John looked at the bird sitting on his hand as he returned home. The bird looked back, meaning that John was looking at himself. Thankfully, his brain had been magically adapted to not get a headache in this situation. ‘Man, I haven’t done this in a long time,’ he thought as he stepped off the mana street.
As the description of the item so tactfully pointed out, this bird had cost him a nice sum of money (and the promise to loudly announce in the tournament where he had gotten the bird from, at least once). However, compared to what he would have paid on the Abyss Auction, and he had checked, it was almost laughably cheap. Sure, he had to take a loan from the dollmaker, but it was either that or take the way back home without it.
Which wasn’t an option as far as John was concerned.
Aside from the reduced price, the advantage of buying the sparrow locally was a stupendous amount of customization. He had been able to tell the dollmaker what he wanted down to the finest detail. Guy would have changed individual strands on the feathers for the right price.
The most important things John had wanted had been the Camouflage and the True Sight. Having these Attributes made it harder to spot and in turn revealed somebody who was harder to spot. For an aerial spy unit, it was desirable to have these traits.
Emergency Barrier was something that came for free, apparently Gaia put part of the blame for having these dolls be discovered by normal humans on the makers. Not a lot of it, sure, but John understood why the dollmaker would rather not have some random bad luck in his daily life. Arcane Flapping was almost free; it allowed John to speed up the bird’s flight by sacrificing a sum of mana. The 2 was the amount of maximum mana the bird could save in itself; in the case of this Attribute, it was the level times 200, so 400.
One of the Hive was an Attribute that made possessing the target cost no Possession Slot. Now, sadly, that only saved him the one actually needed to use the Skill, not the several more Spellcarrier cost. It still meant that he could load up to two spells on the bird with his current limit of 3 Possession slots. Before, he had needed one to possess the target, one to make it a Spellcarrier and another one for the base spell.
Sturdy and Lightweight were simple and cheap filler. Nothing great about them, just neat to have.
The bird jumped up John’s arm until John sat on John’s shoulder, occasionally flying over to the opposite one as he used it to spy on things his eyes could not see. Sure, he could have had it fly around, but for the moment he’d much rather keep it around.
John wasn’t stupid enough to think that he could both use the bird to spot potential onlookers and have it go unnoticed, so keeping it this close meant nothing. ‘So, things I told my enemies today…,’ he thought as he was delivered to the mansion, ‘…I bought a doll and made it move through magical means, I have Siena, and I can heal, although they don’t know how. Unless there were more eyes on me as Undine did it. Well, this is a great way to get behind in the information war. Better grind up a little before I get into the house and listen to whatever speech Lydia has prepared.’
His eyes spotted two black and white dots in the distance. As he came closer, they quickly took the shape of Momo and Aclysia. The Artificial Spirits were waiting for their creator’s return. One of them was eagerly shifting in place, making sure that her hair was as silky and perfect as it inhumanely could be. The other had her arms crossed and tapped her foot on the floor in an impatient gesture, eyes fixed on an imaginary clock.
“There you are,” Momo’s harsh greeting came his way the moment he stepped off the mana street. She unfolded her arms and then a sheet of paper that she had been holding in her left hand. In a stern tone, she read out loud: “John Newman, I have seen the video in which you threaten everyone who is on your tail. While I understand the motivation behind it, I would prefer that you seek counsel with me before making use of such crude tactics. I leave this notice with Momo, so that she may tell you what an idiot you have been. Be sure, however, that this will be brought up again after dinner. Greetings, Lydia Augusta of house Hohenzollern.”
Momo folded the note again and gave it to John, who then in turn allowed Salamander to burn it. He really didn’t care.
“You have gone deep into the shit mire,” Momo told him. “The princess is pissed.”
“She will have to calm her tits,” John simply stated. “This matter I am not going to be lenient on.”
“While I understand, Master, I think you should strive to appease Lydia,” Aclysia humbly added her opinion.
“Yeah, John, while I generally agree that information brokers should just die in a massive fire, making Lydia angry over it is really not worth it,” Momo agreed, crossing her arms again.
