Chapter 152: The Right of Way (Patreon)

1/5Book 2 is now on Amazon. Book 3 will follow in about two months in case anyone wants to stockpile. Meanwhile, we're currently working through the first act of Book 4.---The first petal separated and Kage held it under the violet-gold light. The color warmed along the edge and settled into a clean, archival hue.

[Harvest Successful: Sylvan Record-Blossom Petal x1]

He looked up at the beds climbing the heartwood in tiered arcs, hundreds of living pages waiting in the restored noon, and did the arithmetic.

One petal at a time would take forever.

He set his hand near the nearest frost-greyed cluster and spoke under his breath.

Title: Bed Waking.

Poem: “[Memory] keep what sun has known, / [Growth] restore what light has sown.”

[-140 AWN]

The bed brightened. Grey ash slid off the petals and dissolved into light. Seven blooms opened in sequence, and the air was suddenly filled with a faint pressure.

He harvested seven petals.

“Better,” he said.

Then he went back to work.

The hidden sanctuary made the process almost civilized. Each bed responded to the same basic truth once he found the right title for it. A bed that had held a child’s laughter needed a gentler line than one that had carried a royal decree. A shelf of private secrets sealed at his first touch and required a second cast before it let him near.

Title: Ashed Bed.

Poem: “[Purity] wash the ash away, / [Growth] return the living day.”

[-135 AWN]

The System accepted the rhyme, the petals remembered their color, and his pouch grew heavier.

[Epic Quest Updated: The Final Sylvan Decree]

[Progress: 118/1000]

He moved up the silver stairs. Mumyo stayed quiet at his hip, though the blade gave a small pulse whenever a distant Greenlander pull sent a chime through the forest. Kage answered each pulse with the same decision. Avoid. Wait. Harvest. Move.

The hollow kept him hidden from the main routes, and the restored light inside it made his Awen settle into a steady rhythm. He cast, harvested, rested one hand on the living wall while the next bed drank his words, then cast again. The petals stacked in his dimensional pouch in neat bundles of epic light.

[Progress: 203/1000]

Between casts, his mind started building the next problem.

This cache was a miracle, and miracles had a nasty habit of ending.

The bulk of his petals had come from a hidden area the Greenlanders had missed so far. Fine. That advantage would last exactly as long as their scouts stayed stupid. A guild that farmed the whole zone on strict rotation would eventually sweep every off-route hollow, especially one glowing with restored noon in the middle of a night zone.

Once they found it, they would probably turn it into a permanent lane for lower-level members, feeding experience and reagents through a controlled route. The thought had the sour taste of common sense.

Even if they missed it, the math stayed ugly.

As long as Greenlanders owned the open forest, every petal outside this tree would cost him timing, stealth, and the patience of watching other people kill mobs for him. The flowers died near violence. The flowers died near hostile intent. The flowers apparently had opinions about AOE timers too.

Inefficient as hell.

He could already see the future of that grind. He would wait for a patrol to pass, restore a withered bed, harvest five petals, then back off while a Mist-Veil Stag phased through a trunk and turned the whole area into a sealed radius. Then a Greenlander puller would collect the stag, a mage would drop an AoE spell into its mist, and three more beds would close themselves out of principle.

Literal ages.

Maybe the phrase exaggerated. It still felt correct, though.

[Progress: 267/1000]

The next problem wore Mirethiel’s face.

He had to bring her here.

The quest note had been clear enough to frame and hang on a wall. The Decree itself will speak only to blood the Court still remembers. Mirethiel Vael. The sigil in the echo had matched her name with hammer-weight.

The question was how much she already knew.

A dyer who hunted rare pigments might have family stories. A family name like Vael, passed down through artisans, usually carried a few polished legends around the edges. She might know that her ancestors once tended something important. She might know only that her grandmother mixed violet-gold dye better than anyone alive.

Either way, Kage had to convince an NPC artisan to walk into a contested leveling zone, follow him past a guild’s farming grid, and put her hand on whatever ancient elven lock waited under the roots.

He plucked three petals from a bed of trade agreements and frowned at them.

If I tell her straight, she asks how I know. If I hint, she asks why it matters. If I stay vague, she stays in the city.

Mumyo pulsed.

“No,” Kage said. “I know.”

The blade had a talent for asking questions at the worst moment.

