Another winter came to pass and the days started to warm up with the return of spring. This year, spring meant only one thing to me: rocky shieldback season.
Every morning I waited on the beach for the return of the rocky shieldbacks. I had only been on the beach one day last spring, and in that time killed two. Both were worth a lot of experience at the time. If I could kill two per day this spring, I would hit level 6 in no time.
Of course, I remembered that Earth turtles often ended up endangered because of how delicate their nesting behavior was, and I didn’t want to extinct a species. I assumed they had multiple nesting beaches, so I wasn’t likely to wipe them out entirely, but if I killed too many here–and especially if I harvested all their eggs–they might not return year after year. I decided to only kill a shieldback after it nested, and not collect the eggs. I was hoping to watch them hatch this summer and return to the sea. If necessary, I would protect the babies from predation so that I could encourage larger numbers for future seasons.
I had slowed my training after level 5, again hitting a plateau both in experience and with my own mental effort. The fatigue was real. Diminishing returns combined with an increasing need for EXP, even if it only increased by 100 each level, meant that each level I really needed to push the envelope if I wanted to further advance, which I couldn’t effectively do in town with limited prey and while also trying to hide my skills.
With the additional skill points in 6-point magic, I was a slightly more efficient healer, so I had started doing some additional physical training, adding some resistance training to my regimen. I was still only five and a half years old, so I couldn’t do many pushups, but I would do what I could. When I was done, I would cast a very lightweight heal on myself.
This posed some new questions about my reality and how things worked here. Resistance training didn’t damage my HP, no matter how hard I pushed myself. I suspected if I did pushups until I developed rhabdomyolysis, I could lose HP–and wondered if I would get a debuff status and what it would be called–but generally, fatigue would set in before I could do anything beyond an acceptable level of microdamage to the muscles which is what would trigger muscular growth. Healing, at least on the face of it, recovered HP, but healing also healed damage to the body. Normally, damage to the body would be reflected on one’s HP. Microdamage, like what you would find after training a muscle, wasn’t reflected anywhere that I could see in the stats, but was a real thing in my body, and healing did take care of it.
Magical healing didn’t manage my fatigue–it didn’t seem to replenish cellular ATP–but it seemed like curative magic did. Fatigue, pushed to the extreme, would be a status, and magical cures treated status. Physical fatigue was different from mental fatigue, though. Could curative magic restore ATP, or creatine kinase in the muscle? That seemed preposterous. Did it simply accelerate biological metabolism and speed up an immune response? How could any magic solve the problem of sleep deprivation?
Healing microdamage after training my body took virtually no MP. I made sure that I was well fed beforehand, with enough protein and carbohydrates consumed so my body could make use of those nutrients. If I could cure fatigue, I could probably just train all day, stuffing my face with meat and turning it into muscle. Already, I could cast this level of healing with a cost of 1 MP, and suspected if I could figure out how to cast with fractional MP I could do it with 0. I had been thinking a lot about fractional MP and some of my other skills and abilities.
After learning a bit about taming and becoming confident that it was just another school of magic, I started thinking about other skills as ways of channeling magic as well. If I could develop finer magical control, I thought I could channel MP into my unarmed strikes. I had done no formal training in combat, so this might be something that’s obvious and trained for, and if I felt like asking my father about it I could maybe learn more, but I was hesitant to open that door at this early stage.
More importantly, I was thinking about some of the skills I had obtained from my metasystem. Surely, appraisal and inventory use required magic. I was pulling not just information, but actual matter, out of thin air. There had to be a cost. Was I subconsciously doing it with fractional MP?
I spent a day at the pier, appraising everyone as fast as I could, but it never seemed to add up to a full 1 MP. Either the fractional MP was so small that I functionally couldn’t sum it up to 1, or fractional MP recovers so quickly that you can effectively use it for free. HP and MP would recover, albeit very slowly, over time. That speed might be limited to whole integer recovery, though, whereas fractional MP recovers very quickly.
There was a third option. Since MP recovered slowly on its own–very, very slowly, but it recovered nonetheless–it had to be coming from somewhere. Either there was a secondary source of MP stored in the body, like the body’s fat reserves but for magic, which could be drawn upon to recover one’s MP naturally and would fail upon total magical starvation, or it was possible to absorb MP from the world around us. Perhaps a certain level of expertise allowed a caster to channel external MP directly into their spells, but only so little that it would be less than 1 MP.
There was a precedent for an exchange of an element in the atmosphere if one considered respiration. Humans inhaled oxygen and released carbon by way of CO2 when they exhaled. Plants would then take in CO2 and keep the carbon while expelling oxygen, and the plants would then use the carbon to physically grow. Perhaps there was a magical element in the air which we took in at all times in tiny doses.
I pulled out the rocky shieldback’s magical crystal which I got last year. These were physical manifestations of a build up of magical energy in a body. Very likely, this would all be related. Whatever this crystal was made of, elementally, was probably the answer.