John nodded, “Yeah, I don’t plan to anger Lydia more than is necessary. But this had to be done, the sooner, the better.”
“It would have been more impactful if you had left the woman crippled,” Momo told him with a heavy sigh. “Not that I like the idea of that. However, now everyone who hears about it will think of you as a big softy. Might be that your failure to be intimidating ensures someone actually tries despite your warnings, and then you will have to kill him or you will look weak.”
“I know,” he responded in a tired tone, “but I have shown my stance. If they chose to ignore my words, then that’s on them.” He tried not to show too much that he had no idea if he could go through with it if they tested him.
Aclysia nodded, “I support your decision on this, Master. There should never be another SB. Our privacy is more important than the life of some people who live off others' greed.”
“I just think you should have been more ruthless about this. If you have atrocities planned, commit all of them at once, as Machiavelli suggests,” Momo kept spelling out her thoughts.
John shrugged, he had nothing more to say about this matter. It had been a dirty deed, and he was just happy to have it over with. “Well, now that I have you two around,” John changed the topic and walked towards the mansion to empty his inventory, “how about we grind until dinner?”
“That sounds delightful,” Aclysia said with a faint smile, just happy to spend some time with him. “How was the shopping, Master?”
“Well, you can see the bird,” John said as he opened the door to his and Rave’s room. The techno-lover was not around right now, but the room had already seen the first changes in the shape of a ridiculously soft, pink carpet covering the floor and several cushions having been added to the bed, pink and black in colour. John caught the slightest smell of sweet peppermint, the scent of his girlfriend and her room back at home. ‘Damn you, Pavlov,’ John thought as blood rushed to his penis.
He ignored that for now. He had wasted enough time today having sex and really should finally get to getting himself some experience. Everything in moderation, even in this world of porncraft.
“Aside from the bird, the elementals wanted to spend some of their allowance,” John continued as he pulled useless crap from his inventory. Refusing to just search his memory for this information, and thus taking away the chance to listen to John with the keen interest only a learner of unknown facts could have, Aclysia listened.
“So, first we went by a nice shop that sold figures carved from stone. The shopkeeper was doing it live for onlookers, shaping stones with tools and earth magic. We stood there for about…ten minutes? Because someone was unusually interested. ‘This is so cool,’ Gnome told us, by accident, as she did her mumbling-to-herself-thing, ‘and sexy. I wish I could be thi-‘”
“S-s-s-s-stop!” Gnome interrupted as John pulled something from his inventory.
It wasn’t one of the figures. No, instead it was a book about the making of said figures. As John already knew a Skill to make figures in the shape of Craft, the book did not open a window for him, but it wasn’t for him anyhow. Gnome took it from him with a quick yank and cowered down, tugging the book between her legs and chest, hiding it from view.
“You are so mean!” she exclaimed, looking up to John with a slight bit of tears in her eyes. “I asked you to tell nobody!”
“I didn’t tell them anything they couldn’t have known by themselves. Besides, it’s useless to try and hide if you need to go outside to practice. You want to try and practice that, right?” John teased.
Gnome averted her eyes and let out the cutest little “Uwuwuwuwu” as she nodded.
John patted her on the head. “Good girl, now, as you don’t have a room, why don’t you put the book on the shelf over there? Wouldn’t want it to get lost, now would you?”
“No,” Gnome agreed and did as he suggested. She would have immediately started training, but with John wanting to go into an I.D. soon, that wasn’t really an option.
“Continuing on. After I bought that book for Gnome, we continued on to the dollmaker that made this bird. However, that wasn’t the only thing we bought there,” John pulled out an ensemble of little wooden ships. They were cheap, like 2000$ each, as the only enchantment on them was a slight self-propelling as long as they were in water. Basically, they were the Abyss equivalent to self-driving toy cars. Although, these had the advantage that they randomly switched course and didn’t collide with walls or anything.
The buyer of those items, Undine, bubbled up from the floor and looked at the boats with a silent smile, radiating happiness. Like Gnome, she was eager to use her newest acquisitions but had to wait.
