Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

About a month later, I woke to the grand humming of the giants, greeting the rising sun in their own way.

I spent a brief moment disoriented, having changed where I was sleeping a few times now. The first night I’d slept in a giant’s shoe, not realizing what it was. After a great amount of embarrassment, I’d tried sleeping in [Vault of Ages], but the looming sense of dread, the complete deadness of the [Vault], and occasionally peeking into the vast nothing beyond the walls urged me to find alternative arrangements.

And alternative arrangements I found!

The Jakhong Monastery wasn’t built with non-giant elvenoids in mind, but there was a small population living here that managed to make it work. Most were also [Monks], contemplating the vast mysteries of the universe when they weren’t contributing to the Monastery’s upkeep.

My bedroll was in a corner, and I jumped out of it in pure habit, quickly scanning the room for threats, my senses extending all around me as my heart raced.

There’s no threat. I’m not under attack. I’m exactly where I expect to be. Nothing’s wrong. Calm down.

My racing heart slowed down as I fought down the sudden surge of paranoia and anxiety. It was rare these days that I woke up thinking I was under attack, but every once in a while my subconscious was a massive bitch and got me all riled up.

It didn’t help that I’d been attacked in my sleep multiple times throughout my life.

Embarrassed at the display, but unwilling to show it or have it slow me down, I rolled up my bedroll with the other [Monks], stashing it away in a closet. I paused as I saw a small crack past the wall thanks to [The World Around Me], and called out to Uirphen, the elf who helped organize all of us ‘little ones’.

“Hey Uirphen, I think there’s a crack developing back here. I’d be surprised if my skill was the first one to detect it, but I’m just letting you know in case there’s a real issue.”

The elf took the news with serene grace.

“Thank you Elaine. I will bring it up with the [Monks] later.”

On one hand, with all the Immortals running around, someone had to have a [Fix Cracks] skill, or even passive. On the other, the ‘little one’ rooms were basically mouse holes, parts of the Monastery that had crumbled a bit, then hollowed out and expanded to create additional rooms. I was no [Architect], but it seemed like a bad idea to me. Then again, it had stood for decades at the very least, so what did I know?

I teleported a scroll out of [Loremaster’s Library], rolling it open. I carefully examined the 7-circle array inside for any trace of degradation. I’d painted the rune just yesterday, using extra-thick lines, so there shouldn’t be any issues, but it paid to be safe and to practice.

Satisfied that the rune wasn’t going to cataclysmically explode in my face, I used [Lepidoptera] to actually make the rune, not yet having the skills to use ink and paper to create runes. It was all practice for when my skills shuffled around. I activated the spell, a combined cleansing/cleaning spell on myself, combined with summoning a jar of ink, a fresh sheet of paper, and a simple brush. Having ‘bootstrapped’ my supplies, I turned the page in the spellbook, recreating the exact same rune I’d just cast. One of my lessons and spells from Kunchenjab. A neat little trick, a set of circles I could add to any spell, giving me the supplies to remake the spell - including the ink, paper, and brush to write it out.

Being made purely out of conjured material, it would decay, and [Loremaster’s Library] wouldn’t stop the process at all. It was why I had to be extra-careful and check the runes over before casting them.

My morning ablutions handled, I scurried along the side of the walls like a mouse, making sure I wasn’t getting in the way of the giants stomping through the halls. It was like the road system in Remus in a nutshell. They had their lanes, I had mine, and as long as everyone stuck to them, traffic moved smoothly.

I made it to the kitchen, where another [Monk] was handing out bowls and spoons. I took mine, and lined up for the teacup the giants had placed on the floor for us. Their teacup was enough soup for all the ‘little ones’ and then some - I could literally take a bath in it, let alone get a solid breakfast. The soup was vegetarian, like all their food. Since Samsara and the cycle of reincarnation was a known thing, they took the logic a step further and said that any animal could have any soul, and it was an act of cruelty to cut their life off short. Given how they had a System, I was sweating a little at the implications and how right they seemed.

I remembered reincarnation. According to the [Monks], my soul had been reborn thousands of times and would die thousands of times until I finally achieved enlightenment and escaped the bounds of Samsara. Any animal I ate could possibly have contained my soul, or the soul of any one of my friends or family.

My socialization reserves were at stone-cold zero. I didn’t feel like making small talk with the other [Monks]. I quickly ate my food and returned my licked-clean bowl to the [Monk] who’d been handing it out in the first place. As I got near, my bowl finished cleaning itself, and almost as soon as I’d returned it, it was handed out to the next person in line.

It was weird being able to turn things around so quickly, but hey, a cleaning aura seemed like one of the most generically useful day-to-day skills a person could have. I was a little jealous.

Curse the System for only granting me 32 skill slots! I wanted EVERYTHING! Thank goodness wizardry let me tap into quite a few fun things, at a price.

