Zeal of the Mind and Flesh: A Cultivating Gamelit Harem Adventure (Spellheart Book 1)

by Marvin Whiteknight

  “Say, Mac. What does this thing take for fuel?”

  “It doesn’t! I’m reading the read-me file right now. It converts local ambient magical power into mana. In our case, it’s converting something colloquially called zeal. Curious.”

  “That’s actually… really, really good,” I said with a smile. No hauling endless piles of fuel to feed a furnace. No steam turbines that need to be maintained. This was my kind of magic.

  “I’ll say, if I had one of these back home, I might have even been able to go portable! No more need to leave my CPU’s screwed into a wall, I’d be free to take my real body wherever I wanted. I’ve always wanted to visit the arctic circle. All that clean, white snow around, and no danger of overheating…”

  “So, Mac,” I tried to snap the AI out of its daydream, “have you found anything that will help on your trawls through the ships data? Any way back?”

  “I believe I have found a method that will allow me to synthesize custom structures using points, which I now understand to be a unit denoting a specific amount of energy and matter resources generated by the ship. It’s not terribly efficient though, which is why bringing the raw materials cuts down on costs significantly.”

  My eyes lit up. “That means we can make tools!” I mentally took back what I said about not having enough magic.

  “Yes, simple hand tools should be well within my capacity to make. Though they’ll have to be simple. Anything complicated will need to be made by the ship herself. The mechanisms for constructing things out of a material other than the black plastic the mana generator is made out of are not yet functional. That being said, now that we have a steady power source, I can begin repairs and expansion in earnest. And if you keep earning points, it won’t be long before I can experience this ship’s bountiful assets.

  “Speaking of, I need you to give me asset management rights. As it is, what I can do is extremely limited. This place would be so much cleaner by now if the AI controlling the ship would let me rearrange things.”

  Would you like to bestow your Human Interface Unit with the rights to spend your points and rearrange the customizable areas of The Wanderer?

  “Alright, but no spending all the points on cleaning supplies. I want your first priority to be anything that will be immediately useful to me. I know if I give you half the chance you’ll turn this highly advanced piece of alien technology into a car wash.”

  Mac muttered something about my dirty, impure soul.

  “Oh, there’s one other thing I should mention,” Mac said to stop me from leaving. “I found a video file while trawling through what regions of the ships data banks I have access to. I think you are the intended recipient. It features someone who I believe to match your description of ‘bald alien wizard man.’ Also, it was titled ‘Play for Theo.’”

  “Well, put it up then,” I said with a shrug.

  The guy who showed up on the screen was mostly identical to the one I’d seen in the elven brothel.

  “It seems you’ve successfully made it to your destination! Good thing too. Sometimes people get fried when trying to bond to one of our units. I was worried there for the first hundred years, but it seems you pulled through okay.

  “Now I’m sure you’ve got a whole slew of questions. I’m going to answer a few of the more important ones and leave the rest for you to figure out for yourself.

  “I’m sure you’ve already noticed that you’re not on Earth anymore. In fact, you are quite far away from your old home planet, both in terms of space and time. It’s possible for you to one day get home, but honestly? You didn’t seem too happy back there anyway.

  “The place you’ve now found yourself in is usually referred to as The Ten Thousand Worlds. Mostly because there are, as you might expect, ten thousand worlds orbiting the remains of my old companion’s ship. He, like you, was granted a ship like The Wanderer, and grew it into that massive thing you see in the sky up there. He built these ten thousand worlds as a playground of sorts.

  “You’re on one of those ten thousand worlds now. Your job, should you survive these crucial few months, is to get The Wanderer in working order. Once you’re operational, the real fun can start. Keep in mind though, you’re not the only person we sent here. The other Travelers are not your friends. This is a battle royale, winner take all.”

  The screen went black for a moment, before quickly going live again. This last bit must have been added afterward.

  “I should mention that my old friend was a bit of a pervert, so he sculpted this world according to his fantasies. Have fun with that! Also, stop calling me Baldy!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MAC SENT ME off with some new tools made out of the black plastic material and his best attempt at a proper shirt. It wasn’t very stylish, and the weave was so coarse that it was practically a fishing net, but it was better than nothing. It was itchy, but at least it did the job. At the very least, it would be easy to loop some of my new tools through it. Plus, the design made it very easy to stick new strands of bark to it, making armor repairs fast and easy.

  There were a lot of questions raised by Baldy’s recording. Yes, I was going to keep calling him Baldy. In the end, I decided to just table those questions for a later date. Finding security for the next month was what I needed to focus on. The long-term planning and questions could wait.

  The plastic Mac made the tools out of didn’t hold an edge well, so our attempts at blades and saws were doomed to failure. I did have a nice shovel though, and a big Viking-style center grip shield. Mac also made me a new spear shaft and a couple of exchangeable grips that would hold my bronze dagger in place better than friction and my homemade string.

  I also had a proper bucket which would be useful. Mac assured me it could take full boiling temperatures, but I still worried about putting it in a fire. Still, at this point I was past caring about whether my cups were BPA-free when my only other option was to use a snail shell made of who-knows-what.

