Chương 217: (212) 3.77. We Will Be Asking The Questions

Vin didn't get quite as much progress on the artifact done as he would have liked, but that didn't mean he didn't achieve anything for his efforts. New spell learned! Tier 0 Water Spell (Sense Water). 2, 500 exp gained. Unsurprisingly, the inner workings of a lesser artifact were far more complicated than a minor one. Vin realized almost immediately his trick with uncovering the meaning behind the runic formation and dragging a copy of it over to his own personal mana wasn't going to work this time around.

Instead, he had to do things the painstakingly slow way of uncovering and rebuilding the formation piece by piece, which was how he learned Sense Water. However, his new passive did reveal itself to be quite helpful. Unlike the last few times Vin had delved into an artifact to try and learn from it, this time, the active runic formation seemed to dim and grow weaker once he began studying it, almost as if the artifact was actively trying to help him.

This meant it was far easier for him to work with the different sections without accidentally triggering the artifact or setting off some fragment of the spell, which was a nice change, as Vin wasn't actually certain if the act of drowning would even be enough to pull him from his Introspection. He definitely wouldn't have risked learning from this artifact if Lumel hadn't been close by, that was for sure.

By the time dinner came around, he'd managed to recreate the portion of the formation for Sense Water, and had fully uncovered the section for Create Water, which he already knew the spell for. All that was left was to finish unveiling and recreating the actual spell the artifact was imbued with, but that looked like it was going to take some time. Even Vin couldn't just learn a tier 2 spell in a single day. Not yet anyway.

He and Lumel enjoyed a fairly relaxing dinner of what looked like homemade loaves of bread packed tightly with fish and some sort of kelp that she had stored away in another dimension. He learned that one of Lumel's passives gave her own dimensional storage a stasis effect if she willed it, which meant the food looked as though it had been freshly made. Which was rather strange, as it was still dripping wet and a bit soggy.

"How do you guys have bread underwater…?" Vin muttered, squeezing his loaf and trying to work up the courage to bite into it.

"You'd have to ask my cousin," Lumel giggled, digging into her own meal.

"He's the royal Chef I told you about, the one closer to actually inheriting the throne than me? He's the one I got most of my meals from." Seeing Lumel dig into her meal with relish, Vin shrugged and tentatively took a bite of his own. While the bread was a little moist for his taste, it had a strangely dense texture that prevented it from becoming completely waterlogged somehow, and the tightly packed fish and kelp within were steaming and quite good.

Lumel laughed as he quickly took out his journal and tried to jot down his strange discovery in the almost-empty section of the pulmon fragment. The fact that her people had bread of all things underwater made absolutely no sense to him, and he hurried to try and record his findings. He didn't really know the first thing about cooking, but he was pretty certain making dough and baking it into bread underwater shouldn't have been possible.

Though in a world filled with magic and skills that defied all logic, he supposed a high level Chef could probably do whatever the hell they wanted. Vin put in a few more hours of work into uncovering the main spell imbued within the artifact before deciding to call it a night. While he certainly could work through the night and probably have the spell done by morning, it had been a particularly long day, and he wanted to get some actual sleep after their battle against the Red Dawn.

Bidding Lumel goodnight, Vin retreated back to Terra. He'd been surprised to find Alka's Slayer trainees working sans Alka on some late-night monster hunting practice within the forest dungeon, and after wishing them good luck, he made his way back to his apartment. Where he promptly found Scule tied up in a mass of branches and dangling upside down in the middle of their common room.

"Should uh… Should I come back later?" Vin asked, peering at Shia. The Druid had a wild grin on her face that showed off her rows of serrated teeth as she used her staff to keep Scule suspended.

"Vin! Help! She's gone mad!" Scule shouted, clearly struggling to escape from the dozens of tiny branches restraining him.

"She's already taken care of Reginald!"

"I paid him off with a hunk of cheese I got from one of the Chefs," Shia explained, nodding toward Scule's room.

"He's in a food coma at the moment." Sure enough, a quick peek into Scule's room was all Vin needed to spot the bloated rat happily snoozing away on his back with what remained of a giant piece of cheese clutched in his tiny paws. Carefully closing the door so as not to wake him, Vin turned back to his other companions, wondering where to even start. He was picking up on an interesting sensation that he didn't quite understand just yet, but before going into that, there was the current situation to deal with.

"Alright, I suppose let's start from the beginning. Why do you have Scule bound and hanging upside down?" Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"I'm trying to get answers about his family out of him of course," Shia said, looking at him as if it were obvious.

"He didn't want to talk about them, so I figured I'd try and encourage him."

"I told you, I don't talk to them much," Scule snapped, glaring at the elf. The effect was only slightly lessened by the fact that he was tied up and dangling upside down.

"I only swing by once a month to make sure they're still alive and to give them some stuff to sell. They don't work, so they rely on me to help out."

"Shia, you can't just torture him because he's small," Vin sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

"Could you put him down? And forget about the family stuff for now? He clearly doesn't want to talk about it."

