The Fifth Realm

by Michael Chatfield

  There were people from Alva here. With the power of the linked dungeons under Rugrat’s control, they had transformed the area into a massive underground cave.

  “So what is going on down here?” Erik asked.

  “Well, we have the Viewing Hall down here. Then we’ve got people growing food for the Sky Reaching Restaurants, like the underground cave in the Division Headquarters. We’re also building weapon systems down here. Half of the development happens upstairs but the assembly and building will happen down here once we finalize the new weapons and upgrades.

  “Then, of course, we’ve got the resource farm that is happening underneath the Crafting trial dungeon. All of the resources from there are harvested and processed here before being used by our crafters or sold to our traders, who sell it across the realms. This is how we’re able to support most of our crafters without needing to bring back resources from Alva. I was thinking of adding in training areas down here for the military—you know, work on their fighting abilities and we don’t show others everything that we can do. There are people all looking at the training grounds, looking to understand the strength of our people,” Rugrat said.

  “It really is another city down here,” Erik said.

  “That’s not all. Since Elan has been getting more information on the cultivation, I set up one of the dungeon cores from the secondary dungeons as a cultivation aid. We don’t have to open all of our mana gates before we compress our mana core. It is harder to do afterward but not impossible. People have to pay to use the cultivation chambers but then they can clear out the impure mana within their body, replace it with the denser and pure mana refined by the dungeon core. The impurities grow the dungeon core; the pure mana grows their cultivation. Even if they just refine the pure mana into their mana channels, they’ll experience an increase in Strength!” Rugrat said.

  “Well, actually I found out something interesting for mana and body cultivators.” Erik shared with Rugrat what Old Hei had told him.

  “That’s cheating!” Rugrat complained.

  Erik just shrugged. “With a stronger body and higher mana capacity, it takes a lot more resources to cultivate both.”

  “Well, we don’t have anything to do but wait for the next couple of days.” Rugrat pulled out a book and passed it to Erik. “It can’t be that hard to get to Body Like Stone, right?” Rugrat pulled out three pills.

  Erik let out a light laugh seeing the pills. “It’s always easier following in one’s footsteps.”

  “Yes, it is. Now, you’ll need to control that half-step mana domain you’ve got going on. It’s as crazy as my Aunt Deborah’s hair on a humid day!”

  ***

  Elan was sitting in his “office.” He switched between the Wayside Inns and Sky Reaching Restaurants so that he was never in one place for very long.

  There was a knock at the door.

  He looked up. The reports around him disappeared into his storage ring with a wave of his hand and he picked up the tea that was on the side.

  “Come in,” Elan said. The door opened to reveal one of Elan’s agents, a woman called Verna Warren. She was one of the people who had joined the Alva military and found that it didn’t suit her. She didn’t know what to do, so she had gone on to be a trader. Then, as Elan was growing his information network, she became an informant before becoming one of his agents.

  Elan had quietly set up a group within the intelligence agency that looked to actively recruit Alvans into the agency.

  Only people who were sworn Alvans were allowed to join the agency. Otherwise, they would always just be informants for the Alvan Intelligence Agency. Those who joined were trained in stealth, poison, information gathering, and given the skills, spells, and gear to make them the best at what they did.

  With them as the backbone of the AIA, they had expanded rapidly across the realms with different agents like Evernight controlling areas of interest or becoming part of the chain that passed information back and forth.

  “Trader Elan, there is a scribe here to see you,” she said.

  Elan nodded. “Thank you, Verna. Show them in please.” Elan took a drink from his cup.

  She nodded and waved forward the others.

  There were several men and women. Each of them were scribes but, being people of Alva, Elan could see that their cultivation wasn’t simple.

  Body tempering...a high level of mana gathering—they’re good at hiding it. They’ve done what they can to enhance their sight for those long hours of writing and copying down information. Elan hid a smile.

  Alvans and their tempering. Seriously, who would expect a scribe in the Fourth Realm to have tempered his foundation and reached Body Like Stone, or have opened eight of their mana gates?

  Verna bowed to Elan and closed the door behind her. Elan activated a formation on the table and moved his jaw to pop his ear with the pressured feeling that came with it.

  The scribes all bowed to Elan.

  “No need for that,” Elan said.

  “You might not be part of the council but you watch out for Alva, protecting us. It is only right,” the man heading up the group said.

  “Just doing a job,” Elan said. “And I would like to ask you your help in another task. Please, take a seat.”

  The four scribes sat opposite him and he pulled out cups and started to fill them, passing them to the others. They accepted the cups with both hands and afterward, Elan filled up his glass.

  They drank together and relaxed a bit.

  “Vuzgal has grown in scope and size in the last couple of months. I am in need of scribes to copy down information and create reports.”

  “Conditions?” one of the scribes asked. All Alvans were blunt and to the point; it was somewhat refreshing.

