Chapter III.XXV (3.25) - The Hon Basin

  The next morning Kizu stood in one of the courtyards reviewing his supplies alongside Ione and Anata while Taroe watched over them. He had brought everything he owned. That included his bell artifact and the Atlas of the World Dungeon. As much as he trusted Aoi, he did not trust her family. Her little sister alone was a dangerous enough snoop to warrant caution. Not to mention the Inari branch of the Royal Family, who had been visiting Aoi’s home with more and more frequency each day.

  The Elite vocally did not approve of his decision to bring Anata with them into the Hon Basin, but wasn’t going to stop her from joining. Ione, on the other hand, Taroe had nodded to respectfully when she explained her part. He clearly thought highly of her family.

  Mort eyed the Elite with suspicion from Anata’s shoulder. Kizu got the impression his familiar had never truly forgiven the man for their first encounter which had resulted in the monkey being blinded and shaking in the dirt.

  “Hold up!” someone called out, racing out to the courtyard with a sack over his shoulder. “Don’t tell me you think you could leave without me.”

  The man was unfamiliar to Kizu, Hon heritage with a ponytail and a scar across his cheek. But by now he’d developed enough of a sense of Basil to detect him in most skins.

  “Shouldn’t you stay behind and watch over Anna?” Kizu asked.

  “No. It’s better that I go with you. As it is, I feel like I’m distracting her from her work whenever I visit with her. I’ll be more helpful to her by going with you.”

  “Last time you joined us on a trip you mysteriously disappeared for several days,” Ione pointed out. “Is that going to repeat?”

  “I hope not.” Basil flashed her a smile with teeth. “I have a princess to impress and a necromancer to capture.”

  “Fine,” Taroe said. “Is everyone here? I will need to cast multiple jumps if you have any more companions arriving.”

  “No, that should be everyone,” Kizu said.

  Taroe nodded slowly, then clasped Kizu and Ione’s shoulders. Kizu held Anata’s hand while Basil held onto Ione.

  Then, the woozy sensation of a jump nearly knocked them off their feet.

  Kizu’s boots landed in the exact same spot he’d last been when he departed the Hon Basin. They stood outside the crone’s hut, the ground now overgrown in foliage. Kizu stared at it. The building was lopsided, built from uneven bricks with two separate chimneys poking out in different angles. The windows gleamed, enchanted to only be clear from the interior. The building looked entirely unchanged from all those months ago. A shiver went down his spine. It was as if everything he’d gone through was unreal, like a dream. Now he was back.

  His complex emotions wrestled with Mort’s, whose absolute joy overpowered them. In the end, Kizu just smiled as Mort leaped into the trees, disappearing into his old home.

  “I should be safe from outside observers here,” Taroe said. “We modified some of the enchantments after taking control of this area. Not even the Crone’s other coven members have the ability to pierce the privacy wards with their scrying. We can come and go as we please.”

  “I might need to change some of those enchantments,” Kizu said, examining the area. “I think here is a good safe place for us to work out of. The crone’s connections are familiar with this spot and I should be able to get a few to come to me to start.” Then he looked at Taroe dead in the eye. “But I’ll also need your word that I won’t have Elites jumping in here suddenly to arrest the people I bring by.”

  Taroe scoffed. “I’m not a fool. Not only would that create suspicion and burn bridges, freely given information is always better than forced. A truth potion reveals truth, but not the nuances that create that truth. Many have suffered death by a twisted truth or an unasked question.”

  “What will you do in the meantime?” Basil asked.

  “I will be monitoring you. We have our own scrying spells set up in the hut’s main room along with the grounds. And, since this area has other outside divination oppressed, I will pop in occasionally when you’re not with a guest.”

  Kizu nodded. That made sense.

  “Is there any other tampering with the crone’s wards that we should know about? Anything that might give away the fact that it’s being surveyed by the Hon Elites?”

  “The alterations our warders performed were extremely minimal. We hoped to perhaps catch anyone else with access to the hut, but no one has arrived.”

  “The crone always revoked special permission access every time a guest left. Nobody else can get in. Not without breaking the wards and enchantments.” Kizu had told the Elites as much back after he was rescued and interrogated.

  “Do you believe the crone divulged all of her secrets to you?”

