Chương 9: Milestones

HAVE HUMAN REMAINS BEEN FOUND IN HEALTH POTIONS?! The Grave Report SHOCKING revelations from our underground sources suggest that the "healing potions" sold openly in every apothecary may contain ingredients TOO HORRIFYING to print, but we're printing them anyway! A whistleblower former apprentice at a renowned downtown alchemy guild claims that the shimmering red tincture you swallow every morning "doesn't get that color from crushed rosehips, I'll tell you that much for free!"

He went on to explain that the red actually comes from cherry juice, which is, of course, what he would say if he were terrified for his life. Are the city's potion-makers secretly grinding up the bones of MISSING PERSONS to stretch their batches and fatten their coin purses? What are they HIDING? Officials insist the claims are "unfounded" and "dangerously irresponsible," but that's EXACTLY what they'd say if they were in on it, isn't it?!

One grieving widow told us her husband drank a vitality elixir daily for YEARS before he died in a tragic carriage mishap. COINCIDENCE?! Wake up, citizens of the shared city: that spoonful of "medicine" could be your neighbor... or worse, it could be YOU someday. Distrust everything. Spread the word before THEY silence us all! Varran Ghost, the guild clerk of the remote village, Dunkelhollow, read the article, shaking his head.

"I always knew it," he said, shaking his head. The twentieth new goblin was born. The tribe was now forty in total. He had begun to notice the pattern. The tree's spawning cycle tracked the dungeon's overall health, accelerating when mana ran freely through the root system and slowing when the warren was under strain. In the flush weeks after the siege, it had settled into a three-to-four-day rhythm for every new goblin, each pod swelling and splitting with the cadence of a line running at capacity.

[SYSTEM NOTICE] Passive Territory Expansion Triggered Radius: 300m → 400m Cause: Population density threshold reached The boundary that defined the limits of his world pushed outward, and the dungeon sense rushed into the new space like water filling a vessel. He could feel the stream past the bend where it had always vanished from his awareness. He could feel a section of the southern slope that had been outside his perimeter, the stone denser than the northern bedrock and shot through with mineral veins.

Beyond the shifting treeline, he caught the faint impression of open ground that might have been a meadow. He could feel the stalks of the plants growing in the farm, which was now fully within his reach. In his old life, a few hundred meters was the walk from the office door to the parking lot. Here it was the difference between a territory that could sustain a warren and one that could grow it. The tree was not finished.

Matthew felt the shift before he saw it, a structural vibration that ran up through the stone floor and into his chest. The branches trembled from something internal, and the ornaments clinked against each other. [SYSTEM NOTICE] Dungeon Milestone Achieved: 10, 000 Mana has been gained in total! Reward: New Monster Type Unlocked Ten thousand mana. Every point that had passed through his core since he woke in this body was counted by a system that tracked everything like a spreadsheet.

Kills, absorption, the slow work of the farms and the drain on cocooned adventurers. The tree convulsed. Something was spat out and hit the floor with a heavy thump, rolled once, and sat up. The thing was a mushroom, which was the closest available description and yet not close enough. It was three feet tall. A thick, sturdy stalk topped with a wide, pointed purple cap that drooped at the edges like a witch's hat, two sizes too large.

The cap was mottled, nearly black at the center, fading to a sickly lavender at the rim, wet enough to catch the phosphorescent light. The creature had no arms or legs. In its flat face, a part of its stalk, two round yellow eyes sat on the front below the cap, and beneath them was a wide flat slash of a sharp mouth, currently closed, with the dimensions of something that could open considerably wider than the face containing it. The eyes blinked independently of each other.

The mouth worked silently, testing the mechanics of its own existence. NEW MONSTER TYPE UNLOCKED MUSH-MUSH A primitive mushroom monster capable of inflicting poison damage. It lives underground in dark environments. Mush-mushes are low-intelligence and high-defense monsters. Goblins and mush-mushes are symbiotic entities, sharing cave systems. mush-mushes feast on the scraps and filth goblins leave behind, thereby keeping the cave systems orderly.

In turn, they will often be used by goblins to blockade tight tunnel passages with their hard, poison-spore-emitting caps as barriers. Role: Support. Applies toxin during melee engagements, weakening enemy stamina and regenerative capacity. Cost: 20 Mana Upkeep: 0. 02 Mana/hour [SYSTEM NOTICE] Non-Goblinoid Monsters Your dungeon is capable of producing simple, non-goblinoid-type monsters of the [Dark/Water] hierarchy.

These are generally cheaper to maintain in upkeep but are less versatile in their utility as individuals. Generally, goblins synergize with their co-monsters. Matthew looked at the mush-mush. The mush-mush looked back, tracking him with the slow focus of something intelligent enough to feel that it was being watched. But that was about all that could be processed behind its large eyes. Nicole appeared at his side and studied it with her ears first, tilting and adjusting. The mush-mush stared back, unblinking.

