Chapter 82: The Goose Sage

“How so?” Milo asked.

“Go into my bag and get my map. Just the folding one I carry of the empire. You know it?” Minos pointed at his bag.

“Of course I do. You’ve had it forever.” Milo rooted around the bag a little until he found it, then tossed it over. Minos sat up against the headboard a little straighter and spread it out on his lap.

“See this route? From home to Luto? Goods move directly between the two cities there. It takes a full-day plus a fraction to make the trip. You’re thinking about things in percentages, how your shock absorbers will mean a fifth less time to make the trip. But that’s not how it works. Most transports can’t run safely over that terrain at night, so they have to camp. And they lose a whole night. The only solution has been improving the roads, which is hard because you have to protect the crew while they work and maintain the road over time. It’s been a big project for a generation.”

“Oh, hell. I see,” Milo said, scratching his chin.

“I don’t,” Arthur said.

“Arthur, when wagons and other transports run bad road like it’s good, you essentially changed all roads to be better. It doesn’t matter on every single route, but on some of them it cuts days off a turn-around trip. It’s like you improved every road in the entire empire at once. Goods are going to move quicker, sure. That’s huge. But that’s not the big thing. The big thing is going to happen closer to towns and cities.”

“Oh, gods.” Spiky slapped his forehead. “He’s right. It expands the influence zones.”

Arthur looked confused. Minos, bless him, had listened to Milo and started explaining what was going on right away.

“The empire is organized around walled cities and towns. They have to have walls to protect them from monster waves. Each town has an imaginary circle around it, a zone where they can safely collect resources. Wood. Hunting. Rock. Mining. But that’s limited by how far they can travel in a day, and how far they can move the harvested goods. Those circles all just got that much bigger.”

“Gods, dad. So mail moves faster, goods move faster, and cities cover more ground. That’s huge.”

“And that’s not all of it. If that’s what an old mapmaker can figure out in five minutes, there’s much more for greater minds to find later.” Minos slapped Milo on the back and laughed, louder than Arthur would have expected from a sick man. “You shrunk the world, boys. The entire world is smaller now. It just doesn’t know it yet.”

“I’m still not following,” Arthur said. “You’re saying that the little tubes of shock absorbers somehow did what the system couldn’t? What leveling doesn’t do? We invented those in… what, a couple of hours? There have to be thousands of people all over the world working on making travel faster.”

“There are, Arthur. But when you’ve done everything you can do with the system, you’ve done everything you can do with the system. There’s no more room to grow,” Spiky said. “Every now and again, someone comes up with a better way of doing things. In the last century, things have gotten a lot better. But from what you’ve told me of your world, your reliance on technology drove progress far further than ours. It’s not that surprising that we still have a lot of low-hanging fruit to get at.”

Minos shifted his shoulders down a bit on the headboard as he tried to find a comfortable way to keep himself propped up. “Arthur, I know it seems like a lot. But I’m telling you that I’ve traveled far and wide and talked to a lot of transporters. An improvement like this would change the game. And it makes a difference for every transporter at once, regardless of level. I’m sure they won’t all get the same amount of benefits, but all of them will get something. And there are thousands of them. Tens of thousands. That adds up.”

“Dammit. This is terrible.” Milo dropped his head into his hands. “I feel so bad.”

“Why, son? Is the massive boost to your class that much trouble for you?”

“No, Dad, it’s just that it’s Arthur’s idea. And he’s not getting anything out of this with how things are going. We have to figure out a way to loop him in.”

“I could pour some tea on the shocks.” Arthur smirked. “It might work.”

“Arthur, this is serious. This is your idea and you aren’t going to get anything out of it at all. That’s not fair.”

“Milo…”

“I can’t just let you do this. I know you like giving things away, Earthling, but this is too much.”

“Milo, listen to me.” Arthur clapped his hands on his brother’s shoulders and forced him to face him, eye to eye. “How do you think I was going to build those?”

“What?”

“The shocks. How do you think I’d do trying to make them?”

“Oh, you’d fail miserably.” Milo did some quick mental math. “You might have accidentally burned yourself to death trying.”

“Right. So…” Arthur flicked him in the head. “It was a memory that I had no idea would be important or had any plans to act on. Worst of all, I had no way to bring it to reality even if I wanted to. No matter what happened, there was no universe in which I’d end up making these things. Flat out, zero chance at all.”

“He’s right, Milo. It was either someone else took it, or it went to waste,” Spiky said.

“Still. It’s too much. You have to know that.”

“Maybe.” Arthur sat down on Minos’ side table, lightly. “But that’s another thing. You probably think I care a lot about leveling because I leveled fast. I don’t. I have customers and make enough money. I don’t even know why I would want to keep leveling.”

