Headmaster of Shadowfrost part 2

Sabrina pulled her attention away from the dark blue portal in the middle of the rectangular metal frame that served as the framework of the portal to Gloom Mine and looked at Mist and Julia when they walked into the room. "You might want to avoid getting any closer, Dawn is running a safety test on the portal."

"Alright," Mist replied as he studied the brown haired woman in her twenties who was wearing a professional looking black pleated skirt, a white dress shirt and a pair of metal rimmed blue sunglasses. He glanced at the dark haired girl wearing a lab coat and waving some type of scanner at one of the portals, fairly sure the girl with a lab coat was Ms. Frankenstein which probably made the other young woman Sabrina since she didn't look oriental and she sort of had a librarian vibe.

"I finished five minutes ago, it's fine," Dawn Frankenstein assured them as she turned around to look at the group.

Mist stared at the girl that looked suspiciously like a certain actress, wondering if the system was using his memories to construct people or if it was just a weird case of random chance.

"If it's fine, why did you tell me that you're still running tests?" Sabrina asked with a touch of annoyance at the teenage mad scientist.

Dawn pulled her attention off the nearly naked student and glanced between the librarian and the headmaster. "Sorry, let me rephrase. I finished making sure the portal isn't leaking corrupted qi five minutes ago, I'm still trying to figure out what type of gear we'd need to survive walking in there."

"Let me guess, expensive and bulky?" Mist asked, not sure if he should be surprised that she even sounded like the actress.

"Pretty much," Dawn agreed. "Do you want me to start researching ways to keep people from getting turned into monsters while they mine it or do you want me to start looking into ways to build a bunch of droid miners?"

"Droid miners?" Sabrina asked in confusion.

'Star Wars reference or just a mad scientist one?' Mist wondered as he gestured at Julia. "Julia has the ability to absorb corruption and use it safely to improve her spiritual roots, we should have the ability to use the minion creation machine to recruit siblings."

"And there's a chance it's a family trait," Dawn mused, figuring that would solve a lot of their problems.

"Is the machine going to summon my actual siblings?" Julia asked, not sure how to feel about that since the world was obviously dangerous but her sister would love it.

Dawn shook her head. "It shouldn't but I hadn't had a chance to actually use it yet, it eats spirit crystals."

"Once we get people that can actually mine the crystals, we'll have plenty of spirit stones," Mist assured her. "Speaking of problems, can you show us where the well and the tainted dragon veins are?"

"There's a shaft in the maintenance closet on the first floor that leads down to the well where all of the pipes are that supply the sect with water. You just need to fish a dead demonic cultivator out of the pool and figure out how to cleanse the demonic sludge in the water."

"Is there a reason you didn't grab the body?" Julia asked.

"The last thing we need is a corrupted mad scientist," Dawn replied, unwilling to risk getting corrupted since it might carry over to her other lives. "I lost three flying eyes getting the information I got and I wasn't able to send an eye underwater without it losing the connection because of the corruption."

"Necromancy?" Julia asked warily.

"No, it's just a qi technique that summons a flying eye that you can control," Dawn assured her. "I've found that having a way to view experiments up close while staying at a safe distance is extremely useful as a mad scientist."

"And the dragon veins?" Mist asked, happy that his mad scientist actually seemed to have her head on straight.

"Head down to the meditation chambers, at the end of the hallway is a statue of an ancient imperial official. It's actually an illusion. If you walk through the illusion you'll find a sealed door. According to the warnings written on the door, it leads down into the original meditation chambers that contained the sect's dragon veins. The warnings didn't explain how it was corrupted, just that the chamber was sealed to contain the corruption."

"So, you just turned around and walked away?" Julia asked suspiciously.

"Yep," Dawn replied, popping the P. "All of the seals on the door looked intact which means purifying the water is more important. We're basically running on a skeleton crew for teachers and students, I didn't see a point in borrowing trouble, especially without asking the headmaster."

"I appreciate it," Mist assured her. "Julia, can you take care of the well? I want to see if the mine has something we can use."

Julia glanced at the portals to the mines. "Or you could deal with the dead body and I'll explore the mine."

Mist shook his head. "I'm basically immune to qi techniques and anything getting close that has qi is going to have a bad time and the mines are filled with bandits and monsters. I'd rather not lose the only person we have that can deal with corruption."

"Fine, I'll drag him out of the well and do some meditation," Julia grumbled.

Dawn pulled the spatial ring off her left pinkie finger that she used to collect interesting corpses and handed it to Julia. "I'm going to want this back and I'd appreciate it if you could purify the corpse before you bring it back but this should make it easier to carry."

"How do I use it?" Julia asked as she studied the plain silver ring.

"Just put it on, tap the corpse and focus on moving it into the ring," Dawn explained. "Just bring the body to the lab when you're done purifying the well."

"Thanks and sure," Julia replied as she turned and headed for the hallway, figuring the sooner she got to work, the sooner she'd be done.

Sabrina watched the student leave then turned to look at Mist. "I know that you're immune to qi and corruption but you're not immune to getting stabbed."

