Chapter 13: Serious Spawn

Murphy quickly found himself in the alchemy lab. This was a section of the castle that the spawn allocated for the purpose of Murphy’s alchemy. It was actually quite rare for Murphy to visit it since it was built and the few times he had he was only using it to create the few potions he’d already created or discovered beforehand.

Most of the time, this lab was occupied by hundreds of Alchemy spawn, rushing around and laughing sinisterly while creating any number of questionable substances. For a change, Murphy came himself to create some new potions. Regardless of how powerful his potions were at present, for a beast like Morbid they were almost inconsequential.

With Morbid’s life hanging in the balance, Murphy now had only a short time to create something that would blow all his past creations out of the water. Thanks to the few raids they’d had, and no small number of questing parties of Spawn, they had a huge stockpile of herbs.

To the spawn, the concept of ownership was incredibly obscure. They were a tribal race, and everything they collected was for the good of the tribe. It was only very rare or sentimental things which the spawn held onto as personal belongings.

Even those few rare things would be offered up to Murphy, their master, if he requested them. If anything, they would feel it was an honour for Murphy to take stuff from them. It proved to themselves and their comrades that their taste in things was good enough to attract the master’s interest.

As such, the moment Murphy gave the order to bring every material in the domain that can be used for alchemy, the spawn rushed to throw their precious treasures at him.

Deep in the recesses of the castle, Murphy walked into the lab wearing only a pair of shorts. The contrast between his body when he first started the game and now was quite drastic. Where he had once been as thin as a bean pole, he was now far more developed.

His muscles were toned and sleek, and his body had filled out enough to make him look if not healthy, then at least not anorexic. The reason he only wore shorts while doing alchemy was that his method of alchemy was somewhat different to others.

Instead of timing his concoctions and developing a fixed routine, Murphy used the reactions of his body to determine the completion of a potion. It had actually developed into somewhat of a sixth sense when it came to alchemy, and Murphy used it to great advantage. Apart from him, no one else was crazed enough to wear anything less than 6 sets of protective coveralls, rubber gloves, boots and apron and at least class three face protection.

Exposing any skin at all while doing alchemy was an invitation for a gruesome and unnatural death.

As he walked into the lab, Murphy saw nearly every alchemist spawn that had been born in his domain rushing about the lab. They piled up herbs and materials along the walls and pushed huge empty cauldrons into the middle of the room with a great deal of effort and team work.

The moment he stepped in, the alchemy spawn were ecstatic. ‘Rah rah’ cheers rang out around the room, and the spawn all rapidly finished up the preparations. Murphy closed his eyes for a brief moment to remember all of his past experiments and to try and remember the properties of everything he’d ever encountered.

When he opened his eyes, a strange green light flashed out from them, and in his vision his identify skill went mad as it catalogued every material and herb in the room.

Then, he strolled into the centre of the room, surrounded by 5 huge cauldrons, and started pointing at materials along the wall.

“Cockatrice tongue, six clover, shell of the dragon egg. In this cauldron.”

Without delay, he started barking orders for his spawn, and they rushed to start pulling materials off the benches and walls.

Soon, the five cauldrons were filled with various different bubbling liquids. One of them even had the souls of the dead squirming around inside screaming and wailing. Naturally, although he’d successfully made a potion here, it was a very different effect from the recovery he was hoping for.

Even just touching the potion made his soul shake in trepidation. He decided that this particular potion, Banshee Blood, would have to be tested only after he had the time and was prepared to return to earth.

The others were all various concoctions middling from restoratives to corrosives, but nothing was strong enough to help Morbid. Murphy could only grit his teeth and keep trying.

Meanwhile, outside the castle, thousands of spawn were rushing around as if preparing for a huge battle. Every so often, a hundred odd spawn would walk through a portal and race off to start killing things for the Exp. When the spawn acted independently of Murphy like this, many things about their situation changed.

For starters, without having been summoned there by Murphy, the spawn were basically treated like a player by the system. Although they couldn’t evolve without the ‘summoned’ status, they could still accumulate Exp and raise their stats. As such, it wasn’t rare for the spawn to go out hunting and return with 1000 odd Exp, all of which was poured into the communal Exp of the Domain for Seelie or Murphy to spend.

Under Murphy’s orders, almost every spawn in the domain was either gearing up to hunt for Exp, or preparing to march into Holy Eden and set up a base camp. Even the players felt some duty towards the domain and insisted on helping out in Holy Eden.

