Dreamer's Throne

“You don’t understand! They’re making up all sorts of weird rumors about the soap,” Ryn said, slamming her palm on the table.

She was sitting with Garrett in their room, going over the sales accounts for the last month. It had been nearly three months since they’d started selling the bars in the commoner’s districts and things had been going well. The summer’s warmth had given way to the blustery fall, and winter’s chill was just starting to creep into the early mornings. The soap sellers had started to wrap themselves up in coats as they hawked their wares, but the cold did nothing to stop the crowds that formed to buy from them.

“What sort of rumors?” Garrett asked, not looking up from the paper he was examining.

“They say that the soap drives away sickness!”

“That’s true though. It’s not a rumor.”

“Not when you eat it! People are getting sick because they’re melting it down and trying to drink it!”

Finally looking up, a disgusted expression on his face, Garrett saw Ryn grinning.

“Hah! That isn’t even the worst of it. I’ll spare the gory details, but the rumors flying around are absolutely wild.”

“Drinking soap is not safe,” Garrett said, frowning. “I didn’t think we’d need to add a warning about that, but I guess people are the same everywhere. What are we doing about it?”

Her eyes sparkling with excitement, Ryn slapped a paper onto the table for Garrett to look at.

“Guaranteed not to cure your sickness if you drink it,” Garrett read, his eyes tracing down the flier. “‘Ryn’s Hard Soap. The best soap money can buy.’ Is this an advertisement?”

“It’s good, isn’t it? I have one for each of the rumors. I’m going to post them around the city. This will help stop the rumors, while also building up awareness about our soap!”

“Our soap? Why is it called Ryn’s Hard Soap then?”

“Oh, well, you know, we needed a name for it and Garrett is sort of an ugly name, you know? I mean, no offense, but it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. Ryn’s sounds much better. Carraway even said so.”

Bemused, Garrett didn’t have the heart to tell he had been influencing Carraway to agree with her as much as possible. Selling things wasn’t Garrett’s specialty, either in this life or his past, but he’d been doing his best to share as much as he could remember with Ryn during their dream study sessions and the young woman was absorbing everything he could throw at her like a sponge. It was getting to the point where Garrett was running out of things to teach her. These new advertisements were only the latest in a long line of ideas she was adapting from Earth without knowing it.

“It’s a good name. And the advertisement is great. I would adjust it to say something like, ‘guaranteed to not make you sick if you don’t eat it,’ to point out that soap does help against sickness, while poking at those who believed the rumor.”

“Oooh, that’s a good idea!” Ryn said, jumping up. “I’ll do that.”

“Hold on. We’re not done with the accounts yet.”

With a groan, Ryn sat back down, her eyes going to the paper Garrett was holding up.

“You’re doing well. There was only one mistake. But because you made it during the beginning, you’re off all the way down. Please copy this out again, noting the corrections I’ve made. Overall, we’re doing really well. Even minus the fifty-percent cut you’re paying for protection outside of our territory, you’ve netted a whole gold coin over the last month. That’s after expenses, which means your gross is what?”

Biting her lip, Ryn looked at the paper for a moment and spoke hesitantly.

“Two gold, thirty-five silver?”

“And?”

“Forty-eight copper.”

“Precisely. And sales are increasing. You can see that each month you’ve made more than the previous month. A trend we want to continue. However, you’re soon going to be running into another problem.”

“You mean competition?” Ryn said, her eyes hardening. “Carraway was talking to me about that.”

“That’s right. There are four primary soap producers in the city, and all four of them have the capability to make bar soap, though only two of them are of high-enough quality to provide scented soap. As you expand, you’re going to run into problems both with competition from those soap manufacturers, or more accurately merchants who are working with them to copy your model, as well as other gangs who won’t be happy if you start selling in their territory without providing them compensation. Do you have a plan for dealing with those two groups?”

