I spent a couple of weeks in and around Teichar, experimenting with Ivar, hunting quadhorns and rockstalkers for meat which I gave to Revkah to ensure Ivar would continue to be fed, brewing new MP potions to replenish my diminishing supply, and simply enjoying some peace and quiet.

When I hit Level 27, I opted to put my skill points into my inventory, 5-point magic, and one-armed skills. I was hoping to double-advance all three of those skills in due time. I looked over my complete skill list, contemplating the future.

SP: 0

+ 3-Point Magic (10/100)

+ 4-Point Magic (0/1000)

+ 5-Point Magic (40/100)

+ 6-Point Magic (0/1000)

+ Acrobatics (0/100)

+ Brewing (0/10)

+ Butchery (0/10)

+ Cooking (6/10)

+ Detect (0/100)

+ Enchanting (0/100)

+ Foraging (0/10)

+ Inkmaking (0/10)

+ Inventory (30/100)

+ Knotting (1/10)

+ Literacy (0/100)

+ Needlework (0/10)

+ Negotiation (2/10)

+ One-Armed (40/100)

+ Ranged (0/10)

+ Smithing (0/10)

+ Stealth (0/100)

+ Strength (0/100)

+ Taming (10/100)

+ Tanning (0/10)

+ Two-Armed (0/10)

+ Unarmed (1/10)

I still had eleven skillfruits in reserve for emergencies. If I came across a new skill that would be too helpful to miss out on—like the skill Strength had been, which I had only discovered after meeting a blacksmith in Mirut, although it was also very common among the Velgein people—then I could use one skillfruit to acquire the skill and then ten more to advance it.

I had choked down all the rest of the skillfruit in advance of helping the resistance, using the bonus SP to advance 4-Point Magic and 6-Point Magic, which helped to significantly reduce the MP cost of simple spells in those families of magic. If I could advance 5-Point Magic as well, it would make using my illusions less costly while I was stuck in the north and could not recover MP as quickly, but if I was not fighting the Horuth army, I would not need to use as much illusory magic.

It was tempting to dump all my points into one skill to get as much advancement in it as quickly as possible, but the small improvements would serve me better spread out to skills I needed to use regularly. My inventory was constantly growing, especially now that I was hoarding steel, and so I needed it to get bigger. I was using my sword more often than magic in combat, when possible, to preserve MP. Double-advancing the skills would, similar to magic, be a qualitative improvement in what I could do with them. For my inventory, it would mean I could carry an order of magnitude more in my subspace without feeling the additional effects of the weight.

I had only reached Level 27 because I had been so close to leveling before I parted from the resistance to return to Teichar. Most of the experience I had gained since Level 24 had been from killing Horuthian mages. If I was done helping the freedom fighters, having pushed the occupying force back to the mountain pass, then I was bound to hit a wall in my growth moving forward. I certainly could not justify killing people just so I could get stronger. I was getting experience from enchanting and using my other non-combat skills but it was a slow trickle. It would not add up to much unless I gave it my all, and I had too many ambitions to focus exclusively on any one minor skill.

My future growth would depend on the same thing my past growth had. I needed to find stronger beasts, or another dungeon, and conquer them. If I wanted to change the world for the better, I needed the strength to back up my convictions.

With that decision made, I decided to leave Teichar and to venture deeper into the northern wilds. I hoped to encounter more of the beasts that would be migrating south for winter, and see if I could find any particularly strong rank C, rank B or even rank A creatures before the cold forced me to retreat back southwards.

When I went in search of heating fuel for Ivar to get him through the winter, I found that the Velgeins did use coal for heating their homes after all, since there was not a good source of firewood nearby. My inner Earthling initially recoiled at the idea, given how much carbon dioxide coal emits, but without a global industrial society it was not being burned at a scale that would rapidly cause climate change.

Besides, if climate change were to become a problem, this world has magic, I thought as I made my coal purchase. I added that to my list of things to study when I got stronger. Surely there was a way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere with sufficiently strong magic.

So, in addition to purchasing coal for Ivar’s workshop and home, I bought some for myself and stored it in my inventory. I could burn it for heat in the north, although I would have to be careful about carbon monoxide if I burned it in an enclosed space like a cave.

Fully supplied, I left some new designs with Ivar and bid him farewell as I left Teichar to explore the unknown.

