After I finished talking to the two other most powerful individuals in the tower, I entered the great city, looking around for any familiar faces. I recognized some people who had been from Hassan’s town, though most people seemed to be either from the great city originally or from another town I hadn’t yet been to.
The city was as busy as it ever was. People were in a constant state of motion as work was being done all around. There wasn’t as much construction going on as there once was, but given that roughly 80% of the buildings had been emptied out that wasn’t a big surprise. I had heard about how during the first wave of people leaving, there had been multiple people who had killed others for the upgraded title and never been caught. Assuming they hadn’t fled the city, I would have to be aware of my surroundings.
I navigated through the streets, eventually finding the restaurant that I had been to upon first visiting the great city. The food had been quite good, but I also had another reason for being here. I walked in, scanning the room for the owner of the place. After a few seconds, I spot him tinkering with some machinery that lay within one of the far walls. It seems he has been improving upon his designs for the place.
“Excuse me.” I say, walking up to him.
He turns away from his work, looking at me. “What’d you need?” He asks.
From my aura, I pull out a pouch of coins, digging through it and pulling out a few. “I don’t know if you remember this, but you let me off the hook when I couldn’t pay for a meal a while back. I just wanted to repay you for that.”
I hand him 2 silver coins. I’d needed to really dig through my memory to recall the price of the meal, but after that had failed I just handed him what was likely far more than the meal actually cost.
“I can’t say I do remember that, but thank you.” He says, stuffing the coins in his pocket and getting back to work. With that burden lifted from my conscience, I sat down and enjoyed a proper meal. It was the meat of a shark that had been killed on floor 13. It was fabulously good, as all meals seemed to be now that people could have classes based around cooking.
After I finished eating, I headed over to the city center to see if I could find anybody else I knew. Pretty much as soon as I walked in, I spotted Hassan milling around the main area. He had a few papers in his hands that he was reading through. He glanced up and noticed me walking over, and the papers quickly disappeared, likely being put into the storage ring on his finger.
“Hey Hassan.” I say, waving. “Nice to see you again.”
“It is nice to see you too.” He says, nodding. “How’ve you been?”
“I’ve been well. What have you been up to lately? I haven’t seen you in forever.”
Hassan sighs, but keeps his smile. “I’ve joined the council for the great city. and we have been working to keep things running as smoothly as possible while we integrate the populations of more and more cities into this one.”
“Sounds boring.”
“It is. Mix that with healing the injured who come back from the higher floors, and overall things haven’t been great these past few weeks. Thankfully I’ll be leaving the tutorial in a week, and I won’t have to be in charge of anything anymore. Hopefully I can take things a bit slower once that happens.”
“Are you not planning to push for a B tier title?”
Hassan shakes his head. “I can’t handle the stress of everything involved with the tutorial for much longer. I’d rather not prolong it longer than necessary.”
“I guess I can understand that.” I say, thinking about everything that has happened in the relatively short time since the tutorial has begun. I’d spent most of my time off of floor 1, but from what I have heard things tended to be in a constant state of controlled chaos here. I was honestly glad it wasn’t my job to deal with all of that.
“What have you been up to?” Hassan asks.
“The same thing I’ve been doing since the tutorial started. Climbing the floors and gaining levels. This most recent floor was actually pretty hectic. You’d likely have had an easier time of it than I did.”
I tell Hassan all about what went down on floor 34. He found it amusing when I recounted my attempts to be a proper diplomat, and about how I ended up delegating my job to somebody else. When he heard about how I had taken a cup to fulfill the requirement for benefiting the kingdom, he had a look of surprise.
“That actually worked?” He asks.
“Yep, and I actually still have the cup.” I pull the silver cup from my inventory, showing it to him.
“I know quite a few people who have struggled quite a bit on that floor. They can stop the oncoming conflict, but doing so while benefiting the kingdom has been the big sticking point. You wouldn’t mind me sharing this method with others, would you?”
“Go for it.” I say. “I feel bad for anybody who has to handle that floor by doing any actual politics. My brain just turns to mush the moment I try to wrap it around all the schemes and hidden meanings behind every word spoken in those meetings.”
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“You know, somebody as strong as you should have at least some knowledge of how to handle yourself politically. I imagine that once everybody is back on Earth people are going to try and put laws and such in place to limit those who are at the top.”
“Like hell they will.” I shake my head. “I am pretty sure those in a position to make decisions like that would be the strong or powerful. I don’t think they’d want to limit themselves like that.”
“Perhaps, but it is still something to keep in mind.”
We talk for a while longer, but eventually Hassan has to get back to work. I walk around the city for a while longer, but don’t see any more familiar faces. It is actually kind of disappointing. Everyone was just always so busy. Well, I guess that actually goes for me too. I spent days at a time on other floors, working to progress through them. If there was an emergency, nobody would have any way to contact me.
“Huh.” I say, thinking about that. Maybe it was time I did something about that.
__________
“Cellphones?” Blair asks, looking at me with a raised eyebrow. “Do you already miss modern technology that much?”