Shaking her head, Ryn looked a bit uncomfortable. It was only to be expected, really. Until a few months ago, the only money she’d ever had was money she stole, and she had no experience with being a merchant, let alone the politics and maneuvering that came with it. It was clear to Garrett that she felt out of her depth, no matter how quickly she was learning. Smiling, he nodded in what he hoped was an encouraging way.

“That’s okay. We should have a bit of time before we have to deal with copycats. Let’s think about how we can prevent other people from being able to copy us, or at least make it hard on them if they do.”

Nodding, Ryn gathered up her papers, her gaze distant as her mind worked over the problem. While she thought, Garrett got out the gang’s account books to add the gold coin Ryn had given him. Of that gold, five silver was his as part of his ten-percent cut, so he made sure to note it down. Ever since he’d taken over the books, the gang’s finances had been humming along without so much as a hiccup, firmly cementing Garrett’s value in Henrick’s eyes. More and more the gang leader had been defaulting to Garrett, to the point that it was actually starting to become worrisome.

“What if we made deals with the other soap factory?”

Looking up, Garrett saw that Ryn was staring at him with excitement.

“So long as we’re buying up the available supply of hard soap, no one else will be able to sell a competing product.”

“That’s a good idea,” Garrett said with a nod. “Why don’t you talk to Carraway about that and see if it would be feasible.”

“I should do that now, we don’t have any time to lose!”

Watching as Ryn ran out of the room, Garrett smiled to himself.

It’s good that she’s starting to think through stuff like that. She’ll make a sharp merchant once she has a bit more experience.

Alone at last, Garrett let his attention sink into his body to see his soul spark flickering dimly and let out a frustrated sigh. He had been trying to finish shaping it ever since the incident with the ghoul’s nest, but the final step was proving incredibly difficult. It wasn’t like his progress had halted altogether, but it had become so slow that some days he didn’t know if he was making any progress at all. To make matters worse, his experience gains had completely stopped as well, though not because he had failed to spread more Dream Seeds. Pulling up the notification that had been plaguing him for months, Garrett couldn’t help but groan.

You have reached a major threshold. Your experience gain will be locked until you have broken through.

EXP: 79/80

There was no doubt in his mind that it had to do with the soul spark he was awakening. Up until this point, he’d believed that the system in the Dream and his soul spark in the real world were only nominally connected, but clearly that was false. In order to move up into level four, he needed to break out of the awakener stage and enter the shaper stage. He was more than confident he would be able to, of course, it was just a matter of how long it would take.

His soul spark was filled to bursting with energy and every day it felt closer to finally blooming than the day before. Yet, every day, it remained a smooth seed. Furthermore, Garrett had actually started to doubt the choice he’d made. As he inched toward his goal of seeing the seed around his soul spark burst into life, he found the mental image he was trying to hold in his mind starting to blur and shift. If he hadn’t been surrounded by Dream Flowers every night and wasn’t able to actually sit in the Dreamer’s Throne, Garrett was sure his vision would have warped, causing him to lose the progress he was making. No wonder there were only a handful of Shapers in the city.

Sighing, Garrett pushed all his thoughts out of his head, focusing on the vision he was trying to refine as he began to polish his soul spark. He could feel the impatience in his heart, urging him to press the seed that was being formed, squeezing it until it burst forth with vitality. Doing his best to temper that feeling, he channeled his focus into a slow, deliberate movement. It was only instinct, but he felt that advancing through the natural growth of his soul spark was a superior method to forcefully upgrading. At this point, nothing was as important as stepping over that final barrier that separated him from the shaper stage, but if he was going to do it, he wanted to do it in the best possible way.

The days passed fairly quietly for Garrett, though the same couldn’t be said for the people around him. Ryn was always busy with something, whether it was dealing with a problem with the soap business or her studies, and if she found herself with a spare moment she would invariably come up with another idea and then rush off to try and get it done. A few times Garrett wondered if he should temper her excitement, but ultimately he decided that doing so would depress her natural enthusiasm.

