A short while later Ash and I were walking through the streets of town, with me bearing new markings around my neck. She hadn’t commented on them, but judging from the color in her face and the fact that she hadn’t asked a single question about how the doors worked, she knew that I’d lied about the other tests.
I proceeded to ignore that though, and focused more on copying all of the maps in the Adventurer’s Guild, and eating a sandwich they’d had in their kitchens. After that, we spent a couple hours finding local gardens and farmers who could teach me about various plants that I hadn’t yet learned. Throughout our travels, Ash had shown me every edible plant she knew and how to harvest/prepare them, but my diary was still far too empty for my liking. I also stopped by a tailor to purchase some more enchanting thread, as I didn’t really want to waste my Aspect Manifestation thread on test drives and equipment that I’d eventually replace. However, there was a certain problem that prevented the sale.
“What the hell do you mean one head per spool?”
The tailor shrugged, “You’re a traveler huh? You lot always react like this. Listen here, this whole kingdom is built on mining Spectral Quartz, so it’s not as valuable around these parts. Prices in the Kingdom are going to be a lot higher than you’re used to in all those small towns. You didn’t hear it from me, but this is how the Capital keeps us reliant on them. Without us they don’t have anything but money, and you can’t eat that, so they control our entire value system to make them necessary.” he said, dramatically covering his mouth with his hand and glancing around to make sure nobody official overheard.
I couldn’t help but admit that it made sense. High supply of Spectral Quartz would decrease value, that’s basic econ. I had thought that the sheer number of people within the kingdom would similarly increase demand to counteract this, but it seems as though the mine was more than productive enough to account for that. Add that to liberal spending by people in the Capital so that the neighboring villages would be strong enough to protect themselves from stray monsters, and, as the man put it, make the towns dependent on the capital, and it’s really no surprise that they’d experience inflated prices. I nodded to the tailor and left his shop. I still had a decent supply of enchanting thread after all, and if I ran out I could always make do with conducting my tests by carving enchantments into random sticks that I found.
Ash and I walked in silence for a while, before she asked, “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking,” I responded, “that this Bazaar that the merchant is insisting we go to is going to be stupidly expensive. Considering the approximate average wealth of a citizen in the capital, prices are going to be even more inflated than they are in town, making goods run at obscene rates. The merchant most likely won’t be purchasing anything there, and instead will be selling as many of his wares as he can. Us, Mike, and Liz, on the other hand, don’t really have anything to sell as far as I’m aware, so we’ll just be looking around and potentially spending all of our money, leaving us completely broke. Then, when we reach the next town, we’ll have no spending money and he’ll be rich, so what will he do? Well if I were him, I’d encourage the ‘dumb adventurers’ traveling with me to get whatever they need, and I’d pay for everything, making it clear that this was just a loan for them to pay back, and tell them that in exchange for footing the bill now, they’d have to pay me back extra later on, then encourage them to take another job at the town we arrive at, so that they could pay me back. I’d use the existence of that soul attack I was planning to use against the elemental as well as their guilt as leverage to force them into giving me all of the money from that job, leaving them broke again, so that I could then repeat this cycle at every town we go to.”
Ash considered that seriously for a moment, then said, “And by the time we get him to his destination, the money that he ends up paying us for the escort job is fully covered by the jobs that we did in the first place, so while it seems like he’s paying us, he’s actually just allowing us to keep a small bit of what we earned in the first place. It definitely fits the vibe I get from him.”
Oh yeah, she has that innate personality detection magic stuff. I asked, “What does your innate magic say about him? And Liz for that matter?”
Ash tilted her head, as though considering how to put it into words. “For Aozia, he gives me the same feeling as most merchants. Like, if he was provided a better alternative, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill us all in our sleep. The only thing keeping us all alive being that A), we’re currently necessary for his survival, B), we have a constant shift, so someone’s always awake and keeping an eye out for potential attacks, and C), the fact that you don’t actually sleep in the campsite, so if he did act, he wouldn’t be able to take you out, and you’d probably hunt him down after the fact.
“As for Liz, she gives me kinda the opposite vibe, but still in a bad way. Like, she’s a terrible person, but the way she’s terrible is somehow stopping her from even considering stabbing us in the back. As to what makes her terrible? I have no idea. My innate magic doesn’t really give me specifics, just vague feelings.”
