonate with me exceptionally well.

It looked like a tiny hammer that archaeologists use in the movies, and after I touched it, I felt an incredible connection to it, and it wanted me to craft things. I felt that whatever boost it had, I didn't actually need to use it as a hammer, just have it on me. But for now, I will leave it in this room just in case.

That was a bit disappointing, but I think some of it comes down to the fact that I don't really need a new weapon or armor at this current stage. I feel like when I need to make a new set of armor, the ones that were dropped by the dungeon simply won't do.

For the loot that I got myself, I was a lot more excited about. The first piece of loot I was already wearing was the ring that gave me my mind companion. He was an incredible resource, as my mind palace looked so formidable now, and somehow he's even been able to make stone golem-like defenders, so I'm certain whoever wants to break into my mind will have a terrible time.

The next thing that I pulled out was the Compendium of Spell Waves created by Vespinax, the Demon of the Prime Hell, but I don't yet know what to do with this, and I will probably need to schedule a time with our mages so we can figure out how I can transfer the knowledge from this book into a form that others could read. I spent some time flipping through it, and I was 100% certain that there were more pages in it than physically possible, so who knows how long it will take to actually finish copying this entire book.

I started to take out the lesser pieces of loot that I had gotten, quite a few of them being materials for crafting. It was a nice pile of rank two materials, and I could probably use them to make myself equipment for a while because I was still over 1000 points away in my vitality from reaching the next rank of energy access.

Just in case I might have missed some pieces of material, I went through my tattoo storage and had to stop when I found something that I didn’t know was there. I pulled them out of the storage to find five different colored necklaces.

Wait, did I pick up the loot from the last boss? I could have sworn under oath that I didn’t, and I actually did swear when I got out of the dungeon, and whatever device they were using actually believed me. Was I that out of it that I picked them up on instinct, or did the dungeon core actually help me out?

Whatever the case might be, I was glad to have them, but they didn’t really resonate with me, which was quite disappointing. They did look incredibly cool, with incredibly detailed symbols of the corresponding elements of the hydra head. I accidentally brought two of them closer together, and they actually snapped into place like there were magnets inside of them.

After a moment of shock, I immediately gathered every one of them, and when they all snapped together, I was left with a circular pendant with fire being in the center, surrounded by the others. I still didn’t feel any resonance with this item, but it felt incredibly powerful, and more specifically, there also seemed to be stat points that the pendant would give.

Putting it on, I did feel it tried to connect to something inside of me, but it couldn't, which was disappointing. But when I looked at my stats, I was incredibly pleased to see that the pendant boosted 5 stats—Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, Constitution, Endurance—by 500.

This was an incredible amount of stat points, and I felt the energy corresponding to those particular stats strengthen inside me even more. The unfortunate thing is that these stat points don’t count for getting traits or the next rank of energy access.

The last piece of noteworthy loot was the sapling, or stick as others called it. For it, I sat and meditated for the rest of the night to find out what it needed, but unfortunately, it just needed to acclimate until spring before I could plant it, and I didn’t even find out what kind of tree it would grow into, let alone anything else.