The Land: Swarm: A LitRPG Saga (Chaos Seeds Book 5) Page 11

  “Maybe we should come back later,” he said to Sion.

  Though he had spoken quietly, the two frolicking teenagers heard him. They both turned unabashedly to address their lord. Richter looked at Sion in confusion as to what was happening, but the sprite was just gazing at the woman with a big smile on his face.

  “Greetings, my lord,” Derin said with a slight bow, “we have been hoping”

  “That you would come to see us soon,” Deera finished seamlessly. “There is so much we wish to thank you for. Letting us stay”

  “In the village, giving us the opportunity to care for these creatures,” Derin picked up the conversation again without pause, “and”

  “we truly love the raw beauty of our new home,” Deera finished with a smile. They had moved closer while they addressed him. Now one of her arms was draped around Derin’s neck and her naked body was molded to his side. “We absolutely must find”

  “a way to thank you properly, my lord. Day or night,” Derin said with small enticing smile.

  “we are at your disposal,” Deera said with an identical smirk. She detached herself from Derin and walked towards Richter, giving him a clear view of her natural possessions. When she was only a foot away, a delicate hand reached up towards him from where she stood in the lake below.

  Richter didn’t really realize that he was staring until Sion kicked his foot with a snicker. “Uhhh, yes, well… that’s a very nice offer.” He reached out and helped her out of the water and up onto the bank. Whether by accident or design, as she stepped up, she tripped slightly, and her entire wet body was pressed against his as he caught her. His shirt moistened, and he could feel her erect nipples through the cloth.

  “Oh, my lord is so strong,” she murmured as she ran her hand along his bicep.

  Again, it took Sion coughing loudly for Richter to come back to himself. He knew he was being managed by the small woman, but he also knew he didn’t fucking care! Letting her go, he stepped back. Unfortunately, or again maybe not, he didn’t realize that Derin had stepped out of the lake while he held Deera and was standing behind him. This time, it was Richter who almost stumbled, and the beautiful man’s arms wrapped around him.

  “I would never let you fall, my lord” Derin said softly. The man’s mouth was too close to Richter’s ear.

  Sion was openly laughing now, never one to miss an opportunity to revel in Richter’s idiocy or discomfort.

  Richter, for his part, quickly extricated himself from the man’s embrace and, with a gruff cough, asked, “So you are the two villagers Randolphus charged with caring for the skath eggs?”

  Derin walked over to Deera, who interlaced her fingers with his, “Yes, my lord. We have always had a”

  “High affinity for the skill Beast Taming,” Derin continued. “My sister and I-”

  “You two are brother and sister?” Richter asked, a touch too loudly. They did look insanely similar, as he had first noted, but their level of closeness and affection had made him think that his initial assessment had to be wrong. Their… bits were touching for Christ’s sake.

  Deera’s laugh was the like the light-hearted trill of a songbird. “We are twins, my lord. We share our connection to animals, our appearance and our love for life. In fact,”

  “We share anything and everything you might desire,” Derin finished. He also made what was, in Richter’s estimation, an uncomfortable amount of eye contact while he said it.

  Needing to break the odd tension, Richter punched his cackling Companion rather hard in the chest. As Sion’s laughter turned into a wheezing effort to catch his breath, Richter asked the twins to show him the eggs. They smiled and started walking along the edge of the lake bank. Sion stood up straight, a triumphant look still on his red face and followed the twins with Richter.

  “Did you know?” Richter asked his friend in an urgent whisper.

  “Know what?” Sion asked innocently.

  “That Billy Bob and Jessie Rae up there were brother and sister. I mean, what’s the deal? This is weird, right? Even for The Land?”

  Sion chuckled again, “Do not ask me. I think all of you humans are strange. Though, I may have to find some time to spend with Deera sometime soon.” Sion’s gaze was more than appreciative as he took in her beautiful, sculpted profile.

  “You’re more than twice her age!” Richter said.

