Magic Made Simple

Chapter 30: The Nose Knows

As it turned out, I didn't need to go find the crafter I was looking for. She had found me way before I had reached her station.

"Where are they!" Blair shouts, sprinting towards me. She bumps into several people on her warpath, but she doesn't stop to apologize to a single one. When she reaches me, she grabs my shoulders, her eyes glowing with excitement. "Where are the monsters you brought me! Oh I can practically smell the high quality materials you have!"

"Can you really smell them?" I ask, maybe a bit stupidly.

"I might as well be able to. I have a bit of a knack for sensing these things." She taps her nose as she speaks. I don't know if her knowing I had some powerful monster corpse on me was the result of a skill or a terrifyingly accurate intuition, but now wasn't the time to pry.

"We probably need to go outside the city if I am going to show you this. Maybe even to a different floor."

"Ooooo you must have a lot of bodies stuffed into that aura of yours if you are worried about what people are gonna think." She says, grinning. "Any who, it does not matter! We can go to floor eleven. I doubt any prying eyes will be there to see all your secrets."

"You've made it to floor eleven?" I ask, genuinely surprised.

"Of course I have. I actually just got back from completing floor ten."

"I thought a crafter would have more trouble than most when it came to fighting your way through the floors." I say as we walk towards the staircase.

"Fighting? Well there was hardly much of that. Squashing anything in my path was easy enough until I got to floor 9, and from there I just outfitted the royal guards with some shiny new gear. That got the King to let me pass to floor eleven. I even got a shiny new tier for my pioneer title."

I can feel a bit of the color drain from my face. "Have you told anybody else about that yet?" I ask.

"Nah, didn't really think to. Should I be telling people?"

"No. Well, you can if you want, but I would strongly prefer if you didn't."

"Then I won't tell a soul. You know what they say, happy corpse supplier happy life."

We arrive on the eleventh floor halfway through the conversation. The small island surrounded by open ocean felt way too nostalgic considering it really hadn't been too long ago that I was last here. I wanted to continue down the line of conversation we were on and see if she really meant what she'd said, but she tore the direction of the conversation from my hands.

"Now, show me the goods." She says, eagerly rubbing her hands together.

I turn away from her and take a quick look at the island we stood on, making sure it would be big enough to fit the titans corpse. It seemed to be big enough, so I released the corpse from my aura, feeling a wave of relief when I did. It felt like a burden had been dropped. The feeling of a full stomach was gone, and I even felt a bit lighter.

My expression slowly drops for a moment when I think more about the unspoken metaphor, and I quickly derail that train of thought before I start getting disgusted just thinking about my aura. I turn my attention back to Blair, who for once finally seems to be quiet. She is just gawking with an open mouth at the humongous monster.

"I..." She trails off. Without warning, she suddenly sprints off towards the staircase at top speed. "I'll be right back!" She shouts.

Seeing how fast she moved startled me, and I quickly checked her level, shocked by what I saw.

Human (Level 45)

It looks like somebody has been hard at work. No doubt she's been held back by the materials she'd had on hand, and this corpse would certainly benefit her greatly. Before she returns, I start reabsorbing the corpse into my aura, grimacing at the mana expenditure and the bloated feeling in my stomach that I did my best to ignore.