Chương 16: Chapter 15: Storm Prep

DO HUMANS HATE FAIRIES?! The Truth About Why Humanity Lets Cats Outside! The Grave Report: Fairy Edition SHOCKING revelations have emerged from our two-year investigation into humanity's most sinister open secret: cats. Yes, cats. Those whiskered, purring assassins that humans invite into their homes, feed, cuddle, and then RELEASE onto our streets in their THOUSANDS. Coincidence? We think NOT.

Every fairy knows the ancient truth: cats hunt us, stalk our mushroom circles, bat at us like toys, and sit outside our hollows for hours, and what do the humans do? They stroke the beasts that just murdered a family of five and call them "Mr. Whiskers." One high-ranking source in the Queen's Guard claims cat attacks on fairies have risen 300% in a decade, yet NOT A SINGLE human has ever been prosecuted.

Ask yourself, dear reader: if elves released dragons into human districts every morning, would there not be riots? But when the fairy-folk complain, humans laugh. Is it ignorance, or is it a coordinated campaign of terror, a silent pogrom conducted through disposable paws? Wake up, sisters and brothers of the hollow hills. The humans know exactly what they've done. And as one frightened grandmother whispered to this reporter before vanishing: "They don't let the cats out because they love them.

They let them out because they hate US." The Grave Report demands answers. Before it's too late. She had to get ready for work. The fairy sighed, rubbing her face as she turned, looking out of the window. What if there was a cat out there today? She'd better fly the long way to work, just to be safe. The pressure dropped in the air.

Matthew felt it through the dungeon sense before he had words for it, as a shift in the low constant field of awareness that radiated from him through the stone and root systems of his territory. The air was heavier. Soil moisture had climbed overnight. The fungal patch was reacting, pale roots extending fractionally further than usual, bioluminescence brightening in the humidity, and the stream running faster than the day before. That was the detail that turned abstract data into a prediction. A storm was coming.

Matthew stood at the palisade entrance and felt the pressure in his chest, the dungeon sense translating atmospheric data into an approximation of a forecast. It was imprecise. He could not read wind speed or the specific hour of arrival. But he could feel that it was coming and that it was large. He went out to the farm. He tried to only ever visit at night. That was established, the pattern they had fallen into since the last incident. It was better, a smaller risk.

Matthew came after dark, moving through the forest in the quick, silent lope. Night visits kept the goblin presence off the roads and away from anyone who might travel the frontier tracks and report what they saw. He found her by lantern light, sitting in an approximation of her old, little cabin. It was small but sturdy. Matthew rasped at the window, made out of reused dark glass that hadn't blackened fully.

She looked up and then approached, throwing a longer shawl over the top of her night gown before opening the window.

"Matthew."

"Storm's coming," Matthew said plainly, looking out over the field, swaying in the wind.

"Your field has no drainage for that." She raised an eyebrow, looking at him and then out into the night. It was very late.

"The runoff from the hillside will come straight through the rows. The topsoil washes out, the tubers uproot, and you lose the crop." Sarais stood and wiped her hands on her trousers, the habitual gesture of a woman who was always dirty and had stopped caring. Her face gave nothing back in the lantern light.

"What do you want, Matthew? I can't stop the rain from falling. We've had storms here before. I'll manage." The goblin king looked at the farming woman. He lifted his hands.

"I'm offering capital improvement."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning I have an ability that reshapes terrain inside my territory. Your farm is inside my territory," he said. He could tell she took offense to that claim, so he quickly lifted his hands.

"Spiritually speaking," he pseudo-clarified. It was her land and any sense that it wasn't was going to upset her.

"I can build drainage channels and diversion berms that route the runoff around your crop and into a collection point. I can do it all tonight." She gave him the look she had been giving him since the day they met. Measured disdain.

"I don't need more goblin charity," replied Sarais.

"Charity? Please. I don't pay tithes and I don't donate to charity," said Matthew.

"Organized scams. Do you know how much they sell the blood that they collect from you for free for?" he began, ready to go on a rant. She had no idea what he was talking about. How could she? That was from another world. He shook that off.

"Call it risk mitigation. If your crop washes out, I lose my only supplier. If I lose my supplier, I lose my entire operation. You and this infrastructure investment protect my supply chain." He looked back at her.

"You just happen to benefit from it as a side effect."

"You have an answer for everything."