Mist glanced at the pile of mining picks, baskets, torches and lanterns next to the wall then focused on the librarian. "I'm just going to walk in and glance around then leave, five minutes tops."

"If you're not back in five minutes, we're sending Julia to find you," Dawn warned him.

"That's fair," Mist agreed. "Do we have any normal lanterns that don't require qi or am I stuck with the torches?"

Sabrina shook her head. "You're stuck with the torches, the glow stones are more commonly used because they are cheap and only take a tiny amount of qi."

"Fair enough," Mist replied as he walked over and grabbed a mining pick, a basket and a torch without getting close to the qi infused lanterns as he wasn't sure if his ability would wreck them or just drain them. He held the torch out toward the girls. "Can you light it?"

"Pretty sure you'd need to take a step back…" Sabrina trailed off as Dawn pulled a lighter out of her pocket, spun the tiny wheel and produced a small candle flame without a flicker of qi.

"Sure," Dawn replied with a grin as she reached over and lit the torch. "You have about ten minutes before the pitch burns out."

Mist moved a touch closer then cautiously held his hand out toward the portal, relaxing a touch when the portal didn't even flicker because of his void quirk. 'I probably should have done that on something less valuable,' he admitted, relieved that he hadn't screwed things up. "Okay, I'll try to be back in eight minutes."

"Good luck," Dawn told him, wishing she had a flashlight that she could let him borrow as the torches didn't give that much light.

'In and out,' Mist told himself and stepped through the portal before he could change his mind, hoping that he wasn't about to test the existence of his Spirit Bound ability. He glanced at the dozens of faintly glowing mushrooms scattered around the small cave that gave him a rough idea of how large it was without giving him enough light to see things clearly, especially with the torch.

'So much for putting magic torches around the starting area like a video game,' he mused as he moved the torch around, trying to make sure there weren't any monsters hiding. 'No bodies or skeletons, just a bunch of old mining picks. Is that because the system didn't bother creating them or because they were dragged away by the bandits or the monsters?' he mused as he glanced at the dark blue portal behind him, wanting to make sure he could actually leave before he got carried away.

Mist glanced at the barely visible tunnel that turned into a black void. 'This is worse than walking through a ghost town.'

He carefully set his pick on the ground, leaning it against his leg so that he could easily grab it then moved the basket to the crook of his left arm and switched the torch to his left hand so that he'd have his right hand free. 'Okay, let's see if the voice was telling the truth about having mana.'

He focused on the strange information floating around in his head and cast his Cheat Code 99 spell, pushing all of his mana into the spell and creating a small faintly glowing translucent purple marble that dropped into the basket. "Huh," he muttered, a touch surprised at how easy it had been to create a mana stone and how fast the corrupted qi was already refilling his mana pool.

'That was easier than I was expecting,' he decided, not even trying to contain the smile on his face as he realized that he'd cast an actual spell and that he'd felt the mana move. 'No heart demons, no spitting blood or meditating for centuries, I'll take it.'

Mist spent a few seconds studying the marble and trying to sense his mana pool and the mana inside the stone, something that was made easier by the fact that he could see the marble and that his pool was quickly refilling. 'That's probably going to take some work but at least I don't have to start from scratch.'

He quickly grabbed the mining pick when he heard the sounds of claws on stone quickly moving down the tunnel. He swung his torch as something lunged out of the black tunnel then shoved the torch into its eyes, causing the creature to shriek in pain. He let go of the torch, grabbed the mining pick with both hands and swung as hard as he could, hitting the creature in the head with the pick and causing it to drop like a bag of potatoes.

"Fuck," Mist cursed when he realized that he'd almost been killed by something that looked like a kobold. 'I'm going to be really unhappy if the kobolds scale up to dragons,' he thought as he picked up the torch before it went out and recovered the mana marble that had fallen out of his basket, wishing he had a mental map of the mine so he could track how close the distant screams were.

He glanced at the tunnel then took a better look at the kobold when nothing immediately jumped out at him. 'Nasty looking teeth, patches of discolored red scales and mismatched horns, it's probably the corruption or maybe they're just mutated or weird.'

'Worry about it later,' he thought as he reached down and stole the kobold's bag of stones off the creature's belt which was the only thing the creature was wearing and dropped them in the basket then dashed back through the portal. He quickly handed Dawn the basket and stepped away from it before he did more damage to the stones. "Can you check the stones to see if I drained them?"

Dawn opened the bag and looked at the spirit stones, letting her qi flow over them to check the quality. "They're decent quality and surprisingly clean. Either the bag stopped you from damaging them or your ability was more worried about the corrupted qi."

"Or the stable nature of the stones prevents them from being absorbed," Sabrina suggested.

"Maybe," Dawn admitted. "We'll have to run some tests when we're not broke. What happened to the pick?"

"I figured the stones were more important considering we have a bunch of picks and there are a bunch of old picks in the cave," Mist replied. "I ran into something that looked suspiciously like a draconic kobold. I got lucky and managed to blind it with the torch then hit it in the head with the pick but it jumped about twenty feet when it lunged out of the tunnel and it's fast, I'm not doing that again."

