Aetherios System: Whirlwind

Chapter 22: Blood for Merit

The next month blurred together into a constant schedule of blood, ash, and points.

Each dawn began the same way, with the chime of an alarm ringing through the barracks. The villa servants, under Lasy Xhiu’s command, rung the metallic bell at the start of each cycle every day. The sound of the ringing piercing through dreams and fatigue alike to wake the whole compound. Each of them rose, armored up, and descended into another task for the Empire’s glory in the hopes of earning yet more merit.

One of such tasks, were the beast hunts.

Out in the ashfields beyond Athrastas’ walls, along the mountainside and beyond, were many arcane beasts that needed gathering and hinting. Great scaled hounds prowled between molten fissures, their hides steaming with liquid flame. Mighty rhino-like beasts with lightning that shot from their horns. Large hawk-like birds that bend the wind and air to their advantage. And many more kinds besides.

The beast hunts were usually the quickest merit jobs to do, even if they didn’t pay the best.

Despite that, Ghrukk, Selka and Zach took to the jobs like no other. Ghrukk because fighting was all he cared about, Selka and Zach due to the ease in which each could track and kill the targets with their skillsets.

They took to the tasks with zeal, and seemed to be racking up a large amount of merit despite the low pay for each individual hunt.

Yet, the best paying were still the dungeon delve jobs, which Kate, Holly, Peter, and Tom-Tom seemed to prefer most. The four of them making a rather well balanced team, with Kate and Holly taking offense, Peter playing support, and Tom-Tom being a rather effective tank with his earth spells.

Not only were the Dungeon Dives the best paying in regards to Merit, the earned Dungeon Points also let them buy additional materials and items to either sell for profit, or pass on to the rest of team.

What held them back, was still the time cost. Traveling days or even weeks to and from a dungeon meant days that one couldn’t do much of anything else. Training being a big one, as their training mentors wouldn’t just travel with them days out of the city. Each of their mentors were Peak Adepts or Magus Tier mages with jobs and lives of their own.

Traveling out to do dungeons also meant time that one couldn’t do other jobs. Arena fights, beast hunting, crafting items to sell off.

That last one seemed to be a favorite among many of them; crafting.

None of the group had really had the free downtime to spend on their utility skills since arriving in the world of Aetherios. Up until that point, their lives were a constant flurry of survival, captivity, dungeon diving, politics, war, and yet more dungeon diving. The System to never seemed to have relented a second to spare on such skills, until now.

It was once the opportunity showed itself that the creativity and drive inside many of them began to show and thrive.

Lance and Garret had never stopped being drawn to blacksmithing. Now they had access to proper forges where Doran was more than happy to have some apprentices to teach. Under the tutelage of the dwarf, both worldstriders made huge leaps in their [Smithing].

Henry no longer needed to exclusively use his portable garden to grow herbs and plants. The villa had its own greenhouse for him to use, which led to amazing growth for his [Herblore], to the point Alex was sure that the gentle giant was making mutations and strains of his very own which he then sold off directly for coin, or passed on to the Empire for merit points.

But he wasn’t the only one making new strides in his field.

Devon poured himself back into [Glyphcraft], but also [Infusion] enchanting, another skill that used aether patterning and injecting imprints of intent into objects to enchant them. Devon seemed to take to combining both skills to make interesting devices and items to sell for a steady stream of merit points.

Many were recreations of devices from Earth. His most sucessful being an item that worked like a casset tape player. Inserting aether slates containing recordings of audio into Devon’s device would play those sounds out loud like a boombox.

Needless to say, Devon was single-handedly revolutionizing the music industry across the city.

Allie, Cole and Myrae had a different way of raking in merit points, healing. Healers were just as rare in Aetherios as they were in MMORPGs back home. The talent for such magic was difficult to find, and led to such mages not making it far into Adept tier due to them usually not being combat oriented.

As such, raising powerful healers was expensive. A price usually offset by the cost of their magic services. Which also meant trading healing shifts for Empire own hospitals and Military tents paid merit by hefty amounts.

Alex wasn’t a healer, and he enjoy the beast hunting jobs as much as one might think. Usually such jobs were low level beasts, and weren’t much of a challenge for Alex. Which is what he wanted, a challenge, something to get test and push him in his abilities.

Even the Arena beasts didn’t always provide that, and such fights weren’t’ held every day.

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He had to come up with some other way to catch up with the world’s elite scion and noble heirs with their ten thousand points, or more.

The solution came to Alex in a round about way. There was little that he had which separated him from other mages. Besides his broken core, which he had no idea how to leverage for any benefit whatsoever, the only somewhat unique thing he had was his Wyrm-heart constitution.