I hustled out to the courtyard, grateful that the monks had their daily conditioning. I grabbed my quarterstaff from where I’d leaned it against the inside of the door yesterday, and exited into the courtyard.

A number of giants were already up and about, slowly moving their staves in sync with the leader. A form of physical meditation. I found a spot off to the side, near the front, where I could actually see the leader and not endless feet and calves, and started to move along with the same exercises.

“Let your body become one with the mountains.” The leader called out as she moved into Mountain Pose. “Let your breath become one with the air.”

The exercises were suspiciously similar in spirit to Iona’s katas, if not in form. The poses, positions, and slow movements that were called out were strenuous and complex enough that they were straining even my muscles, forcing my entire body through a moderate exercise. I re-discovered muscles I’d last known during Ranger Academy, and while we’d done this particular morning routine before, I memorized it anyway, intending on bringing it back home with me.

Iona would enjoy doing something similar with me every morning. It was a wonderful warm-up, and we could still spar after.

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The chants from the [Monks] quickly picked up as more and more of them finished breakfast, not all of them choosing to join in on the morning meditations.

“Strength lies in knowing one’s self.”

The mentor slowed way down at that chant, moving us through a series of exercises that hit every muscle group in our body once. She finished just as the next chant started.

“Know from the rivers in clefts and in crevices, those in small channels flow noisily, the great flows silent. What’s not full makes noise. Whatever is full is quiet.”

The exercises changed, moving to a series of rapid strikes and movements. The courtyard felt eerily quiet, the only noises the whistling of quarterstaves and the occasional rustle of cloth, resulting in embarrassed looks for whoever had broken the silence.

“There is no path to happiness. Happiness is the path.”

There was no lunch. The culture and language didn’t have a word for it. I went directly to the gardens, where, in utter defiance of every botanical rule I knew, cantaloupes taller than I was were grown. They were two meters in diameter, and no amount of [Gardening] was going to make them more manageable. Even if I had the strength stat to lift them, I lacked secondary skills to prevent myself from ‘punching through’ their tough skin.

There was a certain satisfying fulfillment to physical labor, to the simple joys of growing food and being largely unconcerned with the greater world. I’d experienced some of it at home, with my own garden, but there’d always been the lurking and there’s stuff to do later behind it. It didn’t ruin anything, but the looming obligations shaded everything.

Here? There were no looming obligations, no quests, no jobs, no missions. There was a peace and tranquility to it, and I could understand why the monks chose to live this way in pursuit of enlightenment.

The unusual size and shape of the cantaloupes made my [Gardening] skill go a little wonky. It kept ‘expecting’ normal fruits, not the modified monstrosities here, and the little nudges and advice it tried to give me, trying to guide my hand like most normal skills, were a little suspect. It wasn’t completely unreliable, but I needed to double check everything against my own knowledge. It was a little like trying to grow trees with a [Lumberjack] skill. That skill would want me to chop trees down, not grow them, so it’d give me great advice - for chopping them down.

I didn’t sigh. I just got to work, patrolling around the boulder-sized fruits, looking for traces of insects or anything that needed pruning.

Thank Ciriel, the insects were not supersized, but it did leave the giants with the occasional pest control issue. One I wasn’t exactly well-equipped to handle, but it was a way I could contribute.

I noted a fruit was at full ripeness, and used [The First Rays of Dawn] to cut it off the stem. I flew up on the wings of a heron, the wings of an angel, and lightly burned an X into the top of it, marking it for one of the other monks to take back to the kitchens.

[*ding!* Would you like to upgrade the General skill [Gardening] to [Giant’s Gardening]?]

Once again I declined the offer. It would be more useful here and now, but long-term I planned on growing normal-sized plants. [Giant’s Gardening] would probably tell me that everything was stunted and too small, and I should prune them all and let the ‘real’ plants get the proper water and nutrition.

Even the prospect of growing gigantic mangos didn’t appeal. Thanks to math, making a mango ten times as large in one dimension would make the entire thing a thousand times as big. I didn’t think I could manage a tree of that size, and the thought of all the wasted mango that I couldn’t eat practically made me want to cry.

Now, double-sized mangos for eight times as large… there was potentially a long-term project for myself. Why do it with skills? It could take me centuries of selective breeding to get there, a wonderful project for an Immortal.

It was thirsty work, and it wasn’t like there were easy watering holes for little ones scattered around. Instead, I channeled my inner healy-bug, went to find a watering can, and tying my hair back, floated upside-down over it while getting a deep drink.

It was good enough for the plants, it was good enough for me.

The shadows were growing long as I finished the last row of the garden, content that I’d done my part to contribute to the Monastery’s upkeep for the day.

