The morning consisted of going around and swinging the maces through the slimes. They would sort of deflate, and then Jim or Doty, both in gloves, would reach into the goop and pull out the monster parts worth harvesting.

“The bodies will sort of boil in place, but not get hot,” Mrs. Kine was telling me, “the physical flesh turning back into mana except for the pieces that changed, like cysts, or pearls, or monster cores.”

“So why not wait?”

“If you let the bodies sublimate then you have to search the whole area. If you kill in the presence of slimes they gather the parts, then you kill the slimes and take the parts from the slime bodies and you’ve harvested the area.”

“Are their slimes everywhere?”

“No, but many outpost locations are chosen specifically because slimes are one of the creatures at the desired depth. Around ten they aren’t anything to laugh at any more, but they are still weaker than anything else. Since most biomes only support three or four combat monster types having a less dangerous enemy like slimes is often ideal.”

“Combat monsters?”

“Slimes, imps, henkals, crabs, those types. There can be others, like onya, though they are a tier one monster that are happy to leave the shallows. They get their needed mana from the fermented food they eat.”

“Because the alcohol traps mana,” I said more to myself than to her.

“Yes.”

It was how alchemy was discovered.

Most magical potions were alcoholic in nature. There were better binders for mana but most of them were poisonous or toxic. Poison could be mitigated with skills or spells or antidotes, but toxicity built up in the body and eventually destroyed or did damage that required more powerful holy healing magics.

We each had two health potions, gifted from the mayor, and to be returned if they were not used. These were not alchemically created though, but instead came into creation through condensation.

Condensation was what allowed the creation of most enchanted weapons, armor, aprons, pots, knives, looking glasses, tea cups and everything else that had complex enchantments. The only enchantments that craftsmen could craft that were superior to condensate enchantments was dimensional shunting.

A Master enchanter could be expected to enchant any material with a single enchantment that they had studied. They might be able to make a tier three enchanted item, which, if stacked property, could have five enchantments, but tier four’s seven and tier five’s nine were outside of any craftsman’s grasp and could only come from condensation.

Jackson, being newly employed in Gus’s wagon train had to learn all the duties. One of which was Storyteller. It was part single man play and part bard for those with a skill on pipes.

For most of our trip Jackson would listen to a story told by another each night and then recite it while the children tried to spot his mistakes.

I skipped most of those in the beginning as I focused on questions and answers from others. Upon listening to them I learned they too held useful information.

The most powerful sword ever discovered was from the black depths beyond level twenty. It held nine enchantments related to fire. Three that increased damage, three that lowered an enemies resistance to damage, and three others that are never spoken about. Though the story itself speculated.

The sword, named simply Torch, need not cut anything. It had only to touch and it set things aflame in magical fire until they died. In the story there are great serpents and the hero grew over confidant. Eventually a serpent broke through the protections of the outpost and devoured him. The serpent burned and fled deeper and deeper into the depths.

As the story is told the hero lives, but is lost in the deeps forever seeking a path upward.

Other items had useless enchantments. A kitchen knife that weights thirty percent less, or a baking pan that is resistant to cold and poison.

Enchantments could even work counter to each other. There was a famous knife called The Knife of the Fool with such enchantments. It increased fire damage dealt, lowered the targets fire resistance by increasing its cold resistance, but also changed all fire damage to cold. It had an enchantment that added poison damage while having another enchantment that cleansed all poisons anytime someone touched the blade, including the target.

Beyond enchanted items and potions that were perfectly stabilized and did not expire, condensation created spell cards, scrolls, skill-books, and rarest of all, augments.

Augmenters might grant a man claws or a third eye or an allergy to grain.

Scrolls could be duplicated by those with the correct skills, so healing scrolls were common enough if you had enough coin. But most people would never see a scroll, skill-book, or augment in their entire life. In the New World this was even rarer as many of those very expensive items were sold and shipped back to the old world.

Potions that restored health, mana, and stamina were common enough, though they were slow regenerate over time effects. Alchemists could provide more powerful immediate healing, or longer regeneration, or in the case of mana potions, a potion that allowed regeneration while using magic.

Unless you attended academies that taught you how to create spells from your own mana you could not earn Class Skills related to mana easily.

While wealth or old families had spell cards, they didn’t have the skills to maximize their use.

The most important aspect was allowing someone to regenerate their mana at their natural rate while still funneling mana into a spell, as normally you could do one or another.

