Chapter 91

By early afternoon, they’d walked ten miles and picked a few fights with various monsters. Luke had just finished extracting his mace from the skull of a badger-looking thing the size of a grizzly bear when Zea said, “That did it. I’m level 17 now.”

“Nice! Do you want to take a break from walking now?”

“Let me just push the rank up on [Mana Manipulation]and see if… yeah, this ritual is looking a lot easier to pull off now. If we want to be safe, I should get one more level and rank up [Cadence] too. [Mana Sight] wouldn’t hurt either, but I think I can do it without an extra rank.”

“Okay, we can do one more level if you think we should.”

“Probably should. Plus you spent all your AP anyway, so you need to level up again too.”

Luke checked his status and said, “I’m only a few kills away from a level. That’ll be 26 more AP. Let’s take a break, have some lunch, and see if we can find a nice spot to farm XP before it gets dark.”

He honestly wasn’t sure why he still bothered to follow a day and night cycle, other than habit. It wasn’t like it was any harder for him to see in the dark now than it was under a bright noon sky. Zea could also see well enough in the dark that they weren’t in any real danger of blundering around blindly. Luke imagined it was that way for a lot of people, but for some reason, almost everyone chose to sleep during the night.

Maybe it was just human nature, and he was overthinking it. There didn’t need to be some mysterious, arcane explanation for it. It was easier to sleep at night, and that’s what everyone else whose perception wasn’t high enough to see in the dark was doing anyway, so why not?

Thanks almost entirely to his new rank 4 [Butchering]skill, Luke had a very good idea of where to carve some steaks off his latest kill. The hide also would have made for some good raw materials, but he didn’t have the time to treat it properly before they left, so Luke reluctantly let it be. They made a small fire and Zea lectured Luke on how to cook the first steak, then after he’d burned it and thrown it out, made two more herself.

He did not get rank 1 [Cooking] that day either.

“So I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Maybe we should set up a kind of permanent camp and just kind of work this area for a few days. Get you leveled up a bit more before we do the ritual, get me some AP to spend on bloodline skills after we do the ritual, and we’ll both be a bit stronger when we start to move north again.”

“Well, I can think of a few problems with that. First is that we don’t have any proof that the church isn’t sending people after us right this second. The more we move, the farther away we get and the harder it becomes to find us, especially if we do it like we are now. Second, the longer we stay in one area, the more likely we are to attract notice.”

“Those are both good points, but I think we can hunt more efficiently if we get to know an area. Plus, have you noticed that the monsters are getting to be higher level the farther north we go?”

“They have, yes. Do you think it’ll be an issue?”

Luke shrugged. If things didn’t get any higher than they were now, he figured they’d be alright. They occasionally ran into something that was a higher level than him, but usually only by a few. More importantly in his mind, they’d level faster off repeated, frequent kills of low level monsters than by hunting down a few stronger ones. It would be safer too, since he’d get a chance to fight the same kinds of monsters over and over instead of having to figure out a good way to take out a new enemy each time.

“I think I’m not on a timer, and it would be safer to be a bit stronger if things are going to keep going this way. I like having a solid ten levels on whatever we’re fighting, just as a safety margin. We can win a thousand fights, you know, but we only have to lose one.”

“That’s true. Okay, how about if we go a bit farther east from the road for a day, then find a place to set up a good semi-permanent camp? We can sit on it for a week and level up a few times, do the ritual to purify your bloodline, and then start heading north again. Maybe I can boost my physical stats some more to help make up for lost time too.”

“That’s a good idea.” Luke took a bite out of the steak, chewed it slowly, and said, “Do these taste a bit oily to you?”

“Little bit, yeah. I think it’s just the type of meat.”

“I wonder if there are any shockrack elk roaming around. Those had the best meat.”

“Those are a delicacy! It’s practically impossible to find them anymore.”

“Really?” Luke snorted. “They’re pretty common in the valley I started in. I’d see them a few times a week.”

“That surprises me,” Zea said. “Although, didn’t you say there was some massive earth elemental guarding the only pass in or out? I guess if no one could get in, no hunters ever showed up to go after them.”

They chatted for a bit, cleaned up their impromptu camp, and started walking again.

* * *

“How about here?” Luke said. They stood at the entrance to a shallow cave, about twenty feet deep and ten feet wide. The mouth narrowed down a bit, so it was somewhat sheltered from the weather, and he was confident he could put together some kind of basic door. It wouldn’t be anything fancy with a handle and hinges, but he could cobble together something.

