Chapter 587: Hammers, Nails, and Shovels
Everywoman: You’ve dabbled in a little bit of everything. From sewing like a tailor to enchanting fields, from studying biomancy to being a Ranger, from chopping down trees to telling stories, from meditating as a monk to running missives as a courier, growing gardens and tilling fields, working as a carpenter and casting spells as a wizard, healing people and fighting monsters, you’ve touched upon a thousand professions. Now go forth, and touch ten thousand more. Improved abilities per level. -16,376 mana regeneration.
[Everywoman] was the closest thing to an omni-skill I’d ever seen, and I had to wonder if [The Elaine] had been a prerequisite for it. It was like a merged skill of every professional general skill that existed, like my long-gone [Medicine]. It helped me with almost literally everything, a subtle nudge to nearly every activity.
Nearly everything could be a job, in the end. [Couriers] ran, [Heralds] talked, [Porters] carried things, [Tasters] checked for poison, and [Courtesans] -
Well, they made Iona a very happy woman.
Time went by. I brought back the logs, and as a community, we de-barked them and prepared them, and Skye figured out the optimal distribution. Naturally, nobody was happy about the distribution, but there wasn’t a happy solution anywhere. We all spent a day in a flurry of hammers, nails, and saws, taking the logs and building what would eventually become a guard’s barracks, but for now was more like a large communal living space. Iona, Auri, and I probably could’ve done it by ourselves in a fraction of the time, but I was coming around more and more to the idea that as a powerful Immortal and Classer, I shouldn’t be doing everything for everyone. What was the point? Some places, some cultures, made it work - most notably the necrocracy of Penujuman, but that wasn’t for me.
We were out of the bunker at last, and everyone who wanted it had a spare, spartan room for their family. A number of our neighbors went back to their farmstead and discovered everything was still standing, shrugged, and continued on with their life. I didn’t blame them - but they were also outside of our protective aegis. A couple of canny groups decided to take over the now-spacious bunker, and Skye was also sticking around there - mostly to prevent shenanigans with our stored food. There was what I had stored in [Tower], so it wasn’t as critical, but nobody wanted a problem.
It was incredible. The moment things started to fall apart, it was all about food.
[The World Around Me] felt like a curse at times. Perfect knowledge combined with heightened senses let me fairly trivially know everything going on around me, no matter how much I didn’t want to know. I had to know how the seeds and the carrots were doing and check for any lurking threats or problems in the soil - or, goddess forbid, Vorler eggs - so it wasn’t a surprise to me when the first shoots pushed through the dirt, unfurling their leaves to a sun that only distantly shone on them.
I’d managed to keep a lid on it from Iona and Auri though, and the looks on their faces made it all worth it.