That wasn’t so much of a deal if you were casting an attack spell and then waiting, but if you wanted to cast a spell that stayed, like a shield or a buff of some sort, those drained mana at very slow rates. Often less than your natural regeneration. If you could regenerate while casting you didn’t run out of mana.

Because condensate mana potions provided that benefit they were rarely on shelves or traded. Likewise with health potions that not only healed but allowed the health to regenerate while health was held in reserve.

Reserved mana, health, or fatigue stopped the regeneration while lowering the maximum available health, mana, or fatigue. Mostly Class Skills did this, but there were cards, and presumably scrolls, skill-books, and augments that did the same.

Oddly enough enchanted items that reserved something did not stop the regenerative effects.

“Are you going to use all these to condensate with?” I asked with a raised voice?

“Not in the shallows,” Doty said with a laugh.

“We may,” Jim said, “As we will likely get potions and I wouldn’t mind a few more.”

“You do what you want with your share,” Doty said.

I glanced at Mrs. Kine who shook her head slightly.

The two of us moved forward as I clubbed a few more slimes while she followed picking out the valuable bits.

As it had been explained to me we owned nothing on a mission like this. The leader decided what to do and when and at the end whatever wasn’t used was divided up as fairly as possible. As such there was no our share, mid way though if Jim wanted to condense these he could.

And he did.

We sat in the building while he counted out thirty-three essence pearls and added the marbles to a circle of metal chain laid out of the floor. Thirty-three was the minimum to guarantee someone was created.

He tossed a few cysts in and then leaned forward.

He was sitting cross legged and leaned forward enough to press his fingers into the outside of the chain.

I knew the process, and right now he was cycling mana from inside himself into the area the chain encircled, while at the same time using his mana in the chain as a sort of wall that didn’t let the mana leave.

There was nothing for us to see, and yet, the chain seemed to reflect the light from the never-dark torches and the enchanted curls.

It wasn’t enough that I was sure I was seeing anything, and yet-

There was a an itch on the back of my hand, as I reached to scratch it a white flash, like a camera’s flash filled the room.

I cut my eyes back to the circle.

There was a green potion bottle inside and a few essence pearls.

He added a double handful of cysts and a couple pearls and began again.

Four times the white flashed. He pulled out the red potions when they were created and left the rest inside.

“I always seems to happen when I’m not looking,” I said.

Doty laughed.

“That’s you?” Jim said with a sigh, and Doty laughed harder.

“What?”

“You can’t look at it?” Mrs. Kine said with a smile, “the flash can’t happen if you look at it, and the condenser has to work that much harder to force more mana in. You’re making it more difficult for him.”

“Oh. I didn’t know. I was just trying to see it change. I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted. Gods know I tried it enough when I was younger,” Jim said.

We got five health potions out of a hundred and thirty-nine essence pearls and twice that many cysts. The last condensation left us with a stamina potion and a handful of pearls.

While you had to start with thirty-three pearls, you didn’t lose too much mana in the attempts and could just add to the circle over and over so long as the person doing the condensing was able to hold the circle.

As you grew more skilled you added links to your chain making it larger, as you went deeper into the depths you’d have to shorten the chain. There was some math that related circle size on the surface to circle size at level nine, where most outposts where.

If you made your circle too large though, and did it in darkness, you could summon a monster. It was one of the reasons outposts were normally at level nine. You could make the circles large and with light avoid monster spawns. Below level ten you had to limit the size of your circles.

Larger circles often meant less material needed as more ambient mana could be captured and stored.

I related like having a bigger storage tank for compressed gas. A larger tank meant less pressure for the same amount of gas, less pressure meant less skill needed to contain the mana.

“Go ring it again,” Jim said as he began to pick up.

Doty pulled the chain that rose up near the trap door looped around a pulley and ran back down as they had done as soon as we entered last night.

We wouldn’t descend past the trap door. The man might have trapped things. We would wait her four about fix days with food, and then two more days without.

We spent the afternoon cutting down a dead tree and then cutting branches and logs. Mrs. Kine collected arm fulls of sticks and branches and stack them into piles.

We’d split the wood here and carry it all back to stack between the two tree trunks near the safe-stay.

The barrels in the safe-stay had been topped off with water. One sealed the other open to air.

We boiled water in the kettle and then poured it into another bucket to cool.

Dinner was dried meat and rock hard biscuits in a bowl of hot water.

There were thickening jars, mostly vegetable starch and some spices, that we added. When you smashed everything it up was sort of stew-like.

A bell woke us on the forth night.

Doty woke us while Jim approached the trap door.

