Invent ~ 10!

Dark Lightning Strike has reached Apprentice IX.

Lay on Hands has reached Student III.

Retaliation of Shadows has reached Journeyman IV.

Assisted Ritual Orb Usage has reached Beginner III.

Joe’s eyes flew across the information as he entered the tunnels and raised his arms to let the Dwarven guards on duty wave an Elf Alignment Rod, an EAR, over his body. It was an incredibly basic test that listened to his mana frequency to ensure spies weren’t slipping in, but until this city became wealthy enough to have more potent security measures in place, they worked with what they had.

As expected, the check came back clean, and they progressed to the interior of Gramma’s Shoe. Joe blinked at the dazzling lights that had been arranged across the ceiling in a pleasing gradient in five distinct sectors; daylight, orange, green, blue, and violet. Looking at the ground under the lights, Joe could see that the lights roughly correlated to the areas the city planner had zoned out.

The ‘daylight’ area was one of the largest, and should be set up for livestock, farming, and a small park. The violet would be the area Havok had claimed for Joe’s magical experimentation, but Joe hadn’t paid much attention to what the other areas would eventually be. For now, his eyes came to rest upon the only real landmark besides his personal workshop and the Artifact alchemy-building: a huge pile of fragments and building material.

It appeared that the Dwarves had been busy. The ground was clear from rubble, and there were teams working to excavate the last few remaining sections of stonework that had been even slightly underground. All that remained at this point was cleanish, bare stone that they could work on, a solid foundation that they would use to build a new and powerful community. Before then, Joe was fully planning to use the destroyed materials to jumpstart his settlement—his class quest would shoot ahead in the near future.

Hurrying over to the pile, Joe started setting up a Field Array. No one was guarding the waste material, for fully understandable reasons, but it still felt like an oversight that he should correct. For him, someone else’s trash was literally his own treasure. Banana peels could become walls, dirty diapers were destined to be shingles, and… “Now that I’m thinking about it… maybe I shouldn’t tell people what I’m going to be making their houses from?”

The Field Array came out to be about ten square meters, meaning he would need to shift it around and redo this work a few times, but it should be worth it in the end. He tapped the lines that remained glowing in the air, sending a pulse of mana along them to get an idea of what he was getting into.

Item: Approximately 10 cubic meters of Rare and below material. (Rubble, most aspects reduced in aspect value.)

Reduction value: 291 Rare aspects, 2,648 Uncommon aspects, 24,097 Common aspects, 72,291 Damaged aspects, 144,582 Trash aspects.

Total mass: 23,490 pounds of material.

Reduction cost: 112.5 mana per second. Estimated reduction time required: 81 seconds.

“Yikes. That’s heavy. Nine thousand, one hundred and twelve mana if I do it all in one go?” Joe assessed the material and nodded as he realized that a goodly amount of it was stone and other dense material. “That’s about a third more than what I have, so I’ll just have to deal with standing here and slowly converting it. Huh. Must be a lot of air in there too, if it was tightly packed, I bet this would be way more expensive and denser than that.”

The idea of ‘dense material’ brought his mind back to the cube of material that had dropped out of his codpiece when he had gotten to this zone. He was waiting to reduce that until he had a proper reduction room; what he was planning on calling a large warehouse with a permanent, oversized Field Array. Until then… Joe closed his eyes and felt at the Ritual of Reduction that was literally written out in his body.

He only had two aspect jars with him, a Natural Common Aspect Jar, and a Natural Unique Aspect Jar. Joe placed them along the Field Array, and directed all the other aspects to enter into his Codpiece of Holding. There would be plenty of Aspects lost, but he needed to get to work on this project. Also, while there were no Unique aspects in this batch, he was hoping that the ritual would eventually uncover some. With everything in place, he started gently pushing his mana into the lines.

Over the next few minutes, the pile of rubble slowly shifted and settled as it was converted into aspects. The original eighty-one second timeline came and went, and a frown started to build on Joe’s face. Aspects were streaming into his storage device, the Common aspect jar long since full. His mana regenerated at just over fifty per second, meaning he had regenerated over four thousand at the point this should have ended.