No one was certain what Murphy was planning yet, but they could tell that he was gearing up for something big. As such, being the warlike races they are, and more so detesting the situation on the planet of Holy Eden, especially those that had been rescued from there, all the players of Murphy’s domain rushed through the portal to prepare the war camp.

Seelie was busy suffering the effects of the rebound from her Mana Overdraw and was currently under the care of her little sister up in her wizard tower. Juwan was leading the effort to prepare the war camp along with Lucile and the Clever Spawn.

Calligso, after hearing about the status of Morbid, raced to Holy Eden and hadn’t left his side since the moment he spotted him lying there half dead and covered with a multitude of wounds.

Slowly, things started happening in Murphy’s domain. At the same time, things were rapidly starting to heat up on the planet of Holy Eden. Chief amongst them was the planet’s capital, Eden City.

In a huge mountain ... wait, that’s a church ... in an unnecessarily massive church that could house an entire metropolis, and did, a dozen very pompous looking clergy were sitting around a polished marble table in a meeting chamber high up within the church structure.

Just looking down from this height gave a panoramic view for nearly a thousand kilometres off into the distance. Standing at a clear window and looking over this scene was an even more pompously dressed bloke, who couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else but the Pope of Eden.

The various clergy were all busily arguing about the demon invasion that was happening right now in a dusty little county in one part of a kingdom which was one part of one of many empires. In other words, it was a shit hole that no one on the rest of the planet even knew existed until today.

A very buff and heroic looking fellow, which contrasted greatly with his soft fluffy clergy robes, slammed his hand onto the table causing it to rumble under the pressure of his not inconsiderable strength.

“We sthould ride forth and sthquath thisth invasthen postht hasthte!”

Hearing him speak, everyone in the room couldn’t help but cringe as they tried to puzzle out exactly what he was saying with that incredibly irritating listhp ... lisp. Ahem...

“Barllo ... do you have to try and speak like that? Just use words without any s’s.”

A red hue appeared on the huge man’s face, and he gave an embarrassed cough before repeating himself.

“Ride forth ... kill them.”

“Why bother? Their just a tiny little domain that doesn’t understand the rules. They clearly don’t know that it’s impossible to siege a quest planet. We have protection from the system!”

A skinny young looking man with the bearing of a noble gentleman voiced what everyone was thinking. For the majority of people here, they couldn’t understand why they were even here discussing this.

“Foolish!”

With a grunt, one of the older clergy rebuked the young man. The moment he spoke, everyone quietened down. Apart from the Pope, this man was the longest living citizen of Holy Eden and commanded a great deal of respect.

Being rebuked by the Pope’s righthand man was almost the same as being rebuked by the Pope himself, as such, that young man’s face flushed with embarrassment and he quickly seated himself and shut up.

With silence suddenly prevailing over the meeting, the Pope, with a gentle smile and calm disposition turned and walked toward the table.

“You are still young Cardinal Lachaust. Becoming a quest planet does not simply relieve you of all threats. The system’s protection only protects us from being raided and losing mass. Things like this, where a smaller domain raids us for resources through a portal are very common, and the system has never done anything to prevent it.

“We must use our own power to deter such things from happening, lest all the smaller domains gang up and raid us to death. Even then, it would normally not be too much trouble. Holy Eden is big enough that only another planet sized domain could truly threaten us as a quest planet, but what would be the point?

“They don’t get any earth for their trouble, and although they can claim resources it wouldn’t be worth the cost of war. No, this situation is different. Although this is just a small domain, which we can crush with the might of our domain as easily as squashing an ant, the players are far more interesting.

“From the reports, it’s clear to me that the young Domain Lord invading us has a very unique power. One that could threaten our peace here. Do you know why that is?”

At the pope’s question, everyone just stared back blankly at him with confused expressions. The Pope smiled knowingly, and his grouchy old right hand stepped up to explain.

“It’s because he has the Deprive skill. Normally, at most, if we were sieged by other domains, the only resources they can take from us are what they can mine and carry away with them. But this kid, with his Deprive skill, can take everything. Geodes, monuments, resource nodes. The things that draw in players and creatures to our world to live here and quest here. Without, we are just an empty domain.”

A light of understanding lit up in the eyes of the Cardinals. Cardinal Lachaust dropped his fist into his palm as he came to a sudden realisation.

“You want to steal his power! If we had the Deprive skill, we could quickly accumulate even more rare resources and draw in more sacrifices for the Holy God!”

The Pope smiled has he touched his finger to his nose.