“Undine wanted them to have something to look at while she bathed. Now, Salamander I had to talk out of just buying everything made from wood…”
“And I am still telling you, you should have listened to me!” the fire spirit wildly announced her arrival. “It would have made for a wonderful fire!”
“Silly Sally,” Sylph manifested with a smug twirl, “you don’t burn money, you spend it on the big two S’s in the life of you, the most important things that exist, the ever important and two constants in the life of everyone happy. Truly, these two S’s are the best reality has to offer. Sweeeeeeeeeeets…”
John pulled a kilogram of sweets from his inventory. Chocolate, marzipan, gelatine-based sweets such as gummy bears, cookies, waffles, cream puffs and everything in between, all neatly stored inside a container that kept everything from getting stale for at least a year. Turned out that the Abyss had its own sweet shops, where they made the sugary goodness from rather unusual materials. Such as blue sugar, won from arcane sugarcane. Of course, these sweets were under strict supervision by Gnome, so that Sylph wouldn’t be in a constant state of sugar-induced fever dreams (or ate all of them at once and overdosed).
That done, John pulled the second item that Sylph had wanted from his inventory. It was a set of fizzy vitamin tablets. He was still confused what the air spirit wanted with these; they were just regular fizzy tablets. As it turned out, he would find out right now.
“…and shenanigans!” Sylph shouted as she stormed at John’s hand.
The tablets, no longer confined within a now shredded plastic tube, were scattered through the air. With a giggle, Sylph grabbed one of them mid-flight and then, before anybody could stop her, plunged right into Undine.
As the remaining tablets joined Rave’s panties on the floor (they were still lying around from earlier, which was weird considering the floor had since been covered up by a carpet), John watched the one that Sylph hugged inside Undine.
First only a few, big bubbles gathered around it, but as the outer layer broke apart it soon became a thin stream of air that rose from Undine’s stomach to her head. John watched, speechless and fascinated, as the white pillar emerged from her head with a fizzing sound.
Sylph was grabbed by the stream and, made of air as she was, pulled up with it. “Hihihi, again, again!” she shouted as she emerged and, once again before anyone could react, grabbed another pill from the floor and flew right back into Undine.
This continued, everyone was too bamboozled by the scene to do anything. The sound of fizzing water and Sylph’s laughter, as Undine’s insides were turned from calm blue slime to a white striped ocean of rising bubbles, were the only things that were heard for a while.
Undine, who stood with her back to the group, started shaking. ‘Oh damn!’ John snapped out of his daze, ‘this might hurt and with Undine’s tendency to not tell anyone, this might be very bad! Sylph st-‘
His concern was silenced by a beautiful, clear sound ringing through the room.
It was too pure, absolutely innocent and untainted by any worries of life. The childlike laughter of the water spirit, whose voice was always like a melody, reverberated from the walls with an almost cleansing power as she fell backwards, holding her stomach.
“I-i-it tickles, hihihihihaha,” she exclaimed, her words underlined with an even louder whooshing sound, like the foam riding ocean waves and dispersing on the beach.
“You like it? You like it! I still have more to go, go!” Sylph gleefully announced and continued to use up all of the tablets.
“You know, the rest of us have to wait to play with our toys!” Salamander complained as Sylph continued her wild fizzle rides through Undine’s body. John, smiling as the carefree situation went on, pulled out what the blaze elemental had bought.
It was a graceful glass figure in the shape of an elf, ending at the hips, resting on a base made from black stone. The elf had extended a hand, from which an enchanted piece of rope extended and reached down all the way to the stone base, which had a depression to be filled with liquid. It was an extremely delicate and beautiful oil lamp.
John placed it on one of the three windowsills. If it were to be used, it was better off there. He also placed a bottle of particularly long burning, magical oil next to it. All the while the laughter of Undine, so seldom heard, and Sylph, never heard too much, still echoed through the room.
John sat down on the bed as he waited for the scene to pass by, grinding wasn’t a thing that needed to be hurried into. Not when there was so much beauty right there and then.