  Sion’s voice got a touch husky, “And there are some things I plan on teaching her.”

  Shaking his head, Richter left his randy friend to his dastardly plotting. The twins had stopped walking. Deera smiled and beckoned for him to look over the bank of the lake. As he leaned over, sure enough, he saw the clutch of eggs. A small wooden fence had been erected around the site. He examined one of the eggs.

  You have found: River Skath Egg. Health 10/10. Durability: 4/4. Item Class: Common. Weight: 0.5 kg. Trait(s): Will lose 1 HP per day unless properly cared for. Will hatch in a matter of days.

  Each egg he looked at, including the bull skath egg, was in perfect health. As he watched, the twins covered their hands in mud and carefully turned each egg.

  “How do you know what to do?” Richter asked. When he had tried to care for the eggs, a prompt had told him he didn’t have the requisite skills, despite his ability to tame beasts and monsters. There was no way these two could be Blood magi.

  Derin smiled up at him, his teeth perfectly straight and gleaming white, not something that was seen too often in The Land, “My sister and I were both born with the same ability, my lord. It is called Empathic Knowledge. The higher our Charisma, the better we can understand the needs and wants of others. It is our ability that guides us in dealing with beasts.”

  “or man,” Deera finished with a small knowing smile as she looked at the sprite. Sion smiled back broadly while waggling his eyebrows.

  Resisting the urge to push his friend in the lake to cool off, Richter asked, “So your care for the eggs is completely based on your ability? This ‘Empathic Knowledge’?”

  “Oh no, my lord,” Deera answered. “We have formal training with animals,”

  As well,” Derin picked up. “Both my sister and I have apprentice rank in the skill Animal Husbandry and the subskill.”

  “Exotic Beasts. Our clients at the brothel enjoyed bringing dangerous animals to bed sometimes,” Deera finished offhandedly.

  Okay, Richter thought, information overload. He opened his mouth to ask one of a dozen questions but then closed it. What he had here was a pair of beautiful, oversexed twins who were apparently former prostitutes, but could also care for, and hopefully train, a set of deadly monsters to fight on his behalf. He decided not to poke this particular hornet’s nest of strangeness at this particular moment, and just take it in stride. Instead, he asked, “Can you teach me your skill?”

  Both of the twins smiled broadly and invited him down into the lake with them. Ignoring Sion’s grin, Richter removed his shoes and rolled up his pant legs as he stepped down into the cool water and smooth mud. Over the next twenty minutes, the twins described what they termed “the link;” a connection to the life force of the animal. As they spoke, Sion also joined them in the water, gently running his hands over the eggs while the twins spoke softly as to what the small, unborn lives inside were feeling.

  Richter listened intently, and then just let himself go, reveling in the moment. He didn’t try to force himself to feel the link; he just opened his senses. He experienced the gentle tug of the water on his ankles, smelled the sweet, wet earth around him and basked in the gentle sunlight beaming down, all the while gently stroking the egg in his hand. Without warning, he felt it.

  Whereas before he had felt only a smooth shell, now he could sense the life of the almost fully-formed creature inside. The baby skath didn’t have any clear thoughts, and the experience was nothing like his mental connection with Alma or even the shale adder. This was more of a feeling or emotional bond. Richter could sense that the baby skath wanted warmth and had started to ex
perience a growing hunger. On a deep level, he understood that it was this hunger that would soon force it to break beyond the boundaries of the only world it had ever known. To fill this need, it would punch through the shell of its egg and feel the cool water and warm sun for the first time. While Richter marveled in this sense of connection, a prompt appeared.

  Congratulations! You have learned the subskill: Exotic Beasts. You can now raise monsters and strange animals. As this is a subskill of Animal Husbandry, you have learned this skill as well.

  Congratulations! You have learned the skill: Animal Husbandry. Under your ministrations, you can now raise animals to be stronger and more plentiful in what they yield. It is now within your power to coax the lives of the beasts around you. While the farmer may cultivate grain and vegetables, you will cultivate the creatures of this world.