I nodded along, as that fit with what little I knew of her. Basically, Liz was a rat, but the merchant was a snake. Liz would run if things turned bad, but the merchant would actively assist our attackers if he determined that they were more likely to win. Ash turned to face me and asked, “So what do we do?”
I shrugged, “Nothing really. I wouldn’t expect anything else from the merchant, and honestly? If Liz or Mike were in danger of dying I probably wouldn’t rush in to save them either. If you want to do something specific then by all means go ahead, but remember that except for you, I’m only with this party for convenience, not out of any sort of camaraderie. Plus, you and I have the option to just pop back home if shit goes sideways, so we don’t even really have to worry about the merchant’s trap.”
Ash considered it and then said, “I’ll at least tell Mike to watch his spending. Otherwise he’ll definitely fall for it.”
“You do you.” I replied. The two of us walked around, stopping by a few more houses with gardens, adding a couple more plants into my diary, as well as scoring a couple new recipes. When the sun set, Ash and I headed back into the room we’d booked at the Adventurer’s guild, and I brought us back home to the subspace.
Ash took a look at the outside of the house, as the first time she’d been here, Sophia had distracted her with her whole semi-divine entity presence deal. “Wait, the house was split up into different subspaces right? How come we can still see the whole thing?”
I considered it for a moment, before shaking my head. “Not a clue. If I had to guess, it would be either A), the subspaces are all overlaid with each other so that while each subspace is completely separate, they exist right next to each other, kinda like adjoining rooms with a door in between, or B), both of our wings were placed into completely separate subspaces that both exist within the bounds of this main subspace. To know for sure we’d have to ask Soph, but she’s in Hell right now, they’re trying to reach Veronica’s place by the end of the day.”
Ash and I walked to the front door and she asked, “And what’s with the empty garden?”
I gave a short laugh and replied, “A bit of simultaneous extreme thoughtfulness and mild dumbness on Sophia’s part. She made the garden so that I could grow my own plants and wouldn’t have to rely on foraging, right? But here’s the thing: Plants need sunlight to survive and grow. And as you may have noticed, there isn’t exactly a lot of sun around here. I thought about enchanting an artificial sun at one point, but that has two problems. One, considering the entire purpose would be to release energy, it would be horribly inefficient, and not at all worth the mana cost. Two, even if I found a way to make it mana efficient, it would literally be a source of gamma radiation a few feet away from where I sleep. If I’m lucky, I’d Hulk out, but much more likely I’d just give myself cancer.”
This spawned another round of questions about what gamma radiation, Hulk, and cancer were, which resulted in a rather long explanation about physics, biology, and superheroes as we sat down and I taught her the rules of chess while we talked.
By the time Sophia got home, I had dinner ready for us on the stove, a kind of pseudo-pulled pork that made me really wish I had bread for sandwiches. Ash was sitting at the living room table, moving pieces around trying to figure out how she’d lost despite taking more of my pieces. I portioned out three plates and brought them to the table, and we all sat down to eat.
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After dinner, I pulled out a deck of cards and asked Sophia how her traveling went. “Well, Sean and I made it to Vern’s place, but I maybe intentionally kinda forgot to mention to her that I was bringing Sean to stay there for the foreseeable future. Her face when two Titled showed up at her front door? Priceless. It did take a lot of explaining as well as convincing though, hence why I was late to dinner.”
As we played a few rounds of Old Maid, Ash and I told Sophia about our day and why we didn’t end up buying anything, as well as the conversation we’d had about the merchant and Liz. Sophia turned to Ash and said “Man you really ended up just in the worst group huh? The whole deal with Mike, now Liz and Aozia too? Not to mention having to deal with this dumbass.” she pointed at me.
“Excuse me?” I replied. Sophia shot me a wink and a rather excited look, as though specifically requesting a repeat of last night’s punishment. Given how much she evidently enjoyed it I may have to turn it into a reward instead, you shouldn’t encourage bad behavior after all. I turned back to my cards, planning a night of pure feather torment, completely missing Ash turning red as she understood exactly what had happened.