John looked at the bird sitting on his hand as he returned home. The bird looked back, meaning that John was looking at himself. Thankfully, his brain had been magically adapted to not get a headache in this situation. ‘Man, I haven’t done this in a long time,’ he thought as he stepped off the mana street.
As the description of the item so tactfully pointed out, this bird had cost him a nice sum of money (and the promise to loudly announce in the tournament where he had gotten the bird from, at least once). However, compared to what he would have paid on the Abyss Auction, and he had checked, it was almost laughably cheap. Sure, he had to take a loan from the dollmaker, but it was either that or take the way back home without it.
Which wasn’t an option as far as John was concerned.
Aside from the reduced price, the advantage of buying the sparrow locally was a stupendous amount of customization. He had been able to tell the dollmaker what he wanted down to the finest detail. Guy would have changed individual strands on the feathers for the right price.
The most important things John had wanted had been the Camouflage and the True Sight. Having these Attributes made it harder to spot and in turn revealed somebody who was harder to spot. For an aerial spy unit, it was desirable to have these traits.
Emergency Barrier was something that came for free, apparently Gaia put part of the blame for having these dolls be discovered by normal humans on the makers. Not a lot of it, sure, but John understood why the dollmaker would rather not have some random bad luck in his daily life. Arcane Flapping was almost free; it allowed John to speed up the bird’s flight by sacrificing a sum of mana. The 2 was the amount of maximum mana the bird could save in itself; in the case of this Attribute, it was the level times 200, so 400.
One of the Hive was an Attribute that made possessing the target cost no Possession Slot. Now, sadly, that only saved him the one actually needed to use the Skill, not the several more Spellcarrier cost. It still meant that he could load up to two spells on the bird with his current limit of 3 Possession slots. Before, he had needed one to possess the target, one to make it a Spellcarrier and another one for the base spell.
Sturdy and Lightweight were simple and cheap filler. Nothing great about them, just neat to have.
The bird jumped up John’s arm until John sat on John’s shoulder, occasionally flying over to the opposite one as he used it to spy on things his eyes could not see. Sure, he could have had it fly around, but for the moment he’d much rather keep it around.
John wasn’t stupid enough to think that he could both use the bird to spot potential onlookers and have it go unnoticed, so keeping it this close meant nothing. ‘So, things I told my enemies today…,’ he thought as he was delivered to the mansion, ‘…I bought a doll and made it move through magical means, I have Siena, and I can heal, although they don’t know how. Unless there were more eyes on me as Undine did it. Well, this is a great way to get behind in the information war. Better grind up a little before I get into the house and listen to whatever speech Lydia has prepared.’
His eyes spotted two black and white dots in the distance. As he came closer, they quickly took the shape of Momo and Aclysia. The Artificial Spirits were waiting for their creator’s return. One of them was eagerly shifting in place, making sure that her hair was as silky and perfect as it inhumanely could be. The other had her arms crossed and tapped her foot on the floor in an impatient gesture, eyes fixed on an imaginary clock.
“There you are,” Momo’s harsh greeting came his way the moment he stepped off the mana street. She unfolded her arms and then a sheet of paper that she had been holding in her left hand. In a stern tone, she read out loud: “John Newman, I have seen the video in which you threaten everyone who is on your tail. While I understand the motivation behind it, I would prefer that you seek counsel with me before making use of such crude tactics. I leave this notice with Momo, so that she may tell you what an idiot you have been. Be sure, however, that this will be brought up again after dinner. Greetings, Lydia Augusta of house Hohenzollern.”
Momo folded the note again and gave it to John, who then in turn allowed Salamander to burn it. He really didn’t care.
“You have gone deep into the shit mire,” Momo told him. “The princess is pissed.”
“She will have to calm her tits,” John simply stated. “This matter I am not going to be lenient on.”
“While I understand, Master, I think you should strive to appease Lydia,” Aclysia humbly added her opinion.
“Yeah, John, while I generally agree that information brokers should just die in a massive fire, making Lydia angry over it is really not worth it,” Momo agreed, crossing her arms again.