"Size has nothing to do with this. This is how my master used to get information out of people that didn't want to talk to him," Shia argued. Even so, she withdrew her magic, decaying the branches and gently placing Scule down on the coffee table." Thank you," he huffed, fixing his clothes and frowning up at her.

"Watch yourself, elf. When you least expect it, I-""Do you want me to tie you up again?" Shia asked, raising an eyebrow.

"... anyway, what brings you here, Vin?" Scule asked, turning to look at him.

"Not that I'm complaining, of course."

"I live here," Vin said, laughing at the look on Scule's face as he recalled that very fact.

"Oh yeah. It's going to be weird actually living together. Especially when some people don't know how to be good housemates," Scule said, shooting Shia one final look.

"So, what did you guys get up to today? I gave Theodore another stealth lesson and worked on some poisons with Bill. I think he's got a real future as an Alchemist ahead of him from what I've seen."

"Regrowing the damage the Red Dawn did to the Sacred Forest took up most of my day. Then I visited some old friends," Shia said.

"What about you, Vin? Spend more time with Lumel?"

"Yep. Spent most of the day with her working on a new spell."

"Vin… You've got to learn to live a little," Scule said, his tone exasperated.

"I mean, you have a girlfriend now, and the two of you just work on magic all day? That's just… It's kinda sad."

"Scule, have you ever considered that Vin's love of magic is similar to your own love of poisons?" Shia asked, poking him with the butt of her staff.

"If you had someone you enjoyed spending time with and they wanted to work on poisons beside you all day, how would you feel?"

"Huh," Scule said, giving the scenario some actual thought.

"Fair enough. I concede the point."

"Speaking of the new place, have you guys actually seen Alka come in here yet?" Vin asked, peering through the open doorway of Alka's room and seeing it was completely untouched.

"Full disclosure, if Alka wasn't planning on using her room, I was thinking about offering it to Lumel. She's been living in the Underside for weeks now, and I think the isolation is starting to wear on her."

"I haven't seen her in here," Shia shrugged.

"She doesn't sleep, so that doesn't really surprise me. Though I did run into her earlier. She said tonight she was going to be working with her trainees in the forest dungeon. I think she's planning to pretend like she's an elite monster and try ambushing them when they let their guards down." Well, that would explain why I didn't see her, Vin thought, imagining the trainees screaming as Alka jumped them out of the darkness in her pitch black armor. Poor guys…

"Honestly, if Alka does want to keep her room for whatever reason, Lumel can take mine," Scule offered.

"It's unnerving trying to go to bed in such a giant space. I'm far more used to sleeping in tight nooks and crannies. I can just have one of the crafters build me like a small box or something and shove it in one of the corners of the common room."

"Thanks Scule, I appreciate it," Vin said, smiling at the petian.

"Though I do have one quick question for you… How many artifacts are you storing in your cape right now?"

"Huh?" Scule asked, giving him a confused look.

"What do you mean?"

"I picked up my level 35 passive today, and I ended up going with Artifact Extraordinaire. It means I can actually sense artifacts now, among other things," Vin explained.

"I discovered from Lumel that I can even pick up on artifacts stored in extradimensional spaces. And from the vibe I'm getting, there's at least one or two artifacts within your cape."

"That's a pretty useful trick, but I can promise you I haven't shoved any artifacts in here without telling you guys. I know how important they are for your experience," Scule said, raising his arms defensively when Shia frowned at him and lifted her staff menacingly.

"I'm not lying!"

"Maybe they were already in the bag when you first stole it from the citadel?" Vin offered, wondering what exactly he was sensing if Scule was telling the truth.

"No, I figured out pretty early on I can basically dump the full contents on a whim, and I tried that to be safe before using it. It was definitely empty when I stole it. And I've pretty much had it on me every waking moment since then. Maybe your new passive is broken?"

"The Red Dawn!" Shia exclaimed, snapping her fingers as her eyes lit up.

"Scule, that Artificer guy took your bag while we were taken captive! Remember how it took an hour for him to start working on Blossom and trigger her defense mode? We thought he was just experimenting with your bag, but he probably started using it himself!"

"That bastard!" Scule said, shaking a fist at the ceiling.

"If he hadn't already had his face viciously torn off, I'd kill him myself!"

"He had the bag tied to his belt when Blossom dragged him over, so that makes a lot of sense," Vin nodded.

"You didn't search the bag when you got it back?"

"Of course I did," Scule huffed.

"But you don't understand how it works. Basically, when I reach a hand in, the bag gives me the item I'm looking for. Unless I dump the entire thing out, if there's something in here I didn't store, I have no way of knowing. I only double checked to confirm all of my own stuff was still there."

"So the Artificer must have stored one or two of his own artifacts in there, and they've just been sitting in your bag for the last two weeks," Shia surmised, looking excited at the unknown treasures.

"Well come on then, dump it out!"

"I am not about to just dump my bag out here in front of you guys," Scule grumbled, reaching over his shoulder into it.

"Now that I know what I'm looking for, I think I should be able to… Yep, here we go." The three of them all waited with bated breath as Scule retrieved the unknown artifacts from his cape. The hidden and mysterious treasures were… A pair of boots and a broken knife.