"Well, I really should think ahead what kind of things I want to try getting energy from. I can't leave the city, since it would cost too much, and grabbing grass would make people want to know what I'm using it for. I should try improving my energy senses other than my soul sense, in order to better sense the energies in things away from me."
"Now I guess I should take a stroll through the market, and look at things with useful energies which I would have a reasonable excuse for buying. For example, maybe some herbs useful in a stew, and maybe some spices, too, and probably also some camping tools. The inn has an outdoors grill I could use to cook, and a few benches and tables for those who choose to cook for themselves, so I would have to actually use some of what I buy, in order to cook, and I can throw in the trash can the supposedly-rotten food which I would actually use for alchemy."
= = =
"Oh, this ended up being better than I expected. After no longer needing to spend 5 hours on reading the soul's memories, I can use those 5 hours to get 20 energy units when I'm not planning to try alchemy, though maybe it would be better to spend 4 hours to get 16 energy units and cook some food, in order to avoid suspicions. Especially since most foods shouldn't take a full hour to cook. But the inn's grill is too expensive to use, costing 10 energy units for every hour. Thankfully, I haven't thrown away my camping stove from before entering the inheritance area, and that camping stove should only need 4 or 5 units of energy to use for an hour. That means that I would be left with between 11 and 14 energy units to use on alchemy, or to stockpile to have my energy filled to the maximum of 52 when I wake up."
= = =
"A thin but not see-through slice of salted meat, some potatoes, and some plants resembling... corn with peas instead of corn kernels, their colors varying from blue to purple and in some rare cases pink, and with the peas growing on a softer meaty part resembling asparagus or bamboo shoots or maybe a tougher cucumber or zucchini, but apparently it tastes sour, so after removing the peas from the kernel it has to be sliced and soaked in water overnight, to remove the sourness, and if I'm right after seeing how it should look before and after soaking it, then said sour water should have some useful energy in it, though I did not get to see such water myself. Pink corn-peas are quite popular in romantic dishes, so the sellers manually remove those from all the products they sell, in order to sell the pink corn-peas at a much higher price."
"Oh, and some blue powder which turns purple after being roasted, the powder being the result of grinding some local nuts. The nuts are inedible until roasted, but once roasted they will go bad in mere hours, while the powder lasts for a few weeks in a dry place, and a few days in this city downwind from the lake next to that village I visited on my way from the inheritance area. After roasting the powder, it is safe to use in foods, and boiling it makes it softer, so I could add most of it to the food I'm making, while keeping some to supposedly eat as a snack later in my room, while actually using that for alchemy."
= = =
After a few days, Mirru started a new routine of cooking a diverse meal once every week, using the rest of the time to save up on energy, which could then be used to buy more diverse food, or more meat. And after a month, this approach has finally calmed down his digestive track, which probably meant that his previous problems were caused by lacking nutrition or wrong ratios of nutrients causing both excess for some nutrients and a lack for other nutrients.
And not dealing with an upset tummy meant that he could spend more time looking for a job which would still allow him to progress. Most of the jobs he could find, were unfortunately not appealing for his particular case, because they would leave him both without free time and without energy at the end of the work days, and they would still not pay well enough for him to be willing to do those jobs.
But there was one job that did catch his interest. It was that of a farmer. Apparently, the previous employee's life ended around the time the old alchemist's life ended, which probably meant the previous employee was either somehow related to what happened, or was used as a scapegoat for what happened.
But the death happened in a corner of the farm, with a dead wild animal planted there as fake evidence that the previous employee's life ended by fighting that wild animal. A sloppy job, but it worked nonetheless, due to the lack of any other evidence at or near the crime scene.
And that meant that Mirru could simply use his free time to look through that previous employee's memories, to learn more about farming and about what that guy learned in high school, and maybe also to learn something about the local mafia, ideally to learn some of their secret techniques.
