Chapter 41: Journey to the West
Up until this point in time, I’d never ridden in a horse drawn carriage before. As a whole, the concept was nearly extinct back in England, only occasionally brought out for certain ceremonial roles (see the aforementioned coronation), as part of a historical reenactment at a fair or while filming a show, or by traditional religious movem...
2024-11-06 08:43:23 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 40: Felis Catus
Two days and nights passed in the blink of an eye, metaphorically speaking, while I enjoyed the hospitality of the Dead Hand. The accommodations weren’t quite on par with the inn, consisting of an attic room with a single bed, with the rest of the amenities shared between a house of three, but it wasn’t bad either. Fat Man and Little Boy largel...
2024-11-06 04:30:30 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 200: The End of the Beginning
Neither Noah nor Elizabeth looked in any shape to talk, giving Emma brief nods as they headed upstairs to sleep. Emma was happy to leave them to it, returning her attention to the last of the notifications just received. The attribute gained from the Hydra Venom was more or less as expected, but far more important was the Level Up tha...
2024-11-06 00:56:44 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 39: Watcher in the Dark
Harvey Miller didn’t own a home in Allensward. There was no point, not when he was present, at most, for a sixth of every year. Far lighter, then, to seek short term lodging on each visit, both for his logistics and his coin. So it was that Harvey locked the door behind him, in a similar inn room to the one Will had stayed at, albeit with...
2024-11-05 05:24:04 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 38: Tithe
Ten percent of the earnings at each stop of the caravan. It was a better deal than it sounded, because we were talking gross revenue here: the total earned in sales, without considering any deductions for what was spent procuring the goods for sale. I wasn’t investing anything into this venture beyond my talents and time, while the rewards could be con...
2024-11-05 03:29:15 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 37: Deal or No Deal
“In principle, I’m down for some travelling,” I agreed easily enough. “But what I need are specifics. How long are we talking though, from here all the way to Light’s End? What happens if I like the look of a stop and want to get off for good? Finally, and most importantly, what’s my cut?”
“The longest time spent on the ro...
2024-11-05 02:58:30 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 199: Pascha
Emma just stared at Saint blankly, as the latter explained that she’d somehow been in contact with an ancient Greek myth, who’d given the Nekomata a massive buff before letting her know, as an aside, that the return from Blenheim Palace hadn’t been quite as accurate as had been hoped.
“Well, that explains that last line in the quest log,...
2024-11-05 01:02:16 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 36: Space Invaders
“Commerce directed northward is heavily regulated: everything is meant to facilitate the war effort in some way, shape or form. Even goods that, on the face of it, have nothing to do with the front line have to be justified in that context, or else the purveyors in question will be denied a trading permit. As you can imagine, this is clearly m...
2024-11-04 23:58:57 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 35: Gladhanding
I may have mentioned before, but my inventory was very useful for mundane purposes too. Removing the blood on my clothes, from a short-lived scuffle, and even the residue of the splattered plum beneath Damien’s boot. Neither of these acts generated a usable item, so presumably they merely vanished, forever lost in whatever void the System used as...
2024-11-04 22:14:43 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 34: Beat It
“It’s a good deal!” Damien protested, his face puckered up in offence. “A single round trip of the caravan can earn a profit of thousands of gilt. I’m not sure how you were able to hide that water of yours, but if you use that on the shipment, then that cuts the risk of discovery to almost zero. No need to look over your shoulder, worried tha...
2024-11-03 22:24:07 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 33: Prepare for Trouble, and Make it Double
“That’s because we told him to keep us on the down-low,” Little Boy declared, pointing a boney finger at Damien. “In our line of work, too much attention is a bad thing! This ain’t like a legitimate business, we don’t do advertisements here.”
“We’re the Allen Keys, the best smugglers in the region...
2024-11-03 21:31:12 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 32: Mind the Gap
Briefly, I considered taking Damien’s report from bed, before dismissing the idea. It would be a touch too disrespectful, enough to breed the embers of resentment, even after how easily I put him in his place last time. Also, I’d yet to obtain a way to open doors from a distance. Climbing out of bed begrudgingly, I made use of my inventory’s...
2024-11-03 03:45:26 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 31: The Cat in the Hat
Our conversation petered out after that, as Spike had a job to do, allowing me to get back to town, Pumpkin riding on my back the whole way through.
[Knife stored.]
I’d stowed my knife and swapped back to a Level 1 Merchant as soon as I was out of the guardsman’s sight, returning to the inn much as I’...
2024-11-03 01:22:42 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 30: Say Cheese
Typically, I’d barely spent ten seconds in the smithy, when what looked like a disco ball lit up on the ceiling, bathing the room in red. I'd seen it in passing, when I'd bought my knife, but had thought it a mere decoration, like the streamers they often went up in shops around Christmas time, not some kind of targeted burglar alarm, one that did...
2024-11-02 22:47:21 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 29: Taste the Rainbow
Unfortunately, bringing the fruit closer to my eyes didn't magically reveal any additional information. Maybe if I had the Farmer Class, it would have helped, but neither of the components of my Class specialised in fruit, and that left me with a problem. On the one hand, it was stored in a warehouse filled with food, lending a strong expecta...
