SLV Chapter 7: Attentive Milya
April 12
There were more source stones than he had estimated.
He counted them into the coarse linen bag one by one. Thirteen in total.
The remains out here probably numbered fewer than three hundred altogether, yet they had yielded thirty source stones between them.
Going by the ten percent drop rate stated in the Thrifty Slaveowner title, he had been remarkably lucky.
Wait...
Lin En hadn't let the joy of the haul cloud his thinking. After setting his goals clearly moments ago, his mind was running quite steadily.
He had noticed a blind spot.
Why were there fewer than three hundred?
Last night alone, before he blew out the candle, he had heard the sand spirit arrow tower fire far more than three hundred times. And it had kept firing through the entire night.
He walked over to the tower. Fresh damage had appeared on its surface, nothing severe, but enough to confirm it had taken hits.
Firing without stop, and skeletons were still getting close enough to strike back.
The sand spirit arrow tower's accuracy wasn't very good, it seemed.
No wonder it had fired thousands of times through the night and only brought down fewer than three hundred skeletons.
Sand spirit arrow towers could be upgraded to improve their accuracy.
As far as Lin En knew, upgrading required an enormous investment of source stones, and on top of that, one had to bring in a highly esteemed source arts master from the inner city district but even if he tried, he would never get one to come.
The web of connections in this world was dense and tangled. Without being embedded in those circles and earning recognition, there was simply no way to get access to a source arts master. Put more plainly, you had to serve as someone's dog before you stopped getting stonewalled.
It seemed the only real solution for now was to repair the remaining two sand spirit arrow tower ruins tonight. There was no reason to delay. Whether he did it today or tomorrow, it had to be done.
Lin En pulled out a source stone and fed it into the tower.
After a full night of use, the light orb at the tower's peak had nearly gone dark, its source energy nearly spent.
The moment the new stone went in, Lin En felt something he hadn't noticed before, a faint and peculiar sensation.
As though the tower were alive, it seemed to warm to him after being fed a second time, like something between them had quietly grown familiar.
"This connection... it lets me direct the tower's targeting rather than leaving it entirely on automatic."
"Remarkable."
He gave the tower a pat and turned to look at Milya.
She was wandering back and forth across a stretch of ground he had already searched.
"Milya, come back. I've already gone through that area."
Milya heard his call but didn't return immediately. Instead she jogged over to a nearby pile of remains, bent at the waist, her small rear end poking up into the air.
She picked something up, then hurried back toward Lin En.
Her face carried a look of mild urgency, as though she was worried he might misunderstand, and she spoke quickly.
"Master, over there... I found another source stone. It was buried under the sand."
"Another one?"
Lin En looked down just as Milya opened her closed hand. A source stone sat in her palm.
There really was another one.
In a desert with no settled soil to hold anything in place, the sand shifted constantly.
Just as the saying in this world went:
You cannot step into the same stretch of sand twice.
It seemed that by the time he had gotten around to collecting them, the sand had already covered some of the stones that had fallen deeper and Milya had been attentive enough to find even those.
It reminded Lin En of the Attentive trait listed in her catalog entry.
The catalog, it seemed, was useful for more than just checking scores and gathering information. It could also help him put the right person in the right place.
"Good work, Milya. Go take a look at the others. There might still be more."
Lin En raised his hand and ruffled Milya's hair.
Milya immediately looked as though she were savoring the feeling, her eyes half-closing with a quiet contentment.
"I need to teach Milya something soon, add new positive traits, and unlock more score."
He watched her walk away, turning the thought over in his mind but he still hadn't settled on what to teach her that would show results quickly.
"If nothing comes to me, I may have no choice but to head to the slave market tomorrow and buy a few slaves just to pad the numbers. What a waste of source stones though..."
Almost immediately, Lin En thought of that as a fallback plan, something to keep in reserve.
"Awoooo!"
At that moment, a fierce wolf's howl rang out.
Lin En's brow creased. He turned at once toward the source of the sound.
His first thought was that the lame she-wolf had lost her nerve and gone wild but the direction of her howl wasn't aimed at him at all. She was facing the main road that led to the inner city.
Curious, Lin En followed her gaze and spotted a figure coming into view.
Not Ruleh. Someone else, a face he half-recognized.
"Milya, stop collecting!"
Lin En said it in a voice just loud enough for her to hear then he turned to look at the approaching figure, who was surveying his oasis with chin held high.
The man wore a light linen robe that looked expensive, embroidered with curving patterns that were, in their own way, genuinely elegant.
Beside him stood a Bactrian camel, slowly working its jaws in a steady, grinding rhythm, chewing its cud.
Lin En searched his inherited memories and finally placed the man.
It was his other neighbor, the widow's only son. The name that came up was Kalil.
The original owner had tried to engage with Kalil before, but had never once been acknowledged. Every attempt at conversation had been met with a look of dismissal.
The man had an exceedingly high opinion of himself. This didn't seem like Ruleh's sort of creeping inspection to see whether Lin En was dead yet.
He was coming from the direction of the main road, so he had most likely just been passing by and happened to notice the changes on the oasis.
Lin En felt no particular tension about it. He had plenty of explanations ready for whatever had changed here.
He was still thinking about how to handle the encounter when Kalil turned and walked away without looking back.
He left?
Fine by him.
Dealing with someone like that was unpleasant even in passing.
"Carry on, Milya."
He called over to her, then looked back at the lame she-wolf.
As though she felt his gaze, the she-wolf gave her tail a small wag and lowered her head.
She took a few steps forward, then seemed to remember something and grew uncertain then she turned and trotted away entirely.
Lin En watched the direction she had gone and raised an eyebrow.
"That wolf... acts an awful lot like a stray dog."
…
He pulled out a source stone and walked to the heart well.
Spend where you should spend, save where you should save.
He couldn't afford to waste source stones on comfort right now, but taking care of basic needs was another matter entirely.
If he went another day without water, he would probably be on the verge of passing out from thirst by tomorrow.
One source stone dropped into the heart well would sustain the water supply for five days.
Adding more stones wouldn't extend the duration, but it would have an increasingly profound effect on the oasis itself.
Beginning from bone-dry desert, it could first generate a trace of moisture in the air, then turn the ground into damp earth, and eventually into true fertile soil but all he needed right now was water to drink. Even if he had fertile soil, without enough people to work and cultivate it, it would be wasted.
He glanced at the faint flour residue along the rim of the well.
That was left over from yesterday, when he had scraped at the moisture clinging to the well walls just to wet the dough enough to work with it.
Thinking about it now, that had been a pretty miserable state of affairs.
He dropped in a source stone. A moment later, a click sounded from the bottom of the well then came the sound of flowing water.
Lin En lowered the bucket and drew up a full pail of clear well water. Without bothering to find a cup, he bent straight over the bucket and drank in great gulps.
The sweet, cool water finally washed down his parched throat and spread through his stomach in a wave of relief.
Water. At last.
And a steady, continuous flow of it at that.
There was far more than he could drink in five days before it ran dry again. Just drinking it would never use it all.
He might as well make good use of it while it lasted, wash himself properly, perhaps. Get a little relief.
And Milya could do the same. A proper wash might even nudge the binding progress along a bit.
The thought made him glance over at Milya's dirt-covered face without quite intending to.
At the same time, he opened the Slaveowner's Manual in his mind.
Hm?
When he looked at Milya's catalog entry again, Lin En was genuinely surprised.
In just one short night, her score had clearly changed again.
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