The smuggling problem expanded in front of him with unpleasant clarity. Mirethiel was a named artisan from the Artisan’s Quarter. Named NPCs drew attention. If he escorted her through Verdant Reach while Greenlanders controlled the entrances, at least one scout would report it. Then a guild officer would investigate. Then someone would notice that the famous hidden player Kage was running an NPC through a resource zone at dawn, and the entire guild would develop a sudden interest in his route.

They would trail him. They would probe the quest. They would bring friends.

And if they learned about the guardian, the prize under the roots would stop being a quest and become a server event with a bidding war.

Protect the NPC. Keep the route secret. Keep the guardian from becoming a circus. Also stay alive, because dying would be embarrassing.

He set a fresh stack of petals into the pouch and closed the flap.

The guardian itself was another column in the ledger.

Could he solo it?

Probably.

The word carried less confidence than he wanted. He had beaten a level forty Curator while his raid held the rest of the dungeon together. The Verdant Reach guardian should be lower level, sealed, and tied to memory instead of some ancient, god-like entity. By every reasonable estimate, it should be less dangerous than the man made of pages.

Reasonable estimates had a habit of dying in dynamic content.

A guardian made from a final decree might protect Mirethiel instead of attacking her. It might demand a song. It might test her bloodline by trying to kill everyone who stood too close. Morpheus loved that sort of narrative trap. A quest that began with flowers could end with a protected NPC standing in the middle of a boss arena while Kage kept aggro off her for ten minutes.

That thought led straight to the Greenlanders again.

If the guardian fight started while the guild was farming the zone, the forest would hear it. A level boss awakening under a unique area would send system effects through the roots, the canopy, and probably half the regional chat. Greenlanders would converge. They would see an unaffiliated player standing at the center of their claimed resource node with an NPC and an event, and they would make choices based on guild pride and profit.

Kage could fight them.

He could fight several of them, or a dozen, depending on levels, composition, and how many of them thought crowd control was a good idea.

[Progress: 318/1000]

His thoughts drifted, uninvited, to the meeting waiting in his messages.

Zara wanted a guild. Lily had forwarded the idea with careful enthusiasm, and the Shifting Galleries party had survived a raid, a Curator, and Kage’s particular approach to leadership. That made them either unusually durable or unusually stupid.

A guild could solve several problems at once.

A guild could put bodies on Verdant Reach’s entrances. A guild could escort Mirethiel under a formal banner instead of one suspicious player and a dyer. A guild could tell Greenlanders that this particular grove belonged to someone else for the night, and make the statement with enough weight to prevent a fight.

It could also put Kage’s name on a charter.

He exhaled slowly and kept harvesting.

Solo play had worked for him in every previous game because he moved faster than the world around him. By the time other players reached his level bracket, he had already left it behind. The ladder was a wake, and he stayed in front of it. Crown of Destiny had ruined that arrangement. The game was too large, too alive, and too willing to remember what players did. Guilds locked zones. Crafters built markets. World bosses changed regional politics. Morpheus adjusted content around behavior, and the world kept its own notes. His class also didn't make it easy at the start - he couldn't spring ahead like he usually did.

Anonymity had been his armor. The Songstone fallout had cracked it. His hidden level helped, but hidden numbers only protected the sheet. The reputation still walked around in his gear.

If I keep going solo, every zone becomes a negotiation I have to win alone.

The thought had a sour edge.

He liked working alone. He liked control. He liked knowing exactly how many variables were in the room. A guild added ten variables, then asked him to schedule them.

And yet.

A guild could hold space. It could run interference while he did the work that required his class. It could turn Mirethiel’s escort into a sanctioned operation instead of a smuggling run. The Shifting Galleries party already knew he had secrets. They had kept most of them, which was rare enough to count as a recommendation.

Maybe a contract. Maybe a favor economy with better discipline.

Mumyo pulsed again, longer this time. Kage glanced down. The blade’s crimson vein glowed faintly, reflecting the violet light of the beds.

“I know,” he said. “I’m stalling.”

[Progress: 377/1000]

The work continued.

He restored beds built from decrees and beds built from lullabies. He found one shelf where the petals had recorded the names of starlight rivers, and another where a single archived apology had grown into a frost-white bloom. He harvested them all with the same careful grip, because the quest counted memory, sentiment aside.

His hands learned the rhythm.

