Chapter 586: Sing
I lost the bet by hours. One of the gods fucking with things was outside of my calculations, and the sun was high in the sky by the time I finished my network.
I felt passingly clever over the whole thing, even though I was cribbing from ‘Wizard poles’, thick pillars of stone and arcanite engraved with enchantments, usually found in more rural areas where centralized networks didn’t work. I couldn’t make an entire field-wide enchantment - but I could carve the enchantments into various stones, and each one covered a portion of the field. I then needed to carefully place the stones all over the field, each one radiating an aura of the enchantments laid. Wards against insects and bugs - that one had to be carefully managed for pollination. Sigils to help handle too much water - a lack of water was fixed with a watering can and an alert when the levels were too low. More wards against pestilence and disease, and I blessed the ancient [Runesmiths] who’d made the runes into a compact form.
In many ways, the wards were a disaster. A lack of arcanite meant I’d need to constantly recharge them throughout the day, the fields double-overlapped in some places and had little holes in others, each ward radius was slightly different thanks to different shaped and sized rocks, the ink was conjured, I had to place them on now-doomed seedlings, and it was inevitable that exposure to the elements would wear them away.
But they were scalable, sustainable, didn’t require an elaborate connected network, and I could make them for my neighbors. It broke my little witchy heart to strip out the vast majority of the fun or better enchantments, but most people didn’t have the spare mana to power the really good enchantments. I was torn on making them anyway, then fueling them myself, zipping over the fields several times a day in a blur of wings and feathers.
The question I was facing more and more - was this a good use of my time?
I was a Classer through and through. My stats were absurd. I could lift 53 times what a normal woman could lift, and do it 116 times as fast. Those effectively multiplied together, letting me do roughly what 6,148 people could do.
Well, if the average person was three times as fast as baseline, and three times as strong - okay, let’s be honest, thanks to my puny stature and modest muscle mass, biomancy or no, six times as strong - that was still the work of 341 people… assuming I needed to apply my full strength and full speed to the task. Picking berries, for example, only looked at my speed, while lifting logs was a strength-only task. Shoveling stone, however, was both.
Was spending, say, thirty minutes a day, every day, buzzing every field worth it to let everyone have higher quality enchantments? Or was my time better spent doing other things, something nobody else could do? Preventing people from literally starving to death was fucking important, but if I didn’t include the water sensor, for example, people could develop the skills and the Skills needed to work it out themselves. It wasn’t like I was kneecapping them, preventing them from making a living, and we were rapidly trying to establish something of a safety net. The vast stores of food in my storage was one such net, and I’d never seen a community come together so quickly, so hard. Adversity was an excellent glue.
Then there was the question of levels. I wasn’t always going to be around to help people, and the sooner the ‘training wheels’ came off, the less I held people’s hands, the faster they’d be fully self reliant. I had no illusions I’d always be around. Mare Town - Katerina’s founded village from the Sixth - needed me, as did a thousand other places, which looped back to the original thought - where was my time best spent?