= = =
During a particularly sunny summer day, which meant the farm would have a bigger break time when the sun was scorching the lands, Mirru ended up visiting the farm, which led to talking with the family of farmers who were looking for an employee, and discussing about the job and payment. They were not willing to pay money, instead offering him housing and food, much better food than what he could afford, as well as a small patch of land to grow things, or to try growing things, which was recently harvested by the family, and for which they would spare a few seeds from the less important seeds they had saved up.
Not only that, but the work wasn't particularly energy demanding, but instead it was a lot of work. Not enough to leave him without free time, but enough to have him only have a few days of free time every day, which he already knew he would be using to read memories of spirits and ghosts.
And the first month would be easier, since at the current time during summer, they didn't have much work to do, and since he would need to learn things during that month, which would meant he would have more free time during the first month.
Si Mirru accepted the job, followed by taking his backpack from the inn and moving into the farm employee's shack, where he would sleep and have his free time, going to the owners' house to eat every day, and sometimes being allowed to eat in his shack, for example if either he is ill, in which case he would be given cooked food, or if someone in the family is ill, in which case he would be given raw food, a stove, and some fire wood, to cook for himself.
= = =
A few days after he started working, he finally found with his soul sight the ghost of the previous employee, so he planned a late-evening stroll every day for the next week, under the guise of getting familiar with the lands, and using it to hide his real purpose of catching and storing that ghost for the purpose of reading it's memories.
= = =
4 days later, he successfully caught the ghost, but he did not start reading it's memories until he finished strolling through the whole farm area, followed by Mirru taking a stroll through the market and buying a cheap technique useful for farming, because the farmer family explicitly stated that they would not provide him with any such techniques. Sure, he would get more information about such techniques from the ghost of the previous employee, but he would need a cover story for that knowledge, or at least for a significant part of knowledge, since the rest could be attributed to talent or luck stumbling upon bits and pieces of techniques and putting them together into a workable form.
= = =
Two weeks later, and a total of 4 weeks after he started working, Mirru finally started reading the ghost's memories, this time going through them chronologically instead of learning about what interested him most, simply because he didn't want to start learning about farming from the ghost yet, since it would make Mirru too suspicious, and because he couldn't make sense of the rest of the useful knowledge because he didn't have the knowledge needed to make sense of it.
So he skimmed through the earlier education, but started paying attention as soon as the ghost started high school, the ghost having studied runes and runic formations during high school, followed by a piracy internship in which he worked on a pirate ship to maintain the existing formations and towards the end of his time there also to make new formations, before an internal conflict led to the pirate group splitting, almost a quarter of the group leaving the piracy world behind, the rest continuing in their ways after leaving the previously-pirates on a shore near a mining city, from where they raided clothes and supplies and sailed near the shore for a few days, before lading and making their way to this city and most of them choosing to join the local mafia, the rest of them laying low and occasionally visiting the local mafia to keep contact with the other previous pirates and in order to make sure they do not end on the bad side of the local mafia, at least not without a chance to mend their relations.
And it was surprising for Mirru to find out that this ghost was the one who convinced that hooligan to attack the old alchemist. And when the alchemist met his end and no useful secret technique was found on the old alchemist or in the whole building, the former pirate turned farm worker was made into an example why mafia members and their associates should not get the mafia to be noticed by the local authorities, or worse, the sects and guilds.
= = =
[Farmer-pirate] "Come on, dude! You heard the kid, the old alchemist surely has a secret technique he recently understood. There is no other reason he would buy that many alchemy resources, especially not that many different alchemy resources in low quantities and high qualities, as well as in low qualities and high quantities."
[Hooligan] "Not sure, man, maybe he's really getting desperate to find a way to extend his life, trying different resources to see if he can improve his life extension pills to get younger."
[Farmer-pirate] "I doubt that. His disciple stole a few of his new pills. The fool didn't even notice they were missing. Or he thought his disciple used them. The alchemist from my pirating time says they're much better than what the old food used before. Too good to still get older. And if the old fool actually turned younger, he could sell his fortune and move to a bigger city, where he could practice alchemy for a few more years under the protection of an auction house which would hide that he's the one who made those pills, especially if he ends up buying some of his own pills, especially at a very high price, in order to not make it too obvious he's the one who made them. And after a few years of doing that, he could definitely join a sect, and a few years later he might come back for his disciple. And if that happens, he would find out about our group, and since we would likely take over his home and shop in order to look for those secrets after he left, he would have a reason to kill us all."