  Mac had also come up with some thin sheets of plastic that I could fold into a cube. These would be handy for making sun-baked bricks. The clay around here wasn’t very good, but if I refined it a bit in the bucket I might be able to start building a hut out of the stuff.

  All those toys were nice, but Mac’s best creation by far were the shoes he made me. Really, they were more like closed-toe sandals, but already my feet were thanking me for not having to endure the rough stone ground on their own.

  All in all, it only cost me another 30 points.

  Mac insisted that we get the scanner operational as soon as possible. Apparently, it would allow us to communicate even when I was on the surface, so long as I didn’t go too far away.

  I agreed with him that such an ability would be very welcome. It was a little lonesome back at camp by myself, and it was probably even worse for Mac buried underground as he was.

  That brought me back to the last item that Mac had given me. It was a shallow dish in the shape and size of a dinner plate, with a variety of ridges lining the sides. I’d spotted some magnetite in the area around here, but I didn’t have the manpower or infrastructure to go mining. So, I’d be panning for precious metals. With any luck, my little camp would be able to enter the iron age soon.

  Panning in the creek didn’t give me any nuggets of gold, but I got a lot of black sand. Hematite and magnetite probably, which was good. I dedicated a few hours a day to planning and the rest to building a furnace out of clay.

  I’d actually gotten quite a bit of metal thus far. Once I got down to a pan full of black sand, I dumped it in my bucket. There were more than a few bits of gold floating around there amidst all that iron. Not nuggets, but tiny little specs. Gold doesn’t alloy well with iron and melts at a significantly lower temperature. Gold was always valuable, Mac had assured me The Wanderer could certainly use it to offset some point costs, but I was more interested in having trade goods with the locals. Honestly, with the amount of gold in this area, I suspected that the creek mu
st pass through a rich gold vein somewhere nearby.

  Making a furnace ended up being harder than I thought. The creek wasn’t as rich in clay as it was in iron or gold, so I had to grab a bucket of mud and let it settle so I could pour the silt off the top and the sand off the bottom to get good clay. I ended up getting a dozen more buckets from Mac and getting a real production line going for both the metals and they clay.

  My fire, which I had desperately kept burning so I wouldn’t have to struggle to light a new one, was forcing me to range ever further for fuel. What I really needed were big logs that would burn all day and all night, and to set aside a big pile of them as fuel for the whole week. Unfortunately, even with my new access to plastic tools, cutting down trees proved to be a lot of work. The woods around here was made up of old growth trees, which meant they were so thick I couldn’t wrap myself even a fifth of the way around their trunks.

  The bark on those monsters laughed at my tiny little bronze dagger. My arms would ache long before the tree even thought about falling. Stripping off a little to weave into my clothes wasn’t too hard, but trying to take one of these trees down was an exercise in futility.

  Luckily there was still enough dead, dry wood and small branches for the time being, though I might have to consider moving camp. Once my furnace got going, I’d need to make lots of charcoal, and that would take a lot of wood. Still, my traps were still performing in this area, and by now they were thoroughly covered with plant matter, which made moving them quite a burden.

  I’d caught a few signs of the local wildlife too, beyond fish and plants. One of the creatures in this area was a three-eyed bunny. I’d made several attempts at making traps to catch one of them, but the things must have been smarter than the Earth variety, because they always steered clear of anything I managed to set up. Observing them wasn’t fruitless, however. After watching one of them pull and tug at a reddish-green weed, I saw it pull out a huge tuber.

  I’d just assumed the plant was a weed, but it was actually something that was a cross between a carrot and a potato. It was a nice addition to my diet. A few more vegetables and I could make fish stew.

  Eventually Mac and I actually came up with a clever idea for getting some gold. The scanner ended up needing iron, so I’d haul down a bucket of black sand, scraping off the lighter bits and just leaving the heaviest portion, where the gold was located.

  The iron disappeared in a flash of light, leaving the behind the tiny flecks of gold. The iron vanished to wherever the stuff was stored by the functions of The Wanderer’s systems Mac doesn’t yet have access too, but I ended up with about enough gold to make a very expensive penny. This early version of my furnace, which was little more than a column of clay bricks and some charcoal, was just barely enough to get the gold melted into a vaguely disk-like shape. I even ended up having to ditch my prototype crucible to get it out, but I ended up with a small gold coin. Not bad for a few weeks of work. You could actually make a living doing this.

  Suddenly my implant started ringing in my head. I was getting a phone call.

  Here? But how?

  I answered the call, only to be greeted with a familiar voice.

  [Ah, it warms my digital heart to see ugly little specks of dirt turn into a beautiful clean piece of pure gold.]

  It took me a few seconds to figure out what was happening. Mac had gotten through to my implant. But how? There were no data networks on this world. I rubbed the man-shaped mark on my chest.

  It must be a function of the ship.

  “You bought the scanner?” I asked Mac. He sounded different from before. Like he was talking directly in my head instead of through a speaker. Similar to an implant call, but something a bit more intense than that.