There was a bit of a shouted conversation through the door before we set our weapons and shields aside, faced the wall with out hands above our head as the man we’d been sent to find climbed up into the room behind us.

“You lot can turn around and offer me a good meal,” the man said.

He was shorter than myself of course, but shorter than both Jim and Doty. Mrs. Kine might be taller, but it would be a close thing.

“Of course,” Jim said, “Just a moment.”

He had a sealed jar of some sort of fruit alcohol, and a sealed jar of stew.

He produced a essence pearl and placed it on the floor and then carefully sat the jar of stew above it. Then he drove his hand down on top. There was a pop and a brief puff of fog from below.

“Be just a minute,” Jim said as he worked his knife under the lid on the jar of alcohol. It was sealed with some sort of wax that eventually gave way.

He sat the whole jar before the man who lifted it to give it a sniff.

His hair was cut short and mostly gray. His beard was a patch work of white, black and dirty red. Perhaps where he had earned his name.

It was not the type of beard that made people look good. It was the type of beard homeless men had.

The lid of the earthenware stew jar popped up, breaking the wax seal as steam popped out. It carried a wonderful smell that promised big chunks of meat and spices.

“Why disturb me?” Red asked as he produced a small knife from his belt. The blade was glass, but changed shaped slowly into a wide spoon.

He began to eat as Jim explained the attacks and the mayor’s request. Jim indicated I was part of the wagon train that had survived the ambushes and killed the gang members.

Red didn’t have any questions for us at all. He listened and then sighed.

“I will help,” he said, “I will be ready to travel in ten hours, perhaps a bit longer.”

He drank a few swallows of the alcohol, glanced at it, and then sealed the lid to the jar by rubbing his finger around the edge and heating the wax.

“This is very good,” he said as he stood.

“Ten hours,” he said as he headed back down into the trap door.

In the morning as soon as the sun was up we headed out to clear the area like we had the previous days. We now each had four healing potions and and a stamina potion a piece.

We stocked the safe-stay with wood and water and threw a shovelful of dirt into the latrine hole over the solid waste.

We took the never-dark torches with us. The last thing they did was crack three essence pearls under the glass jar that held the fog.

After the third I got close. It looked like the glass was slightly steaming.

I reached out to touch it, thinking it was hot.

It wasn’t.

“Most tanks this size can only hold two pearl’s worth,” Doty said as he reached out a finger and closed his eyes.

As his finger got close to the glass I saw the wisps of steam floating away from the glass draw in and flow into his finger.

“A bit’s leaking out, but it’s not bad,” Doty said.

“That will keep the lights on without the fire?” I asked.

He blinked at me then shook his head.

“The heat has to power it, those lights would suck the mana dry in an hour or less. That just keeps the enchantment fresh, resets the knots or whatever you scholarship types call it. I thought you’d know this stuff?”

“Memory fog,” I said tapping my head, “lots of holes.”

“Ah. Aahhhhh,” he said as if something clicked for him.

“That why you headed out west?” he asked.

I shrugged, but he grinned at me.

“It don’t matter though,” he said with a grin, “we’ll take a half-educated Alchemist over someone that can’t even control glass.”

“I bet,” I said with a grin. His smile widened but I had no idea what was happening.

It was just afternoon when Red joined us.

He had a cupboard on his back, and honest to goodness wooden box with two vertical doors as tall as he was.

He got out from under the straps and folded down two pieces of wood from the back, and then two more that made triangles to keep the thing upright.

“Inside please. It’s shunted for weight and space, but not time.”

Mrs. Kine seemed excited. Jim seemed stoic and Doty cursed.

“Bleed depths with that,” he said, “I’ll wait out here.”

“Get it or not, but we talk in there where no one can see what happened with spells or skills. You stay out here you won’t know the plan.”

Jim ducked a bit as he walked through the open doors.

Mrs. Kine smiled at me and followed.

I had to duck and sort of twist sideways at the same time and ended up taking Mrs. Kine’s hand to help me through. There was a room on the other side with a ceiling high enough that I didn’t have to duck.

We sat on trunks. There were shelves with potions in little shelves with small paper tags. Several weapons attached to the wooden walls. There were crates of charcoal near the door, and a few pots and pans. A barrel of water, a keg of something, and bottles of what I assumed were alcohol.

There were half barrels full of the common condensation potions. Barrels full of essence pearls, and cysts, and one almost full of monster cores.

The room was big, but not huge. It appeared to be constructed out of wooden planks with gaps.

I lifted my hand to look at it. The light without shadows. I cupped my hands together and put them up to my eye to look inside.