“That is why I called you all here. We must capture that young Domain Lord at all costs. I don’t want to scare him off with a huge army, and I especially don’t want him to realise what we are planning for him. We need to send small raids so that he doesn’t become suspicious. Sacrifice a few pawns to draw him in further, until we can pull him into a trap.”

With that, the Cardinals eyes all lit up with greed and desire, and they put their pompous heads together to try and come up with a realistic plan. For a rare change, someone was plotting against Murphy without underestimating him. Not everyone is as easy to capture as the fat Baron, and if Murphy realised they were going to catch him to draw out his Deprive skill he would most likely kill himself first.

‘Finally! This is perfect. The ‘Cursed Potion of Unreasonably High Health Recovery’. If this can’t heal Morbid, then I’d be hard pressed to find something that could.’

Having that thought, I quickly left the Alchemy lab, leaving the spawn to clean up everything I’d left behind. I just hoped none of them touched the red cauldron. Even I was dubious about touching it. Just being near the fumes caused my skin to melt off, which is saying quite a bit.

This potion cost me quite a bit to finally refine, and nearly half of the substantial stockpile of resources we had stashed away had been gobbled up by the cauldrons. On the plus side, I now had half a dozen new potions with interesting effects and my alchemy level was already pushing against the boundary of level 7.

I was actually quite frightened at just how easily I made poisons with explosive or poisonous effects. My explosives skill jumped several levels after I created a potion that nearly blew my castle off the top of the hill. It was only a lucky happenstance that Seelie had spent a bit of effort to reinforce the protective enchantments in the alchemy lab to prevent such things.

After that incident though, they would have to be renewed and probably made a little ... a lot stronger. With great haste, I rushed through the portal to Holy Eden. I then froze on the spot and quickly back peddled when I noticed the eyes of all the spawn starting to glow red and very malicious glares being cast at each other.

I almost forgot that I couldn’t be present on a quest planet with my summons if there are too many of them. Otherwise, they start killing one another. The system was very malicious in its stupid rules. Luckily, I was quick enough to retreat before any limbs started flying off.

After a few moments, Chuckles then rushed through the portal and snatched the potion before running back through. As he passed back, all the spawn that had been on the other side started filing back through to the Domain. After the last few spawn stepped through and communicated that it was safe for me, I stepped through.

Without pause, I raced towards Morbid. Chuckles was rubbing Morbid’s big wet nose with a worried expression. The phial of the Cursed Unreasonably High Health Healing potion was empty and lying in the dirt. As I approached, the wounds on Morbid’s huge body slowly started closing up with soft little red firefly like light sprinkling out every so often.

Morbid let out a comfortable sounding growl as his body shook. His big droopy dog eyes opened up to see Chuckles and I staring at him worriedly. Slowly, as his body recovered, the light in his eyes slowly came back. After blinking a few times, his massive body rolled over slightly and that massive wet tongue of his lapped out and bathed Chuckles and I in slobber.

“Grrrr.”

A deep growl came from his throat as he closed his eyes in dreamy comfort from the recovery effects of the potion. At last, a deep breath that I’d been holding in for a little too long was released, and my body suddenly felt heavy with fatigue and then just as quickly felt great.

After about an hour of sitting around rubbing Morbid’s belly and telling him how good a dog he is, he was ready to stop playing dead and jumped up to start leaping about everywhere playfully. It seemed, out of everyone, Uncle Calligso was actually the most excited about Morbid’s recovery.

“Haha! Come here you great over grown fur ball! HAHAHA!”

With greatly exaggerated leaps, Uncle Calligso then barrelled into the huge mountain that is Morbid and a wrestling match then quickly ensued. With Morbid now quickly healing, I returned my focus to the present. I had a few plans that I had to put into motion.

Chief amongst them was my plans for this quest planet. I intended to loot it to death. I sent Chuckles to gather information so that I would know where all the nearest resources worth stealing ... err ... I mean reappropriating were. Although it goes against my code of ethics to target a culture like this just because they were so oppressive, my domain needed resources and I’d rather take them from someone I disagreed with strongly.

Besides, it was a game, and I intended to be a hero. As such, looting this world wouldn’t weigh too heavily on my conscience, and I suspected that my player citizens wouldn’t be against trying to cripple a planet that focused on capturing races they were prejudiced against just because they looked evil.

On top of that, I’d found something interesting on this planet.

Faith.

I had no information on this yet, but I suspected it was a game mechanic for high levelled players later on in the game. Something like super mana or something. As such, I wanted to do some research on this energy and see if I could find a way to generate it myself.

