Five years later.

“Rena, can you–gah!” I shouted as I walked through the front door of the Guild building with a stack of boxes and baskets in my arm, nearly tripping over a durcat that was sprawled out in the entranceway. “Rena! I told you not to let your ‘cat sleep in the front of the branch!”

“Sorry,” a bored teenage voice called out from the back. “Morton, come.”

I set down the boxes and looked back at the durcat, who lazily yawned and set her head back down. I frowned.

“Is she even tamed right now?”

“Oh, whoops.”

“Rena, y–how many times have I told you not to let beasts roam wild in the office!”

Despite my protestation, Rena really had flourished in the role. She had been, unsurprisingly, the first member to reach the silver rank, and after her apprenticeship wrapped up she had taken on the role of the Freehold branch manager.

Her time on the farm had taught her a lot about working with beasts, both with and without a taming bond. She had raised Morton since she was a little kitten, even bottle-feeding her to build rapport, and had good relationships with a number of beasts without even keeping a bond active. Her parents had needed to keep up their own taming skills just to deal with the influx of beasts that ended up living around their home, often taking over bonds for animals that Rena was comfortable letting go of and living alongside while free, which her parents were less comfortable with given the four-year-old child in the house. It was not a surprise to me that as she approached fifteen, her mother started pushing me extra hard to marry their daughter.

The girl in question finally came out of the back and scooped up her durcat, who growled a bit but did not fuss beyond that. She had grown beyond the plain brunette child I had first met into a young woman, and while her hands and forearms were a bit scarred from handling beasts with teeth and claws over the past five years, it did not distract from her budding beauty.

“By the way,” she said with a cheeky grin. “Shennel was asking about you again.”

Hard farm work had not broken her youthful crush immediately, but it was easy to brush off when she was a scrawny kid. After an incredibly awkward encounter a few years in, when I had to firmly reject her after she showed up at my door in the middle of the night, we settled into a more comfortable friendship, which resulted in her pivoting to playing matchmaker for me.

“I’m busy!” I said, grabbing one of the grain baskets and sweeping out the side door to the attached pens.

“You’re already over twenty, Pilus! You’re going to end up a lonely old hermit surrounded by beasts if you don’t pick a wife soon!”

I grumbled as I left her behind, pouring the grain into the feed trough for the beasts, then cracked my back. I was actually only almost-eighteen, but I had needed to keep up the lie about my age over the years that followed.

After feeding the animals, I checked the inventory logs, and made a note of what needed resupplying. We were running low on badges, and I would need to make more, but I quickly topped up the jar of beast crystal for Guild transformation ceremonies from my inventory. I could just say I had some in the boxes I was carrying if asked. I had mostly started transporting inventory the mundane way, just to avoid questions, but for a small, valuable thing like that, I always kept them on hand.

“Oh, if you’re doing inventory, we need more healing draughts,” Rena said, sticking her head through the doorway to the backroom.

I frowned, looking at the crate, which was running low. “How many did you use?”

“Me?” she asked, feigning innocence. “I sold them all. Mostly.” I sighed, looking at her scarred arms, and shook my head.

One thing I had not considered right away when I started my project of expanding taming was how much I had relied on healing magic when dealing with beasts. Once tamed, there were not many risks, but the process of taming could be violent, and when dealing with the untamed animals on the farm, minor injury was a regular problem.

When I noticed a younger Rena starting to get small scratches and bite marks, and realized she was one dangerous accident away from true injury that would force my hand, I started to work towards making some kind of healing potion, as I could not reveal my knowledge of 6-point magic in the Kingdom.

I knew from my childhood that some fruit had HP restorative effects, so I started there. The syrup I had been making each spring had a minor healing effect as well, in the small doses one might normally consume syrup, but technically a good amount of HP could be restored by chugging a pint of syrup. It was a stopgap measure, but a concoction of sweet syrups and juices from fruits worked in a pinch.

There seemed to be a correlation between sugars and HP restoration just like there seemed to be a correlation between amino acids and MP restoration. However, I was pretty sure meat restoring MP was less about amino acids themselves and more to do with the fact that animals seemed to concentrate magic, as was seen with beast crystals. The magic that percolated through muscle tissue was more immediately usable to a human than the raw element, which I had only managed to use for recovery through the use of glowbells in brewing.

That led me down a rabbit hole of exploring more plant growth, which I was already researching thanks to my skillfruit orchard. I knew that the skillfruit trees used both types of magic to grow, and the tree was able to produce fruit that could provide additional SP. That led me to want to examine more fruit trees, which required a merchant as a source.

When Marshan finally received my letter, he made a trip east, and we were able to be reunited and catch up. Rather than dance around the subject, we sat down in private and talked through what happened. I revealed many of my secrets to my former teacher, and he took it all in stride, though a lot of that might have been because I promised to outfit his convoy with tarands and the new wagon designs. The man knew not to slaughter the golden goose, as I knew would be the case.