It should be dark with some light entering from the cracks. It was lit.

Red was looking at me when I lowered my hands.

“Scholar?” he asked.

I considered how to answer. Likely he simply meant a curious person, but I didn’t want to misrepresent myself if he really meant-

“If you can’t say no to that, the answers yes,” he said quickly, “and the longer it takes you to get there the worse off the rest of us are. So first, no questions about the box. It’s bigger on the inside, you can breathe, it’s lit up. I crack a few monster cores in here every so often with a depth gauge to keep the mana up. That keeps the magic working. I don’t have a clue how it works, and I won’t be talking about it.”

I opened my mouth in the way they had here to indicate you wished to speak. I’d much rather raise my hand but no one understood what that meant.

“I’m not talking about it,” he stated again this time with a bit of anger in his voice.

I kept my mouth open.

“What?” he asked.

His voice was cold and quiet and I had a feeling if I asked about it I’d regret it. Which made me realize asking if all dimensional storage spaces needed monster cores to maintain, might be too close in subject. I want to ask because I’d had one in a belt buckle but knew nothing about maintaining it.

I changed what I was about to say.

“What’s the plan.”

He stared at me, as if to convey that he knew what I’d planned on asking him.

“Maps,” he said moving through the crates and barrels.

He took two leather maps and a thick wooden rod that ended up containing a paper map.

“They attacked here, here, here,” Red said, “and Splitrock is here. Seems straight forward they came from this way. Problem is there ain’t much this way that’s not corporate. Which is worse because if they sacked this town,” his finger hovered over the paper map, “and they have the cards from there, we are in for a bad time. There were at least two legendary cards here. One of which let John Rope see a bit into the future. He couldn’t tell anything about the future but his own physical condition. The man had the card for years though and worked out a system of cutting himself or pulling teeth or whatever else to warn himself about things. Funny part is he said he never had to do those things because the warnings warned him and changed his future. If they have that card we get out ahead of them and get everyone to safety. The other card is a beam weapon. Six times a day, burns a hole about this big,” he said holding his hands to indicate a basketball sized hole.

“It’ll burn though six to eight fingers of metal or paces of stone. It can be overwhelmed at a huge cost of life. If they have that, we also run. Likely though if they got attacked and lost they destroyed the cards. They were honorable men.”

He looked at us and then frowned.

“So we go there?” Jim said leaning over the map. He reached down, likely to turn the map but Red slapped his hand.

“White Fork,” Red said, “and don’t touch the maps your hands have oil on them.”

“So we go there and ask if they still have their cards?” Jim asked.

Red stared at him as if he was an idiot.

“If they were attacked, and had legendary cards among the defenders, it’ll be a war zone. Maybe they could poison gas the town or the like, but I don’t see them sneaking up on John Rope without him being able to warn himself.”

“Should we warn Splitrock?” Jim asked.

“You said they fled, but you can do as you please, but I’m headed straight there and checking to see if this gang has the cards. If they do I’m running, and you should to. They’ll become the dominate force in the area, establish a power base and then grow fat and lazy. Or they’ll roam and the Viceroy will be sent to deal with them. Either way I won’t be in the area to temp them with my cards.”

Jim frowned for a while then let out a breath.

“Doty will head back and let the others know your plans. Is there a place we can all meet up?”

Red lifted one of the leather maps and set that down. It covered a much larger area.

“There is an old native village on a Mesa here. No water up there, so no one ever goes up there, but there are buildings and fields of grass if they have animals. They’ll have to haul water up. It’s out of the way, has three different ways down, and good slight lines. If they hide there likely this gang won’t be looking for anyone there. It’s also well known enough that they can find it even without extensive maps. No one goes there, but everyone knowns where it is.”

“So we meet there?” Jim asked.

Red considered for a moment.

“They should send other runners out to other towns and villages. Tell them about the cards. If the gang has a beam spell, if any survivors have seen it, that should be enough to tell everyone to flee anyway if the tales of rape and torture don’t.”

“Are the rest of you coming with me?” he looked at Jim and then Mrs. Kine and myself.

“You can ride in here so that I don’t have to wait on you.”

“While I’m sure my husband would love to see what happens inside the room while it’s in motions, I think it is safer for us to head to the mesa. Neither of us have combat classes.”

He frowned at me then asked how I had killed so many men without combat classes.

“Poison.”

“Ah,” he said with a nod, “and nothing in the room moves no matter how hard the box bounces. I wish you luck and thank you for the warning.”

As he began to put the maps away Jim spoke up, “Should I go with you?”

