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Book 3: Chapter 22: Two Months Later...

"Are you awake now?" Flossy asked.

Arthur blinked, the world snapping back into focus. A smell as sharp as dragon urine made him recoil. As he did, he realized that the older woman was standing right in front of him, holding something under his nose. A small vial. Smelling salts?

"What happened?" he muttered

"You had a seizure," she replied matter-of-factly.

What? Arthur felt for his internal healing card. Sure enough, he found it at work steadily drawing on his mana.

Then, as if a switch had been flipped, his memory of the last few minutes returned. He remembered eating an off-colored peach that, surprisingly, didn't taste too horrible. At least, until he had lost control of his limbs.

"I had a bad reaction," he said, his voice gaining strength. He straightened up and looked around, rolling his shoulders. His muscles felt as if he had just finished an intense workout. "What went wrong? I thought you said you tested the peach for poison."

Flossy was always meticulous about such things, and it was one of the reasons Arthur trusted her. Well, to a point.

Flossy shrugged and turned back to scribble frantically in a notebook. "We did, but sometimes unexpected reactions happen." She cast him a dry look. "That is why we have testers."

Arthur preferred when his job yielded resistances rather than seizures. The past couple of months had been quite fruitful in that regard. Especially last week, when a strange mix of salts and almond flakes had granted him a Resistance to drowning in salt water. He hadn't tested it out yet, but...

"You owe me double pay," he said, dryly.

"Do I?" Flossy blinked eyes made extraordinarily large by glasses.

"Yes, I want hazard pay. You hired me to quantify the results, not to act as a poison tester.”

Arthur found it easier to be blunt with her. Otherwise, she tended to completely miss nuances in conversation.

Flossy thought hard, then nodded. "Then yes, double pay today."

This meant Arthur was leaving with two Rare card shards for today. Brixaby would be happy about that.

He leaned back in the chair and let the healing card finish its work.

Flossy's crazy experiments never took up his whole day and left Arthur plenty of time to train. He left her laboratory cave a few minutes later, healed of any lingering effects from the seizure and wealthier by two Rare shards, and made his way down the twisting hallways.

Bit by bit, he was figuring out the layout of the confusing Mesa Free Hive. The trick, it seemed, was to stop trying to make it make sense.

When he got to main bubble number 1 -- a place one would think would be at the front or the end of the inner Mesa complex, but no, it was smack in the middle -- Arthur didn't take the stairs up to the higher caves. Instead, he bent to get his hands dusty to help him grip better, then jumped at the cave wall.

The sheer rock wall was porous, which made sense because there were so many caves. There were lots of holes, big and small, to grab onto. Arthur started to climb.

It was risky. He'd fallen once or twice when the hand or foot holds crumbled from under him. But both times he hadn't fallen far and hadn't broken any bones. Just gained a bunch of bruises.

Now that his Rock Climbing skill was up to level 22, he had a sort of sixth sense about where it was safe to put his hands and feet.

That warning from his card only came when he was actively using the skill. If he didn't focus, he could easily overlook the little whisper of wisdom in the back of his mind that his hand or foothold wasn’t safe.

Also, he learned that to keep getting better, he couldn't just climb the same paths over and over. He had to keep pushing himself and trying new things to continue to level. Maybe there was a life lesson in there, but Arthur was too busy climbing to think about it.

His new knowledge -- or was it experience? -- warned him twice about weak handholds. He changed his grip, even stretching way above his head one time.

He was rewarded with Rock Climbing level 23.

Arthur grinned. His success helped lift him the rest of the way.

He got to the cave he was looking for and found a not-so-happy man with soil-stained looking down at him.

"Normal people use the ladders, or call a dragon."

"What's the fun in that?" Arthur asked, standing.

"You do have a dragon, right?" the man, Taza, asked.

"Yes, but he's still too young to fly me up. Plus, climbing gets my heart racing." Arthur would rather Taza think he liked the rush than know he was working on his skills.

Some rumors about his and Brixaby's abilities had leaked out to the general public. But they hadn’t made the splash he’d feared. Most people in the hive didn't care much about fighting. So much so that Arthur had gained the impression having a combat card was like a dirty secret nobody wanted to talk about.