"Tandaradei gives," Nicole said. The certainty in her tone, though, was absolute. Goblin logic ran simple. Nicole raised her arms.

"Tandaradei!" The word rang through the chamber and into the tunnels, and goblins came from every passage. They saw the mushroom monster sitting on the floor with its yellow eyes. They saw Nicole with her arms up. The sound that went through them built into a chant.

"Tandaradei! Tandaradei! Tandaradei!" Stolen story; please report. Arms went up. Feet stamped. The core chamber filled with goblins praising their king. He didn't really do anything. It was mostly the tree that did all the hard work. But he was happy to take the credit with a friendly wave. The mush-mush, surrounded by loud, unpredictable creatures in a cave, did the reasonable thing. It hopped away. The stalk compressed like a spring and launched it several feet sideways into the crowd. The goblins scattered.

It landed, bounced, hopped again toward the wall, found a cluster of wild roots growing from a crack in the stone, and latched on. The flat slash of its mouth opened, useless for combat and perfectly adequate for gnawing, and it began to eat. It was, Matthew decided, the perfect employee. Cheap and specialized, with no ambition that would create friction with the existing workforce.

It was the low-level call center employee who was good enough at their job to keep it but not good enough to move anywhere else, so they would be there for the rest of their lives. A drone. Exactly what every business wanted. The goblins did not understand the concept of an office, which was unsurprising, because they did not understand privacy well to begin with. Goblins were a hyper-communal species that did everything together.

The idea that a person would voluntarily separate from the group was, to a goblin, roughly equivalent to voluntarily not eating. Technically possible, but indicative of a malfunction in the brain. Their numbers were their only strength, after all.

'In the wild', so to speak, a goblin that separated willingly from the rest was suicidal. But Matthew needed somewhere to think, and he could not think in the core chamber, which was a public space and a spawning ground and now a mushroom habitat all at once. He could not think in the barracks, which were full of goblins, or the hallways, which were full of Rick, or the nursery, which was full of literal slobbering babies.

So he carved himself a small chamber off the main corridor, halfway between the core chamber and the barracks. TERRITORIAL MANIPULATION: ACTIVE New Chamber: Office Cost: 3 Mana Mana: 61 / 1, 000 Eight feet by six, high enough that he didn't have to duck, with flat stone walls. As for the interior, he had Sarah's team build the furniture from his sketches with their usual no-questions-asked efficiency. Of course, they didn't actually know how to formulate questions.

The desk was a stone slab on two stone legs, rough but level. The chair was a split and hollowed log with a backrest lashed on with fiber cord. It was uncomfortable, but it was a chair in a room with a door that closed. Luxury. Matthew sat down and leaned back. The wood creaked under his weight. The desk sat empty in front of him. The room was quiet. It felt like being home. He closed his eyes. Matthew had known he needed this for weeks. The goblin king thought about the things he had been too busy to think about.

Then, as if summoned by his attempt to find inner peace, he began hearing footsteps approaching from the outside already. Matthew reached down and picked up a long, thin rock from the floor. It was roughly the size and shape of a phone. He held it to his ear like a phone.

"Nicole. Get me my ten o'clock." The words were absurd and he knew it. There was no ten o'clock and no assistant outside a glass wall waiting to route his calls. The gesture was a fossil of a life that no longer existed, performed by a man on a log in a room carved out of rock. It felt right anyway. Sure enough, the door opened. Nicole appeared in the doorway. She had not knocked, because goblins obviously didn't know about such conventions.

Confused, she stopped and studied the scene: Matthew in a chair, behind a desk, holding a rock to his head, talking to nobody.

"Tandaradei," she said. She chewed on the next part, her mouth working around the shape of it.

"You... do game." Matthew stared at her. The words came out rough and misshapen, produced by a throat that was not built for Common and a mind still assembling its vocabulary one word at a time. They were also a sentence, with a subject and a verb and an object. He felt rather proud, actually. Her mind was sharpening the more she gained power. Goblins were rather simple to improve. One just had to feed them. This was one of the universe's mercies for him.

"Goblin hungry," Nicole finished. He could see the effort in her face, the concentration of someone hunting for words in a language she had learned entirely by listening. She found what she wanted.

"Many goblin. Many hungry. No game. You give goblin no hungry." Her eyes were hard and bright and fixed on his, and the glare belonged to a manager delivering a performance review to someone who was not performing.

"Nicole eat Tandaradei." The syntax was wrong. The sentiment was clear. He laid the rock phone flat on the desk as if hanging up. Stone clicked against stone.

"You know, Nicole, I like that you aren't afraid of speaking truth to power." Matthew folded his hands in front of him, letting the tone carry what the words could not.