  Sion looked at him in surprise, “I just learned a new skill! And a subskill!”

  Richter looked at his Companion in shock, “Animal Husbandry and Exotic Beasts?”

  “Yes,” Sion said. “How did you know? Did you look at my status page?”

  “No,” Richter shook his head. “It’s just that I learned the same skills just now. Does this ever happen? Two people learning such specific skills at once.”

  “It can,” Sion replied doubtfully. “What is strange is that I’ve never had any skill with animals in the past. All of my people have various connections to the forest, and mine dealt with herbs. I was actually forbidden from working with the animals we kept. One of the elders once said that barring actually eating them alive, I could not have made the animals hate me more.”

  The two Companions looked at each other, trying to figure out what had just happened until Richter posited, “Maybe this is the skill the Quickening increased.”

  Sion slowly nodded and said, “Maybe,” but his tone remained doubtful.

  “Congratulations, Lord Richter,” Deera said once the Companions were done speaking. She clapped her hands in delight, “We did not think”

  “You would grasp the skill so quickly,” Derin continued. “Congratulations to you as well, sir sprite. Is there”

  “Anything else you need right now?” Deera asked.

  “No, thank you,” Richter replied.

  “Then we will go swimming,” the male twin said, “Of course,”

  “You are welcome to join us,” Deera finished with a small smile.

  Not waiting for a response, the twins swam out into the lake and were soon splashing each other and wrestling in the water.

  Richter and Sion watched them for another minute or two. “Nothing weird about that,” the chaos seed said.

  Sion kept his eyes glued on the sexy, naked twins and said, “I like them!” A grin that large should not have fit on the sprite’s face.

  Richter kept looking as well, “I like them too. Dibs on the girl.”

  Sion turned his head and looked at him in surprised outrage. Then the sprite just turned back to watching the twins and said, “Meh.”

  Richter laughed. “Alright, creepy smurf. What did you want to show me?” he asked, reminding his friend of their initial reason for coming to the meadow.

  “What? Oh, right, this way.”

  The two of them walked north along the lake’s edge until they reached the waterfall that fell from the cliffs above. Richter took off his shirt and shoes and placed them in his bag. He knew from experience that no matter how wet the outside of the bag became, the contents would remain nice and dry. Sion led the way across the rocks that stuck up out of the water in front of the waterfall. Each was slippery, but they were able to make it safely to the midway point of the falls without falling. Sion then stepped forward into the torrent of water and entered the cave hidden beyond.

  Richter followed a moment later and was immediately drenched. He was through in a moment though and stood in the near-darkness of the hidden cavern. He cast Simple Light. A glowing white ball appeared above his head and illuminated the area around him. Pieces of harvested crystal sat on the ground where the mist workers had left them after clearing the tunnel to the crystal garden. Richter spent a few minutes loading all of them into his Bag. The villagers were restricted from coming to this part of the meadow, but it still seemed like a good idea not to leave a valuable resource just lying around.

  When he was done, Sion led him to the back of the cavern, to the small tunnel that led up to the crystal garden. The walls of the tunnel still had small amounts of crystal attached which tugged at his clothes, but it wasn’t a true impediment. The tunnel narrowed and led upward, ending in a hole in the ceiling. Richter soon emerged from the tunnel and pulled himself up into the larger cave system that held the garden.

  When he was finally in the upper cavern, he looked around, but couldn’t see much. There were mist lights in the far ends of the cavern, but the illumination was only enough for him to make out vague shapes around him. Also, the glow from his Simple Light spell only cast a radiance of about five feet, and it wasn’t enough to see the cavernous space he was standing in. As Sion climbed up after him, Richter cast Mist Light from his personal mana pool. A large ball of grey light appeared before him. He placed his hand on it and pushed it up towards the ceiling where it would stay for the next year. What it showed took his breath away.