  “You will be allowed access to high grade materials and your schooling paid for. You would work for three weeks and get a week off, rotating. You can leave with a two-month long warning. Access to spells and faster writing and scribing techniques.”

  “Tempering?” another scribe, a man this time, asked.

  “Based upon your performance, you will be able to get pills and aids to increase your cultivation. All of you Alvans are cultivation mad.”

  The others simply smiled.

  “Okay, so what does it entail?” Dang asked.

  “You would be listening to a source that would relay information to you after their activities or during them. We just need to get them in close to get information while you can write up reports that one can assimilate, like information or technique books. You write and pass them on,” Elan said.

  “I don’t think I am suitable,” one of the male scribes said.

  “That is no problem,” Elan said.

  The man bowed and left the room.

  “Copy information?” Dang asked as the formation was re-activated and the door locked once more.

  “Vuzgal’s dungeon has a large area of influence. It extends over the city for the most part. If someone says something inside that area of influence, or they put down a technique book, then the answering statue will relay what the person is saying or can read out the information contained within different books. We have been recording down any information from different Expert or higher level books to add to the libraries.

  “There is a lot of information on any given day and the answering statue’s speed can be increased so only the fastest scribes can keep up with it, compiling a book in just a few minutes.” Elan looked at the stunned faces in front of him.

  Erik and Rugrat privately called scribes a printing press. They could use spells and techniques when writing to make them faster than a modern printer on Earth. They could also create magic spell scrolls, technique books, and information books, directly pouring information into one’s mind.

  Elan wanted to use them for this purpose. If they could write out information books, then the reader could directly assimilate the information into his or her mind, immediately getting up to date on everything that was h
appening, understanding in minutes what would have taken hours to read.

  “Do you know where this answering statue is?”

  “No,” Dang said.

  “Let’s head down.” Elan stood.

  They headed out of the private room and went into the back rooms of the Sky Reaching Restaurant. Verna came with them, protecting and looking out for Elan.

  They took a rising rune-covered floor, what Erik and Rugrat called an elevator, all the way to the basement. Then, with special medallions, a wall opened for them. They passed through several more doors before they reached a stone-covered floor. The floor and walls were smooth and sleek, though when stepping on them, one wouldn’t slip.

  They entered the dungeon proper. They were tens of meters underneath Vuzgal now. The area had changed. The alchemists and farmers had laid down their fields and there were beasts of the Vuzgal army that were being raised and maintained. A second ammunition factory had been created, as well as a complex of firearms and modern weapons facility.

  Rugrat’s new semi-automatic rifle, underbarrel grenade launcher, rotating grenade launcher, mortars, and formation sockets were all made down here.

  Guards patrolled the area. Undead guarded each of the paths from Vuzgal. They were the strongest undead that they controlled, wearing a number of high Journeyman-level gear and being treated by alchemists and smiths to increase their overall strength.

  There were very few entrances down to the underground but this complex was the base of Alva’s strength in Vuzgal.

  They stepped onto a speeding walkway. The runes moved the floor to make it faster to get around. Rugrat had called them airport walkways and played with them like a kid for hours after Julilah made them.

  Simple, but effective.

  They got closer to the Castle District and walls fell from the ceiling.

  Each of the training areas and the Castle District extended their walls all the way down to the bedrock. That way, if someone got into the underground, they could still protect themselves and defend underneath themselves.

  They passed the guards watching the gates and headed inward. There was a simple room, with a voice coming from it.

  “With Flashing Footsteps, one must drive power through their legs and create light spells underneath their feet and in the direction opposite to the direction of travel. The light underneath their feet will levitate the practitioner; the force from the light blast will push them in the opposite direction. One must learn the spells Light Levitation, Directional Light Lance, Light as a Feather, or similar spells and understand them completely, combining them together into the Flashing Footsteps technique.

  “Klaus, head of the Fighter’s Association, and Deputy Head Inis—”

  A voice was spitting out words at a rate that Elan could barely keep up with. He entered the room, seeing a statue standing there. Four scribes were in front of them—one furiously copying, the three others ready to write at any moment.

  “—after all, you’re the leader of the Fighter’s Association here.”

  “Then shouldn’t I be setting a good example? You know—heading into the dungeons, coming out victorious!”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” the deputy head of the Fighter’s Association said.

  “Whoa!”

  “You’ll need to hide your identity if you want to go into the dungeon.”

  “Grogar the bold!”

  “Are you sure you’re okay? Did you hit something with your head this morning?”

  “You! Hey, I’m the branch head!”

  “Like when did that matter?”

  Elan stepped back from the room, the sound being cut off, and the group looked at him.

  “It is like an information gathering thing, able to pick up on anything that is happening within range of the dungeon. It is very literal, so you need to add in the correct terms to search through that information. If you want to gain information over a long time, then you need to add in priorities.