"I have a rationale for everything. The answer is simpler. A storm is coming, you aren't ready, and I can help." Sarais looked at the field. Her hands went through her tired face as she thought about it. She didn't like the idea of someone touching her operation, even if she understood the vulnerability of it. He understood that.

"Do it," she said.

"But you're paying for any damaged produce." He started at the edges. Outside, Territorial Manipulation worked exactly as it always did inside the warren. It worked anywhere in his territory. Matthew pushed. The ground responded, flowing and reshaping under his hands like a potter's work. He began with the diversion channels, shallow trenches cut at angles to the rows, designed to catch the hillside runoff and route it along the field's perimeter instead of through it.

Six inches deep and twelve wide, lined with packed clay he drew up from the subsoil and smoothed. They were functional, the engineering equivalent of a roof gutter, and the difference between having one and not having one was the difference between a dry field and a flooded one. TERRITORIAL MANIPULATION: ACTIVE Terrain Modification: Diversion Channels (4) Cost: 80 Mana Mana: 1, 677 / 2, 000 Eighty mana. Very expensive, but the farm was big.

Working such a large space took much more effort than making a tiny, goblin-sized room. The channels would need periodic maintenance as the clay cracked and eroded, and that was the cost of infrastructure. Then the berms. Raised mounds of soil and stone along the downhill edge, a secondary barrier for whatever the channels could not carry. Matthew shaped them from fieldstone and subsoil, packing the material dense and hard, angling the surface to deflect water from the nearby streams instead of absorbing it.

Two feet high, three feet wide, running the full length of the field's lower edge. TERRITORIAL MANIPULATION: ACTIVE Terrain Modification: Runoff Berms (continuous) Cost: 60 Mana Mana: 1, 617 / 2, 000 He worked through the night. The channels and berms would keep the water off the crop, and they created a secondary opportunity his logistics brain could not ignore. The water had to go somewhere. Diverted from the field, it would concentrate at a collection point. That could be used. A small fishing pond was made.

Not only would it provide drainage from rainfall, but it would also help keep Sarais away from the goblin's prized stream to the west. The last thing he needed was for his people to get into a conflict with his only worldly contact because she caught a trout from their sacred stream. TERRITORIAL MANIPULATION: ACTIVE Terrain Modification: Fishing Pond Cost: 6 Mana Mana: 1, 611 / 2, 000 FARM UPGRADED Reservoir Constructed! A large pond used to hold runoff rainwater.

It helps prevent flooding and, during hot days, acts as a source of easily accessible water. Fish and small animals are likely to find themselves a home here. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. The watermill was a tribe project and it was a great teaching moment for him.

Sarais watched from the porch, her face saying she had no idea what she was watching happen as the goblins rolled a massive, stone boulder past her house that Matthew shaped into a large grinding wheel. Matthew brought a construction crew to the surface for the first time, six goblins under Linda, who had been Sarah's apprentice and had absorbed enough to run a site. Although she lacked Sarah's intuitive grasp of load distribution. — Life really did sometimes give people the oddest talents. The mill was small.

A vertical wooden wheel positioned in the runoff channel where the diverted water collected, fed by the secondary outlet stream that always flowed along the field's north edge. The wheel turned a stone-grinding platform that could process grain or pulp tubers. This was the pinnacle of goblin engineering. His people had never seen anything like it. Honestly, he felt like he could do better himself. But for the tools he had, it was halfway decent. It was hard to teach them things outside, though.

Goblins didn't like being above ground, he noticed. Being above ground meant the sky and the disorienting openness of a world without walls. FARM UPGRADED Water Mill Constructed! A simple water mill. Powered by the flow of a nearby stream and runoff overflow from the farm's water reservoir, the water mill turns a grinding wheel that can be used in a variety of processes. The fence was the last piece. Matthew stood at the property line where the field met the forest.

Most of the boundary was marked by a low ditch and a row of posts Sarais had cut from saplings and driven in by hand years ago. The fence was functional but weak, enough to discourage deer and useless against a determined predator or a curious human. The only good part of the fence was the one she had built after their first meeting and it separated her farm from the forest. He could build a wall.

Territorial Manipulation could raise a stone from the bedrock, a continuous solid rock barrier three feet high and two feet thick, the kind of fortification that would stop anything short of a siege engine. It would be highly effective. It would also be obviously, unmistakably a magically created project, and an obviously fortified farm on the frontier would draw exactly the attention Matthew could not afford. He consulted Sarais on the matter.