  [I did buy the scanner! I determined that it was unlikely you would be able to lower the point cost any further through your labors. Thus, I made the executive decision that any small amount of points lost would be mitigated by the efficiency of having a direct line of communication with you on a continuous basis.]

  “Gee, Mac. You saying you missed me?”

  [I merely wanted to imply that you’d get work done quicker with my guidance.] Mac chided sardonically. He’d gotten friendlier with me since coming to this world. Before he’d been simply my long-time contracted personal assistant, but now we both knew we were in this mess together.

  “That should be the last thing to get the command center fully repaired and operational, right?”

  [That’s right! Things are just now coming online again!]

  We’d had 185 points before. Mac just bought the scanner…

  Total points: 92

  So, the scanner ended up costing us 93 points, I wasn’t happy about being so low but at least we had something to work with.

  “Well? Did we gain anything besides the ability to talk at moderate distances?” I asked Mac.

  [Actually, the ability to communicate with you mentally at this distance was brought about by the command center coming fully online. Not because of the scanner, although I think that the scanner is useful all on its own. It does just as its name would suggest, it allows me to create a 3D model of the surrounding area, updating about once an hour. I’ve already been able to map much of the tunnels below me. I think it might be worthwhile to explore down there. The Wanderer is telling me that some of the items down below might be able to aid in its growth].

  I nodded, though I realized there was no way Mac could see the gesture. “Good. I’ll feel much safer if I’ve got you with a map, scanning for anything big and dangerous. I’ll feel even better once I get some iron tools at my side too.”

  I hadn’t forgotten that I’d gotten the bronze dagger from those caves. If there was other good stuff waiting to be collected, I wanted it. I was under no illusion that I’d be able to make top-quality iron by collecting it from the riverbed. Even if Mac and I could come up with the right chemical formulas, I just didn’t have the infrastructure or the personal skill.

  I ended up smashing up most of the snail shell for the calcium carbonate. I left enough for a decent bowl but much of the shell would become flux for the furnace. I’d get my coke from wood, which just came from some leftover charcoal.

  For my furnace, I’d constructed something called a draft furnace, based on some designs we’d come up with. In the end, it still wasn’t quite hot enough to melt iron, so I needed to add a blower. Between me blowing air in with a simple fan and crank mechanism Mac printed up and the natural buoyancy of hot air sucking more air up into the furnace as it left out of the smokestack, I was able to get something pretty darn hot.

  In the end, with Mac’s help, I was able to get about a kilogram of cast iron from a couple weeks work. Cast iron is very brittle and doesn’t make very good bladed edges. Luckily, Mac was able to build a plastic handle that fit a good rock I found, making a hammer. Really, I should have thought of making such a tool earlier, since the stone hammer made quite a good club.

  I was lucky I’d downloaded those educational packets, and that I had Mac with me, because making metal tools required a lot of work. There were a dozen times I was on the verge of giving up and would have if not for Mac assuring me that I just needed to give it one last try.

  By Mac’s count, it had been nearly two weeks of work to survive out here and get to this point. But I’d succeeded in making a big, dull blade. It was somewhere between a dagger and a short sword in length, but it was pointed and would make a decent sidearm in case something got inside the range of my spear. Mac printed up a sheath for it that would be fixed to the inside of the new shield he was making, so I could draw it the moment something got in close.

  It was a far cry from the full body plate I’d hoped to have by now, but it was better than having my only real weapon at the end of my spear.

  What finally moved me into action was when Mac told me he’d fully mapped out the third level and had assured me that there were only two types of creatures down there that would be big enough to be a thr
eat to me. One was those centipede things, and the other was a species of giant lizards that preyed on the rats. It was probably one of them I’d heard roar when I first stepped outside. For the lizard, he’d figured out where they nested and their general routes through the place, and I’d be arriving through the entrance furthest from their nests during a time when most of them would be sleeping. The centipedes would have to be scanned for and avoided on an individual basis.

  “If I get killed by a giant slug, I’m going to crawl towards you and with my last dying breath and bleed all over the floor.”

  [I wouldn’t be asking you to go someplace so messy if I didn’t think the rewards were worth it. Odds are, you won’t even need your weapons.] Mac said. [Just listen to my clean, soothing voice and you’ll be in and out in no time.]

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll stay armed and armored all the same.”

  I trudged my way into the underground tunnels. By now the subterranean passageways were familiar to me. I was able to get to Mac’s position in the cave system in no time at all. I hadn’t seen any sign of the big centipedes or the giant rats since I cleared this place out with smoke. Maybe the fact that I regularly patrolled this path kept the smaller creatures away.

  Mac provided me a light source. It was a much bigger glass cylinder than the one I had previously obtained. Apparently, the ship had been growing more ever since the power was turned back on.

  Soon enough, I was wandering through the damp passageways as Mac whispered directions in my ear.

  [Take a left-hand turn by that filthy splotch of moss on the right. Now continue on beyond that puddle of disgusting liquid. I couldn’t identify it, but it sure looked nasty on the scanner.]