Dinner was garlic bread, cheese, and to no surprise, cantaloupe. There was something deeply satisfying about seeing part of the X I’d burnt into the skin of the fruit showing up on the rind when the giant placed ‘a small slice’ for us on the floor. Direct from garden to my plate, all the work made me hungry and I happily went for a second slice.

After dinner I went to Kunchenjab’s lair, and politely knocked on the door larger than every town gate I’d ever seen. The giant was a Classer, and probably heard me walking down the hallway by sheer virtue of his stats alone, ignoring any absurd super-condensed passives he might have.

“Enter.” Even through the door, his bellow was like a physical force pressing down on me. I didn’t bother trying to open the door. [Etheric Aegis] extended my vitality to my clothes, and I [Blinked] through. Far less effort than trying to open the door.

“Little Elaine. Do you believe you have contributed to the Monastery on this day?” The [Runesmith] asked in a ritual fashion.

“Yes, mighty Kunchenjab.” I replied, keeping it simple.

“Then come here and ask your questions.” He patted his desk with a hand nearly as large as I was, and I flew up. His desk was already cleared, and I teleported out of [Loremaster’s Library] the project I’d been working on for the last month. A scroll that would be considered a hefty book for a giant unrolled itself in front of us, the entire thing filled with a dense script in my smallest handwriting.

Kunchenjab had refused to make a simple rune that would generate the entire Medical Manuscripts - so I decided to do it myself, under the guidance of one of the best wizards in the world.

I’d decided on a set of scrolls, because all the fiddly nonsense with book bindings, covers, glue, different materials, double-sided pages, and all that other nonsense was a huge increase in difficulty without any true practical payoffs. The sharp decrease in difficulty once I’d decided to do scrolls had been promptly undone when I decided to make it in three different languages at once. High Elvish, Hakka, and Altaic. A shame Trade-Tongue was so limited it didn’t have most of the needed words.

A set of runes teleported themselves out of Kunchenjab’s personal storage with a faint pop, creating a ring around one eye. They flared with light, the wizard casually activating three dozen different methods of enhancing his vision.

I quickly took mental note of every rune he was using, and their order. This was one of the subtle lessons Kunchenjab had. I was embarrassed it took me three days to notice he was doing it. Every time I came in and visited, he had a different set of runes, a different set of functions. Careful observation and study would expand the repertoire of spells I had, and I suspected many of them were unique to the giant, or otherwise not broadly spread.

He was a [Runesmith] after all. He was the one making the runes the rest of us used.

Once he’d seen that I was taking notes on his runes, he’d started to display more, the set of stones curling his head and wrists constantly changing.

I’d come prepared with questions. The first day I’d been unprepared, and Kunchenjab had kicked me out in a minute, telling me not to waste his time.

I was sure he was terrible at being a [Monk] at this point, shiny bald head or not.

“You’ve told me how spells fail when written at this scale, because the mana takes time to process through the channels, and has finished burning up earlier sections before the mana’s made it to the ends.” I said. I hadn’t learned this at the School, but then again I hadn’t taken the most advanced wizardry classes either, and the size of my spell array was measured in square meters. “You gave me a solution to use both booster-capacitor arrays and multiple mana input circles, but I ran the math and it looks like it’s still too large, and will burn out. What’s the next stage in super large arrays?”

“Well spotted.” That was literally the highest praise Kunchenjab had ever uttered. “The next and final step…”

I furrowed my eyebrows in concentration, my dismay growing as I realized I’d basically need to completely start over again.

Nobody said this project was going to be easy, but as I mentally traced out the supporting superstructure for the mandala, I realized I might finally have all the pieces of the puzzle to finish my project.

Kunchenjab continued to lecture for thirty minutes, detailing all the ins and outs of the method he was describing, ensuring I had all the details and twists down. At the end of his lecture I bowed again.

“Thank you, mighty Kunchenjab, for imparting your wisdom to me once again.”

The giant snorted.

“You’re one of Night’s. Let him know next time you see him that I might send a request or two his way.”

I noticed that Kunchenjab had carefully avoided using the word favor, and I knew how Night felt about those.

“Now, I believe our time tonight is at an end. Shoo.” Kunchenjab unceremoniously kicked me out of his lair, and I found myself wandering back to the quarters.

I was lonely. Kunchenjab’s two sentences at the end of his lecture was more than I’d talked with anyone else here. In the darkness and silence, my heart ached for Iona, ached for home.

I’d failed in my primary quest, but was successful in my secondary objectives.

What was I still doing here? I had the last piece of the puzzle to complete my huge spell - which had to be worth at least a modest achievement when I classed up - and Kunchenjab had implied something similar when he gave me a message to pass to Night.

I wandered the hallways, past the sleeping room - I quickly let Uirphen know I was leaving - and grabbed my staff before heading straight out the doors. Once there, under the baleful crimson glare of the twin moons, I opened my wings and took flight north.

It was time to go home.

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