Ryn wasn’t the only one who was busy, though, as Gorn and Obe were still dealing with the aftermath of the adventuring team’s betrayal down in the ghoul’s nest. They had informed Henrick what had happened, and after the gang leader called in Garrett to learn more about Viper, he had decided that the best thing to do was go on the offensive. Storming into the adventurers’ guild, Henrick had slammed the bloody badges on the receptionist’s desk and demanded to be compensated for the vicious betrayal.

If he’d been a normal person, or even a weak Awakened, he would have disappeared within an hour, forever erased from the world for such blatant disrespect. Instead, he had been invited into the guild master’s office and twenty minutes later was leaving with his recruitment fee refunded and three more teams that would go down to check things out. Two of the teams were standard combat teams, but the third was a forensics team that specialized in understanding what had happened in a particular place. Their work had been incredibly slow, but they were paying for rooms in the inn, so Henrick didn’t care one bit that they were still around after three months.

The investigators had examined the old ghoul’s nest extensively, even going so far as to dig up the dirt where the flower ghouls had tunneled their way up to ambush the Green Dragon and Farsight teams. Getting updates from Gorn, Garrett was astounded at how accurately the investigation team was able to put together a picture of what had happened, and worry had begun to creep into his heart as they started to track the ghouls toward their new nest. As they got closer, that worry grew, and finally Garrett pulled out his trump card, having Viper drag himself into camp, nursing a bloody wound in his side.

With the mysterious adventurer’s appearance, the ghouls were quickly forgotten as they tried to figure out what role Viper had played in the whole scene. They knew he’d faced down the two teams by himself, and according to his version of the story, he had just started to fight with them when the ghouls attacked, focusing on the larger group first. After the lights had gone out, the fight had ended quickly and he had escaped through the crack. When he placed two of the Green Dragon badges on the table, there wasn’t much the investigators could do.

One of the investigators was an Awakened who specialized in interrogation, using mental energy to pressure out the truth. Unfortunately, Viper’s mental energy was too strong for his tricks to work, leaving him no choice but to assume that everything had happened the way the masked adventurer had explained it. By the time the investigators got back to tracking the ghouls, the path had completely vanished and they returned empty-handed.

Meanwhile, Garrett had been spending his days meditating as much as possible and his nights familiarizing himself with the world of the crypts. He knew there were extensive tunnel systems all over the city but had never realized just how large or dangerous they were before. The crypts alone were massive and filled with monsters. Just like the city on the surface, the lower levels of the city were split into thousands of small sections, each controlled by a stronger monster or a group of monsters.

Already the flower ghouls had been forced to fight two different battles against other monster groups as they moved through the crypts looking for a new home, one against a disgusting slug-like monster that tried to absorb them, and the other against another pack of ghouls. In both cases, their ability to absorb their opponent’s life force had given them the edge they needed, but at the cost of one of their already scant numbers.

Existing in the same space had been enough reason for a conflict, but as soon as their enemies had sensed the nest stone they carried, it had turned into a battle to the death. Nest stones weren’t specific to a type of monster but instead allowed any monster to replicate themselves, using life force from recently dead corpses to expand their numbers more rapidly than they would naturally spawn. This made the stones incredibly attractive to monsters of any kind and produced a frenzied desire in all who saw it to take it for their own.

The amount of life force required for each type of monster to use the nest stone varied, but so long as they could gather enough of it, they could expand their numbers indefinitely. With this in mind, Garrett commanded the flower ghouls to press their advantage, and after killing all the ghouls that had attacked them, they traced the pack back to the small room they were using to hold their prey and set up a new nest. Not every monster pack had a nest stone of their own, but they would still instinctively pile up the bodies of their prey in the hopes that a new nest stone would form. Finding a large body pile, the flower ghouls dragged over the bodies they had collected and put the nest stone deep in the center of it, preparing to increase their numbers.