  “We found out that the answering statue works with keywords. We were getting a lot of random conversations from the Expert crafters, so we added in these keywords, so if a tailor talked about a specific tailoring technique, we would record. If they were talking about the Crafting trial dungeon and their activities inside, we wouldn’t as that is recorded in the Viewing Hall. We also found that if we gave the command to start from the beginning of the conversation, the answering statue would give us the information someone said in the last ten minutes. Past that, we couldn’t get anything.”

  “What about if someone is using a formation to stop them from being recorded?” Dang asked.

  Seems that you are the right person for this job.

  “The answering statue doesn’t make any noise, it just moves its lips.”

  Elan thought for a second. “Could it be mimicking what the person is doing?”

  “We didn’t think of that,” Dang said. “If we had some people that were good at lip reading maybe we could figure out what they were saying?”

  “I think I have a plan.”

  Elan explained the system that he wanted Dang to implement and expand on.

  The answering statue could speak so fast it tested the speed of the scribes, spilling out information. It could also move its lips according to what someone was saying. With this, a second scribe with good drawing abilities was needed, creating an information book so that one could see what was being said.

  “Okay, so we need four scribes in there at all times, then we need a second group to take the information collected and organize it. They will need to piece conversations together, piece the different books together. With the answering statue telling us which book or person the information is from, that will be easier. A group to compile that information and create several copies. Then we have another group going through the lip reading and translating that into conversation. And more people to send out items to the academy, items to the intelligence networks, and what is useful and not useful information,” Elan said. The statue was simplistic but they could add in a number of commands and it would carry them out. It was just knowing what kind of orders they had to give in order to unlock its abilities.

  “Sounds like a lot of work,” Dang said.

  “Ah, but then, with that, we can save the work of my agents, only send them out on high-priority tasks and the rest of them are free to work on other things.”

  “No wonder you’re looking to recruit more scribes. I’m in,” Dang said.

  “Very good!” Elan smiled.

  Chapter: To the Earth Floor

  “How are they looking?” Glosil asked Yui. Tiger Platoon was working with Dragon Platoon. They had taken over the teleportation pad in Alva and the farmers had worked with the alchemists to grow up an Earth-attribute forest around the pad.

  There were different plants that would act violently if disturbed seeded in with them and then they used a section in the forest to simulate attacks by the beasts.

  This created the closest simulation to what they might find in the Earth floor.

  “I think that they’re as good as they can be. I think they’re starting to slack off with the training,” Yui said honestly.

  Glosil nodded.

  They couldn’t keep their attention all the time and once they had it down, then their minds would start to wander and they would assume that things in the training would remain the same way in reality.

  “Incoming teleport!” the manager for the teleportation pad said.

  “Clear the pad!” Yui yelled.

  They moved out of the way. A few moments later, there were five new figures there: Domonos and some of his people from Dragon Platoon.

  Seeing Glosil was there already, he headed straight for him and dismissed his soldiers.

  They met with the group that was training as Domonos saluted Glosil.

  Glosil saluted back. “How are things in the Fourth Realm?”

  “Erik and Rugrat are planning to head to the Fifth Realm. They want to gain
technique manuals. I went and saw them in the undercity. Erik told me about techniques and showed me their effects. They’re very different from what we do currently,” Domonos said. “They’re like spells but can combine movements and mana together into attacks. Some can rely on just mana, or just on physical abilities. I recorded down everything Erik told me.” Domonos tapped his storage ring.

  “How is the training going?”

  “The training staff is smaller but they’re no less fierce. Seeding the new with the old was a good way to bolster strength. I don’t feel like there will be any degradation in their training,” Domonos reported.

  “Good. We’ve been training with Dragon and Tiger Platoons. It has taken some time for the new members of the First Army to get used to everything here. I worked with your second-in-command and we reorganized the two platoons, mixed the old and the new in together. We have enough for another two platoons, bringing us up to a full company strength. I want to talk to the two of you about the chain of command for them. For now, I want to operate as two oversized platoons. Changing the chain of command now could only lead to more confusion before the fight.”

  Domonos and Yui nodded, understanding the sentiment.

  “Are we still heading out tomorrow?” Domonos asked.

  “That is the plan, unless there is anything that you two have that would make me push back the operation?”

  Domonos and Yui shook their heads.

  “Tomorrow it is. Make sure they’re rested and well fed tonight. They’re to remain in the barracks—don’t want them getting into trouble the night before,” Glosil said.

  “Personal visits?” Domonos asked.

  “In the cafeteria. Only two drinks per person.”

  “Understood,” Yui said.

  ***

  Glosil wasn’t able to sleep at all that night. As morning came, he pulled on his body armor, pulling it tight and securing the Velcro. He checked the magazines, making sure that they were easy to grab and pull out.

  He shifted around, checking the reassuring weight of the armor, before he grabbed gloves that had been made by the tailors to protect his hands and also give him full range of motion. He tilted his head back and put his helmet on, clipping the strap.