“Arthur, that’s… a really terrible way to think about things.” Minos looked shocked.

“Yeah, I know I’m switching gears pretty hard here,” Spiky said, “but damn, Arthur. You really want to just stop getting better?”

“That’s not exactly it. I don’t care about leveling. But I do want to get better and I’m going to try really hard at that. I just don’t care about… levels for levels sake. If leveling helps me make better tea, then that’s what’ll happen. But I care a lot more about the journey, what goes into getting the level than I do about the level itself.”

“We’ve all read the Goose Sage, Arthur. We get it. But this is…”

Arthur cocked his head in a confused way, half because he really was confused and half to force someone to fix it. Milo kept talking, but there was no way Arthur could listen until he cleared this up.

“No, wait. I missed something. Who is that?” Arthur asked.

“Who is what, you weirdo?” Milo said.

“The Goose Sage. Who is that?” Arthur said.

All conversation stopped so fast the room almost lurched.

“You honestly don’t know. Gods.” Minos stared at Arthur like he had revealed he was secretly the sun itself. “How do you not know? Next, you’ll be telling me you don’t know who The Bear is.”

“That one I know. Mizu told me.”

“Arthur, the Goose Sage… Okay, I’m going to give this to Spiky. He might get an achievement for explaining it to someone this old.”

“Thanks. Arthur, your world ran on science. Who was your best scientist?”

“Best? That’s hard to say. Newton, maybe. Einstein. Any of a dozen people with last names that I heard of but never remembered. It would be hard to quantify.”

“Okay, but say there was one. And he wrote the book on how to do science, and you wanted to be a scientist. Would you read it?”

“Sure, probably.”

“So here, we run on the system. Science is secondary. And whatever else the system is, it acts like a person. For most people, understanding what it likes and doesn’t like is a big part of pushing a class forward. And we can quantify that understanding fairly well. Guess how.”

“Levels,” Arthur said. “That makes sense.”

“Right. And the highest level person who has ever existed besides The Bear was the Goose Sage. Sage because that was his class. It’s a really, really abstract class. You get it for thinking about problems a lot, and you level it by thinking about problems a lot. You level it fast, if that’s what you want, by solving a lot of problems. Doesn’t matter what kind.”

“Okay, I think I’m following. I don’t get the point yet, though.”

“I’m getting there. One day, someone finds out what the Goose Sage’s level is. It’s eighty-three. An eight and a three, when the next highest recorded level in our history was something in the low sixties, and that guy was a famous warrior who protected frontier towns on his own. Literally single-handedly turned back monster waves,” Spiky said.

“Big gap.”

“To say the least. Anyway, they bring this up, like anyone would, and it turns out the Goose Sage didn’t actually know his level. He’s shocked to find out it’s that high,” Spiky said.

“Could he have been lying?”

“There are whole books on that question, but basically no. They checked in the ways you can check and he didn’t seem to be. So then two things happen. The first is that the city he works for gives him full, no-questions-asked employment for the rest of his life. And the second is that they ask him to write down what he knows about advancing his class. And he writes a pamphlet. Something that’s not even a single page,” Spiky said heavily as he started on the end of the story.

“Actually, this used to be a residence, right?” Minos said. “Milo, run around and check the bookshelves. It would be weird if there wasn’t a copy somewhere.”

Milo nodded at his father and ducked out, returning in less than a minute with the thinnest leather-bound book Arthur had ever seen. He tossed it over.

“Read it, Arthur.” Spiky said. “We’ll wait.”

Arthur shrugged and dug in.

The Goose Sage Manual

I never tried to raise my level. Not once. I’ve been asked to write this manual, but I’m wholly confident nobody will ever get any value out of it. Because I never focused on trying to actively raise my level.

I am a Sage because I like to think about problems. That’s all. I value the pay I get in pursuit of solving problems, simply because it allows me more time and freedom to tackle my next mental challenge. Those who alerted me to my level informed me they were confused. Had I never read my notifications? Had I never monitored my status screen to find bottlenecks? No, I hadn’t, and I was equally confused to find out how often others do. I mentally commanded the system to dump my stat points into wisdom, where they belonged. And then I moved on with my work.

I have given the matter some thought. While I don’t know precisely how my level became so high, I can still make some educated guesses by focusing on where my mindset on the matter of leveling differs from the perspective of others. First, despite what others have said, I have never focused on gaining levels as a goal. Second, I have focused on simply doing my job better, every single day. I care nothing for experience gains. I do not seek achievement notifications.

If my experiences teach you nothing else, let them teach you this. The potential for growth lies in loving your work and attempting to do it better each day.