* * *

The far north was a sparse, barren place. As I had traveled, discovering new beasts and exploring the region, snow began to fall and soon was persistently on the ground. I wondered if I had already turned eleven years old, but I might have been influenced by the cold in the north to think it was later in the year than it actually was.

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Weeks turned to months, and the wintery darkness became the norm. It was brutally cold, especially compared to my childhood living by a tropical beach, so I had sewed together some hides to keep me and Treepo from freezing while we traveled. Buda’s wooly coat gave him a natural resistance, which he had despite being evolved from a jungle beast, but none of us were comfortable in the cold.

We had witnessed many migratory herds of different beasts heading south towards warmth and light, looking for forage and food, and soon found ourselves relatively alone in the north.

“If there’s so little to hunt, we’re going to run out of supplies if we stay here,” I muttered to Treepo, who chittered from under the hides in my lap. “I guess we should head back southwards.”

Buda grunted, but stepped forward again, turning his head slightly. I followed his gaze and saw a creature walking in the distance.

“Good eye, Buda. Let’s go check it out–” I started to say, but then the ground started to tremble.

I paused, hunkering down on Buda’s back, holding him still and steady. An earthquake? I had not experienced anything like that yet in this world, but perhaps it was more common in the north. There were mountains here, so tectonic activity made sense.

The ground continued to rumble, and the creature we had spotted in the distance had also frozen rather than flee, perhaps a natural inclination of the beast for the situation. I would have thought most beasts would run in fear from the ground shaking.

With a sudden crunching sound, the ground beneath the creature in the distance exploded, and a giant maw erupted from the earth, consuming the beast whole.

The maw continued to rise as the beast it was attached to emerged from the ground, arching through the dark sky before crashing into the earth again, tunneling back into the rocky ground.

I gaped at the sudden violence, in awe of the behemoth. I had the presence of mind to appraise it from a distance, and felt my heart hammer at the name that was revealed to me: darkwurm.

Was this another draconic beast? I had encountered one before leaving Mirut, the draconewt, and it had almost killed me. In fact, it had actually eaten me, and I only survived because I had been able to kill it from the inside by destroying its heart. Had I not purchased my sword before meeting the beast, which I had used to cut my way out of the newt’s stomach, my story would have probably ended then and there.

I could not tell if this beast was actually draconic or just regularly horrifying. Had my appraisal called it a wyrm instead of a wurm, I might assume some kind of relation. That assumed that the beasts of this world even came about from any form of familiar natural selection and evolution. In any case, this predator was huge and terrifying.

The tail end of the wurm burrowed back into the ground, and I waited for the trembling to subside. To my surprise, the earth started to tremble even more, and I realized with a start that we were acting exactly how the darkwurm’s prey had acted.

“Buda, run!” I screamed, and we took off just in time to avoid the ground erupting once again behind us, shards of rock glancing off the armor I wore beneath my cloak and hides. Buda squealed in pain from one such projectile cutting into his hide, and I used earth magic to pull it out and healing magic to help him recover so we could keep putting some distance between us and the monstrosity.

I did not want to be eaten again.

“Circle back around!” I shouted to Buda. As terrifying of an opponent this beast was, having been revealed to me, I could not deny that this was the kind of challenge I needed if I wanted to get stronger on my own terms.

The beast’s tail end once again disappeared back into the earth. Focusing on the ground around us, I tried to get a sense from where the wurm would next emerge. I knew where it had dived into the ground. Was it fast enough to get in front of us while tunneling, or would it keep coming from behind?

“Hard left!” I cried out, my neck craned back to watch for the next emergence.

If I had enough magic, I could probably manipulate enough of the stone around me to use as an early warning system, but this part of the world had me at a disadvantage. I had MP potions in my inventory, but I could only consume so many of those before I would get potion sickness. I need to play this smart.

The beast burst forth from the ground again, hot on our heels, but predictably it had followed a straight line from where it had burrowed in and where we had been headed. While it might have had access to prey who would freeze in response to the ground shaking for it to easily hunt, it clearly understood how moving targets worked as well. It emerged where we would have been, had we not changed directions just beforehand.

This time, I got a closer look at the beast, and saw that its maw was full of row after row of horrifying razor-like teeth. Getting eaten and cutting my way out would not be an option for this encounter, not that I had seriously considered it in the first place. Any time spent inside that mouth would eventually tear me to pieces.