[Hooligan] "Ugh, you drive a hard bargain. But if you're right, if we visit him, we have to end him."
[Farmer-pirate] "To make sure he doesn't bark about us at the wrong tree. But there is no way we wouldn't find anything good if we visit him. At the very least, he should have a few thousands of coins worth of materials and pills, probably a few tens of thousands, maybe even more than a hundred thousand, even if he doesn't have a technique. And a useful technique alone could cost a few hundred thousand, let alone what else we would find."
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[Hooligan] "I'm not sure, man. Might be safer to cut our losses with him, and let him go."
[Farmer-pirate] "Come on! There's no way he doesn't have at least a technique book to give his disciple or his tea friend if he nears his end."
[Hooligan] "He might not have it."
[Farmer-pirate] "If he doesn't, then he would have pills and materials, and plenty of them. Expensive ones, too. The longevity pills he can make from the ingredients he sold would be worth at least a few hundred coins alone, let alone everything else he would find. At most, you would need to keep him alive, to get him to tell you his secrets, and if we find something useful, there's always the option to pay for someone to read his mind and share the mind-reading with one of our group.
[Hooligan] "Fine. But if I can't find at least a few hundred coins worth of things, and if he somehow doesn't make it far enough to read his mind, then it's your life that's on the line."
[Farmer-pirate] "It won't get to that! I assure you!"
Then the hooligan left to tell his superior about that, and after a few weeks of farming, the hooligan angrily attacked him out of nowhere, ending him with a single attack before the former pirate turned farmer could even start talking, and everything faded to black.
= = =
In the months of rummaging through the pirate-farmer ghost's memories, Mirru started reading the farming book, and learned more about farming from the ghost, but his main focus was on learning about runes and runic formations. Those memories seemed somehow more difficult to access, for some reason. Mirru felt like those memories were somehow locked or hidden in the pirate-farmer ghost's memories. So he tried to use what he learned from formations, to see if he could somehow more easily access those memories. At first, nothing happened, then small changes could be seen, and after a few more months of trial and error, something popped, and Mirru Cartrack could finally access a few more years worth of memories.
= = =
"Remember, this is your last chance of leaving the runic guild without having your memories of this place locked, making you forget everything you learned inside the guild."
The old and powerful man's words resonated through everyone's minds. They were 14 kids in a room. Started as 17, but 1 gave up early, one gave up right before this day, and the other was caught to be a spy from a local mafia, caught trying to send some secret information to the outside world.
Nobody left the guild that day. A few left the guild in the following years, some caught as spies, and some simply finding it more likely to progress by joining some other guild instead, and one case of someone dying by trying to modify a rune.
= = =
Seven long years of learning runic secrets from a guild focused on secrecy. All guilds were focused on secrecy, but this particular one seemed to be more paranoid than what Mirru heard was the norm, and even more paranoid that even some of the most paranoid guilds he heard of, which almost certainly meant they had a big and important secret to hide.
And in those seven long years, he did not find more that mere hints of such a secret even existing. That is, until the day he decided to leave the guild. But he couldn't leave the guild until he mastered the secret, at least not alive. Only those who learned the last secret would be allowed to leave alive, from those who found out about the last secret of that guild.
What was the secret? A runic technique formed from a few normal techniques working together to complement eachother, with the goal of improving runic inscribing.
The first technique was a microscope technique, shortly followed by a telescope technique for scouting runes from a distance, since it was fairly similar to the microscope technique, and thus much easier to learn, giving the learners a sense of accomplishment, to increase their morale.
The third technique was a method of training fine control over one's energy.
The fourth technique was for making and controlling hundreds of tiny tentacles of energy at the same time, in order to write tiny runes at an incredible speed.
