Aeres Academy - Chapter 25 preview

The monster, artifact and component crafting, and identification class was the first class that was held in a room that felt like a university classroom. In a descending lecture hall, with tiered seating and a wall on the other end, there were tables that allowed us to sit and stare down at the lecturer and the three tables worth of parts he had brought along. Each table was split into different basic elements, from monster parts – cleaned and washed, thankfully – to enchanted or imbued material on the second table and mana crystals on the final one.

The lecturer was a sight herself, an older woman whose once auburn hair had grayed, leaving only a smattering of color in the tied-up bun that peeked out of a cloth handkerchief holding the entire thing down, the once colorful embroidered butterflies much faded. All her clothing was like that, once beautiful works faded over time, the only items that seemed well cared for the multiple-pouched belt that tied to both legs and the pair of enchanted spectacles. A part of me noted she might once have been striking – not beautiful, not handsome, striking – but had aged into an older, stern beauty.

“Really?” Brand, having chosen to trail along and sit next to me, stared at my face and then at Professor Wynn incredulously. 

“What?”

“Her? I mean, she’s fine but a bit old, no?” Lowering his voice, he added, “You’ve got weird tastes.”

“Oh, and who would you be interested in?” I challenged.

Brand kept his mouth shut, but I watched his gaze flick over to Sophia. I had to admit, the boy was not wrong, she was cute but…

“A little young, isn’t she?”

“Not everyone’s as old as you.” His eyes rolled, before he looked down at Professor Wynn at the bottom. “Better than those about to keel over.”

I snorted but chose not to answer. I had to admit, growing older had not decreased my admiration of the opposite sex, but had instead widened my scope of appreciation. However, while the body I inhabited was much younger and, thus, it was less inappropriate – on the physical level at least – to date those younger, there was a certain level of maturity that I had learnt to prize.

At least for anything beyond a night’s pleasure. 

Of course, trying to explain that to a teenager was a losing game. Even if I could play the older, wiser adult, there was only so far I could stretch that act before others began to question it. Just because I was in my late twenties physically – a decade older than some of the kids here – did not mean I could act the silver-haired fox. 

Finding the balance and the mixture in me was always going to be tricky. There wasn’t exactly a document out there that detailed how one should react to being reincarnated with one’s memories and knowledge, with desires and heartaches of the past, and yet knowing that nothing – no one – could ever be retrieved.

Or could they? I had died and been reborn, whole. Could another? And if so, did I want that? People spoke of soul mates, but I had never experienced that. Someone I loved and cared for, certainly. Someone I had been happy to raise a family with, certainly.

But there were parts of me, the darkest parts, the parts that enjoyed the pain and the agony, the testing and the bloodshed that I indulged now, that she had never been able to understand. Even if I could bring my wife back, would I?

I’ll admit, the flickers of homesickness, of familiar sounds, of the Internet and TV and mass media, of familiar songs that I could never hear again or rituals at holidays, left me aching and empty. It helped that a part of me had forgotten portions of my older life over time. A consequence of old age, of the transfer. Another, that I had learnt to embrace the moment, the wide variety of moments of wonder in this world.

Maybe it was the need to manage this loss, this feeling of being an outcast in a different world that had me fixed so hard on being an adventurer, on exploring all the way down, to clearing the painful memory block within my mind. A distraction, from an aching emptiness of another life gone by, never to be recovered.

Just because some ~pain~ had entered my life, I could rebuild another here. And recover it all…

Or perhaps…

“…dissection and skinning will be part and parcel of all your training. However, monster parts are – for the most part – unimportant in the fault. Many of our graduates will never require anything beyond a basic understanding of the process. Many of you will hire secondary porters and cleanup crews to travel with you to do this work. Some, however, might become such second-tier delving teams, and as such ALL of you should be paying attention.”

Professor Wynn was standing behind the first table where the monster loot – furs, claws, teeth, stingers and chitin and more – lay. She gestured down at the items before her, continuing. “What you see here are the most common non-perishable loot items. Other perishables like organs – musk, poison and egg sacs for example – can be extracted, but come with their own difficulties.”

“Difficulties, Professor?” Kira asked, an enchanted quill and pieces of paper before her as she jotted down notes. The quill was not a major enchantment, just a linked one to a pot such that it was always filled with ink and she need not be delayed while taking notes.

“Degradation of the organs due to mana concentrations, improper harvesting techniques, inadequate storage methods or even damage during the transportation process itself are the most common reasons. They are perishable for a reason, and as such require a higher degree of skill and equipment to harvest properly.” Professor Wynn smiled. “We’ll go over these aspects in more detail but there are supplementary classes available for those interested. It is worth noting that because of the higher degree of knowledge – and equipment – required, perishable materials are often more lucrative too.”

Kira nodded happily, jotting all this information down. She was not the only one, of course, though few had the option to utilize as much paper and ink as she did. Most took only a few notes on aspects that they found most important while the rest of us just paid attention and hoped to memorize what we could.

One of the major aspects most fantasy novels forgot – or perhaps just chose to ignore – was how rare paper was in most countries and times. The sheer amount of work required to make paper birthed multiple industries and had made one bureaucrat-slash-inventor a god in our world, after all.

In this world, paper making was a little easier, if still expensive. Raw material was hard to find, even if there was a plant that shed fibrous material that could be used to make paper, mostly because of the plant’s need for mana enriched soil. The options were either crushed mana shards in the soil or dungeon farming.

Both very expensive.

Of course, not everyone was paying attention. I noticed Yorrick, eyes half-closed, staring at Kira and Rayzan slouched in the back, looking bored and checked out. I had only a slight tinge of surprise at noticing the man at all in the building, a part of me having expected the legacy student to have been allowed to skip classes he obviously did not require.

“In general, because monster loot is common, regular in number and acquirable by most adventurers and delvers, their value tends towards the lower end. In addition, until the fifteenth floor or so, the vast majority of monster parts are infused with too low a level of mana for regular enchanting. As such, while we will spend some time on the harvesting of such items, it will not be a concentration of our studies here.” Wynn shrugged. “If you ally with the academy, additional remedial courses are available in the future. We do not teach such courses to noviates, though other guilds often host such courses themselves.”

A slight beat, her eyes sweeping over the crowd of noviates. “For those who fail out of the academy, who find that the life of an adventurer is not to their liking, there are also collection guilds. Professionals who will further teach you the skills required to make use of your skills and knowledge of the early dungeon floors. So do not despair if you do fail. So long as you pay attention in this class, you still have a future.”