Cressida thought it might be because they were scarred from the places they'd left. Arthur increasingly worried it was an enforced cultural ignorance.

Despite that, Arthur liked Taza, who he'd met through Flossy. Taza didn't talk much about his life before coming to the Hive, but from the hints Arthur had picked up, Taza's family had worked for a cruel noble before they managed to escape. Arthur could sympathize.

Somehow, Taza got a Rare card in his youth. It had been both a blessing and a curse. The noble had forced him to use it night and day, well past the point of exhaustion. His family had been held hostage to ensure he complied. It got to the point where Taza had been on the verge of actually damaging his heart deck, which Arthur hadn’t known was possible. But after Taza escaped, the card made him invaluable to Mesa Free Hive.

His card had the magical spell to make plants grow at an accelerated rate. Lots of Common and Uncommon cards could do that, too. What made Taza’s Rare was that his accelerated growth spell didn't cause the soil to lose its nutrients.

Arthur had learned a lot recently. Like how growing crops could rob the soil of its nutrients. Dragon soil could be added to fix it. But dragon soil was expensive and dangerous to use. Plus, it was needed at the edges of the kingdom to reclaim the land.

So someone who could use magic to keep the soil and plants healthy while wildly overproducing was worth his weight in gold.

Despite the fact his card had brought him pain for years, Taza loved being a farmer. He was happy to teach Arthur what he knew.

Arthur had shot up to level 15 in Farming in less than a week, and had leveled several side skills such as Herb Identification to 11, as well as made headway into Trimming, Pruning, and Harvesting.

He thought he might be on the verge of a farming class, soon.

This was all useful, though not vital in the upcoming fight against the Mind Singer. That was the reason Arthur was here today.

“Well,” Taza said with a roll of his eyes at Arthur’s antics. “Let’s get to work.”

Right now, they were working on a new variety of corn that would hopefully provide a larger yield at about eighty percent of the time it took other types. It wasn't the most exciting thing, but Arthur couldn’t complain if it kept people from starving.

They worked down the rows: Arthur identifying and pulling weeds, which grew rapidly in dragon soil. They both worked quickly: Taza because of his experience, and Arthur because of his skills.

After about an hour, Taza thanked Arthur and paid him a simple Common shard. It was very low pay for the week. But again, that wasn’t why he was here.

"I'll finish up here," Arthur said, pointing to the hoe and other tools. That was part of his job, too.

Taza thanked him and left for one of his other projects. But before he did, he used a bit of his magic to make the plants grow overnight.

New Counterfeit Spell obtained: Rapid Plant Growth

Time remaining: 59 minutes, 59 seconds.

Arthur hid his smile.

Once Taza was out of sight, he walked across the length of the space to an orchard set in the back. Among peaches, cherry trees, and almonds stood a single apple tree. It was bigger than the rest, and if someone looked closely, they would see a purple sheen to the bark.

Arthur looked over his shoulder to make sure Taza hadn't come back. Then he concentrated on his newly copied ‘Rapid Plant Growth’ spell and used it on the tree.

The apple tree seemed to sigh like it was relieved. The leaves turned toward Arthur. Then, right before his eyes, purple flowers bloomed all over – literally, up and down the trunk as well as the branches. This wasn't how normal apple flowers bloomed, but this wasn't a normal tree.

As Arthur kept feeding it power, the flowers withered, seemed to collapse in on themselves, and were replaced by the green buds of growing apples. Those grew and deepened to a dark purple as they ripened. In less than a minute, right when Arthur was almost out of mana, he had a whole harvest of purple apples that blocked psychic powers.

Arthur started picking these apples, putting them one by one in his Personal Space. He had barrels of them now. Each one was an arrow in the quiver of tricks he planned to use against the Mind Singer.

After he finished that job, he cleaned up the last of the rows of corn like he promised Taza.

Then, he made the long climb down. His next stop was to find Brixaby.

With some luck, his little dragon would be done with his crafting job, too. It was payday for both of them, which meant more Rare shards. If they were really lucky, they’d have enough for a brand-new Rare card.