Yearning for the Moon

Chapter Thirteen

I had thought that finding a way to remove the Hematite without damaging the crystal inside the hunk of rock would be my biggest problem, that finding a way that took mere seconds to minutes, would be so much easier than the current way that could take several hours. Except while I had managed to figure it out in a week of real world time, that was significantly longer in the spatial world, my next problem seemed to have no solution in sight.

I was slowly accumulating more and more gold coins, it helped that I sold the pills individually and didn't often sell the same type more than once or twice, it kept the buyers interested. While I had been working on the Hematite issue, I had gotten dozens of offers from most of the wealthy and noble families in the city, all of them wanting me to come work for them, or wondering if I would sell directly to them. People could believe what they wished but surely it wasn't too far of a stretch to think that after successfully refining a pill in the competition, I got my hands on more pill formula's and proceeded to become a pill refiner?

Was that too hard to believe? I don't think it was, after all I had only released low-grade pills so far, I had given a bottle of medium-grade healing pills to Darian Silvstron, but for all anyone knew it was actually just a low-grade one like I had made in the competition and Darian had been exaggerating. I had yet to be tempted by any of the offers I had received because I knew they only wished to control me, and I had certainly had enough of that in my life already. If only my family could see me now, the first pill refiner in thousands of years, I wonder if they would regret banishing me to the Silver Woods.

Though if they hadn't I knew I never would have gotten here, without that encounter with Orpheus, without the blessings from the twelve, I never would have lived this long. It was annoying to admit sure, but it was the truth, and I fully acknowledged it, but that wouldn't stop me from living the life I had now to the fullest. Now that my hematite rock problem was solved, the next one was the lodestones, to make them smaller, stronger, more efficient, a tall order for sure, considering I wasn't truly sure how they worked.

Surely it wasn't as simple as the crystals empowered the lodestones to form a physical barrier and that was it, that couldn't be all, but as I spent days and weeks on it, months in the spatial world without coming any closer to a conclusion, I decided it was time for a break, I needed to rest my mind for a little bit and though I toyed with the idea of cultivating, I rejected it in the end, deciding I had done enough work for a little while. Now most people I know, would go out shopping or go drink for fun, but I wasn't most people, so I took the time to fully explore the spatial world, I knew I had been left some things apart from the main blessings from the twelve, maybe it was finally time I looked at them.

Bohdi had left me some books, I had seen them in passing but never paid much attention to them, I think right now they could be the perfect thing to get my mind off my problem, which was one of the last I needed to solve before I could finally go and begin construction on my city, though I suppose I had to see it first before construction could even happen.

Bohdi had loved knowledge, he had even said he wanted to prepare books of the knowledge of the world as a blessing, but had worried it would be outdated by the time they actually found a successor, so instead he gave me a ring to tell me what emotion drove people, and though it hadn't been particularly useful yet, I knew it likely would be at some point in the future. Bohdi with his love of knowledge, maybe left me some interesting books to read, maybe some books on long lost skills that could help me solve all my problems, surely not, even I knew that was a false hope.

I wasn't that lucky, nothing in the world could solve all my problems except me, conquering them one at a time, but it didn't mean those books didn't have anything helpful, in truth I probably should have looked at them much sooner. I leave my failed attempt at making a smaller lodestone and head upstairs to look for the books I had known Bohdi had left me. I find them not far from the chests of gold, just like Bohdi to view knowledge as valuable as gold, though the smart knew that knowledge had a value that far outweighed gold.