2024-11-02 21:01:37 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 28: A Little Bit of Everything
[Furthermore, you may select one of the two options below.
1) Wrath and Ruin: As a Soldier, once per day, break the limits of your body to deliver a devastating blow. As a Merchant, you will know when someone is trying to cheat you.
2) Death and Taxes: As a Soldier, wounds you inf...
2024-11-02 18:59:40 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 27: Murder, She Wrote
[50 EXP gained for your first premeditated kill!
Level up!
Title gained - Murderer: Death comes easy, murder is hard. It requires a certain resolve, to take up a weapon and kill in cold blood, far from the battlefield where emotions run high. You are recognised by certain dar...
2024-10-31 14:54:19 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 26: Dead Money
My first reaction was annoyance, to have come so far only to face a hurdle in the final hour. I smothered that quick, with experience borne from far too many business deals gone south, to consider what to do. I could run. That was the simplest, expected course of action: I already had what I needed, so why not vanish into the night, and leave the ho...
2024-10-31 09:47:05 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 25: Thief in the Night
It was strange to be able to go outside at night, and have it be genuinely dark. It could never have happened in London, where fluorescent lights were never more than a few feet away, and even the suburbs had street lights that never went, courtesy of the cheap and plentiful electricity that the modern grid supported. It was different, in Fr...
2024-10-30 15:43:14 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 24: Threading the Needle
I was taking a bit of risk, letting Damien go after our rather heated exchange of views, but that was somewhat inevitable. Like in business negotiations, I had to show some promise in order to interest the other party, in this case whoever was looking to hire me, but not so much that they saw all of my cards. This way, I’d ...
2024-10-30 12:18:03 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 23: The Water of Life
I had to admit, I hadn’t seen that coming. Damien had always come across as fairly strait-laced, focused on physical training and with a love of old heroic ballads, a bit of a himbo, even. To have him blatantly admit to involvement in some kind of organised crime? That was a surprise, especially because historically, smugglers of legal subs...
2024-10-30 10:35:35 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 22: Goldfinger
Far from the most flowery apology I’d ever heard, admittedly, but it was in keeping with what I recalled of his character. Indeed, if he’d gone too much further I’d have suspected someone of putting him up to it, but as it stood, the apology felt genuine, driven by embarrassment and guilt rather than anything more problematic. I still let him ...
2024-10-30 08:58:35 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 21: Knock Knock
True to my word, I spent the next day taking it easy, catching up on some much needed sleep after a week of anxiety and more reading than I’ve done since my final week of university exams. I lounged in my room at the inn, enjoying the unfamiliar sensation of sustained peace and quiet, something that was rare back at the orphanage, and utterly non...
2024-10-30 04:40:39 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 198: Black Sabbath
Internal Affairs, as a general rule, did not get too much publicity from the media arm of the Empire. This was sensible, because as a department that worked in the shadows, investigating misconduct and crime committed by other members of the Empire, they preferred to keep a low profile, typically only commenting on their work on a particular cas...
2024-10-29 23:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostSo, apparently I'm due to travel to a family gathering for Halloween. This is news to me, given I only found out today, and between that, the editing going on in the background to tidy up some of the earlier chapters in terms of grammar and sentence structure, and generally recovering from a cold, well. Suffice to say, I'm quite behind where I'm supposed to be, both for my second book launching...
2024-10-29 05:24:17 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 197: The Beginning of the End
To Emma’s chagrin, making a wax sculpture turned out to be significantly harder than she had expected. Whilst she had no issue heating and moulding the wax itself, nor with using the sculpting tool, thanks to her passive traits from the Chandler class, that was as far as the benefits went. For the most difficult aspects, namely, sha...
2024-10-28 23:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 196: Egeria
Astrid had answered the call, partly to come to Emma’s assistance, but also as an escape from her pursuers, who had proven both numerous and persistent. Accordingly, she returned in anticipation of a fight, should any of them still linger at the spot where she vanished: though she also hoped that the main force had dispersed to go looking elsewhere. ...
2024-10-25 20:38:04 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 195: There and Back Again
The trip back home was thankfully back to business as usual: a smooth, seamless and instantaneous transition from being buried underground to the front steps of the family home. More than anything else, Emma was happy to see the real sky again, after how long she’d spent in one artificial environment after another.
[...
2024-10-24 17:33:06 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 194: Minutemen
Disabling a digital bomb was nothing like how it looked on TV, Emma quickly learned. That was a good thing, because there wasn't nearly enough time for the Monitor Lizard to write an entire new page of incredibly verbose code all on the spot. Instead, he booted up what looked like a control panel of some sort, and entered his username and password. ...
2024-10-24 05:07:48 +0000 UTC View PostChapter 193: I Tell You This Story To Save Your Life
“You understand,” the Monitor Lizard exhaled, following Emma’s gaze, his hands overlaid atop the device at his heart.
“At last, you understand. There was never any hope of survival, for anyone who stepped into Blenheim Palace. Why would there be? My masters had weeks of undisturbed access while the p...
2024-10-23 00:28:29 +0000 UTC View Post