I missed mining. The way station had provided me with such a substantial quantity of stone that harvesting it myself had seemed like a waste of time. But though farming used the same mechanic, collecting carrots was nowhere near as satisfying as making stone disappear. For most of my career as a Survivor, I'd been using my tools lightly, with about the same force as I would swipe grass with my hand.

Swiping faster would increase the pace of the skill, so I'd developed a habit of using my pick in the same way, holding it close to its head and doing little taps in quick succession. It worked, and it kept me from tiring myself out, but I'd recently discovered that a few hard hits were worth a dozen gentle taps. If I used my pickax like a real miner, at least like the ones I'd seen in movies, then I could mine the blocks even faster. It was also more fun, and fantastic exercise.

The tunnel zigzagged as it went deeper, but I didn't want to do any additions to the passages above the old base. Instead, I walked down to the first switchback and dug out through that corner. There might be iron for me to find, or quartz, but it didn't really matter. I was just here to grind my skill the last of the way to its next level.

I swung the pickaxe overhead with both hands and brought it down against the wall. Cracks appeared instantly, spidering out from the point of contact, and I hit it again before they receded. Of course, it wasn't only the change in method that had sped up my workflow. Kevin's pickax cut the time required to harvest stone down to a third of what it would be if I was using a regular iron pick.

Plep.

The first block was now a coin in my hand. I dropped it into a pouch at my belt and continued. More iron would have been nice, but I already had several hundred ingots at my disposal. Back at the bunker, I'd dedicated an entire room to furnaces and kept them burning continuously as long as I was home.

One was for turning logs into charcoal. Another converted the dark sands of the Wastes into glass shards and iron nuggets. The third combined those nuggets into ingots. The shards were useful as well. At a worktable, I could combine them into blocks or panes, which came into being with the uneven texture of stained glass, though it was all clear instead of colored. The blocks crafted into bottles, which were handy.

The lillits had little glass, and from what I'd gathered, neither did the rest of Drom. Something as simple as a bottle was a rare item. If I ever needed another source of income, we could have a few lillits set up shop in Henterfell and corner the market. Not that I was terribly interested in that, but the glass blocks potentially had another use.

I was planning on building a room with a glass floor. In Minecraft, mobs didn't spawn on glass. There might have been a few exceptions, but I remembered it being pretty foolproof, so that might be another way to reduce spawns aside from keeping torches burning everywhere.

Stone vanished beneath my pick, and my mind wandered. I was carving out a tunnel that would look very odd to anyone unaware of how my skill worked. Normal people didn't leave behind perfectly flat surfaces when they hacked out rock. In case Otto or Godwod ever wanted to tour the mine, maybe I would pay lillits to come down here and make it look more natural.

As I was working, I had an epiphany.

There were several environments where mobs in the game wouldn't spawn. Only one kind of monster appeared on lava. Lava was not a viable construction material for me, but it wasn't just glass that stopped mobs from spawning, it was any transparent block. That included leaves. I hadn't bothered using leaves since I’d tested them out on my first day. The blocks were unstable, and you could push right through them. But I had stacks of leaf coins I'd collected while harvesting trees.

It might not work, it was a quirk of a game, and the way my System functioned split on from Minecraft in several functions. Still, it was easy to test, and worth a try. Eternal Torches required both gems and experience to craft, so any cheaper alternative to spawn-proofing a location put me one step closer to being able to live in town.

Ding.

At the sound of the notification, I dropped the pick and tapped my elder sign, summoning the status screen and selecting the appropriate tab.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

Achievement: Crafty (4)

Well done, through hard work, dedication, and anti-social tendencies, you have unlocked new harvestable materials. You can now collect meat, water and meta-materials. While meta-materials are not found in most Realms, they are essential for expanding the crafting capabilities of any Survivor, opening the door to many advanced formulas and superior equipment.

Congratulations, you have reached the maximum level of your first skill. Further advancement of [Miner] has paused pending entity assessment.

Heck yeah. Meat. It was a minor point, considering everything else mentioned in the notification, but I was still stoked about it. Vegetables and bread were fine, but I was excited to add some protein to my diet. Meat and fish were also quicker to spoil than the foods I could harvest already, so extending its shelf-life to indefinite proportions was a nutritional game changer.