Our relationship was a bit less friendly, but I was confident he would keep my secret. He had hardly been in love with the crown in the first place, being dragged north to provide goods to outfit the army, and preferred a Kingdom at peace over one at war, since war-time profiteering was hard in a Kingdom where one had to obey the crown’s summons or become a traitor.

I also offered him a lot of potential wealth with this new trade route. It had never been all that profitable to travel east before, but as the Guild grew, we had a lot of coin to spend and a need for many valuable goods, like beast crystal and deepwater pearls.

As agreed, Marshan started also bringing me all sorts of rare fruit and herb seeds. Over the years, I grew many different plants and experimented in lots of ways. I finally got my hands on citrus, although by then I had made some simple grain alcohol and then vinegar, but I was happy to have multiple options to expand my cheesemaking project. I had started sharing the cheese with the village, and a few people fell in love with it, and thus another market was born that Marshan could tap, although I had needed to figure out how to age hard cheeses before he could transport it across the Kingdom.

One of the fruit trees I had grown was something like an apple or pear, and it made a pretty nice juice that was full of sugar and restored a moderate amount of HP. It grew a bit bitter when reduced due to the tannins, but the syrup added back in some sweetness while also boosting the restorative value.

The result was a vial of brownish liquid that tasted fine, but was a bit hard to swallow, that restored almost 30 HP. It was not enough to save a life from a gruesome injury, but it would quickly heal a bad cut or bite. This became the Guild’s healing draught, and was another way we made a lot of coin.

I had been very, very worried about conflicting with the Church, but in Gurt, the priests told me there was no issue. It was known that good meals kept people in good health, and while the draught provided a concentrated boost of good health, it did not stave off sickness, restore lost appendages, or perfectly restore broken bones unless they were set correctly first. For these kinds of ailments, one still needed magical healing. The draught only expedited natural healing.

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As far as anyone else was aware, that was all I had accomplished with healing potions. In truth, I had actually discovered that there was a correlation between the red magic of the dungeon core and the body, beyond the obvious of how it corrupted beasts in large doses.

I knew, given that corruption was a thing, that the magic affected growth in some capacity. The problem was, the red magic in concentrations was overwhelming. When tempered and balanced with blue magic, it could help plants grow, and I knew that plants could recover HP, so there had to be some kind of connection. All of life and magic was connected in some way—most plants could not uptake blue magic, but glowbells could, and could help stabilize blue and red, so there were exceptions to every rule—I just needed to figure out how to make it all work.

The breakthrough came when I tried to directly use my purification magic on some red crystal. The purification aspect of 6-point magic burned away at the crystal, and when the red burned away, I was left with a small sliver of golden crystal. When appraised, I discovered it had magical healing properties. I supposed that it was not unusual for a 6-point magic effect to grant healing energy to a magical material, and purification cost more MP than simply healing would, but it was something. I had precious little red crystal, requiring the bulk of it for skillfruit production, and the MP cost was prohibitive, so it was academic.

In any case, the average person was happy to have a way to quickly heal from smaller injuries, and especially at a lower price than what the Church required through donation. I had needed to scale up production, and brought in more apprentices, including some of Bilgus’s grandchildren when they reached age. He and his family relocated to Freehold, which had nearly doubled in size over the previous five years.

Stepping out of the Guild branch and mounting up on my tarand, I guided him out towards the west gate. All around Freehold people were coming and going, and most of them were accompanied by a beast of some kind. The diversity was staggering. Once Hella returned from the west with a collection of beasts in tow, she headed south next, and brought back even more from Taraponi and Haklan. She was one of the other early silver ranked members of the Guild and had claimed a small fortune in bounties from me.

I waved to one of Bilgus’s kids as he passed me by, heading south to the expanded part of the village where they had started a small farm to supplement the village’s food production. Our hunters and guards were so capable now, with the addition of beast aid, that we were able to push back the tide of lubargs and other wild beasts and clear a section of land outside of the walls for farming.

The west wall of the village had also been expanded to make room for more businesses and housing, and rebuilding the main gate to the village with slightly more grandeur, giving the whole village a bit of a T-shape, facing the west. I stopped in with Lidel, our expert saddlemaker, ensuring the order for the Gurt branch of the Guild was on track. She had three apprentices helping with the work, one of which was another grandkid of Bilgus.

Everything seemed to be on track, so I made some quick rounds to the village’s water towers. After the proof of concept at the inn showed its value, we had built a second one when we expanded the village to the south, for the farmers, and then a larger one that brought gravity-powered running water to the main village. There were a few people who could power the enchantments to channel water from the well up into the tower, but the big one always needed extra help getting refilled, and I threw some of my own magic at it, bypassing the enchantment and quickly topping it up.

