Tim's POV
Hejinmal had taken to the library very well.
The gold coins I placed, formed a bed of sorts in the library's largest corner, not a comfortable bed by any standard a human would apply, but dragons apparently had different criteria, and Hejinmal had arranged himself across the pile with the satisfied smile, like he found the right temperature and texture and was not planning to move for several hours. The books surrounded him on all sides, organised with a care, like a bookfort. He had spent three days cataloguing the volumes we had brought from the fortress, cross-referencing them against what the orphanage already had, and producing a written index in a hand that was remarkably precise.
The children had discovered him on the second morning.
The library had always been popular, one of the earlier investments in the orphanage's transformation. But Hejinmal added a new delight to the library experience that no collection of books alone could provide, Hejinmal tried to read them a story, while children climbed on him.
He bore this with what I assessed as genuine fear, *I wonder why he is scared of some kids*.
I watched this from the library doorway that morning and thought that perhaps the librarian was a push-over.
The arm was the problem I had been forgetting to fix, since the fortress.
The Earth Church in E-Rantel had been the least directly confrontational of the four churches during the healing price dispute years ago, not neutral exactly, but less evil, than the Water Church's more hierarchical structure, the Earth Church was more *grounded* in the healing work.
The old priest there, who examined the stump, worked through the evaluation without commentary, thorough and quiet, and then gave me the assessment plainly.
"Tier three holy spell needed. That will be twenty gold coins."
I paid without negotiating.
The tier three holy healing was a different category of experience from the tier one work I did myself, the spell operating at a depth and scale that my own practice hadn't reached, the regeneration proceeding not gradually but with great speed of magic. I watched my arm grow back with the strange feeling of my nerves growing back the biological process running faster by the second, the sensation not painful at all.
In two minutes, I was fully healed.
I flexed the new fingers. Made a fist. Extended it. The nervous connection was whole, the muscle control present, the proprioception accurate.
The old priest looked tired as I thanked him with the sincerity and then left.
Harvest season arrived and with that, my Great plan begains.
I assembled every child in the orphanage old enough to carry a basket and told them we were going farming.
The protests began seconds after this announcement and continued at varying intensity for the rest of the month.
The farms in and around E-Rantel needed harvest labour. This was always true at harvest season, the gap between what farm families could accomplish and what the scale of the harvest required was bridged by hired hands, seasonal workers. We were showing up without pay, which the farming families received with the combination of gratitude and slight confusion that unexpected generosity produced.
I did not tell the children what I was actually planing.
They were harvesting sure. Every grain head pulled, every vegetable collected, every basket filled and carried to the collection point was experience accumulating in the farmer job class, that class counted harvest rather than cultivation, the class I had confirmed levelled on yield rather than care. I had hundreds of children do farm work around me. The farmer class was going to give them levels, and they were going to get it while thinking they were doing community service because their caretaker had decided this was a kind act, so here they were.
I did approximately ninety-nine percent of the actual harvesting.
This was not what I had planned, but it was what happen. Children were you know children, their speed, their ability to maintain consistent effort over an eight-hour harvest day were all calibrated to child capability rather than monster capability *like me*. A field that I could clear in forty minutes took the children most of a morning. The farming families needed the harvest done, and I had to finish it in time.
I cleared fields that way, from one end to the other, the druid perception providing continuous information about what was ripe and what needed more time, the physical work proceeding at a pace that the farming families stopped helping me, as it was pointless.
By the end of the month, all the farms were harvested.
The children had accumulated whatever farmer class experience the month's work had generated. And every child in the orphanage over the age of eight had developed a comprehensive and deeply felt opinion that farming was some sort of torcher.
I told them we would do this every year.
The response was a colloctive BOOING.
"Why are Booing me, I'm right"
Winter came, and with it my long project.
The Eight Fingers had been a background for years, the criminal organisation that managed E-Rantel's underworld with the competent thoroughness. Drug trade, slave trade, prostitution, the various categories of activity that existed in the space between what a city's governance acknowledged and what it actively suppressed. I had known they were there, as I knew Overlord lore.
The drug farming was where I started, because plants talked and drug crops had distinctive signatures, I could find those signatures the way I found rare herbs, the same perception running across the same city, the same green language now being used to map criminal infrastructure.
I went out at night, in the plain dark clothing.
The first grow operation revealed the distribution chain. The distribution chain revealed the processing location. The processing location revealed who owned it, and the ownership network extended outward through the city, the hand that held the line connected to the arm, connected to the body, connected to the head that was not in E-Rantel.
The Eight Fingers' leadership operated at a scale that was larger than this city. The E-Rantel operation was a node in a network, managed by local figures who reported upward to their bosses, I noted this and continued mapping.
The slave houses were the hardest part of the mapping process. the same methodical approach, the same observation, the main problem was slavery is perfecty legal, I don't care, I will get rid of it too.
I wrote it all down. Every location, every operational pattern, every figure of authority I could identify through observation.
The process took more than a year.
By the time autumn arrived and I turned nineteen, the map was complete.
Every drug farm. Every distribution point. Every slave house. Every enforcer, every manager, every local authority figure who was taking payment under the table. The whole architecture of the Eight Fingers' E-Rantel operation laid out in my private notebook.
I WILL END IT ALL IN ONE NIGHT.
Tim
LeveL [65]
Farmer: [15/15] [MAX] [Undated]
Paladin: [2/5] [Updated]