Only, he couldn’t exactly share that with anyone. At least not any way he knew. It wasn’t like he could give someone his blood to drink to gain the constitution as well. There were two problems with that. The first being, that’s not how constitutions worked. And the second problem, his blood was an aether poison, and would actually make anyone who drank it weaker.

It would eat and remove in latent aether in someones body, even making other poisons stronger by default. He thought. I mean, I guess I could sell it as a poison suppliment on the black market, but it doubt it’d have demand. Who wants to poison themselves on purpose?

“Well, all you weird flesh-sacks do that,” Obby chimed in.

What, no we don’t. What the hell are you even talking about, you dumb rock?

“Uh, don’t you meat-things just call it, drinking?” Obby fired back.

“Alcohol isn’t… oh holy shit!”

And that’s all it took for Alex to realize it.

One of the main issues for Mages was that their internal aether, as well as their multi-refined bodies were vastly harder to poison with basic toxins. Thus requiring powerful alchemical ingredients, arcane beast parts, and herbs to create poisons that were effective against them. It also meant that getting drunk off alcohol was incredibly hard.

But, Alex’s blood attacked those internal defenses, and primed bodies to be susceptible to poisons. All thanks to his integrating Wyvern blood into his Wyrm-heart constitution.

It took some help from Allie in the brainstorming phase, and a lot of Obby’s skill knowledge in both [Glyphcraft] and [Alchemy], but he was bale to nail down a repeatable way to process and then store his blood into enchanted potion vials. The vials would keep the processed elixir fresh, and its effect potent for a long time, making it effectively shelf-stable.

Once the resulting liquid was consumed by a mage, they could essentially drink beer like a mortal. It only to a small demonstration to Lady Xhiu for her to happily pass the process and product on to the Empire on his behalf.

The next problem became apparent. Alex only had so much blood. And he could only produce so much of his “elixir”. The demand that was projected by such a product couldn’t possible be met by Alex alone.

That was, again, where Alex and Obby worked together to find a solution.

If Alex used Wyvern blood to gain such an effect, maybe Wyvern blood could be the supplement to Alex’s own?

More testing, a large sourcing of Wyvern beast blood, and lots of trial and error later, Alex had it. A viable elixir creating the same effect by Wyvern blood instead. The stronger the Arcane Beast, the stronger the effect, obviously. But that just meant more options, more tiers of mages that could access the joy of his product.

“Wyvern Farms” would probably be constructed within months, but that was fine with him.

Through Lady Xhiu, Alex sold the entire idea off to the Urhara Empire for a huge, fat, dumpy load of Merit points.

It almost felt like he was cheating.

He went into his next training session with Master Sionna with a wide smile plastered on his face.

***

Again, weeks went by, and Alex trained relentlessly to push himself.

He couldn’t do much in the way of his constitution and manipulating Draconic energy, not with Amnios still slumbering in its Soul-orb. He needed the Hydra’s guidance to know how to properly tap into the energy and use it.

Furthermore, even with his frequent training sessions with Master Sionna, he hadn’t managed to nail down a proper plan in forming a [Technique] either. Each time he tried to bring it up, she shut him down immediately.

“You’re not ready, not yet,” she would say.

He didn’t know when being ready would come about, but he didn’t think he knew more about the subject than a Magus with her very own [Technique], so he let it be.

Work on his fine aether control, spellcasting, and martial skills did manage to climb upward with Master Sionna’s guidance though. Things that eluded him in Sylvaris’ scroll began to make sense, and he felt like he was once again making large steps in progress after having hit a plateau long ago.

New ideas were forming in his head regarding enchantments, and methods to open his final two Meridian Points. Along with possible ideas on how to further increase his Wyrm-heart bloodline.

But they were things he wouldn’t rush quite yet. He felt like he had time to get them right.

A thought that turned out to be wrong.

The bell of the early morning chimed, just as it usually did, and they all got up to begin their usual routine. Putting on their clothes, and exiting their private rooms into the shared courtyard of the space.

As they entered, a familiar figure awaited them.

Lady Xhiu stood waiting for them. Her composure set everyone on edge instantly. She wasn’t there for a simple visit, it was clear right away. Her golden eyes swept over the squad, lingering on a few of them a bit more than others.

“Good morning, I have some news for you all. Something that will end up making this day a rather important one for all of you.” she said.

“Good morning, Lady Xhiu. What new do you have for us?” Alex asked stiffly. He hated the formalities and pretenses that she insisted they use every time she appeared, but he didn’t care to start an issue so early in the morning.

“You all will come with me,” she said with a for more official tone than usual.

“To where will we be accompanying you, Lady Xhiu?” Kate spoke up that time, also keeping her words formal.

“To the Imperial Palace,” the Magus tier noble said back. “her highness, Empress Yue had demanded you appear.”