During the next week, due to the exaggerated prices in town, Ash and I planned to hang around in the subspace. Sophia had left for Hell in order to run the various tests that I needed, and specifically to have Veronica run all the same tests to check that Sophia and Sean’s being Titled didn’t interfere with them in any way. As a result, Ash ended up spending the next day helping me with various things in my shed, mostly pulling the cloud fibers from my Aspect Manifestation and helping me organize my many many bone knives.
Speaking of the bone knives, now that I could control 5 at the same time, it was about time for me to finally expand Project Horizon. When I made my new blindfold, I’d designed the enchantments with this in mind, and in my crosshatch that housed the enchantments for making windows that saw in a different spectrum, and could zoom in and out, I added the Horizon enchantment, rather than specifically the Horizon 1 enchantment. If you’ll remember, the symbol that I’d based Project Horizon on was a gently curved line, and the knives in question were designated by tally marks going through it. Once I hit Horizon 5 though, I switched up the nomenclature a bit to Roman Numerals, making them Horizon I through Horizon V. In the window next to the zoom enchantment, I placed just the Horizon symbol, and next to that crosshatch, I placed another grid, this one with far more open slots than the nine in the original design. In the first five open slots, I placed the symbols for Horizons I through V, and…
Five windows opened on my blindfold, but for some reason, I could only see out of one of them… what? Why? What did I fuck up?
Oh.
I’m stupid.
I then spent the next few hours painstakingly carving eyes into Horizons II through V. Yeah, I guess the windows can’t actually show anything unless I make the knives a source of input…. I’ll just ignore Ash laughing her ass off at me. That’s the ticket. I’ll also ignore Sophia laughing through the telepathy link. Fuck.
But hey! It works! I may be dumb, but I ain’t stupid! They may be laughing at me, but I haven’t seen any of their drones flying around!! Sure Ash may be way more of an Assassin than an Enchanter, and Sophia can make one cohesive house that somehow exists in three completely separate yet paradoxically still connected subspaces with basically just the snap of her fingers, but we’re talking drones here. I flew my knives around, observing everything from five different constantly shifting angles. Thanks to the fact that I was manually controlling all of them, I always knew what direction my windows corresponded with, and I played around, practicing shifting the location of the windows to correlate with the drones’ locations. Due to the fact that I was splitting my attention between five different knives, I noticed a huge decrease to my reaction speeds as well as my ability to interact with my immediate surroundings. To fix that I would need to either get a lot better at splitting my conscious mind, or accomplish something that I had been thinking about and planning ever since my first failure. It wasn’t ready yet though, so I’d start off with trying the first option.
Once Project Horizon was satisfactorily updated, I took a quick peek at my loom and found: A complete sheet of fabric. My very first one, as the loom had ended up not using mana nearly as efficiently as I’d thought. I had Ash help me take it off of the loom, being careful not to let the edges start unraveling, and bring it into the house to set it down on the living room table, which was the largest flat surface in the house, other than the ground outside, which would risk someone stepping on it. Now that the sheet was completed, there was another project that I could advance. The project to make Sophia and the other demons functioning spacesuits.
Within a matter of minutes I was walking back into the tailor’s shop. He recognized me, and asked “Finally get yourself enough money for thread?” I shook my head.
“Not why I’m here,” I replied. “You see, I happen to have come into possession of a way to manufacture extremely high quality fabric. I need to learn how to use it to make simple clothing. Namely, pants and a shirt. How much for you to teach me?”
After spending pretty much all of my money not even a day after I’d warned Ash about it, I spent the next few days learning how to take measurements, what shape to cut cloth into to use, and what kinds of stitches I should use to connect the different pieces, and how to roll and flatten the edges before sewing them so that the fabric doesn’t unravel at all. In the end, the tailor had ended up enjoying teaching far more than either of us had expected, and I learned more than just how to make pants and a shirt, and also learned the designs for gloves, socks, and hoods. Five days later, I thanked the tailor for teaching me even more than I’d originally paid for, and he told me that if anyone ever asked about the clothes I’d made, point them towards his shop. I agreed, then headed back into the subspace, where I may have mildly abandoned Ash to spend a few days alone since I’d go off to the tailor every day and Sophia would leave for Hell.
