An Unwavering Craftsman

The following week proceeded without incident. There were no kidnappings, demons, or even rumours. If there were spies, they were too good at their jobs to be noticed. Fleta and Shigeo, satisfied that Damien's plan had got off the ground and further noble plotting was unlikely, resumed their adventuring work, although they still refrained from taking missions that would leave them away from home overnight.

Damien agreed fully with the other two young adults that he could feel himself growing stronger. By the end of the week, Lana was able to use the adamantite hammer, although she was still slow enough with it that it was a toss up whether tier three iron or tier eight adamantite gave her the best rate of experience gain.

Greenhair successfully mixed up a potion. It was only a low-tier stamina potion, but his look of joy as he proudly waved it around brought a warm smile to the faces of everyone watching. Then he drank it, to reuse the vial for his next attempt.

It turned out that despite being more or less immune to the bad smells, he was highly sensitive to bad tastes. A vial in which hundreds of the failures had been concocted, each seeping a little further into the glass, did not make for a pleasant drinking vessel. The potion promptly exited him again, and the unfortunate Grace spent the next half hour carefully removing it from the wall and carpet.

Damien's supplies of dragon had taken a noticeable dent. It would be a while before he'd need to switch to lesser materials, but it was a sign of his hard work. Neither Greenhair nor Lana had mentioned visiting the Dreamer's temple again since the first occasion, but Damien knew he couldn't put it off much longer. Having used up a significant chunk of the dragon, they needed to check their progress, to ensure things were going as well as they assumed, and to check none of them were falling behind.

He raised the subject at the dinner table that evening.

"I'm really excited about it! I want to see how far I've come," exclaimed Lana, who had long since lost her shyness.

"It would do us good to know our current progress," agreed Greenhair. "Although I shall refrain from selecting perks, just yet."

"That would be advisable," agreed Fleta, who had searched for extra information about tier one class users. She hadn't found anything, but the way no-one from Illuganasis would even discuss the subject told a story of its own. The only remaining avenue of exploration was to see if foreign kingdoms had ever tried the experiment, and while Damien had requested Viscount Flemming to ask after such information, it would be some time before the search bore fruit.

"Then I'll take you tomorrow," said Shigeo. "I'll keep an eye on you while you're sleeping," he added, with a glance at Damien that suggested he would have a full complement of potions secreted about his person.

Fleta had been asking after demons, too, and there her contacts from Illuganasis had been more forthcoming. Not that they'd been able to offer much beyond what they already knew. None knew Damien's demon by name, although the consensus was that the name did indeed sound demonic. None knew any methods of protection, either, but all were very clear that as long as no-one deliberately called the demon by name, it couldn't reach the real world.

Given Damien's experiences in his previous encounter, he had some doubts as to what those people considered the 'real world'.

Nevertheless, he was going to have to risk it at some point, and with no interference from the demon in the previous week, he was feeling better about the situation. Thus, the next morning, Shigeo and the group of young adults made their way to the temple of Murill the Dreamer.

"Greetings, Shigeo," said the priest standing watch in the entranceway, tipping his head to the famous adventurer despite his eyes being fixed firmly on Greenhair. "And to you three as well. Damien, I expect? But you two, I do not know. I was not aware of any elves visiting the town."

Greenhair was thankfully looking less obviously emaciated now. He still had a way to go, but the worst of it was hidden under clothing, and since no-one here had dealings with elves, no-one realised his gaunt face was unusual.

"I'm Lana. Pleased to meet you," said the first of their new residents, giving a curtsy.

"Greenhair, likewise," said the elf.

"And as you guessed, I'm Damien," added the last of the trio. "We're here for [Mindscape]."

"Of course," said the priest, observing the amount of money Shigeo was putting into the donation box. Having experienced the benefit of being on the temple's good side, he was already generous, but this time he had an additional motivation. "Let me show you to a room," added the priest, guiding them to a small chamber with four beds, instead of the hospital-ward like room they used for the general public.

Another flicker of doubt passed through Damien's mind as he wondered why preferential treatment was given based on who could afford the biggest donations, rather than those who most closely followed the temple's teachings. That seemed unfair, but given that it kept him out of sight while he was potentially about to meet a demon, he wasn't going to complain.

At least people couldn't buy high-tier classes. Damien briefly imagined a world in which the tier class you received was based on the size of the donation to the priests performing the ceremony of paths, and decided he liked it even less than the actual, mostly hereditary state of affairs.

"If you would please lie down, I shall perform the prayer," said the priest.

"Ah, I'm just here to keep an eye on them. Just on those three, please," said Shigeo as the others took their places on the beds and closed their eyes. Despite never having experienced the prayer first-hand, it was common enough that all knew what to expect.

The priest nodded and began a chant, his voice taking on an ethereal, echoing quality as Damien's body grew heavy and his consciousness faded.

The first thing he noticed was the breeze. He was indoors, so why was there a breeze? His eyes slowly opened, still feeling heavy and unresponsive, but all he could see was a sea of blindingly bright blue. It took a few more seconds for his brain to kick in, and inform him he was lying on his side on grass. He pushed himself upright, feeling nothing but astonishment when he realised the blue was the sky. It was completely the wrong colour! He looked up in wonder, slamming his eyes shut when an unbelievably bright yellow disk came into view, so much brighter than the source-lights that he couldn't even bear to look at it.