Next thing on my list was to train my spawn and citizens. The best way to do that was to throw them into constant battle against strong opponents. This was the strongest quest planet I’d encountered so far, and it was perfect for tempering myself and my troops.

As I pondered over my plans, I meandered back to my domain and sat down in the throne constructed from the bones of enemies, courtesy of the spawn decorators. I was quite surprised by the amount of Exp my spawn had already accumulated in the only half a day that I’d been in the lab.

With those points, I then bought the two most pertinent things for my plans at present. A permanent portal stone, so that I could turn the random portal to Holy Eden into a permanent portal. The second was a Portal Protection enchantment.

With this, I’d be able to enchant my portals to only let my domain’s citizens pass through them. The last thing I needed was some scumbag from Eden sneaking into my domain and reporting my location to my enemies.

Surprisingly, these two items were cheaper than I’d initially expected them to be. It left quite a bit of remaining Exp which I decided to invest into a domain quest board and system quest board.

I set them both up in the town square down at the sinister lands. The moment I placed the system quest board down, it filled half the square. It was almost a hundred meters long and 5 meters high. Both sides were littered with all sorts of system quests from bounties to tutoring, and even random quests like slay 10 dragons from a Dragon Domain or capture an emperor from the planet of 30 emperors.

My Domain Quest board was tiny in comparison to it, but over the span of the night, dozens of requests for parties or bounties were posted up by the players in my domain, and every time something was posted, the board automatically grew a little bit more. A good number of the requests were placed by Alton for specific materials. He paid quite highly, but everything he requested was quite rare.

Come morning, I was still looking through all the quests of the system board and trying to familiarise myself with all the system quests and their rewards. Some of the quests were very tempting but required me to be linked to a specific planet. After looking through them for half the night, I discovered that the system quest board actually only had a handful of quests from the system.

The majority of quests were actually put up by other players and domains. After a quick inspection of my domain space, I determined it was possible for anyone to place a request on the system board. The only problem was that it was incredibly expensive, coming in at almost 1 billion exp just to post a single A4 sized request.

On top of that, many of the quests were filtered by system administrators, and only certain quests were allowed to be posted. For example, you can only post a bounty if the system determines you have a sufficient grievance with the target. Generalised targets, like the dragon slaying quest, were only able to be posted if you were at war.

Many other little footnotes were involved in what could be posted on the system board. The number of posts that were actually from the ‘System’ filled only about 1/10th of the quest board.

While perusing the board, I suddenly felt a soft bosom pressed against my back and a pair of arms wrapping around my waist. My breathing abruptly stopped, and my body seized like it was held together by rusted bolts.

“ ... Seelie?”

“ ... Murphy?”

Following this encounter was perhaps the most prolonged and awkward moment I’d ever suffered through in my life. I had no idea what the hell I was supposed to do. After a very long and quiet moment, I decided to just muster up my courage.

Slowly, I lifted my arm and turned around to face the blinding bright eyes of Seelie, staring directly into my soul. In all the time I’d known her, I don’t think I’d ever seen Seelie looking so happy.

“Murphy, you never finished what you were saying yesterday...”

With a very expectant gaze, I was stared at. Stared to death by those big beautiful expectant eyes. I could only blush like a child and scratch my cheek as I averted my gaze off into the distance.

“Ungh!”

Following which, I received a very abrupt punch to the stomach and felt all the wind leave me. Seelie’s face was scrunched up into a cute little pout as she continued to stare at me expectantly.

With that, it felt like all the awkwardness rushed out of me. A stupid grin covered my face, and my hand slowly encircled Seelie’s waist, pulling her closer into contact until our two bodies were fully pressed against each other.

“Seelie. I love...”

Half expecting Murphy’s Law to suddenly operate, I glanced around suspiciously looking for any potential hazards. When nothing happened, I let out a long breath and looked back at Seelie.

“I love you too.”

Suddenly, my vision seemed to turn dark as a blooming smile filled with happiness spread across Seelie’s beautiful face and stole away all my focus. Even if I wanted to remain aware of my surroundings, with that beaming smile I was helpless to divert my attention.

Her arms wrapped around my neck and she pulled me closer until her soft lips met mine. It was only at this point that I realised I had no idea how the hell kissing was supposed to work. I mean, I’d seen plenty of people do it, but that didn’t mean I knew what the hell to do.

Luckily, just like earlier, it seemed I worried over nothing. It appeared to come naturally. Although I won’t say I’m a Mozart of kissing just yet, it wasn’t as hard as I expected. The only problem was, the kissing was taking a long time this time, and it seemed the longer it took, the more intense it became.