She understood the question immediately because she had been working from the direction of a woman whose survival depended on not attracting attention for years now.

"The guild would send someone else inside a month," she replied.

"Don't need that. Wherever the hell Varran is… I can feel trouble brewing in the air already, Matthew."

"What if it looked like a field fence? Stone posts and crossbeams, low enough to step over and sturdy enough to keep out animals." She considered.

"That's just a fence. People have fences."

"Stone fences are better than wood fences."

"Stone fences are more expensive than wood fences."

"I'm not charging you."

"You never charge me. That's the part I can't figure out," she said, eyeing him up and down.

"Is that a problem?"

"It's suspicious, Matthew." He shrugged.

"The ditches, I understand. You have an interest in me being able to help you. But the watermill? The fence?" she asked.

"That's extra. What are you after here?" Matthew looked at her, disarmed in tone.

"Can't a man just want to help his neighbor out of the goodwill of his heart?"

"No. Not in these times he can't," replied Sarais, adjusting her shawl as they stared each other down.

"Just make it look natural, okay?" she said.

"No… smooth walls. Make it chunky and rough. It has to look like I made it myself."

"Yes, ma'am," he replied. With that in mind, he went out and built the fence. TERRITORIAL MANIPULATION: ACTIVE Terrain Modification: Perimeter Stone Fence Cost: 120 Mana Mana: 1, 491/2, 000 FARM UPGRADED Perimeter Fence Constructed! A continuous property fence, made out of natural stonework. It is rustic and sturdy. It acts as a deterrent to foraging animals and people, as well as a minor wind break.

Three feet high, built from field stone raised out of the bedrock and shaped into rough posts that were lined with unstripped logs. It looked like something a farmer with more labor than money had built by hand over several seasons.

"It's good," Sarais said to him.

"Looks like shit." The words were unadorned and they were the most positive thing she had ever said about any of Matthew's work.

"Exactly as the customer specified," he replied. They sat on the porch after the work was done. The sky was overcast, the clouds thick and low, the pressure still falling. The storm was hours away, and the air had the charged waiting quality that came before heavy rain. Goblins ran, covering their heads away from the farm and back toward the forest. Jackson turned around, looking back. Matthew waved to him from the house, gesturing for him to go on. They vanished, hopping over the stone fence.

Sarais had a cup of barley tea. Matthew did not.

"Matthew," Sarais said.

"Why do you care?" Matthew looked at the field.

"What? About the field? Like I said."

"No. The goblins," she replied.

"I mean, don't get me wrong. But they're not meant to be alive, I reckon." He looked at her.

"Bird can't find any worms, it starves. Fish runs into a shark? It gets eaten. That's how nature works. Goblins?" she asked, leaning back on her chair.

"Goblin meets a man, it gets beat down right quick." Sarais chewed for a moment before looking at him.

"Heaven knows I don't rightly know what you are exactly, Matthew. But you ain't no goblin. So why do you care about them?" She waved at him with a hand.

"You're more man than goblin. How'd that happen?" Matthew sat there, thinking about it. His hands were folded as he leaned back, his index fingers tapping together.

"My… warren," he began.

"is a struggling department. Your farm is a struggling department. The world I'm in is a failing operation, and the failure isn't because the people in it are stupid or lazy. It's because nobody has ever built the infrastructure to let them succeed. Nobody built the drainage. Nobody built the school, or the trade routes, or the training programs." He shook his head.

"You want to know why I'm teaching goblins to read and write, Sarais?" he asked, looking at her.

"Because this world you all made," he began, pointing at her and then gesturing with his finger in a low circle.

"is a shithole." She sipped her tea. But the unexpected happened. She smiled. Not a lot. It was just a tiny hint on the corner of her lips. But it was the most he had ever seen from her. It was the suggestion that a smile might exist in the vicinity if the circumstances were different and the person considering it were less tired and less dependent on a seven-foot goblin for her survival.

"It's nicer near the cities. You should go see them some time," she said.

"There's actual civilization there. It's not like out here, near Dunkelhollow."

"I don't think that's a good idea," replied the goblin king, plainly. She exhaled through her nose and took a sip of the tea. The sky rumbled in the distance. Thunder, afar but approaching. He watched the sky rolling.

"What I do best is set up the things that let other people do their best. It's good for them, and what's good for them is good for me." Sarais looked at him for a long time. The lantern flickered between them, the wind was picking up, and the tea was going cold.