Title, line, cast, harvest. Step, breathe, next bed. Awen dipped, steadied, filled again. The sash at his waist kept the casting strain off his core, and the Maestro’s longcoat carried the sourceless light in soft charcoal folds. Somewhere beyond the hollow, a Glimmer-Bark Treant rang through the forest, and a Greenlander AOE team answered it with disciplined magic.

Kage checked the outside world through the gaps in the canopy.

The phantom elven architecture still held its twilight shape. Spiral staircases floated around distant trunks. Mist rolled in lavender and silver along the forest floor. The night iteration had hours left, and the zone was still performing its beautiful, broken reenactment for an audience of farmers.

He needed to use those hours.

A pale light flickered near the edge of the sanctuary. Kage paused and looked down through a gap in the silver stairs.

A Mist-Veil Stag had materialized beside a frost-sealed bed outside the hollow. Its antlers trailed silver mist, and its hooves left glowing ripples over the dark ground. The blooms near it stayed shut tight.

Kage withdrew behind the heartwood and waited.

The stag phased through a redwood, circled, and lifted its head as a Greenlander scout appeared along a luminous path. The scout’s shield carried a low taunt, and the stag turned toward the puller with a chime of disturbed air. The two moved away along the farming route.

When the path opened, Kage slipped out, restored the bed with a quick couplet, and harvested four petals before the next rotation came near.

The pattern announced itself.

Mob respawn. Wait. Greenlander clear. Restore. Harvest. Move.

The thought of standing still while other people controlled his pace made his jaw tighten.

He could run instead.

The idea sharpened as soon as it appeared.

If he ignored safety and moved at full speed through the whole zone, harvesting withered beds in passing and restoring them with quick couplets, he could cover the entire night iteration before dawn. His boots were built for light ground, his agility kept the underbrush a nuisance instead of a wall, and Mumyo’s weightless edge could cut through roots when the forest tried to grab his ankles. He would stay out of combat, keep away from the Dream-Wells that were the main grind spots, and touch only the margins where blooms had died from collateral violence.

The Greenlanders had warned him away from their routes.

Kage smiled, thin and sharp.

They had claimed a unique zone because they had numbers, discipline, and a rotation. He had a quest, a class built to read broken gardens, and a growing resentment of other people’s timers. The forest had opened its archive to him, and the archive wanted petals.

When the last accessible bed in the sanctuary opened under his final couplet, Kage stood in the center of the silver stairs and counted.

[Epic Quest Updated: The Final Sylvan Decree]

[Progress: 432/1000]

He let the number sit.

Four hundred thirty-two. A huge jump from sixty-seven, and still a long fall from one thousand. The hidden grove had given him the first serious stack of petals. It had also shown him the limit of hidden groves. Verdant Reach was full of dead gardens, sealed beds, and frost-choked memories scattered across the farming routes. The rest of the petals waited out there, under the Greenlander grid.

He closed the pouch and looked toward the mouth of the hollow.

Priorities.

First, petals. The Chromatic Thread commission had completed itself somewhere in the first dozen restored beds, leaving Mirethiel’s original request as a convenient cover instead of the real objective. The real objective needed volume, speed, and a route that treated the entire zone as a resource instead of a single hidden room.

Travel was the first tax.

The walk from Korros to Verdant Reach had taken about thirty minutes. That made any partial run an hour-long round trip before the first flower came into view. Splitting the harvest across several nights would feed half his time to the road. He had better uses for the hours, given his busy schedule.

Tonight was the correct answer.

The dead petals failed to trouble him. A withered bloom was only a page that had closed. His couplets could call the memory back from ash, provided the bed had enough root left to answer. The gardens outside would need more casts than the sanctuary, maybe more variation, and the violence threshold would force him to time every restoration around the Greenlander pulls.

That was the actual problem.

He had to wait.

He had to calculate their rotation and slip through the margins. If a mob respawned beside a bloom bed, he had to stand in cover and let a Greenlander party clear it, because any attack from his side could seal every flower within twenty meters. If a scout moved down a luminous path, he had to pause until the route opened again. If an AOE timer burst near a cluster of beds, he had to let the petals die, then restore them after the pull moved on.

The Greenlanders had warned him away from their routes. He gave the warning the weight it deserved.

The forest had given him a quest, and tonight the forest would set the pace. If the Greenlanders wanted to keep their efficiency, they would learn to accommodate him.