John nodded, “Yeah, I don’t plan to anger Lydia more than is necessary. But this had to be done, the sooner, the better.”
“It would have been more impactful if you had left the woman crippled,” Momo told him with a heavy sigh. “Not that I like the idea of that. However, now everyone who hears about it will think of you as a big softy. Might be that your failure to be intimidating ensures someone actually tries despite your warnings, and then you will have to kill him or you will look weak.”
“I know,” he responded in a tired tone, “but I have shown my stance. If they chose to ignore my words, then that’s on them.” He tried not to show too much that he had no idea if he could go through with it if they tested him.
Aclysia nodded, “I support your decision on this, Master. There should never be another SB. Our privacy is more important than the life of some people who live off others' greed.”
“I just think you should have been more ruthless about this. If you have atrocities planned, commit all of them at once, as Machiavelli suggests,” Momo kept spelling out her thoughts.
John shrugged, he had nothing more to say about this matter. It had been a dirty deed, and he was just happy to have it over with. “Well, now that I have you two around,” John changed the topic and walked towards the mansion to empty his inventory, “how about we grind until dinner?”
“That sounds delightful,” Aclysia said with a faint smile, just happy to spend some time with him. “How was the shopping, Master?”
“Well, you can see the bird,” John said as he opened the door to his and Rave’s room. The techno-lover was not around right now, but the room had already seen the first changes in the shape of a ridiculously soft, pink carpet covering the floor and several cushions having been added to the bed, pink and black in colour. John caught the slightest smell of sweet peppermint, the scent of his girlfriend and her room back at home. ‘Damn you, Pavlov,’ John thought as blood rushed to his penis.
He ignored that for now. He had wasted enough time today having sex and really should finally get to getting himself some experience. Everything in moderation, even in this world of porncraft.
“Aside from the bird, the elementals wanted to spend some of their allowance,” John continued as he pulled useless crap from his inventory. Refusing to just search his memory for this information, and thus taking away the chance to listen to John with the keen interest only a learner of unknown facts could have, Aclysia listened.
“So, first we went by a nice shop that sold figures carved from stone. The shopkeeper was doing it live for onlookers, shaping stones with tools and earth magic. We stood there for about…ten minutes? Because someone was unusually interested. ‘This is so cool,’ Gnome told us, by accident, as she did her mumbling-to-herself-thing, ‘and sexy. I wish I could be thi-‘”
“S-s-s-s-stop!” Gnome interrupted as John pulled something from his inventory.
It wasn’t one of the figures. No, instead it was a book about the making of said figures. As John already knew a Skill to make figures in the shape of Craft, the book did not open a window for him, but it wasn’t for him anyhow. Gnome took it from him with a quick yank and cowered down, tugging the book between her legs and chest, hiding it from view.
“You are so mean!” she exclaimed, looking up to John with a slight bit of tears in her eyes. “I asked you to tell nobody!”
“I didn’t tell them anything they couldn’t have known by themselves. Besides, it’s useless to try and hide if you need to go outside to practice. You want to try and practice that, right?” John teased.
Gnome averted her eyes and let out the cutest little “Uwuwuwuwu” as she nodded.
John patted her on the head. “Good girl, now, as you don’t have a room, why don’t you put the book on the shelf over there? Wouldn’t want it to get lost, now would you?”
“No,” Gnome agreed and did as he suggested. She would have immediately started training, but with John wanting to go into an I.D. soon, that wasn’t really an option.
“Continuing on. After I bought that book for Gnome, we continued on to the dollmaker that made this bird. However, that wasn’t the only thing we bought there,” John pulled out an ensemble of little wooden ships. They were cheap, like 2000$ each, as the only enchantment on them was a slight self-propelling as long as they were in water. Basically, they were the Abyss equivalent to self-driving toy cars. Although, these had the advantage that they randomly switched course and didn’t collide with walls or anything.
The buyer of those items, Undine, bubbled up from the floor and looked at the boats with a silent smile, radiating happiness. Like Gnome, she was eager to use her newest acquisitions but had to wait.