"Boardrooms fill up with yes-men, and it drags them under because nobody has the guts to say what everybody's thinking." He shook his head.

"You've got what it takes to make it far in this company." Nicole grunted. She had no idea what he was saying or talking about. The words were sounds in patterns her vocabulary could not parse. But the tone was legible. Matthew stood, ready to get back to it. The chair creaked.

"Goblins hungry," he agreed. They were a wonderful fifteen seconds of peaceful quiet while they lasted. In Dunkelhollow, the farmer, Sarais Hexenfrau stood at the Adventurers' Guild counter with a burlap bag at her feet and an expression just as empty. The bag had held twenty-two rabbit pelts, processed and leathered, fur clean and hide soft, prepared by someone who knew the work. Dunkelhollow was not a proper town, and the Adventurers' Guild was not a market.

But it was all that existed out here in the backwaters, at least as far as the legitimate market was concerned.

"Oh, these are good furs," said the receptionist, flipping through them. He was heavy-set and balding, and the guild badge on its leather cord was likely the only jewelry he would ever own.

"We'll give you a hundred for the bag." Sarais stared. A hundred, for twenty-two pelts. That was awful.

"I didn't know you got into trapping," he added, peering at her. The look on her face made the arithmetic clear: they were worth three times that, and that already allowed for the margin the guild would take reselling them somewhere with actual buyers. Seeing her expression, he lifted his hands, palms out, the gesture of a man following a policy that was not open to negotiation.

"Hey, if you want to sell them somewhere else..." He let it hang. There was nowhere else, obviously. This was frontier country, where the guild was the only game in town if you were doing things by the books. They subsidized the outposts and kept them supplied and, in exchange, took a cut of everything that moved through their halls. Trappers and farmers alike sold to the guild, and the guild sold onward at a markup that would embarrass a city merchant.

"Tell you what. You do good work." He leaned forward, dropping into a confidential register.

"A hundred in coin, in hand. Or one-fifty marked straight off your debt." The same math it always was. Take the cash and keep treading water, or take the reduction and sink slightly slower. The interest was compounding at eight percent a season. She had to get rid of it fast. Sarais chewed on nothing, her jaw working, a habit that surfaced when she was angry and did not intend to show it. Showing anger in a guild hall as a dark elf on the frontier would be a problem.

"This is unfair, Varran," she said. Flat, factual, delivered by someone who had said it before and expected to say it again and knew the saying changed nothing.

"Hey. You should be glad we're giving you anything." His voice shifted into something worse than hostility, the casual dismissiveness of a man invoking history.

"Five years ago, you'd be in a noose with the rest of your kind." He looked her over while he said it, indifferent rather than cruel. Her jaw kept working. Her eyes held his a beat longer than they needed to, and then she looked away.

"Put it to the debt."

"Very good. Only four years and some left, then." He scratched a mark into the ledger, the pen loud in the quiet hall, and turned the book to show her.

"Maybe quicker, if you keep bringing furs in with your crop." He flipped the ledger shut, and the silence afterward belonged to a completed transaction with a customer who had not yet left.

"Oh, by the way." He pulled a note from the stack beside the ledger.

"That goblin problem you posted about. It's, uh..."

"It's handled," Sarais interjected. He looked up.

"Pardon?"

"Yeah. Your team handled the warren. The four of them." Her face stayed composed, her voice level.

"They bunked at my farm the night they finished and headed northwest the morning after. Sounded like they were going to the city." His eyebrows rose in surprise.

"Oh! Well, then... That's not like Kohnrad at all." Sarais shrugged, lifting her hands.

"Between you and me?" She dropped into the same confidential register he had used on the furs.

"I think they found something big. Didn't want to give the guild its cut." His face changed, the calculation visible behind his eyes. Adventurers skipping town on a valuable find was uncommon rather than unheard of, and guild policy on unreported discoveries was specific and punitive. If Kohnrad had found something in that warren worth more than a bounty on twenty pairs of goblin ears, the guild's interest shifted.

"I see. Thank you," he said. She turned to go. Two steps, and his voice caught her.

"Oh, we also sent a second team. Three people. Did you see them too, by any chance?" She stopped with her back to him, which she was grateful for, because her face did what it wanted for half a second before she got hold of it.

"Told them the same thing," she said steadily.

"They probably went after them. After Kohnrad's group, I mean. Same direction." Sarais walked out, and the receptionist watched her go. He stood behind his counter, fingers tapping slowly against the wood. The tapping stopped. He had a job to do here and something was getting in the way of that. His employer would have an issue with him if he didn't get a wrangle on this and her soon.

Varran Ghost looked across the hall at three men sitting near the wall, nursing drinks with the idle, available posture of guild contractors between jobs. He raised one finger.

"Gentlemen. A word?"