  He was standing in a forest of crystal! Large and small, the iridescent shards stuck out of the ceiling, walls, and floor. Stone stalactites hung down and were now studded with crystal shards like corn on a cob. The largest crystal he could see was jutting up from the ground and was four feet long and two feet thick.

  There was so much! Even though it had made things dangerous for a moment, he in no way doubted he had made the right decision to sacrifice a special soul stone to accelerate the garden’s growth. He hadn’t known at the time that the garden was also going to experience months of growth all at once, but from what he could see, it seemed like that entire growth cycle had occurred as if accelerated by the soul of the demoness he had sacrificed. The garden would probably never experience growth like that again, but, for now, he was swimming in crystal!

  “So we need a handful for each enchantment. How many useful doses can we get from this?” he asked.

  “Hundreds, probably thousands,” Sion said with a smile. “And just to be clear, it is not exactly a ‘handful’ that determines the appropriate measurement. Your hand is bigger than mine after all. Some crystal is always lost when it’s rendered to powder and then purified enough to be usable, but as you can see, there is more than enough raw crystal here to supply the village’s needs. There are more crystal patches in the adjoining rooms. Nothing as extensive as this, but it is still a very respectable garden.” The sprite’s voice got a bit more serious. “This is not what I wanted to show you, however.”

  Sion led him through the garden. At one point, Richter had to use the pommel of one of his swords to break a shard of crystal that was blocking his path. He put the broken piece in his bag along with the rest that he had collected. As they walked to the far end of the cavern, he cast Mist Light again and threw the ball of light towards the ceiling. Soon he could make out something irregular against the far wall. Sion led him unerringly towards the spot. At first, it looked like black crystal set against the grey stone walls, but then he saw that the color was actually a rich red. To be specific, blood red.

  Richter cast Simple Light again to improve his vision and examined it. His breath sped up as he read.

  You have found: Blood Crystal. Resource Class: Rare. Steeped in the blood of Richter, Master of the Mist Village, this crystal has greater properties than a normal crystal. This red mineral is tied to Richter and can make objects and potions specifically tailored to him. The properties linking him to this crystal also mean that it can be used to target him with certain spells or poisons. The damage he would receive would be magnified significantly. This crystal may also be used to augment Blood magic. Further uses of this crystal exist and must be discovered.

  Ric
hter looked at Sion who gravely looked back. Then his eyes turned back towards the patch of crystal. The chaos seed realized that he was basically looking at a ready-made voodoo doll that could only be used against him. The patch of crystal was about four feet across. “How much powdered crystal could be made out of this?” he asked softly.

  Sion examined the patch, “I won’t know until we get it down. Five measures, maybe ten. I cannot say for sure.”

  “Does anyone else know about this?” Richter asked in the same voice.

  “I do not think so,” Sion said. “The guards patrol this side of the meadow, and I do not think anyone besides you and I have been inside.”

  Richter nodded, “Thank you for watching out for me, my friend. Let’s harvest it.”

  The Companions worked in silence. They broke off pieces of crystal with their swords and put the shards in Richter’s bag. Sion commented that small red shards were falling to the ground, but Richter had already thought of that. He summoned a mist worker who was able to absorb everything on the ground through its amorphous body. It also helped to break off pieces of crystal. When they were finally done, the worker funneled the tiny, red shards through its body and into Richter’s bag. Lastly, it scoured the wall of any red fragments that had been too small for the two men to harvest. When they were done, all that was left was blank stone. In the center of the bare patch was a crater with a small hole in the middle.

  “Will it grow back?” Richter asked.

  “I cannot say,” Sion replied. “If there were some kind of seed that it would grow back from, I would bet that it’s down that hole,” he said, pointing to the finger’s-breadth burrow that disappeared into the stone. “If you truly want to remove any doubt, we could dig into the stone. Or you could use your sonic spell. I doubt whatever crystal seed is down there would survive that.”