And the thought of the source-lights made him realise they weren't there. Nor was the bowl. He spun around, but could see nothing but the grassy field in which stood a single, leafless tree, with no ocean or other distant islands in sight. There was nothing but the alien blue sky all around, a full hemisphere of it without the walls of the bowl, with the light coming from the iridescent disk above.

"Woah, this dream is weird," Damien muttered, wondering where in this foreign landscape he was supposed to view his status.

The grass rustled, ripples visible across the meadow, moving around in directions that seemed to have nothing to do with the breeze. And then the giggling started. High pitched and childlike, coming from all around, but nothing visible to Damien as he spun around in fright.

"He thinks this is a dream," came a child's voice from behind him. He twisted, once again finding nothing there.

"A dream. A dream," giggled another voice, again right behind him.

"Who's there?" shouted Damien. This wasn't the demon, but it didn't seem any more friendly.

"If this is a dream, then aren't we you?" asked another of the voices. From the sounds of giggling, there were dozens of the things, at minimum.

"But you said this wasn't a dream? Where am I?"

"You shouldn't listen to voices in your head, silly!"

Damien resisted the urge to start yelling, walking towards the tree instead, on the basis that it was the only obvious feature in the strange landscape. It felt like if he picked a direction and kept walking, he'd fall off an edge. The world shouldn't just end in every direction like that; he should be able to see the entire rim of the bowl!

"Aww... He's angry!"

"Of course he is. You called him silly!"

Damien ignored the nonsensical voices, looking up at the tree instead. It felt... important, somehow, as if it had a connection to him.

It had twenty-one branches, something which Damien knew before he'd even counted them. Four of the branches each held a single bud. Buds that were ready to bloom into flower, if only he gave them a push.

"This is my status," he realised.

Over level twenty in less than two weeks! Damien quickly worked through the maths. The experience cost to level doubled every ten levels, which meant level fifty would take about three and a half months, while level eighty would take... Wishing for some paper, he had to approximate a little, but he was fairly sure it was a couple of years. Assuming they kept the same experience rate, anyway; it would likely drop off once dragon materials ran out. Not a huge timescale, given the rewards that waited at the end of it.

Hopefully, the other two were doing just as well.

"He thinks this is a dream, but that his status is real," laughed a voice, and instantly the giggling doubled in volume.

"A fool! A fool! The thieves made fools of them all!"

Damien's attention was caught by the familiar word.

"What did you..." he started as he spun around, then gasped as he saw the rift in the meadow. A crack, a metre across at most, but stretching away from the tree as far as he could see. It certainly hadn't been there earlier.

It was deep. From the side, he could see no bottom to it. Cautious, he knelt alongside it and looked straight down into the chasm.

At the bottom, he saw sky-green. A cloud drifted past far below him, upside-down.

"Return! Return from one dream to another," giggled a voice, and Damien felt powerful arms shove him forward. Leaning over the rift as he was, he had no hope of stopping himself, and toppled into the crack. He stuck out his arms to brace himself, but despite the hole being only a metre wide, he didn't seem able to reach the edges. The green sky beneath him grew larger as the blue behind him receded, becoming nothing more than a thin sliver on the other side of the rift.

His eyes snapped open back in the temple.

"Welcome back," came the voice of Shigeo. "Did everything go okay?"

Damien took a few seconds to collect himself, the rustling to the side of him suggesting he wasn't the only one who'd woken up. "I think so? On the bright side, that didn't show up, but I can't say I was expecting it to be so... trippy. I dreamed of a place where the sky was blue, and I was stuck on a field of grass floating in the middle of nothing. Level twenty-one, though."

"Nice."

"I have reached twenty," came the voice of Greenhair.

"Twenty-three," said Lana, eliciting an impressed whistle from Damien. She hadn't touched the dragon, and, aside from a few experiments, hadn't even been using adamantite. Perhaps relying on high-tier materials wasn't the optimal levelling solution? It wasn't as if he could melt fabric and pour it into moulds, though.

Or could he? He'd heard that rubber existed in a liquid form. That couldn't be reused, but if there was something that could... There was some pretty weird stuff out there, so it might be worth checking with Viscount Flemming.

Greenhair was going to be the real problem, though. Potion making simply lacked the flexibility of the other two crafts. Not that reaching level twenty was in any way slow, but he was likely to remain the tail of the three.

Actually, that seemed grossly unfair. Since elves vastly outlived humans, why did they level at the same speed? Wouldn't all older elves end up with capped levels? Damien thought they should have an experience divider applied, but given his current situation, in which he was relying on the levelling speed of an elf, he wasn't going to complain about it.

In the worst case, Damien and Lana could exceed level eighty, leaving Greenhair to remain at a lower level, and it would balance out.

The group of four headed back to their seaside home in high spirits. The thought of needing to keep their efforts up for two years before they could start selecting feats was a bit daunting, and Damien would certainly be bored to heck by the end of it, but it was possible. Their rate of progress was astounding. Even the Illuganasis deaths could be viewed in a positive light; the fact that someone thought the experiments worth killing over implied that they knew there would be no unexpected caps or roadblocks.

The group arrived home, and Damien once again took up his needle.