Spiteful Healer-Chapter 330: Reconstruction

Spiteful Healer-Chapter 330: Reconstruction

Aegis pulled a torch from his inventory and wandered through the ruined village, holding the tablet with the ancient image with his other hand. With it as a reference, he was able to find the base of the structure. It wasn’t thanks to the surrounding landscape in the image, as all of that had changed drastically over the years. It was thanks to a few circular stone walls still standing, albeit only a foot off the ground.
He plopped down cross-legged on the dirt in front of the ruins and propped up the stone tablet with the image on it against one of the remaining walls, grabbed a nearby stick, and used the stick to draw lines in the dirt.
Lina snuck up behind him. “How bad is it?”
“Bad. Way worse than the intermediate crafting mastery quest,” Aegis replied. “The fact that these stones are still standing even though these buildings were supposedly destroyed thousands of years ago speaks volumes to how they built them. There’s nothing special about the materials used, though. I can tell by looking at it that it was made using resources from the surrounding areas. This is all about craftsmanship,” he spoke while using the dirt to sketch out his plan of action.
“Anything I can do to help?”
“Gonna need a lot of leather from those mountain cat monsters. Gotta set up some crafting stations here. This’ll take a while.”
“I’m on it!” Lina shadow-stepped away. He sketched a bit more before standing up and dusting himself off. He pulled out several tools from his inventory and strapped them to his back and belt while simultaneously shelving his shield and claws.
“Here we go again,” he marched down the mountain.
Stonecutting was first. He used his skills to mine a quarry down the mountain and cut the stones into the highest-quality blocks he could. He had the details on how best to do it fresh in his mind from having studied for the advanced stonecutting quest. Once cut, he brought a few more than he needed with him up the mountain back to the ruins.
Wood was next, with plenty of trees to cut in the vicinity. The trees were so easy that a level 1 woodcutter could harvest them, but Aegis knew the trick to this quest was going to be all about quality. He took extreme care in the chopping and trimming process to obtain the best base material, achieving a near 100% on most of his cuts due to his high skill level.
Ore, sand, clay, flowers, and other herbs followed. Lina brought an abundance of dead monsters for Aegis to use for creature harvesting, for leather and meat. For the amount he’d gathered, Aegis would’ve usually been able to harvest and process it all in a couple of hours. His need to get the maximum quality on each gather was slowing him down drastically, though, and it took him nearly three full days to gather enough for everything he’d thought he’d need for the reconstruction.
Lina spent a lot of that time idling around, either watching Aegis or talking with the NPC, asking Danton questions like how long he’d been up in the ruins, and whether or not anyone else had tried to do the quest before(they hadn’t).
Any of the materials that were too big to stick in his inventory, namely cuts of stone, he finished stacking neatly off to the side of the ruins. Lina helped him transport the last few up the mountain from where he’d been cutting them out of the earth.
“That should hopefully be enough,” Aegis rubbed his hands on his knees after observing a satisfyingly large stockpile of resources.
“It is getting pretty late now in the real world, right?” Lina asked.
“Yeah. Gotta get some sleep before classes tomorrow. I’ll start on processing all of this after that,” Aegis nodded.
Lina looked at her feet, twiddling them. “Okay…”
“Something wrong?”
“Do you think, maybe… Even though we’re in the middle of nowhere, I thought you could sleep in the sim-box. You know, using dream-state.” Lina shrugged, speaking without lifting her head once.
“Why’d you think I brought this?” Aegis pulled a tent out of his inventory that bore Rene's symbol on the side. Lina’s face lit up as he set up the tent within seconds, throwing in some pillows and linens from his inventory inside as well to make the interior comfy. Once he was done, he stood in front of the tent and pulled the door open, motioning Lina inside.
She rushed in, Aegis behind her, and the two snuggled up together for the night.
He awoke to Lina shaking him, still inside the gameworld.
“I think you’re going to be late if you don’t go now!” she said, looking as though she’d been fighting to wake him up for a while. He sat up in the tent with no recollection of how he passed out. He took a few moments to gain his bearings, open his interface, and check the real-world time in the settings menu.
“Ah, you’re right!” Aegis cut himself off by logging out of the game-world mid-sentence.
Eli climbed out of the sim-box in his simulation suit and got to work taking it off, getting dressed, and rushing out of the room.
Tuesday flew by. He had more ogling fans and livestreamers following him around Campus between the classes, but that didn’t bother him. He was in a much better mood knowing that he didn’t have a nanotech class that day, and the lectures he did attend were ones he was already well-studied in. Hearing his professors talk in these classes made him feel better about the situation. They wrapped up, and he slipped back to his room to get back to work on the quest.
Lina was waiting for him, and the pair got started on the next part of his reconstruction: processing. Aegis built a bellows furnace using wood, stone, and leather. He got it hot enough to smelt the iron and other materials that he’d gathered, but first used it to make the parts of a loom and sawmill to process the different materials. He also built a stove, crafted a pot for cooking the food depicted in the tablet image, and began tanning the leather he’d harvested from the monsters.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. any occurrences.
When the setup was complete, the long, arduous task of refining everything began. He avoided mass-processing any of the materials and instead took care with each and every one, knowing full well that the quality of his end products would be the determining factor in whether he completed this quest.
He knew this mainly because all of the other advanced crafting quests that he’d completed over the last few months focused primarily on quality improvements. Not a single quest was completable with a craft that wasn’t above 80%, and the materials provided were consistently much lower than that. Thanks to this, he’d got a handle on how to either process things quickly or process things slowly and carefully to improve their quality.