“Feces… it’s shifting down from above!” Joe hadn’t even thought about how that would impact this reduction. Now he was glad he hadn’t simply pushed for completing it in one burst—the stone may have all toppled onto him, or at the very least not been stacked in such a nice pile anymore. “How did I not think about that?”

Releasing the array, a flare of the mana lashed out and vaporized a good amount of the stone, reducing it to trash without granting him any aspects. “Ugh… what a waste. Still, I can do this at least another three times without any issues. I should save it for when I get access to my Reductionist class quests.”

Quest complete: Beginner Ritualist. Ritual Lore (Novice IX): 1/1. Resources gained: 1,000/1,000 Common Aspects, 5,000/5,000 Damaged Aspects. Reward: access to Beginner Ritualist II. Record breaker reward: Reward for Beginner Ritualist II increased.

Quest gained: Beginner Ritualist II. Now that you’ve prepared your reagents, quills, and likely went on a shopping spree of epic proportions, it’s time to do some actual work, and prepare for combat! Higher-tier materials aren’t going to rip themselves out of monsters for you, you’ve got to do it yourself without dying! Create 25 offensive and 25 defensive rituals for use in combat! Minimum: Beginner rank. Reward: self-protection is its own reward, but you specifically will also gain access to Beginner Ritualist III! Offensive rituals: 0/25. Defensive rituals: 0/25.

“What the abyss…? Wasn’t the reward from the first quest a boost to the next reward? But this one’s reward is just access to the third one?” Joe looked over the rest of the information, then at the charged Aspect Jar. He gathered them up, letting the Field Array fade into nothingness.

Natural Common Aspect Jar: 1,820/1,820 Common aspects.

Natural Unique Aspect (Unique) Jar: 1,201/9,558 Unique aspects.

Aspects gathered

Trash: 141,581

Damaged: 74,373

Common: 25,926

Uncommon: 3,390

Rare: 418

Special: 3 (Zombified). 100 (Anima). 111 (Molten)

Unique: 1,719

Artifact: 357

Legendary: 0

Mythical: 0

Looking at the list, Joe could only bite his lips to keep from being frustrated. Weeks of effort, the sacrifice of a half-dozen impressive weapons, as well as the material from another Artifact building had all been devoted to creating a single building that no one could even access yet. “Only reason this place is still standing is that upside-down pyramid… that was a great return on investment. Keep that in mind.”

He looked at the pyramid and felt his eyelid twitch. “I suppose I can only wonder what an Artifact-ranked Reduction Warehouse would look like. For now. It’s fi~ine.”

“Major-General, if I may-” Joe screamed and vaulted away from Major Cleave, who stood stock-still as Joe clutched at his heart. “Sir. You need to stop doing that.”

“If I gave you a bell, would you wear it?” Joe muttered too softly for even her enhanced senses to pick it up. He cleared his voice and spoke in a normal voice, “Sorry about that, I was lost in thought. Would have screamed at anyone who came up on me right then. What were you, ah, what’s your suggestion?”

The impressive mustache twitched as Major Cleave struggled to swallow her harsh words. “I was saying that perhaps you might want to consider getting a few buildings in place for the people in the area. While we do have the ability to go for a long time without sleep, simply having the option may sway the minds of the people considering staying here long term in your favor.”

“An excellent idea.” Joe nodded vehemently, totally not agreeing because he was afraid that annoying her too much would bring her axe to bear and turn him from regular Joe into ‘Espresso Joe’ by slicing him up into fine bits and applying heat and pressure in to form of hiding the evidence in the lava pits. “Let’s find Ciril and get a team of mana-rich Dwarves together. Also, please feel free to remind me whenever I’m going off on tangents. I know I have things to do, and I’m always glad to toe the line in the Shoe!”

“Sir…” Major Cleave’s voice was pained. “Before you came here, what sort of things did people throw at you, and how many times a day did it happen? Just for research purposes.”