The fifth technique was for making a few large energy tentacles for making huge techniques, for controlling runes from a distance, and even for attacking enemies.
The sixth and final technique was perhaps the most useful one. A technique for taking over runes, after they are finished. Especially useful for taking over the runes made by other people. First, the technique required converting a part of one's energy into a form of energy as similar as possible to the energy of the targeted rune, then slowly letting that energy get closer to the rune, then dissipating that energy closer to the rune for the rune to hopefully absorb it, then guiding or even helping the rune to absorb some of that energy, then pushing more of that energy into the rune, and with that energy under your control, you would then start changing the rune from the inside.
And after mastering all of those six techniques, in order to merge them together, the final test was recreating a runic formation used to safely test new runes and runic formations, said formation being huge but made from lots of small runes, effectively needing a large energy tentacle covered by with lots of tiny energy tentacles, and those tiny tentacles writing the runes while the large energy tentacle focuses of the form of the runic formation array.
And as he promised himself, the secretly-rune-weaver turned pirate turned farmer, so secretly a powerful rune weaver that even he forgot all about it, ended up having his memories locked up and leaving the paranoid guild, then joining a pirate group after not finding any well-paying work in the slums of a bigger city, where he would start learning rune weaving all over again, having his rune weaving memories locked up, then eventually leaving the pirates to move to a city where he thought his life would be safer, and where his life was safer, until he decided to convince a hooligan to attack that old alchemist.
= = =
Two years after getting to the city, and after he was done learning everything useful from that ghost, he was notified by the family employing him that he would no longer work for them after a few years, because a married daughter of the family would return home with her kids and her husband, after they had to sell their house and leave the village they lived in, because a local mafia wanted to start farming for a guild. Thankfully for the family who had to leave their home, the husband was known as a no-nonsense kind of guy and even respected by some of the mafia members, so he was able to negotiate with the guild on behalf of the rest of the people, for the guild to pay them a better-than-fair price for their homes and land, to guard the sellers on their journey to their destination city of choice from one of the nearest cities and if they made a big-enough group to be worth guarding them all, and even to help the sellers to buy at least a home if not also land in or around the city of their choice.
Most people gladly sold, with only three exception. One family who decided to simply sell the rights to use that land for three decades, by which time the land might be worth more money or might be worth less money but it would still be their land. An elder couple who wanted to keep living there for the few years they had left, even if the local mafia started farming around them, saying that they do not want to leave their home until they leave the world, and that the ones who would be farming the lands would still need a few houses around, for the workers, so an extra house for a few years would not make that big of a difference. And the third and last family did not want money, and instead wanted one of the mafia members dead, for what that mafia member did to his late daughter. And in the end, the last family reluctantly ended up selling the house in exchange for the death of that mafia member, as well as enough money for a small house on the outskirts of one of the nearby cities used as a destination by half of the villagers, the other half going to a city in the opposite direction, and from where would come the family who would leave Mirru without a job.
= = =
With that in mind, Mirru started using up the scraps he had access to, in order to make a few pills, a few rune weaving tools, and even to rune-weave a knife with a sharpness rune on one side of the knife and a durability knife on the other side of that knife.
And when the fated time came, a week after the new farm members arrived, Mirru was let go with a modest parting gift consisting of seeds for most of the crops grown on the farm, or at least the not-expensive seeds, as well as enough long-lasting vegetables to last Mirru two months of only eating that, enough salt for three months, and fresh vegetables and fruits which would last a week at most, but more than enough for Mirru to start saving enough energy to get back into his inn life.
= = =
But it was not meant to be. The inn was getting emptier every day, Andrares the merchant was not available to meet, and the local government seemed to consider conscripting people into the city guards, because apparently the local mafia who caused Mirru's job loss ended up growing their business and their people's power so fast that they were planning to open their own guild, which would put them in conflict with other guilds, which would likely cause a worsening economic situation in the area, as that guild fought with the nearby guilds, and maybe even outright war between those guilds.
