Chapter 6: Quest Reward Time
This time, I beat the brothers to dinner. I had already eaten two slices of a pizza that I hadn’t had in thirty years by the time they joined me. They looked exhausted; their hair was out of place, and Elicec had a fresh cut across his forehead. Both of them looked like they had run a marathon and then fought a dragon afterward. Did forming a core take that much out of you? Was it because their race formed two?
“Hey guys, everything okay?” I asked, my voice was full of concern. I hoped they were okay and that if anything was wrong, it hadn’t been caused by bumping into me.
“Great!” they both said at the same time before Cecile continued alone.
“We formed our cores on the first try, and it turns out the mana in this place is pretty potent. We both even managed to get a C-grade. This wouldn’t have been possible without you, Dave, so get that frown off your face. Tonight is a celebration!”
“My brother is right, and he's underselling it. I had expected a D at best, considering where we came from. Our cores are even aligned already. I’ve got a knowledge affinity, and he’s got a hoe affinity,” Elicec added.
“Not to sound judgmental, but yours sounds a lot more useful than his, Elicec,” I said. What did an affinity with a hoe even mean? Could he use it as a weapon? Sow seeds better?
“Oh no, while knowledge is great, and I’m glad to have it, the gains are much more abstract than my brother’s. He can specialize the hoe as a weapon or use it to grow mana-infused plants. It’ll have some pretty amazing uses as he grows his core,” Elicec explained while his brother kept smiling like it was the best day of his life.
“Well, I’m glad you’re both happy with the results. As for me, no core yet, but I did learn a ton. After dinner, I should be able to complete my first quest,” I said, stuffing another piece of pizza into my mouth between words. I had forgotten how much I loved this place’s cooking.
“Well, there’s always tomorrow. Make sure you complete the quest with the system, or it won’t count. So, with everything you learned, is the world making a bit more sense now?” Cecile asked while his brother placed their order with the waiter.
“Yeah, somewhat; one question, though, you can probably still help with. How do you all keep track of the time? I haven’t seen any clocks anywhere.” As I asked this, what looked like two bright blue heads of cabbage appeared, one in front of each of the brothers.
“Oh, yeah, you probably don’t know about universal time. So the way our mom taught us when we were kids was to close our eyes and focus on the smallest bit of passing time we could think of and try to visualize that filling up the next increment of time, and so on. She used different words, but they probably won’t help you,” Cecile explained.
After my next bite of pizza, I closed my eyes and considered a second. I wasn’t sure if that would be small enough, but generally, everything else was just defined as fractions of a second instead of their own unique units. Plus, I knew roughly how to count out a single second; that wasn’t going to happen for a millisecond. I counted out sixty seconds and then tried to picture sixty grains of sand filling an hourglass. From there, I pictured sixty of those hourglasses on a shelf labeled hour. As I started to picture twenty-four shelves, a new image flashed in my brain.
| June 3rd, 2024, 8:27 PM. |