Water was different. You didn't really harvest water in the game, but you could pick it up in bottles and buckets by the block. Did that mean I could create water source-blocks now? Would liquids I poured out flow endlessly downhill? With the right angle, you could fill an entire pond with a single bucket in the game. I almost didn't want it to work that way. The entire concept of liquid source-blocks was too ridiculous for the real world. But I was sure going to check.

Meta-materials had to refer to whatever special metal Kevin's tools were made of. I immediately crouched down to swat at the pick and was gratified by the resulting pop as it converted into a new medallion. With the naming function of the anvil, I could finally get some insight into his tools, hopefully including a notification about the qualities of whatever the material was.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

I practically ran back up the tunnel. That last comment about having reached the maximum skill level concerned me. Normally, I would have been happy to hear that I'd reached the pinnacle of something. If only in one minor aspect, I was Kevin's equal. Or I would have been. What was an entity assessment? Had Kevin gotten one? If he had, there was no way for me to catch up to his skill level unless I figured out how to get assessed myself.

Esmelda was waiting for me at the mouth of the tunnel, which was pleasant enough, except that Otto was with her. His black beard looked freshly oiled, and though he wasn't armored, he was sporting his red and blue doublet emblazoned with the sign of Henterfell. It was only his second visit to Williamsburg, and he looked about as happy to be there as I was to see him. His craggy face had locked in a frown, and his dark eyes narrowed as they took me in.

It was hard to look casual when it was obvious you'd been hurrying. I dropped my pace and waved.

"Sup, Otto."

"It is Sir Otto," he said. "Your wife was just trying to prevent me from entering the mine without you. Is there something you don't want me to see?"

"She's very protective," I said, casting Esmelda a grateful glance. Lord Godwod suspected there was more to me than met the eye, but he didn't know about my powers, and I preferred to keep it that way. There was no telling what kind of demands the Margrave would make of me if he fully understood what I was capable of. "Sorry about that."

Otto took in my backpack, the sword at my hip, and my lack of mining equipment of any kind. "Where are the workers?" He asked.

"It's a lillit holiday," Esmelda said brightly, "but they have been hard at work for the Margrave."

Otto gave her a dubious look. "Do you have anything to show for it?"

"Don't worry, I have some gold for you already. It's in storage."

He looked past me to the opening of the tunnel as I came out. No doubt, Otto was curious about the condition of the mine, but the mention of gold had gotten his attention.

"Show me."

As far as Otto knew, I was staying in a house in town that had actually gone to Boffin. It wasn't as large or as nice as his previous home, but it was solid, as I'd raised the walls myself out of granite blocks. Lillits had filled in the roof with thatch over a wooden framework, and I'd added a couple of glass windows, which were practically a luxury item in its otherwise nondescript exterior.

Boffin was out, so we let ourselves in. If the town’s progress impressed Otto, he didn't show it. Esmelda used a key to open the basement storeroom. It had a proper lock, which we'd had Duad make for us. All I could craft were automatic buttons, which would have begged the question of how in the heck something like that worked.

The storeroom was basically a walk-in closet full of mostly empty shelves. Boffin kept food in there, as well as a small chest of silver that served as the town coffer. My chest was in a place of prominence, on the dirt floor at the end of the room. We kept the extra swords in Boffin's bedroom upstairs. Otto stepped to the side so I could enter. There had been a lengthy discussion regarding how much gold we should hand over to the Lord of Henterfell, as well as what condition it should be in.

Initially, I had vastly overestimated how much gold would be expected of me. The lillits had never mined it before, but Dongle had given us some insights. Gold was worth roughly ten times as much as silver by weight, and a small mine could produce five pounds in a year and chalk it up as a win. The sword I had offered Godwod was even more valuable than I'd realized. The raw material was almost worth the title he had given me by itself.

Opening the chest, I brought out a handful of gold nuggets wrapped in cloth and brought them over to Otto for his approval. Duad had made a small mound of them for me out of an ingot to use as samples. The ingots were too big, and we didn't want it to look like we had too professional of a set-up or were on the verge of minting our own coins. Otto's eyes widened a fraction as he felt the weight in his hands and looked them over.