“Undine wanted them to have something to look at while she bathed. Now, Salamander I had to talk out of just buying everything made from wood…”
“And I am still telling you, you should have listened to me!” the fire spirit wildly announced her arrival. “It would have made for a wonderful fire!”
“Silly Sally,” Sylph manifested with a smug twirl, “you don’t burn money, you spend it on the big two S’s in the life of you, the most important things that exist, the ever important and two constants in the life of everyone happy. Truly, these two S’s are the best reality has to offer. Sweeeeeeeeeeets…”
John pulled a kilogram of sweets from his inventory. Chocolate, marzipan, gelatine-based sweets such as gummy bears, cookies, waffles, cream puffs and everything in between, all neatly stored inside a container that kept everything from getting stale for at least a year. Turned out that the Abyss had its own sweet shops, where they made the sugary goodness from rather unusual materials. Such as blue sugar, won from arcane sugarcane. Of course, these sweets were under strict supervision by Gnome, so that Sylph wouldn’t be in a constant state of sugar-induced fever dreams (or ate all of them at once and overdosed).
That done, John pulled the second item that Sylph had wanted from his inventory. It was a set of fizzy vitamin tablets. He was still confused what the air spirit wanted with these; they were just regular fizzy tablets. As it turned out, he would find out right now.
“…and shenanigans!” Sylph shouted as she stormed at John’s hand.
The tablets, no longer confined within a now shredded plastic tube, were scattered through the air. With a giggle, Sylph grabbed one of them mid-flight and then, before anybody could stop her, plunged right into Undine.
As the remaining tablets joined Rave’s panties on the floor (they were still lying around from earlier, which was weird considering the floor had since been covered up by a carpet), John watched the one that Sylph hugged inside Undine.
First only a few, big bubbles gathered around it, but as the outer layer broke apart it soon became a thin stream of air that rose from Undine’s stomach to her head. John watched, speechless and fascinated, as the white pillar emerged from her head with a fizzing sound.
Sylph was grabbed by the stream and, made of air as she was, pulled up with it. “Hihihi, again, again!” she shouted as she emerged and, once again before anyone could react, grabbed another pill from the floor and flew right back into Undine.
This continued, everyone was too bamboozled by the scene to do anything. The sound of fizzing water and Sylph’s laughter, as Undine’s insides were turned from calm blue slime to a white striped ocean of rising bubbles, were the only things that were heard for a while.
Undine, who stood with her back to the group, started shaking. ‘Oh damn!’ John snapped out of his daze, ‘this might hurt and with Undine’s tendency to not tell anyone, this might be very bad! Sylph st-‘
His concern was silenced by a beautiful, clear sound ringing through the room.
It was too pure, absolutely innocent and untainted by any worries of life. The childlike laughter of the water spirit, whose voice was always like a melody, reverberated from the walls with an almost cleansing power as she fell backwards, holding her stomach.
“I-i-it tickles, hihihihihaha,” she exclaimed, her words underlined with an even louder whooshing sound, like the foam riding ocean waves and dispersing on the beach.
“You like it? You like it! I still have more to go, go!” Sylph gleefully announced and continued to use up all of the tablets.
“You know, the rest of us have to wait to play with our toys!” Salamander complained as Sylph continued her wild fizzle rides through Undine’s body. John, smiling as the carefree situation went on, pulled out what the blaze elemental had bought.
It was a graceful glass figure in the shape of an elf, ending at the hips, resting on a base made from black stone. The elf had extended a hand, from which an enchanted piece of rope extended and reached down all the way to the stone base, which had a depression to be filled with liquid. It was an extremely delicate and beautiful oil lamp.
John placed it on one of the three windowsills. If it were to be used, it was better off there. He also placed a bottle of particularly long burning, magical oil next to it. All the while the laughter of Undine, so seldom heard, and Sylph, never heard too much, still echoed through the room.
John sat down on the bed as he waited for the scene to pass by, grinding wasn’t a thing that needed to be hurried into. Not when there was so much beauty right there and then.
