Free Web NovelChapter 28: Farming
"Your name is Tom."
The Vaelith’s ears went flat.
"Tom," it repeated, in the voice of a creature that had waited a thousand years for a name and been handed a wet sock.
"Tom," Aidan confirmed, grinning.
"I am a Threadseer of the Deep Vaels. I read the shape of fate itself. I looked into the one soul in creation that climbed back out of the thread-eating dark." Tom’s tail lashed. "And you’re calling me Tom."
"Yep."
"...I hate it." Tom sat down hard. "I hate that I don’t hate it. That’s worse."
"You’ll grow into it, buddy." Aidan straightened, still smiling. "Come on. I’ve got a wristwatch buzzing."
...
The watch on his wrist had been blinking since before he woke.
He tapped it, and Beatrix’s voice came through, dry and a little tired, like she’d been up half the night. freēwēbnovel.com
"Finally. I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday." A pause. "I found what you wanted. A Tier-10 Terrorized Dimension. Freshly opened, unowned, and the Association just cleared it for a large-scale expedition."
Aidan’s eyes sharpened. "Where?"
She sent coordinates. Far north, well past City G, a stretch of tundra where the gate had torn open two days ago.
"Aidan." Her voice went serious. "This one’s a big deal. The top guilds are all sending real teams. Not C-rank kids on a contest. Their actual powerhouses. If you’re going in, you go in careful, or you don’t go in at all."
"Careful’s my whole thing now." Aidan was already pulling on his coat. "Thanks, Aunt Beatrix. I owe you one."
"You owe me several. Try not to die." frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
The line clicked off.
Tom watched him from the windowsill, mismatched eyes half-lidded. "You’re going somewhere dangerous."
"I’m going somewhere with a lot of food and a lot of experience I can farm quietly." Aidan glanced at the little creature. "You’re staying here. Keep an eye on Solenne. She’s had a rough decade."
Tom’s tail flicked once. "The girl with the borrowed face and the deep water in her." A pause. "...Fine. But I’m doing it because I want to, not because you told me."
"Sure, buddy."
...
The gate sat on open tundra, a jagged black tear thirty meters tall, its edges rimed with frost that had nothing to do with the cold.
Aidan set down a kilometer out, high in the pale sky, invisible.
He’d expected a crowd. He got an army.
The staging ground around the gate was packed. Anti-grav transports, command tents, banners of half the top-ten guilds in the world snapping in the wind. Hunters everywhere, and not the young kind. These were settled, scarred, heavy with presence, most of them radiating the dense pressure of Tier-10 powerhouses.
And six of them stood apart from the rest.
Aidan inspected them from a safe distance, careful, and the readings came back at Epic-rank. Six Epic-rank Hunters, each one worth an entire guild’s front line, gathered to lead the expedition into a fresh Tier-10 dimension.
’That’s a serious turnout.’ Aidan hovered, watching. ’A Tier-10 dimension with a Spirit Vein is worth a war. Makes sense they’d send the heavy hitters.’
He had no interest in the war.
He waited.
He watched the expedition form up, watched the six Epic-rank leaders take point, watched the long column of Tier-10 Hunters file through the gate in disciplined waves over the better part of an hour. He was patient. He’d learned patience in a place that had nothing else.
Only when the last of them had vanished into the tear, when the staging ground had emptied to a skeleton crew of watchers who never once looked up, did Aidan drift down and slip through the gate in perfect silence.
Cold blackness swallowed him, then spat him out.
...
The dimension was vast.
It opened into an endless expanse of frozen forest and glacial rivers under a sky the color of old bruises, mountains stacked to every horizon, and it was teeming with life. Tier-10 monsters roamed it in the thousands, huge and strange and territorial, most of them far off from where the expedition had pushed in.
Perfect.
Arthur was still gone, sealed in the pocket dimension attached to Aidan’s Exotic Summoner talent, deep in his cocoon, evolving. Aidan was on his own for this.
That was fine. He wasn’t here to fight anyone who could fight back.
He was here to farm.
He pulled his stealth tight, layering the Dread Light Mask’s invisibility with a barrier of dead air that swallowed sound, and got to work.
The first Tier-10 monster died before it knew he was there, a shaggy six-legged thing the size of a truck, dropped by a lance of Netherbind Rot that ate through its defense and unmade its vitality in seconds, silent and clean. He swept the corpse into his inventory whole, core, meat, bones, and all, and moved on.
Then another. And another.
He built a rhythm.
Drift through the frozen wild, unseen and unheard. Find a monster alone or in a small pack, far from the expedition’s noise. Rot it, or bleed it, or blast it apart with wind and blood compressed into silent bullets. Bank the whole body. Move on.
His arsenal made it effortless. Nether and Epoxy to dismantle the tough ones without a sound. Blood and Wind for speed and precision. Attraction to yank a fleeing monster back into range before it could cry out. He never once let a kill get loud. He never once crossed the expedition’s path.
Hour after hour, he farmed the edges of a dimension too big for anyone to police, and the experience rolled in.
[Level up.]
[Level up.]
[Level up.]
It came slower than the Epic-rank kills had, one Tier-10 monster being worth a fraction of a Terror General, but there were so many of them, and he was so patient, and nothing in this frozen wilderness could touch him.
By the time five hours had passed, he’d killed a few hundred of them and stuffed his inventory to bursting with cores and meat, and the notifications finally slowed and stopped.
He found a quiet ledge above a glacier, sat down out of sight, and checked his status.
—————
[Player Aidan]
[Level: 612 (8%)]
[Rank: Transcendent-Median]
[Titles: The One Beyond Despair (X)]
—Attributes—
[Attack = SSS-31]
[Speed = SSS-34]
[Defense = SSS-30]
[Health = Divine-10]
[Control = SSS-35]
—Talents—
[Power Bond (SS)]
[Exotic Summoner (X)]
—Inventory—
[10 x Omni-Slot Machine tickets]
—————
<Quests>
<Terror Raids>
—————
’Level 612.’ Aidan turned the numbers over. ’Five hours of quiet work for a hundred and twelve levels. Slower than farming Epic Terrors, but a lot safer, and I don’t have a room full of top-ten guilds noticing me.’
His stats had climbed into the low SSS-30s across the board, Speed and Control a touch ahead of the rest, all of it a clean stride above where he’d started that morning. Still nothing beside the Divine-10 Health that towered over everything, but the gap was closing, one patient kill at a time.
’And I’ve barely scratched this place.’ He looked out over the endless frozen wild, at the thousands of monsters that had no idea he existed. ’The expedition’s fighting over the core somewhere in the center. I could farm the edges for a week and they’d never know.’
He wouldn’t stay a week. Solenne was home with a grumpy fate-cat, Arthur was due to wake any time, and a man could only carry so much frozen meat before it stopped being funny.
But he had time for a little more.
Aidan rolled his shoulders, pulled his stealth tight again, and rose off the ledge, silent, invisible, a ghost in someone else’s frozen world.
’A few hundred more,’ he thought. ’Then home.’
These large Tier-10 terrorized dimensions contained tens of thousands of monsters, so a few thousand disappearing this early won’t raise any suspicion anyway, let alone just several hundreds of them.