I ignored the odd feeling in my stomach though, and went straight for the living room where I’d been keeping my cloth on the table. We only had three days left before we headed out after all, and I wanted to get started on making myself a brand new outfit. During the past few days, I’d ended up using all of the thread I’d saved up over the past year and made another sheet, so I had two 7’ by 5’ sheets, which was more than enough fabric for a simple set of shirt and pants.
Another odd quality about this cloth was that as individual strands, or even as thin threads, they could be cut. However, when it was woven together into cloth like this, it was practically indestructible. No pair of scissors could cut through it, and I’m pretty sure it would take strength comparable to Sophia’s to actually tear it. Not that I’ve tested this yet of course, as I had only just recently been able to make enough fabric to waste some on tests. Did this mean that my entire plan to make clothing out of it was halted before it could even start? Not at all. Possibly due to it being MY cloth from MY Aspect Manifestation, I could somewhat spread my consciousness into it, and force it to separate. It was kind of like having a telepathic bond with a rag. Or maybe soulbond would be a better analogy, since it did technically originate in my soul.
I’d had Soph help me take all of my measurements a few days ago, and I used them now to divide my cloth just how the tailor had taught me, getting as close to the edges as I could. It took hours to make sure I had all of the right measurements and actually cut everything, so by the time I was finished Sophia had already made her way back home. I carefully organized all of the pieces that would be my new normal outfit, and put it in my shed, then grabbed an empty basket and put all of my leftover cloth inside of it. I then made my way back into the living room, and interacted with the two girls I had neglected for the past few days, with dinner, conversation, and three-player modified demonic sennett.
The next day when I woke up, I immediately headed to my shed and started working on sewing everything together, making sure that all of the frayed edges were properly rolled and flattened, and that all of my seams were practically invisible. The cloth itself was delightfully soft and stretchy, so I made the bands around the wrists, ankles, and waist a little smaller than the parts they attached to. Not enough to cling to the smallest part of my wrists and ankles, but enough to make it easy to roll them up. After all, with the extra lessons I’d been given, I didn’t need to settle for a simple shirt and pair of pants. Oh no, I was going for something far grander. An outfit that I’d been wearing when I came to this world, and if things go to plan, the outfit that I would leave this world wearing as I backflipped into Hell.
What I was making: Sweatpants and a Hoodie. The tailor had not gifted me with extra knowledge, no, that would not be worth giving extra thanks. What the tailor had gifted to me, was the very concept of Comfort Itself. And with a few more hours of rolling, sewing, and dividing…. It was complete. And for the most glorious of all tests… I put it on.
It was as though Heaven itself had descended and crafted itself into an outfit. Which, considering it was made from material gathered from a literal cloud connected to what would be my Divine Aspect, wasn’t actually too far from the mark. I had never in my life felt so comfortable, so free. My balls were practically singing at the idea of never having to stuff themselves into my old leather pants again. Never again would my back ache from the weight of a bearskin pulling down on my shoulders. NEVER AGAIN would I stuff my poor sockless feet into sweaty and disgusting boots. I didn’t need them anyway ever since my whole body was toughened by the baptism, and only wore them because my old leather pants were too long and the hems would trip me if I didn’t have the extra inch of height from the soles of my boots. Now? Now I could roll with bare feet, sweatpants, and a goddamn hoodie. I’d even sewn in a big pocket into the front for my hands, reaching the pinnacle of clothing design.
Now that the clothes themselves were done, all that was left was to enchant them, so down the sleeve of my left arm and left leg, I spent the next day, my final day before we all left for the Capital, adding in my golden enchantments for cleaning (a leaf), temperature control (A/C), repair (a wrench and screwdriver), and mute (speaker with an x), leaving plenty of space for more potential enchantments that I think of. The patch system had been convenient, but the end result kinda looked terrible. I wanted this new outfit to last my entire damn life.
Once everything was finally finished up, I still had the majority of the final day left to enjoy, so I started it by showing off everything I’d worked so hard for to Ash. She was less than impressed.
“You look like you’re just wearing pajamas.” I didn’t let her negativity get to me though, as I was still basking in the awe of my own brilliance. “I’m just as comfortable as though I was too. Better yet, these clothes make me nigh unstabbable. Go ahead, just try to stab me.” She looked at me as though looking at a massive fool. The ignorance of this bitch. She knows not the glory. Surely Sophia will appreciate my accomplishments.