“No- well, yes. Kind of. I miss the convenience and utility of it. I realized that if anybody needs to get a hold of me, they really have no way to do so. I was wondering if you could make something to make sure people have a way to contact me and vice versa.”
“That won’t exactly be the easiest thing to make.” She sighs. “Do you know where you go when you go to another floor? Probably not, so I’ll tell you. We go to another dimension.”
I am about to say something, but she stops me.
“Let me finish. It’s not another dimension in the same way your fancy little trait does it. You can go to a fourth dimension, maybe even eventually a fifth one. This one goes pretty much infinite dimensions away, effectively making it another reality entirely. This means that not a single one of the floors exist in the same ‘space’. No matter how far you travel or how many dimensions you move through, you will not reach another floor.”
“That explanation makes very little sense, but I get your point.” I say. “How could you possibly know all of that though?”
“My trait.” She says. “It lets me understand more about something the longer I focus on it.”
My eyes widen in surprise. “You unlocked your trait early as well?”
“Yep. Unlocked it all the way back at level 29.”
“Why didn’t you tell anybody?”
She shrugs. “Nobody ever asked about it.”
“So is this how you’ve been able to craft stuff so much better than everybody else?”
“It’s a part of the reason. Don’t discount the fact that I am just damn good at making things though. I have certainly put in the hours of practice necessary to get this far.”
“I guess that's true. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you doing anything that wasn’t productive. You should take breaks from time to time, find a while to relax.”
“This is how I relax. When I want to decompress, I do some metal work. Smacking hammers against heated metal is more therapeutic than you’d expect.” She seems to remember something, pulling out a large machine from her storage ring. With a loud clank it plops down onto the ground. The thing is as tall as I was. It had treaded tires and claws that looked very sharp.
“What the hell is that?” I ask, looking at the thing.
“This is Douglas the digging bot.” She says, patting the machine. “It is the prototype I’ve been working on to extract materials from the ground. The miners down in floor four are nice and all, but they work slowly. This bad boy would work quite a lot faster than them. Do you think you could go set it up for me? You are the only person I know other than myself with spatial storage good enough to transport it.”
“Sure. How do I turn it on once I get it there?”
“Just infuse a bit of mana into it here.” She points to a rune on the side of it. “Once it starts digging, it will absorb mana from all around it to continue operating. At least, it should in theory. This is the first version that I felt confident in testing, so I am going to have to go check up on it in a few days to make sure it is still working.”
“Why not go do it yourself though?” I ask. “Wouldn’t it be wise to see it working in person?”
“Well I’d like to, but I have to keep an eye on that thing.” She points to an anvil on the other side of the air bubble we were in. On it was a glowing piece of metal that occasionally shot a spark of mana in a random direction. “It could explode at pretty much any time, and I’d rather be here to prevent that while it cools down. I would also like to not wait to test this device, so until you came here I was contemplating whether or not to just send it down into the sand and hope it hit something.”
“Well, I guess you won’t have to worry about that anymore.” I say, still looking over the digging machine. “So where does it store the materials it finds?”
“The inside is spatially expanded. It can compartmentalize the space if it finds more than one material, because unless the material being stored is pure it will mess it up quite badly. I am still working out the kinks in that system so I’m expecting most of the harvested materials to be unusable.”
“How long did it take you to make this thing?”
“About a week. I’ve had the idea for something like this in the back of my head, but for the longest time I didn’t know how to make it. The rune book I earned from the system event helped quite a bit though. Funnily enough, I can actually process books faster than just reading them, as my trait makes me understand its contents without even reading it.”
“What is the name of your trait?” I ask. “It sounds pretty useful.”
“Scholar's Eye.” She says. “Why?”
“No reason. Just curious. I should go and get this thing set up. I guess I’ll see you later.”
She gives me a wave goodbye, and after some time I arrive at floor four. I don’t know where she would want the device to be placed, but I figure there is no better spot for it to go than at the lowest point in the floor.
10 minutes later, I am in the final chamber of the floor. There is a kobold shaman and kobold archer attacking me, but I just let their attacks bounce off my barrier. There was no reason for me to be killing the monsters, so I wouldn’t. My barrier grows in size, and the digging machine appears within it. I infuse some mana into the rune that had been pointed out, and the machine instantly gets to work.
It sinks into the ground, quickly disappearing from sight and digging a tunnel in its path. I kick the earth surrounding the hole to cave in the top part and cover the hole up. I wouldn’t want any monsters to interfere with the device.
Blair probably had some way to track down and retrieve the device, so I wasn’t too concerned about her not being able to find it. She said she would check on it in a few days, so I’ll try to remember to ask her about how it went-
A loud boom echoes up the hole, blowing the earth above it into the air. The rock all around the hole fractures as the spiderweb of cracks spreads for several meters. I look down the now clear hole to see what happened, but I already knew what I’d see before I even looked.
The machine had exploded, and parts of it were embedded in the stone all around the hole. I shake my head and start digging. She would probably want the pieces of it to see what went wrong.
“Somehow, I feel like she is going to blame it on user error.”