My level growth had slowed down, only gaining a level or two each year, but I had less of a need to push hard at earning experience given that I was gaining a skill point every day or two from eating skillfruits. I had never seen the skillfruit have much of an effect on Rena as she grew, and I assumed that was due to the limitations of how nature dealt with growing skills.

Even if the average person could not make good use of skillfruit, I identified one way they could be used, which was childhood. Children at Level 1 had no skills, and no skill point to assign, to the best of my knowledge. I knew my own circumstances as a child may have affected that and altered my data, but I had never seen a Level 1 child with a skill. They earned 2 SP when they reached Level 2, of course, and then those points were assigned to skills as they gained the 200 EXP to grow to Level 3.

Having SP to use at Level 1 meant children could acquire skills early, possibly even more than one. Advancing the skills would still take the normal amount of time, practice, and effort, but the ability to rapidly gain a breadth of skills while so young was a potential game changer. Given the additional means of gaining experience from having more skills to practice, it would rapidly accelerate early leveling.

I made it a point to share some of my skillfruit with young children, trying to get kids a chance to get an early start on their growth. I was encouraging children to learn Literacy as young as possible with the extra point, so that they had reading and writing at their disposal and also could use it as a means of additional growth. To do that, the Guild offered teaching days once per season for the village kids, and I would give the kids a syrup-sweetened skillfruit drink—basically, a skill growth potion—when they attended to help them pick up Literacy and other skills. It ate into my stores slightly, and I was limited in how much I could scale up my yearly production without burning through all my red core crystal until I could find another dungeon. Marshan brought me rumors of “dead zones” that could be dungeons in the south, if I could find the time to make the trip.

I still earned an easy couple of hundred SP each year from growing and eating skillfruit, plus the SP from my handful of levels. I pulled up my profile to look at the results of my growth.

Pilus Horgson (Lv 42)

HP: 322/322

MP: 388/459

Status: Absorption (major), Protection (major)

EXP: 2988/4200

Skills: 3-Point Magic(++), 4-Point Magic(++), 5-Point Magic(++), 6-Point Magic(++), 8-Point Magic(++) Acrobatics(++), Brewing(++), Butchery(+), Cooking(+), Detect(++), Enchanting(+), Foraging(+), Horticulture(+), Inkmaking(+), Inventory(++), Knotting(+), Leatherworking(+), Literacy(+), Needlework(+), Negotiation(+), One-Armed(++), Ranged(++), Smithing(+), Stealth(+), Strength(+), Taming(++), Tanning(+), Two-Armed(+), Unarmed(+), Woodworking(+)

Familiars: High Treehopper (Lv 10), Tarand (Lv 10)

My familiar list was light, as I was only bonded with Treepo, my constant companion, and the tarand I had raised from young who I had named Horsey. The locals did not know what the word meant anyway, and I thought it was funny. I had maxed his level cap but had not transformed him, as I did not transform working tarands into mystic ones as a rule, save for the herd leader. If something happened and I needed a quick escape, I could feed him a beast crystal and use the surprise speed boost to get away.

As for the other beasts, the apprentices on the farm had the various herd leaders under control as well as the more dangerous beasts that needed a bond kept on them, but I was preparing to visit Gurt and had dropped all my other bonds.

I could have mastered a single skill over the past five years had I put almost all of my skill points towards one, but I preferred to be a Jack-of-all-trades. I had spread the skill points out, bringing a few of my magic skills 10% towards mastery, taking taming almost 30% towards mastery. I advanced some skills for the cheap cost of 10 SP that I had historically ignored, but frankly, the fact that I had a steady income of SP convinced me to at least advance every skill I gained once. I also double-advanced a few that would help my hunting and survivability. Overall, I was not unhappy with my skill list in the least, and it got better every year.

SP: 0

+ 3-Point Magic (0/1000)

+ 4-Point Magic (100/1000)

+ 5-Point Magic (0/1000)

+ 6-Point Magic (100/1000)

+ 8-Point Magic (100/1000)

+ Acrobatics (0/1000)

+ Brewing (0/1000)

+ Butchery (0/100)

+ Cooking (0/100)

+ Detect (0/1000)

+ Enchanting (0/100)

+ Foraging (0/100)

+ Horticulture (0/100)

+ Inkmaking (0/100)

+ Inventory (0/1000)

+ Knotting (0/100)

+ Leatherworking (0/100)

+ Literacy (0/100)

+ Needlework (0/100)

+ Negotiation (0/100)

+ One-Armed (0/1000)

+ Ranged (0/1000)

+ Smithing (0/100)

+ Stealth (0/100)

+ Strength (0/100)

+ Taming (273/1000)

+ Tanning (0/100)

+ Two-Armed (0/100)

+ Unarmed (0/100)

+ Woodworking (0/100)

The village was prospering, I had seen many of my projects through, and my goals were being met and often exceeded.

I knew it would not last forever, but for the moment, I was happy.