I went a  little deeper into the Outer-wastes today. Deeper than last time, anyway. I stood in at the base of a canyon staring up a craggy cliff face that looked like some giant had take a city and then stuck it to their wall with glue.

At the canyon’s base there was an immense heap of bodies, trash, charred machinery and vehicles. On the actual  cliff was the city, its buildings jutting out, like cabinet shelves in the world’s most desolate office.

*****

After bracing myself a little I jumped up, the sudden acceleration making me feel just a little light headed. The three hundred foot leap was over in about a second and I found myself hanging from the edge of one of the lowest buildings.

I pulled myself up nearly fell through one of the windows on that side of the building.

“Oops...Careful, Corny.” I said. Warning myself as I walked along the side of the building. Careful of all the holes and broken windows. Sure I was undead but I didn’t want to risk dying again if I could avoid it.

*****

I’ve come to the conclusion that it's easier to think of the Outer-Wastes and Inner-Territories as two different, mostly separate worlds. One was wild and dangerous and fantastic. The other was ordered, no less dangerous, but mundane.

It was like one of those stories where one could go through a magic portal in between a fantasy land and the real world. And from what I was remembering from Corny’s secondary school history classes, that was pretty much the intent.

The source towers anchored the subspaces and the subspaces overlapped creating what was effectively a miniature parallel dimension. So long as the towers stood, the fantastic and the mundane need not live side by side.

Sure there were a few areas and times where things bled through, but in general the people could enjoy relatively normal lives. Speaking as someone who’d had to live through a world of endless horror and wonder, I both understand and applaud their decision.

Occasionally wanderlust fine, and a little adventure understandable…if you’re into that sort of thing. But day to day life should stable, safe and sane.

*****

I explored the sideways city with leaps and bounds. I’d gotten comfortable enough I’d started going inside of the buildings looking for anything of worth.

While the Hunter Office’s would only buy essence stones and materials collected from the bodies of monsters.

Other loot could be sold at numerous salvage establishments and pawnshops throughout the city. And it’d be a shame not to take advantage of the opportunity since I’d bought then fiddled with a storage item, to allow me not worry about how much I was carrying.(More game-like convenience.)

There was shriek that was quickly cut off when I sent a piece of gravel flying in the direction that the sound came from. The little piece of stone whistled through the air, before it hit its target.

A thing that looked like a cross between a haggard old woman and a turkey buzzard, keeled over. The wall behind it was painted in blood and brain matter.

I recognized the creature from a big book of monsters that we’d had in the house for some reason. The beast was a harpy and the city was full of them. This is maybe the fifteenth harpy I’d killed while making my climb.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

For a second, I thought the harpy’s body was going to fall through one of the windows.  It didn’t, it just felt onto the floor.

Which meant I’d have to harvest it, which was a pain, because aside from the axe I got from my last trip into the wastes, I still needed to buy some decent hunting gear. Collecting beast materials with a kitchen knife was both messier and more difficult than I’d expected.

*****

After quickly carving the creature apart and cutting my way through its chest, I held the harpy’s essence stone in my hand. Essence stones were heavy things and the harpy’s seemed to either emit or gather air.

A light breeze blew out from my fingers as I held the stone. I stared at it, not knowing what expression to make. Harpies seemed to be some mixture of severed undead and monster. Gaining wings from the magics corruption. So it made sense that their stones were bigger than those of your average severed. (About the size of a golf ball.) More magic meant more essence…

After thinking about the world and its creatures for a bit, I concentrated a little and shifted the flow of my essence, channelling it through the little glowing stone.

*****

Essence Stone Refinement was a trick of making stationary ‘stored’ essence  shift to a semi-active form. It was sort of like using friction and body heat to make drinkable ice water out of a chunk of ice.

In theory anyone could do it, but only innate casters could do so effectively with little ill-effect.  I’d picked up the trick when I watched the counter girl...er...Agnes, do it in the hunter offices. I wasn’t that good at it myself, with more than thirty percent of the stone’s stored energies escaping as I refined it.

For bigger, more precious, stones I’d probably go to the Handle offices to have a professional handle it.

I watched the stone grow brighter as its essence was agitated. Then I watched it shrink as the essence flowed out of the stone. Now, if I were one of the Witches in the office I’d be putting the semi-active essence into a jar or vial of enchanted glass.

The customer would take it and then inhale and or drink it in, pulling the semi-active essence into their core. Circulating it through their body so it could join and increase their total amount of personal essence.

‘I’ wasn’t a witch though, I was just doing this for me, so I simply pulled the harpy’s essence inside of me, watching the stone disappear.

*****

There was a warmth in my chest, after refining more than a dozen harpy stones I could feel my internal essence rising in the same way it rose when I took the essences of that ogre and that Rat King. I’d leveled up again.

Going from level six to level seven. Once again, I was kind of wishing there were some convenient numbers to quantify the changes caused by my increased essence. I mean I could definitely feel myself growing stronger, but how strong was up to debate. Was I many times stronger, or just a fraction stronger.

Was this a percentage based thing? Or was I growing in set increments? If I were a normal person perhaps the changes would have been more obvious. Unfortunately I wasn’t, so I just had to guess and be content that the change was at least positive in feeling.