Practically, it wasn’t that important, but I had a deep need to understand as much as I could about it. From that knowledge there could be additional practical use. In the short term, I was worried about the possible practical advantages to my skills and power. Every little bit helped.
* * *
The arrival of the rocky shieldbacks was something to celebrate, and I quickly went to work tracking them and turning them into experience to feed my leveling machine. I quickly hit a roadblock to my plan. The shieldbacks were too high value not to add to my inventory–which both felt like the responsible thing to do, to use every part, but was also necessary to hide my activity–but I could only carry so many. Even hiding away the heavy, mineral-rich shells, I was being weighed down by shieldback meat. These things were not small.
Over the winter, I had developed a few connections in town. I was toeing the line between revealing too much to an adult who might rat me out to my parents while trying to find useful adults who were trustworthy, and still maintaining the useful illusion that I was a simple kid who wasn’t worth their time. I usually bailed from my attempts to build my network, not trusting the adult once I got to know them, but I had stumbled on one good connection.
Mirut was a fishing town, no question about it. Fishmongers were plentiful here, but there was only one actual butcher in town. This was the man one could bring their hunted beasts to and get usable meat from it. There weren’t a lot of men who would leave town to hunt–I presumed it was dangerous in the jungle–but when they did, they would often bring their winnings here, unless they could butcher it themselves. The rest of the time, the butcher was limited to selling preserved and dried meats, some made in the shop and some purchased and resold from the ships at port, although ships usually needed the dried meats more for their sailors while at sea.
There was a clear shortage of meat in Mirut. Meanwhile, I had been developing a surplus.
It started when I was just browsing the store fronts, away from the pier. I had passed by the magic shop I still owed reparations to for the stolen MP potions, and noticed an open-front butcher shop across the way which I hadn’t seen before. I wandered over to look at the dried meats on display.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
A large, hairy man was behind the meat bar and greeted me. “Hello lad,” he said.
“Hello,” I responded. I looked at some pepperoni-like sausage on display. “These look great,” I told him, pointing.
He chuckled. “They are, but I don’t think you can afford it,” he commented. I probably looked like I had no money, which was true. I actually knew almost nothing about the currency and economics of this kingdom.
I made an executive decision, and pulled a piece of meat from my bag, a cooked nodmouse from the summer. I had allowed some meat to cook and cool before storing it so I could pull it out in situations where I couldn’t explain why it would be steaming hot. I’d usually wrap these in an edible leaf from the garden, which I also had stockpiled, which made each item a discrete item in my inventory again, as opposed to the uncooked, just-dismantled meat which would stack. “My mom made this,” I told the man. “It’s tasty. Care to trade for a piece of that?”
He motioned me closer and I handed him the packaged meat. He unwrapped the leaf and took a look and a sniff. “This is nice,” he commented while examining it. “Polerat? No, too delicate for that…” he muttered. He grabbed a knife and snipped off a piece of the maybe-pepperoni and tossed it to me. “Deal.”
I chewed on the meat. It was delicious, well-flavored in a way I didn’t get to enjoy too often in this life. The man ate the nodmouse morsel, chewing thoughtfully. I decided to weave a bit of a tale. “My pa sometimes brings home meat, but we can’t always eat it before it starts to turn. My ma can’t dry the meat as good as this. If I brought you some, would you buy it off me?”
“I’ll take a look at least, and I’ll tell you then. What’s your name, lad?”
“I’m Pilus! Nice to meet you!”
“I’m Boshan, and likewise,” he said, reaching over to shake my tiny hand.
Over the coming weeks, I started bringing him some of the enormous amount of meat I had been receiving from my leveling work. I still needed meat to cook and eat for MP restoration, but a five year old boy can only eat so much. I brought braygulls and polerat, mostly, which he admired the quality of thanks to my dismantling ability, and he started paying me out some coins in exchange.
It became clear after a while that I was bringing more meat than made sense, but I knew that Boshan–who had become the more casual Bosh the better we got to know each other–was charging quite a lot in turn for the meat at his store. Though I could see he was curious about the meat, he knew better than to ask too many questions. I started selling him almost all my meat and started only eating fish and jumpcrab for MP replenishment. I wasn’t thrilled about the loss of dietary diversity, but it was nice to earn some pocket change.
I learned that there were three classes of coins in common use. The lowest value coins were small coppers. Ten small coppers were the equivalent of one large copper. Ten large coppers, or one hundred small coppers, had an equivalent value to one small silver, which was the second class of coins. Ten small silvers similarly added up to a large silver, although these were less common in circulation. Ten large silvers, or one hundred small silvers, had an equivalent value to one small gold, which was the third class of coins in common use. Again, ten small gold coins were worth one large gold coin, but you virtually never saw these as a commoner.
There were higher value commodities that were also traded for even more valuable transitions among upper classes, but Bosh couldn’t speak to that. Bosh told me it was rare to even see a gold in his life, which again made me wonder just how much my mother had spent that day at the Church. A small copper itself was of higher value than some of the smallest transactions, and there were some other commodities that people would trade with instead of coinage in cases like that.