“That’s up to you son. I know what’s in this space since I’m linked to it. If anything of mine is missing when you exit I’ll know.”

“Sir I would never-”

Red held up his hand.

“Not an accusation, just letting everyone know.”

Jim chose not to accompany the man, who left at suck a great rate of speed that it put me in mind to think of theatrical effects with vampires or superheros.

Doty left immediately. Jim updated the log book in the safe-stay and then checked everything over again before we left.

We cleared out a space and rested just before the sun sat. We ate and planned. A hard run all through the night should get us out of the shallows by morning. But it wouldn’t be on a road and therefore we wouldn’t know exactly when we left the shallows because there would be no marker stone.

Once you opened a potion it had a shelf life. Like scrolls or wands, potions were packaged as a single use item. There were minimum amounts needed to activate the magic.

I used one of the fatigue potions around midnight and felt the effects immediately. Further it felt like I was a child for about an hour afterward. By that I meant that when I was a child I could run and run and run and never ever feel tired or exhausting building. As an adult, even a short run began with that feeling that there was an eventual time limit on the run.

For an hour or more, I didn’t have that feeling at all.

Mrs. Kine kept looking at me, and I knew I was ginning like a fool, but I couldn’t help it.

When I was younger my brother’s disease took a lot of my parents’ attention and time. He was in a wheelchair fairly quick, and that cut out a lot of outdoor activities.

Even we were outside I felt bad being able to run around when he couldn’t.

Then he died, and there was a window of time before my medical grade depression took over from my angst-filled teen years.

Not at lot of depressed people run marathons.

I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt eh pure joy of running.

We didn’t circle very often, simply outran the imps and when the henkal pack grew to large slowed near imps in the hopes they would be distracted for long enough that we could sprint away.

We didn’t slow until a few hours after sunrise.

That rest was cut short.

“On your feet!” Jim screamed.

I was up in an instant.

“Redhorn!” Jim screamed.

The animal was moose like in that it was far larger than it should be. It had horns that were wide like a deer but only a few branching points.

The antlers looked gray stone with flecks of some sort of reflective green.

“What do we-” I began.

“Get your pack and back away, if it gets red we run.”

“Red?”

“Get. Your. Pack.”

Mrs. Kine had hers on he back and was already pulling me along.

I grabbed mine and began to struggle into it.

“Face it,” Mrs. Kine said.

I’d turned away to get my arm into the other strap.

The thing was on the other side of the creek just standing there.

It also had four eyes?

There were the two eyes on the sides of it’s head like a goat, more on the side than forward and two half spheres that were a solid black above and closer to the center.

I had a chilling memory of spider eyes from the movie ‘The Mist’ with those creep ass spiders.

We were backing away from the huge creatures until we were behind trees. I only noticed they were creatures, plural, after ten steps.

The others were smaller with two long spikes like impalas. They stood in the underbrush further away than the larger one that had approached the water.

Once we were in the trees Jim had us bunch up.

“Secure your packs, we are going to be sprinting in just a moment,” he said.

I did exactly that.

“We ready to run?” he asked.

“Ready,” Mrs. Kine said.

“Ready,” I repeated.

“Turn and follow me,” he said.

Then we were running again.

“Why do you call them redhorns?” I asked fifteen minutes later when we stopped on the top of a small hill.

“They looked green.”

“The gems?” Jim said, “They can be green, blue, red, black, yellow, and orange, though some of those may be a rumor. When they decide to charge the antlers get hot. So hot they glow red and set fire to things. The real danger is the antler spikes shatter and break off, but they don’t cool. They can cook you from the inside by the time you get the pieces out.”

“I’ll take over the watch if you like,” I offered as I got to my feet.

Mrs. Kine was braiding some of the grasses around us. I’d see the dried braids used to start fires before.

“Thank you, but if you are ready we can keep moving.”

According to the map we were in safe zones all the way to the mesa but clearly the wilds still had dangers.

When the sun sat we kept moving, though it was only at a walk until we were back in a forest with very little undergrowth.

Broken bones seemed to be the biggest worry Jim had.

Our never-dark torches lit the way with ease though I didn’t like what the did with the shadows and the trees.

I kept seeing things that turned out to not be there.

Of course then I wondered if there were things that weren’t there. Were ghosts real here? Some sort of smoke or shadow monsters? I don’t know.

We didn’t sleep, only stopped for short breaks.

I used another stamina potion in the middle of the next day.

We reached the base of the mesa that night and Jim stood guard as we slept.