Once morning arrived, I summoned the leftover meat from the hellhounds near Kohaku’s cooking fire, which she gladly cut up and roasted. It didn’t take long for the others to smell the food and gather near her door, but thankfully didn’t seem jealous, only curious.
She led them all up the ramp and set down a plate of roast meat in the grass, sat down, and gestured for the others to sit as well before gesturing for them to have some food. They did so, albeit anxiously, perhaps expecting a person to appear out of nowhere and yell for them to work.
Which sadly was somewhat true, since once they finished eating, I had to tell them I needed them to lay the brick foundation in the pit. I felt bad about it, but until was strong enough to break their mana tethers and defend myself from being eaten, I didn’t have much choice in the matter either.
With some resign sighs, all six fox-kin headed down the access ramp to the pit, Kohaku standing guard towards the forest while the five others began stacking bricks which seemingly leaked mortar and stuck in place despite me not having any on hand. It seemed to be one of Nan’s abilities from her hardened labourer class, which I found interesting.
Remembering why I had needed workers in the first place, I cast the [Phantom Workers], feeling mana form into 6 ghostly looking but otherwise generic fox-kin who began working alongside the living team. As time passed by, I could see that Tushu was struggling to keep up with pace of the others, so I asked him to grab stonecutting tools from the storeroom.
As the last of the original bricks were laid into place, I created large chunks of stone from my stored matter as well as mana which the fox-kin diligently began chipping, cracking and cutting into bricks the same size as the ones I had been given by the soldiers during my awakening.
By mid day they were finished with the first foundation, had their lunch, and were already a quarter of the way done with the second pit.
I continued summoning stone as needed and soon enough the foundation pits were walled with brick. I gave them the rest of the day off, dismissed the phantoms, and carved the hallway to have some small, recessed booths which the fox-kin all now sat at.
As much as I would’ve preferred to give them privacy, I was incredibly bored, so I listened to their conversations while practicing my writing in the fox-kin hieroglyphs.
Most of the talking was between Dun and the trio. Their conversation mostly consisted of stories about the conditions of their former mining sites, which seemed to progressively get more abhorrent as the day went on, and the way they spoke of it as if it was simply normal concerned me enough to start wondering about my chances of getting a therapist through my summoning. Tushu’s stories mostly consisted of him getting kicked in the back or shoved into a wall by passing Masters in their grand libraries.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, when I interjected to ask what the masters looked like, they described a fantasy elf nearly to a tee. The only addition seemed to be a change to their skin tone and texture due to them living in a desert oasis instead of dense forest. I also asked if other species were kept by the Masters too, which led to a lengthy discussion on whether wolf-kin, Gnoll-kin, and dog-kin were the same group, but that’s not the important part.
As it turns out, these desert dwelling Masters enslaved just about every single species at some point, because I was given descriptions of Dwarves, Gnomes, Kobolds, Beast-kin, Goblins, Fae, Humans, Treants, Golems, Undead, other types of Elves, and at least 2 Elementals who eventually cratered half of the elven continent in retribution.
Unfortunately, the only accurate timeframe that I could acquire from them was from Tushu, who stated that he heard about destruction of the elementals in 1334. While that information was certainly helpful, I didn’t know the current year to know how long ago that would be.
Eventually the chatting died down and the group all went to bed, leaving me with some time to mull things over. My conclusion, of course, was becoming a liberator.
At some point, I was going to encounter those dune elves. It’s a simple matter of time and leveling until I meet them, because unless the elves were isolationist, they almost certainly had populations outside of their continent of origin, and they would probably still own slaves.
When that time comes, I can judge which should be punished.
With minimal effort, I created 30 more stone chunks for tomorrow’s day of work, before once more returning to my self-taught literacy testing.
Contrary to what the description of the skill, I didn’t have seemingly any understanding of this world’s tongues. I figured it has something to do with being from another world.
Whatever the reason, I found the carving to be relaxing, if a bit tedious in some parts. The fox-kin hieroglyphs mostly consisted of paw prints, eye symbols, ears, tails, a few teeth, and of course rough depictions of fox-kin in varying poses. As you might expect, carving all these symbols required constantly adjusting the absorb ability into narrow and broad shapes.
By the time morning arrived, I had managed to carve a small poster along the lines of the famous “keep calm and carry on.” Of course, it lacked context and was written in symbols, so the message was somewhat lost.
The foxes got to work, I helped where I could, Kohaku speared a stray hellhound, and by nightfall there was now a pair of rectangular brick courtyards above the ground. Another stray scout tried to sneak into the barracks and was promptly punched by Dun, skewered by Kohaku, and shanked with a chisel by Nan.
[Thrisnak, Lvl 103 Hellhound Defeated] [Frenkor, Lvl 102 Hellhound Defeated]
So far as I could tell, animals and sentients were on two different scales when it came to levels. My fox-kin were all around level 7 and above and seemed to have little trouble handling Lvl 100+ monsters. My best guess was that complex thought had some strain on the rate levels were earned but increased their potency.
Having now killed roughly 40 Hellhounds in a relatively short time, I could see why they might have been ignored at first. Something so easy to kill would be brushed off if a village had even a token of combatant members, so the tide probably built up unnoticed until it was too late.