In the beginning, Bosh was clearly undercutting me and only offering me one small copper for the polerats and braygulls I was bringing him, but when it became clear this could be a longer-term arrangement that benefit both of us, he told me they were worth more to him and back-paid me for the ones I had already sold him. Now he gave me two small coppers for a polerat and four small coppers for a braygull. That was high for other parts of the kingdom, but here it was so much more profitable to work as a fisherman that there wasn’t any meat in circulation, so they sold immediately, even at a large mark-up. Whatever didn’t sell would become dried sausage, jerky, and other preserved meats. In some cases, those sold for even more, because they were useful for the ships to stock.
Bosh wouldn’t buy the jumpcrab meat when I showed it to him, even though I hadn’t seen much of it along the pier at the fishmongers. People might just not know that crab meat was edible, which made sense. If they did, all those crabs at the beach would be more regularly hunted. They were easy kills even without magic, unlike the braygulls which I only ever killed now with air or water magic. The excellent price I was getting for them was because I wasn’t using an arrow and wasn’t damaging the meat at all.
Come spring and the rocky shieldbacks, I wanted to try selling Bosh the shieldback meat. I wasn’t able to fit a whole rocky shieldback in my pack, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to pull this off. To start, I used a stone knife to cut a chunk off one of the dismantled pieces of meat, which I returned to the inventory, where it was then stored as modified meat. I wrapped up the hunk of shieldback meat and put it in my bag, instead of my inventory.
“What’s this?” Bosh asked, when I presented it to him.
“Shieldback,” I told him.
He laughed. “You a fisherman now?” He looked closer at the meat.
“Uh, no… the ones on the beach.”
“Rocky shieldbacks? With those hard shells?” He looked at me skeptically.
Oops. I had overlooked that the shells were too hard to cut without dismantling abilities. How would one even butcher them properly to get this meat out? “Um… maybe?” I said, trying to think fast, and failing.
He continued to stare at me for a few seconds, then shrugged. “I’ve never tried this, so I don’t know what it’s worth. I’ll give you two copper now for it, but come back tomorrow and I’ll let you know what I think.”
I exhaled with relief. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” I said, and he nodded. “And, Bosh…”
He glanced back up from the meat, and I struggled to figure out what I wanted to say. Eventually, he nodded. “I can keep a secret, Pilus. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
* * *
I headed back over the next morning before visiting the beach, since my inventory was still pretty full. Bosh pulled me inside and took me to the back. He sat me down on a chair and then sat himself on another, opposite me.
“That rocky shieldback meat was some really high quality stuff,” he started. He frowned. “I don’t know how you got it, and I’m not going to ask.” The pretense that I wasn’t the one acquiring the meat had completely fallen away. “Rocky shieldbacks can be dangerous. They’ve been known to have magic. Did you ever find a small, blue stone in them when removing the meat?”
“No,” I lied. I trusted Bosh for the most part, but I didn’t know where this was headed.
“Ok, good. If you had, I’d recommend you stop whatever it is that you’re doing. You must have gotten lucky and taken one out before it developed magic.” He leaned back. “This will stay a secret between us. You’ve helped me out a lot over these past few months, and you’re clearly a capable kid. I’ll give you another 8 copper for the piece of meat yesterday, and I’ll give you a large copper for similar sized pieces, if you have any.”
I relaxed a bit, then smiled. “You wouldn’t happen to have a larger pack I could borrow, would you?”
Bosh loaned me a larger pack, which I folded up and put in my small pack. He showed me the back door to the butcher shop and told me to start bringing stuff in that way, out of sight so that other folks didn’t ask questions. Just like that, we were in proper business. Turtle season wouldn’t last forever, and I had to spend some time roughly chopping down the otherwise perfectly dismantled carcasses so I could wrap them, but I started bringing four or five wraps each morning in his large pack.
My shieldback grind resumed, now that I could offload the meat. I started getting used to feeling heavy all the time since I had far too much meat in my inventory, but I didn’t want to miss out on this limited opportunity. A few weeks later, nesting season was over, and I told Bosh I would only have this meat for a little while longer before returning to the usual fare.
Bosh found some cooks who worked for the private kitchens for some of Mirut’s wealthier citizens and ended up selling the meat for a really good price. When it was all said and done, he tipped me another five large coppers. I ended up with a few small silvers worth of pocket change heading into the summer, not to mention the magic crystals, of which I had a couple of dozen. I saved one whole shieldback to hopefully find a way to cook, as I was still interested in eating it myself. I also had whole stacks of the shells, which I suspected were valuable or useful in some way, hidden away in different locations.
I wasn’t sure why Bosh had been so worried, as no rocky shieldback had ever cast any magic at me. Of course, most of them didn’t even know I was attacking before I drilled a stone nail into their head. Maybe if I didn’t have magic of my own, things would have gone differently for me.