The rest of the head lacked much in the way of defining features. It had no eyes that I could see, and its face was largely just the gaping maw. I remembered a creature from a popular piece of science fiction back on Earth that this beast was similar to.

I don’t think it’s draconic, I hastily concluded. Besides, dragons were magical, and this was a magical desert. With low or no magic, this beast would have difficulty resisting my spells, which was my main difficulty when fighting corrupted dungeon beasts.

“Ok, Buda, slow down,” I commanded, the poor ramhog grunting in displeasure. “We need to bait him close for this.”

My mount slowed and then stopped at my command, and I started setting my trap. I felt my inventory burden lighten as I dumped a huge amount of material into a pile on the ground next to us, while the trembling ground got more and more terrifying, the beast getting precariously close.

“Now, go go go!” I screamed, and Buda pushed with all his might against the ground, rocketing forward just in time to avoid the gaping maw’s repeat emergence. I grinned savagely as I saw it consume the rust-red pile I had left behind.

I leapt off Buda’s back, landing on the ground mere meters from the massive wurm as it climbed into the sky, and dropped my large gold 4-point magic circle on the ground in front of me. I reached out with my magic, feeling for the rusted iron that the wurm had consumed, and took control of the mass.

The cloud of rust condensed and formed into a spinning disc inside the beast’s throat, and with a push, my MP plummeted as I forced the ring to expand against the inside of the wurm’s throat. The darkwurm let out a horrific bellow, and writhed in the air in front of me, twisting to dive back into the earth and dislodge whatever was in its throat.

With a force of magical will, I funneled the rest of my MP—hundreds of it—into the expanding grinding wheel I had created inside the wurm, and with an explosion of gore it sawed clean through the flesh of the beast, severing the wurm’s head from its body.

Buda swung around and after quickly grabbing my magic circle and shoving it back in my inventory, I grabbed ahold of my mount as he carried me away from the rain of bodily fluids and the falling beast. I was not sure that separating the maw from the rest of the beast would kill it, because I had no idea where the creature’s brain would be, but this form of decapitation seemed to work just as well on the wurm as it would have on any other creature.

With an earth-shaking thud, the darkwurm slammed into the ground, dead.

* * *

“This is one disgusting dead body,” I stated after finishing my inspection of the corpse.

The darkwurm was enormous, too big for me to simply store in my inventory wholesale. Perhaps if I had double-advanced my inventory, I could have taken the entire thing, but I was not convinced this was a beast that my familiars and I wanted to eat anyway. After appraising the beast with 3-point magic to see if it contained anything useful, I took the beast’s so-called head, then immediately dismantled it and dumped most of the contents back out, keeping only the razor-sharp teeth. I had no one to sell them to, and did not have a particular plan for them, but they chewed through stone with ease and could possibly come in handy in the future.

It felt bad to leave behind the rest of the possible loot, but I had developed a bit of a hoarder tendency when it came to this kind of thing. My inventory was full of relatively useless beast loot that I had already once had to empty, leaving piles of bones and other junk in the jungle back home before setting out as a merchant’s apprentice. Though I had started to leave behind offal and bones from my kills, knowing that scavengers would eventually eat and make use of it, I still had the bad habit of keeping any cool horns, teeth, claws, and scales. My current armor was made of draconewt scales, but I had yet to find any practical use for most of my other trophies.

If I was being honest with myself, I probably never would. I pulled one of the darkwurm teeth out to examine it, then shrugged.

Oh well. Maybe I’ll find a merchant who would be interested in some of this stuff when I return to Horuth.

With a sigh, I put the tooth back in my inventory. I had not really stopped to think much about it over the summer, but the more time I spent in the wilderness of the north, the more I realized I probably was going to head back south across the mountains to the Horuth Kingdom. First and foremost, I considered myself a magic user, and that was just not a viable lifestyle living in Velgein territory.

I had found no dungeons in the north, so I had not been able to examine how the corrupted magic of the dungeon would act in this region, and my magical resources in my inventory like beast crystal and deepwater pearls were in rapid decline. At this rate I would soon run out, and then I would have no way to replenish my MP.

“Come on, Buda, Treepo,” I said, turning away from the large corpse. “It’s time to head back.”