"You sound like you're running some merchants' guild operation," she said.

"Seems beneath a king, doesn't it?" Matthew thought for a second.

"Hey, crowns are usually made out of gold, right? I just happen to need to get my gold first," he replied.

"You want some tea?" she asked, already half finished with hers.

"No, thank you." He rose.

"I'd better get back. They're afraid of thunder, you know." She looked at him, surprised. Not so much at the information, as to how it was conveyed. It almost sounded like it had parental concern in it.

"Really?"

"Oh, yeah," he said.

"You'd be surprised how emotional they are about things. They look scarier than they really are once you get to know them. The one you killed? His name was John. He was a good man." Sarais sipped her tea for a moment, studying him. She lifted a finger, pointing at him.

"Matthew. They eat people," she replied, not moved in the least.

"Hey. I'm trying to get them to change their diets, okay? That's why I need you to get more of that harvest in," he explained. Matthew thought for a moment.

"Oh, Sarais. I need to ask. Are there any other dungeons in the area?"

"... Dungeons?" she asked.

"Uh, no. Well, it depends on what you mean by 'the area'?" she replied.

"City to the northwest, Weltbaum, has a dungeon in its center. But that's weeks from here by carriage."

"Is it demonic?"

"Demonic…?" she asked, confused. Sarais eyed him up and down.

"No, Matthew. It's a beginner dungeon," she shrugged.

"Sprites, slimes, a few pixies. The adventurers' guild loves it." Sarais sipped out the last of her cup.

"Most big cities out there have a dungeon in the middle of them. They farm the monsters inside for parts. It's how they got so big to begin with." Clever. From his perspective, it was rather grim. But from the perspective of the 'civilized world,' as it were, it was rather elegant. A dungeon was an endless mine of monster parts and resources. It makes sense that cities rise up around them. He could imagine an entire economy built around an endless goblin-producing machine.

It would be best if humanity never learned about the dryad tree. But it didn't help him identify what had attacked them.

"Some demons attacked us a little while ago," he said, feeling that he could trust her with this. In fact, maybe even she was at risk. He wasn't sure. Sarais looked concerned, which was more troubling than anything for him. She was a hard woman and nothing ever seemed to faze her.

"... Haven't heard of talk of demons since the war," she said, thinking for a moment. Matthew waited for more. Then: "You'd better go, Matthew. It's late." He wanted to protest. There was more here. But he could see that he wouldn't get it from her tonight. Matthew nodded. She nodded back.

"Oh, and Matthew. Thank you." Stepping off of the porch, Matthew waved over his shoulder, turning to make his way back toward the warren. The storm came. Matthew watched it from inside the palisade with the dungeon sense extended to its full radius, mapping the water's path through the territory he controlled. The channels worked. Runoff off the hillside hit the first diversion trench and turned, following the angle he had cut, flowing along the field's perimeter instead of through it. The berms held.

What overflowed the channels pooled behind them and accumulated at the collection point instead of washing through the rows. The collection point filled, the water reached the mill, and the wheel turned, the first rotation slow and grinding and then faster as the flow increased, the stone axle creaking as the mechanism engaged. The fence held. Something came out of the forest in the middle of the storm, driven toward the farm.

Whatever it was could not find a gap or push through, and it retreated into the trees, and the field went undisturbed. [SYSTEM NOTICE] Infrastructure Milestone: External Territory Improvement Projected Yield Increase (Next Season): +18% The numbers were small. But not small for the work of one single night. In that context, they were monumental. Infrastructure compounded. Every channel and every fence was a line item that paid dividends every season, every storm, for as long as it stood.

Looking down, he stared at the overflowing stream, rushing into the warren and into the dryad tree. It was flush and rich, its branches glistening as they swayed beneath the ground. The name tags on its branches rattled and clanked, like a wooden wind chime. The storm made it cold, the rushing water of the stream taking the heat of the air with it into the depths of the world. All beneath its boughs, his tribe sat quietly and stared up toward it as it swayed over their heads like a shielding mother.

They were huddled together in pockets, staying warm in small groups. They preferred to be out here tonight rather than in their bunks. Matthew made his way to them, sitting in their midst next to Nicole. She looked up at him and then leaned over, resting her head against his side. Above their heads rattled the wooden name tags of those many who came before, clamoring like the voices of ghosts.