"It will serve." He shifted a satchel from over his shoulder and placed them carefully within it before brushing past me to get a look inside the chest. Officially, I was entitled to a quarter of what the mine produced. King Egard would get another quarter on account of him being King, assuming Godwod was playing honest. The rest belonged to the Margrave according to the agreement we had signed as a part of my becoming a baron.

It was a raw deal, though Boffin had suggested it could have been worse. It would have bothered me if I didn't have Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth to call upon to continue with this charade. In the future, we could negotiate a better agreement. Aside from that, there were plenty of ways to launder the gold once the town established itself and its citizens were engaged in legitimate trades of their own.

I'd given Otto about a pound, and there were only a couple of ounces nestled in linen left in the chest. He grunted.

"If you are cheating the Margrave, there will be consequences."

"I know," I said. This was essentially an honor system. It wasn't like they could track my credit cards or monitor my bank account. Probably there were lillits in Williamsburg who were already on the Henterfell payroll or soon would be. Godwod wasn't the sort of man to run a business entirely on trust, but that was why we were being careful.

Esmelda was less demure. "That's insulting. Will has been nothing but a faithful vassal to the Margrave. He's already accomplished more for him than you ever could."

Otto's face darkened. "Watch your tongue," he said, "before you lose it."

I pushed him. It was an impulse that came on too fast and hot for me to stifle, and it wasn't paired with the forethought to moderate the force I applied. My System hadn't made me a superhero, but I was stronger than I'd ever been in my previous life, and sometimes I forgot. Otto's back slammed into the shelves, disturbing a bundle of carrots, and his hand fell to the sword at his waist, but he didn't draw.

His face bunched up into a snarl. "Wretch. I could take your hands for that."

"No, you couldn't," I said, ignoring the way my heart was beating in my ears. "I outrank you. And you threatened my wife. You're lucky if I don't complain to Godwod."

Prison is a very controlled environment, at least since they started putting in cameras. People still got into fights, robbed each other, dealt drugs and made a hundred other poor decisions while they were in there, but that usually came with consequences. A lot of guys had seen me as weak because I didn't do those things, and they hadn't been entirely wrong. It had been in my nature to do whatever I thought I needed to get along.

For nearly thirteen years, I had been legitimately terrified that anything I did could make my bad situation worse. Plenty of guys in there extended their sentences over nonsense. Conflict makes me uncomfortable anyway, and I'm naturally inclined to smooth things rather than to escalate. Of course, I'd broken some minor rules and done other stupid things while I was in, but mostly, I'd learned to keep a tight lid on my impulses.

Dying and being reborn with magic powers had changed me. It would have been weird if it hadn't. Since coming into this world, I'd more and more found myself saying and doing the things I would have previously held back. Being more confident was an improvement, but there was a dark side to that kind of freedom. A part of me wanted to put my sword through Otto. I could have gotten away with it. I was worth a lot more to Godwod than he was, and someone else could deliver the gold.

Killing monsters was one thing. But I'd killed soldiers too, human beings. I felt like that should have weighed on me more than it did. This situation was very different. Otto wasn't attacking me. There was no way to frame this as self-defense. It scared me that a corner of my mind was totally cool with that.

Otto's cheeks reddened as the truth of my words sank in. He struck me as the sort of guy who enjoyed bullying people beneath him, and until recently, I would have fallen into that category. He adjusted his surcoat.

"A man who doesn't defend his wife is a cur," he said, his hand drifting to the lump in his satchel as if to remind himself why he was here. "I can overlook this slight for now, under the circumstances. Godwod looks for my return."

"That's great," I said. “Have a safe trip."

He met my gaze and glanced away. I'd seen this a lot in prison, too. Guys acted like they hated each other, threw a few punches, then whoever lost changed his attitude. Instead of leading to more conflict, a lot of fights were nothing more than a means of establishing hierarchy. If one man pushes, and the other doesn't push back, the pecking order establishes itself, and everyone gets along fine. It probably didn't hurt that I had the eyes of a demon.

"We look forward to your next visit," Esmelda said as Otto walked out of the room. He didn't respond, and she grinned at me.

I shrugged.