"Welcome to dealing with cultivators as a mortal, it sucks," Dawn argued, wondering how her sister would stand up against the creature.

"Yeah, we're going to have to come up with alternate solutions," Mist admitted as he handed Sabrina the basket.

Sabrina looked in the basket at the strange stones that didn't feel like qi stones. "Are these mana stones?"

"Yep," Mist replied with a grin. "I was testing out the mana regeneration in the cave and the stone spell. I can probably make two stones a minute which is either really good or maybe my reserves just suck and the stones aren't worth using."

"Do you want me to test the library's ability to generate books before I've finished putting the books on the shelves?" Sabrina asked.

"You haven't unpacked everything?" Mist asked, a bit surprised.

"I wanted to make sure we were actually sticking around considering the issues with the water and the corrupted dragon veins," Sabrina admitted. "They're currently in my spatial ring which means I don't have to leave anything behind if we had to bolt. Besides, most of our collection comes from donations and public shops. I'm taking the time to sort through everything and make sure someone isn't trying to kill us."

"That's fair," Mist admitted. "Have you run into any problems yet?"

"No, I even found a couple of rare books that probably got tossed into the collection by mistake because someone wasn't paying enough attention. I should have everything sorted by the end of the week and on the shelves."

"In that case, you should probably take the mana stones and see if you can buy some techniques since the cursed techniques just appear on the shelves," Mist suggested, figuring this was a good time to stock up on techniques the students can use.

"I'll probably need more than two stones," Sabrina replied as a vaguely Asian looking man with short dark black hair walked into the room wearing an open robe over a set of black gi pants and a short sleeved shirt.

"I'm aware," Mist admitted as he studied the man that was probably a good half a foot taller than him and solid without being stocky.

"Headmaster," Le Chan offered politely as he walked over. "Did you learn anything about the mines?"

"I ran into a corrupted kobold or at least I'm going to assume he was corrupted judging by the discolored skin. I managed to kill it but I could hear kobolds screaming deeper into the mine so I left before I got mobbed considering it was annoying fast."

"Fast for a mortal or fast for a cultivator?" Chan asked thoughtfully.

Mist shrugged. "It covered at least twenty feet in a second or two but I managed to hit it with a torch and my pick after I blinded it so probably just fast for a mortal but the corruption is going to make dealing with them annoying."

"This would be a lot easier if I could just walk in there and murder them," Chan complained, less than happy about the corruption. "Speaking of murdering people, do you want me to deal with the people in the forest?"

"Leave the cultists that are boosting the forest alone for the time being since they're increasing the quality of our spiritual herbs. I doubt you can reason with the cultivators that showed up to steal everything they can, but we have a monster filled mine that is filled with cultivation resources and a magical mirror will give people rare resources if they win, feel free to invite them to use the mine."

Chan shook his head. "I doubt they're going to be willing to mine spirit stones, it's generally backbreaking work even for cultivators since the stone around the spirit stone also absorbs the qi, becoming something more than mundane stone."

"They don't have to mine anything, the kobold had a bag of stones and there should be plenty of herbs and cultivation resources in the mine. Just spin them a story about taking five or ten percent and that we have plenty of resources and not enough people to actually gather everything with the monsters in there. Blame it on an overly cautious headmaster that doesn't understand the 'reality' of cultivation if you need to. We might even be able to keep some of them alive if we have Julia hang around a bit to absorb the corruption. If not, nothing of value was lost."

"Other than the resources they manage to steal," Chan argued.

"I'm more worried about the forest, the mine is endless and having them clear the first couple of areas means we might be able to secure a couple of rooms so Julia and I can benefit from the corruption without worrying about getting killed."

"It would also give me a chance to study the effects this particular type of corruption has on cultivators without losing any students," Dawn pointed out.

"I'll take the actual students to the library so we don't have any mistakes," Sabrina offered, figuring it was a good chance to cover library etiquette and the proper way to take care of books before she was forced to beat some of them half to death as an example about why you shouldn't mistreat books.

"Sounds good," Mist agreed.

"I might have to kill some of them," Chan pointed out.

Mist sighed as he thought about the flaw, not sure if they were created by the system or just recruited. "I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I read the reports on this group, they're willing to kill people over the resources and they're willing to consume everything they run into like a plague of locusts. We might as well take advantage of their greed since Julia doesn't have the skill or power to carve her way through the mine right now and I don't want any of the teachers or students getting corrupted."

"I'll take care of it," Chan assured him. "What are you planning on doing about the mirror?"

"I don't know," Mist admitted. "The evil copy is more aggressive and a touch more skilled than the original, there is probably a way to take advantage of that. If the copy survives, we can recruit them. If they don't, we might have to resort to drugs or some type of luck potion that only works if you stay calm or something."

"I have some techniques that require a calm mind, the combination should work nicely," Chan suggested.

"That shouldn't be too hard," Dawn mused. "Something that increases aggression might also work to push the evil clone until they're not seeing straight."

"Come up with a list, I'm going to check on Julia and make sure she didn't fall in," Mist told them, figuring it would be a good place to make some mana stones while they absorbed the corruption.

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