He used carpentry and woodcutting for the wood from the mountain. He used an alchemist's kit in his inventory to turn flowers into dyes. The forge was used to smelt iron and glass, and his mithril jewelers' kit was used to refine all of the stone better he’d be using for the lower walls of the structure. He made sure to have blocks that fit the shape of the round structure, which took a bit more care than usual.
The evening of Tuesday came and went, with another two in-game days gone. The processing continued into Wednesday after classes, when he finally finished preparing the remaining materials for the reconstruction to the best of his ability. That meant that by the time Thursday rolled around, it was finally time to get to the actual reconstructions.
He carefully planned out each step, starting with the structure itself. The stone was used for the outer walls of the observatory's base, with wooden planks used for the interior walls and flooring. Pillars were set up to reinforce the structure in preparation for the heavy telescope that was depicted on the second floor.
The telescope was his real challenge, though. He got started on it towards the end of the night, but didn’t get very far before he had to settle in and sleep. All the while, Lina kept him company and helped out as best she could by joining his construction project.
Level Up!
Your Leadership skill has reached
Level 151!
The message popped up during the last task he did with Lina for the night. He settled into the tent with her and tried to sleep, but couldn’t, and ended up waking early, climbing out of the sim-box without disturbing Lina.
His mind was filled with thoughts of his upcoming nanotech class, and he was dreading it.
He remained seated in the sim-box for a moment, his legs dangling off to the side. The sun hadn’t risen yet, leaving Eli in darkness.
“I joined the coalition!” His roommate declared loudly, startling Eli. He looked up to see that his roommate, too, had just climbed out of his sim-box on the side of the room opposite Eli’s. When their eyes met, Eli saw a level of enthusiasm on his roommate's face that was scary.
“Coalition?”
“Yeah. I’m a proud member!” His smile widened.
Eli tilted his head curiously. “What coalition?”
“Yours, of course!” He spoke matter-of-factly.
“I have a coalition?”
“Yup. You didn’t know?!” His roommate tapped his wrist implant to turn on his holo-screen, illuminating the far side of their room. A few more taps on his wrist and the screen switched over to a live-stream broadcast of Mikael, the level 165 Crusader class player who worshiped the god of Zeus.
Aegis recognized him from their run-ins during the tournament in Stormtop, but his armor and weapons looked much more powerful now. He had his guild around him, moving about a small village overlooking the abyss. The skies around the village and above the abyss nearby were packed with Airships of all sorts, all using the designs of Kalmoore’s airships that were not reliant on Island Stone magic.
“Another ship just came in from Savringard to join the cause.”
A guild member of Mikael’s spoke on the stream.
“Have Mightymira vet them, make sure there are no spies,”
Mikael replied.
“What is this?” Eli asked, still confused.
“Oh, right. Sorry, let me show you the famous clip,” his roommate tapped his wrist implant a few more times to bring up a highlight from Mikael’s stream, where he stood atop an airship facing the camera.
“The time has come for the people of the Shattered World to stand up to their oppressors. Many of you have been waiting for a hero to arrive and take back control of our islands, or negotiate with the members of VGN for access into the abyss. But VGN members and guilds have repeatedly taken action to prevent anyone from even obtaining an Elder Tree seed themselves, so that they maintain their titan grip on the end-game areas below our shattered islands.
“Well, that stops now. As Aegis has said, we all have sim-boxes, and this is our world as much as it is his. We can’t rely on him to come out of retirement to fight our battle for us. So, we’re creating the Aegis Coalition, in honor of how he fought against VGN valiantly on the island of Tarolas to end Seraxus’ oppression.
“We have located a small island that is not a part of any major kingdom, from which we have established a small base and have begun construction of our own fleet of airships, free from the taxes imposed by the kingdoms of VGN, and away from the island of Kalmoore that Aegis fought so hard to keep peaceful,” Mikael spoke clearly and concisely, as though he was reading from a script.
Aegis let out an elongated sigh of disbelief.
“Don’t you think this is awesome? We’re going to war with VGN by ourselves! Gonna finally show them what’s what!”
“That’s great and all, but why’d he have to call it the Aegis Coalition?”
“It gets everyone to join, you know?” his roommate shrugged. “A lot of people are hoping you’ll show up too, and give a speech or something. Will you?”
“What? No.” Eli shook his head, standing up from his sim-box and slowly taking off his simulation suit. “I’m busy with my own stuff. I don’t have time to get involved in that. Mikael looks like he’s got it handled.”
“It’d mean a lot to everyone, though,” he said with pleading eyes.
“Nope,” Eli waved it off without hesitation. He glanced back to see the dejected look on his face while Mikael’s voice continued to ramble on in the background.
“Level, class, island of origin. None of it matters. What matters is that you have a heart that loves this game, and you want to stand up and defend it. Stand up for freedom, lower taxes, and a truly open world free of these streamers and their oppression. We’re bringing down VGN, that’s a promise.” Mikael finished, and the clip ended.
Eli caught a glimpse of some text at the bottom of the clip at the end, showing that it had over 30 million views.
“Maybe you’ll change your mind?” There was still a glimmer of hope for this roommate.
“Uh…” Eli’d finished with his sim-suit and was getting dressed. He took another moment to see how much excitement his roommate had for him, with all of the Fanta-See network products scattered around his side of the room. “Maybe. I gotta get ready for class,” Eli said, though the size of the smile that grew on his roommate's face made him regret his words.
He finished getting ready, headed out to class, and by the time he made it back to campus, all of his thoughts on Mikael’s coalition were replaced with the dread of his upcoming nanotech lecture once more.

Chapter 330: Reconstruction