“Could work as a location, as long as there are monsters to hunt. I wouldn’t want to stay too long, but a day or two to level up isn’t too bad.” Zea’s mouth twisted as she spoke, still clearly unhappy with the idea of casually leveling up.

“I’ll start making some rope,” he said as he eyed up the cave. He pointed at some sort of thick, viny bush that was crawling up the rock face and said, “I can run it through some of this and hang a kind of door off it to close the place off. It’ll be rough, but better than nothing.”

“I’ll collect some stuff for a firepit and get some tinder shredded.”

“Don’t go too far,” Luke said. “I don’t feel anything nearby, but the forest is too thick to really see too deeply into it.”

“I know. You don’t have to babysit me.”

“I’m still going to worry about you.”

“Ugh, fine. I’ll stay close by.”

It wasn’t that Luke didn’t trust Zea. It was just that she was about as strong as he’d been at level 8, despite being level 17. Any number of creatures they’d encountered in the forest already could kill her if she’d been on her own. It was a measure of her trust in him that she’d agreed to keep going.

They worked for a few hours until their new cave home was as comfortable as they could reasonably make it, including a few racks for drying and stretching animal hides. Zea was initially against the idea until Luke promised more blankets and agreed that he’d be the one who carried them. As soon as they’d gotten that issue resolved, she’d suggested he build a few extra racks, just to be safe.

They spent the next few days hunting monsters. Luke cleared the XP needed to bump up to level 26, and Zea leveled up again to 18. After her bump up to rank 2 [Cadence], she finally felt she was prepared to use [Bloodline Purification Ritual], and so they decided to call it a day early and head back.

“What do you need me to do?” Luke asked when she started unpacking the supplies.

“Just stay out of the way for now. This will take a bit to get set up.”

Luke did as asked and whiled away the time carving a piece of deadwood he’d set aside into the shape of a sitting dog his neighbor owned when he was a kid. It had been a golden retriever, ridiculously derpy, but friendly and loving in a way only good boys could be. It was too bad they’d only stayed at that place for a few months before Dad had moved them to take a new job in another city.

That had happened a lot of times, for a lot of reasons. It was rare to stay anywhere for longer than a year, and by the time Luke was twelve, he’d stopped bothering to unpack his stuff. The boxes just sat in the closet, all three of them, and he’d lived out of an old ratty backpack instead.

Not much had changed there. He’d spent a month in the valley, barely more than a week in Valtira, and then it had been pretty much a new place every night from there on out. Hell, the stupid cave in the middle of nowhere took third place for the longest time he’d spent in one spot since he woke up in that field.

“It’s ready,” Zea said softly.

Luke looked over and saw a thing drawn on the cave floor with something that might have been chalk. It was a square, about three feet wide and with a hundred different squiggles around its border. Lines radiated out from it to connect it to the corners of a pentagon that surrounded the whole thing, and even more lines came out of that to connect to six small circles set equal distance around the whole thing.

In each of those circles was one of the ingredients they’d been carrying around. The silver bowl had some sort of incense in it, not yet lit. Next to that was a flat rock, dark gray with a wavy band of green on it. A bundle of herbs, tied together at the stem, sat in the third circle, followed by a desiccated animal heart, a small ivory tusk six inches long, and a glass vial filled with some sort of golden oil.

“Spooky,” Luke commented.

“Don’t mess it up,” Zea told him. “I’m going to be pissed if I have to redo anything. I’ve already checked this over three times. Go sit down in the square in the middle.”

Luke set the figurine down and hopped into the center of the diagram, then arranged himself to sit cross-legged and looked over at Zea. “Now what?”

“You sit there. I’ll do all the work. This… it shouldn’t hurt, but I’ve never done this. If I do it right, you should be fine. Whatever happens, don’t move outside the square. Don’t touch the lines or smudge anything. Keep your hands close by your side or sit on them or whatever you need to do. This is going to take at least an hour.”

“What happens if something goes wrong?” Luke asked.

She shrugged. “Depends how far in we are, I guess. Wasted reagents at least. Pain. You could end up with severe blood loss. If you didn’t have that regeneration skill, I would say we need to wait to even attempt this.”

“Oh, well, no pressure, but don’t fuck up.”

“This is as safe as we can make it,” she said with a glower. “It’s too late to turn back now. Are you ready?”

Part of him wanted to say no, that he’d been getting along just fine without this upgrade. That wasn’t really true though, and he knew things were just going to get worse down the road. He needed to do this if he wanted to fix everything.

“Let’s do it.”