Tim's POV
The gardening levels had come in steady and generous through summer and deep into fall, the druid perception making every session a precise operation rather than an approximation, each plant telling me exactly what it needed, the feedback loop between correct intervention and class progression running cleanly and consistently. Six more levels across the season, which combined with the earlier gains brought the total to fifteen levels in the gardening class.
Maxed out. Fifteen levels, which mades sense, as gardening job class, was a common job class, and that means Fifteen levels max.
I sat back on my heels and consulted my notebook, running the tally. Fifteen levels from gardening. The cook levels, the doctor levels, the priest levels, and vermin levels from my earlier years. The two levels from the alley that I did not name in my notebook but that was there in the count regardless.
I noted the gardening class as complete and considered what it had given me beyond the raw levels, the druid class mostly, the green language. A fair return on investment.
The harvest, when I conducted it, was a modest affair by any agricultural standard, a handful of grain heads from a pot on a windowsill, threshed carefully onto a cloth, the seeds counted and stored. As farming operations went, it would not have impressed anyone. But I was testing something.
I ran the scan immediately after.
One level. Clean and clear, the paper confirming. The farmer class had activated.
I sat with the result and worked through what it meant.
The gardening class levelled in response to the quality and correctness of care, the druid perception had been so effective precisely because it optimised that care to an extent this world's best couldn't achieve.
But the farmer class, apparently, operated on a different principle entirely. The levels counted after harvest. Mostly by Volume. How the crop had been tended was irrelevant to the metric.
Which meant that a druid-assisted farming operation, where every plant received exactly what it needed and yields were consequently much higher than normal, were mostly meaningless.
The problem was scale. My windowsill operation produced a handful of grain. A meaningful harvest required meaningful acreage, which required either land I didn't own or an arrangement with someone who had land and could be convinced to let me work it. The church had a small kitchen garden but nothing approaching a grain field. The surrounding farmland belonged to families and noble estates.
This was a problem for later. I noted it, added it to the list of problems for future me, and moved on.
The farming class was not going to be my primary level source. That was fine.
What do i do now...?
The healing ward occupied the same wing, but in fall it transformed into a different institution. Summer's relative health gave way to the seasonal surge with predictable result, the cold driving people indoors, the crowding accelerating transmission, the weakened and elderly and young beginning to feel the pressure of dropping temperatures. The two rooms filled. The church, which operated its healing services with the efficiency of any institution, prepared accordingly.
Brother Aldous assembled our class in the corridor outside. He walked us through the rules with the same tone he used for information that was important.
The pricing structure was fixed. One gold coin for a tier one healing spell. Five gold for tier two. These were not the church's prices, they were the agreed rates across all four elemental churches, a cartel arrangement that had apparently been in place long before we were born, The penalty for undercutting, and for healing without charge, was not a fine or a suspension of priesthood. It was execution. Made public.
I kept my face neutral while Brother Aldous explained, *what's wrong with the chruch*.
In my previous life I had worked in an industry with aggressive pricing practices and had developed a comprehensive if cynical understanding of how institutions used collective agreement to maintain margins. This was the same thing *mostly, implemented with medieval directness or better called death by hanging. The churches had cornered the market on tier one and tier two healing magic, fixed the price at a level that extracted maximum value from people in physical distress, and enforced the arrangement with lethal consequences for anyone who tried to compete on compassion.
It was, by any reasonable moral assessment, abhorrent.
The large room was more overwhelming than I had expected, and I had expected it to be significant. Hundreds of people in various states of illness and injury, the smell of a space where too many bodies had been waiting too long, the particular acoustic quality of a room full of people. The church staff moved through the space with practiced efficiency, triaging, directing, managing the flow.
Our class dispersed. I found a position and began.
Light Healing* at tier one addressed a specific and reasonably broad category of physical problems, minor wounds, early infections, inflammation, and the like. It was not a cure-all. It did not address deep structural damage or advanced disease. But for the seasonal illness surge, it was pretty good.
I worked steadily, methodically, with the patients rhythm I had developed in the poor room over the previous two years. I asked brief questions before casting, establishing the nature of the problem.
Three hours.
The other students were flagging before the two-hour mark, their magical reserves genuinely depleted. I had not discussed my magical capacity with anyone in this institution, but I was aware that it was not typical for my age and training, the same base statistical advantages that made me physically resilient also made my magical reserves substantially larger than a normally-developing student's. I kept pace with the others in visible terms, slowing appropriately, taking the occasional break that my body didn't actually need, calibrating my apparent exhaustion to match the room's expectations.
One hundred and thirty-two gold coins, but half of the profit i made, goes to the chruch.
I counted it when Brother Aldous tallied the class's earnings at the end of the session. Sixty-six gold coins, all mine. The number of coins sat in my hand in the form of a heavy purse.
I knew exactly where it was going before I left the healing ward.
E-Rantel in the early evening had a particular quality in fall, the light going amber and low, the streets carrying the smell of woodsmoke. I had not been back to the lower ward in years, my routines now centred on the church's northern district, and the walk south had the slightly disorienting quality of returning to a place you knew very well.
St. Linel's orphanage looked the same. Of course it did, it's not like they had money. The worn door, the window with the slightly crooked shutter that had been slightly crooked since my earliest memory of it, the faint sounds of children in the interior.
I did not go to the front door.
I knew Sister Edna's patterns. By this hour she would be at her desk in the small office, doing the accounts that she did every evening. She would be tired. She was always tired by evening. The accounts were the last thing before she gone to bed.
The side door was unlocked, as it always had been in my memory, the orphanage could not afford the kind of security, and the neighbourhood's understanding that St. Linel's had nothing worth stealing was its own protection.
The office door was ajar. A candle burned inside.
Sister Edna was asleep at her desk, head down on her folded arms, the accounts spread beneath her, the feather still loosely in one hand.
I set the sack down on the edge of the desk with care, in the space not occupied by papers, where she would find it when she woke. It made a sound, and I watched her face for signs of waking. She shifted slightly, resettled, stayed asleep.
The note I had written before leaving the church was brief. I had not spent long on the wording, which was usual for me.
Hello*
By Tim
That was all, and Boy, was it a great note, i really out-did myself there.
I folded it and placed it against the sack where she would see it first.
Looked at her sleeping face for a moment, the face of a woman who had named me, fed me, watched me with careful and uncomprehending attention for years, and had eventually signed the paper that sent me somewhere better, if anyone killed her, I'd burn that kingdom down.
Then I left. Pulled the side door shut behind me with the same care I had brought it open with. Stood for a moment in the cool evening air of the lower ward, the familiar sounds of the neighbourhood settling around me.
I turned and walked back north toward the church, hands in my pockets, thinking about what comes next.
Tim's stats (he can't see his true stats)
Level: [37]
Vermin killer: [2/10]
Assassin: [2/10]
Priest: [1/10]
Gardener: [15/15]
Chef: [9/15]
Doctor: [4/10]
Wizard: [1/10]
Durid: [1/5]
Farmer: [1/15]