So Mirru Cartrack found himself packing up his things after buying as much camping food as he could afford with his remaining energy, then decided to use some of his few remaining coins to pay for transport to a distant but more peaceful city in a coastal mountain region with deep waters right form the shore, and a few inland lakes for the people to use for leisure.
= = =
The journey was rough on his body, but it was also a very good practice environment for the techniques he learned from the secretly-rune-weaver turned pirate turned farmer. He would need to be able to accurately and carefully control his energy to make runes or even in combat, even when in motion and when his movements weren't easily predictable.
The energy tentacles were... unsettling. Especially since he could use them to secretly write runes on the things around him. And most importantly, because he could use them to prank people, by touching them from unexpected angles, by moving objects, by pulling and pushing them in a direction of his choice, or all of those at the same time.
= = =
Half way through the journey, Mirru figured that he could turn the tentacles into sails, and use them to gather energy quickly in a small place, then he could merge a few of those sails into a sphere, then he could compress the sphere to compress the energies, which would make it easier for him to place a few drops of blood on said small sphere, in order to more easily gain control over the energies inside, which meant he could use those energies together with alchemy ingredients and even alchemic pills, powders, and elixirs, to make new and improved pills or powders or elixirs, which might be able to help him grow his energy absorption rate, or his energy capacity, or both. Definitely both, given enough time, but probably only one and only slightly, until the trip is over.
= = =
By the time he got to the destination, he not only managed to master all of the skills of the paranoid guild, but only when using each of them individually and not using more than one at a time, but he also managed to raise his energy absorption, from 2 energy points per hour of active energy absorption, to 2.5 energy points per hour of active energy absorption, and from 18 energy units after 9 hours of sleep, to 22.5 energy units after 9 hours of sleep. And double the active energy absorption if he used that artifact of his again.
= = =
Due to the long journey, Mirru Cartrack managed to get the members of the caravan group to get comfortable-enough around him, which allowed MC to ask them a few questions about his destination, namely what are the news he should be aware of, what are the things he should know about the city, and what are the cheapest inns he could stay at.
This process took multiple days, with different discussion topic for different days, and only talking during the time they had to wait for the food to cook but without leaving the food unattended.
But they asked him what he was doing in the city he left, and what he is planning to do in the city he's reaching, so he told them what he did, and that he is planning to look for a job in carpentry or hopefully a job working with mechanical contraption, since that is what high school he went through. He could not afford even the possibility of leaking his secrets, so he decided he would look for a job like that and after a few weeks of looking for work or a few months of work, he would buy a few books about rune weaving and refining, under the guise of improving his mechanical engineering, supposedly hoping to find a guild or a sect which would let him join.
= = =
And right after reaching the city, a loud sound shook the whole city, and Mirru saw lots of soul fragments scatter around the city, them Mirru quickly caught a dozen or so of the nearby soul fragments and put them inside his treasure, then hid all traces of having done so, hoping those soul fragments held useful knowledge and hoping that he would not be caught having captured those soul fragments.
= = =
Unbeknown to Mirru, those soul fragments he captured would later turn out to be his ticket into a sect, after thoroughly reading their memories, those soul fragments being the soul fragments of the grandson of one of the male sect elders, said sect elder deciding to ask a female sect elder to take Mirru Cartrack under her wing, in a move which made a lot of male disciples angry and jealous. And all of this was predicted by said female sect elder, but MC was unknown and untraceable for said elder, at least until his arrival at the sect. And, for fortunately for MC, she did not know of MC's ability of reading the memories of ghosts and spirits.
So she started planning to take on a new disciple, especially sine she only had female disciples and she predicted that her future disciple will join the sect as a male disciple. In particular, she needed to have a new building created, to separate him from the facilities used by her female disciples, especially the baths, toilets, clothes washing rooms, and the rooms of the female disciples.
The last time male and female disciples had shared facilities, the results were so bad that the sect was almost split in half, and a quarter of the disciples were lost in only a few months, and had to be culled to prevent the numbers from reaching dangerously high amounts.