  “No,” Kizu admitted. Still, he was pretty confident about that truth. The crone despised surprise visitors. She liked the control of allowing specific people into her domain at specific times. And he had been in charge of maintaining several of the illusions that concealed the hut.

  “Any other questions before I depart?”

  “What do we eat?” Ione asked.

  “Whatever you brought and whatever you can find.”

  “How long will we be here?” Basil asked.

  “Until the coronation.”

  Taroe scratched his beard and frowned at them. Then he looked over to the hut, shaded by the canopy above that shielded them from the sun.

  “I’d prefer to do this myself. I strongly considered taking a de-aging potion and joining you here. I especially don’t like allowing my…daughter to be here with you. The witch covens have vindictive and nasty people.”

  “Why don’t you?” Ione asked. “Seems like it would be easier for everyone if you stuck around.”

  “Because many of the witches will notice signs of potion use,” Kizu said. “You won’t be able to deceive them that way.”

  “Correct. And other strategies I’ve considered have been vetoed by my superiors. So I will observe and wait for my time.” He frowned as he eyed each of them individually. “You kids be careful here. Understand?”

  They agreed and he jumped back to the capital. They were left behind with the muggy humidity clinging to their skin. The nearby brook babbled pleasantly behind the foliage.

  “Well,” Basil said. “What are you waiting for, Kizu? Give us the grand tour!”

  Anata nodded her head eagerly. And they all stomped forward through the overgrown grass to the hut.

  Kizu pushed on the front door, it creaked open and showed them an almost entirely unchanged cluttered area. Hundreds of preserved ingredients dangled from the ceiling, just low enough to make him stoop as he entered the hut. That hadn’t been necessary when he left.

  “Be careful touching things. Most of it is safe, but that doesn’t mean all of it.”

  “What’s this?” Ione asked, holding a withered four-winged bat. “It’s cool to the touch.”

  “Unsafe.”

  That did not deter her as she lifted it up to the window light to inspect it better. The jostling broke the hex holding it and the creature flew into her face and toppled her over.

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  “It’s in my hair! It’s in my hair! Ow, ow, ow!”

  “Hold still,” Basil said, reaching down and grabbing her hair.

  His arm lost its form and turned to clear goo, coating the side of her head where the four-winged bat was stuck. A few seconds later, he withdrew his arm, expelling Ione’s hair while capturing the bat inside his oozing limb.

  “What do I do with it?” Basil asked.

  “Just put it outside,” Kizu said. “I think there are a few spares anyway.”

  Basil stuck his arm out the window and released the withered bat. They all watched as it flew off, flapping madly into the jungle.

  “Please don’t touch anything else,” Kizu said.

  Ione flopped back on the wooden floor. She started muttering to herself and Kizu caught a couple words about wings and temperature. He assumed she was trying to better understand the bat monster. It would probably take her a minute.

  He stepped over her sprawled out arm and showed the others the room.

  “Over here you can see the cauldrons. There are a few for different purposes. The one currently up we used for stew. My room is over to the left next to the fireplace and the crone always slept in the loft above. There’s a ladder over behind that barrel of miscellaneous skeleton bones.”

  Instead of heading off for the loft, like Kizu suspected, Basil went over to the barrel and began to rummage through it.

  “What are you doing?” Kizu asked.

  “Looking at the different bone structures. Like, look at this one.” He pulled out a skull missing half its teeth. “This is from an elderly gnome. You can tell by how the skull curves right here and how brittle it is. A human child would have a far more dense bone.”

  “But…why?”

  “I figure Aoi will want them. It might be a good gift to help her out of her funk.”

  Kizu shook his head and walked over to the cupboard that held all of the crone’s pots and pans. He took out the crone’s wooden bowl and felt along the etched markings. A leaf, an insect, a mouse, an owl, an ocelot, a human, and then back to the leaf. He breathed out a sigh of relief. Already Kizu noticed several of the crone’s cursed babbles missing, probably taken by the Elites after raiding the hut.

  Unfortunately, the one area that had been completely cleared out was the crone’s potion cabinet. Not a single vial had been left behind. Kizu scowled. That was a treasure trove of resources, gone. Maybe he could try talking Taroe into giving him some of the contraband. But he doubted it.

  He closed the cabinet and noticed Anata’s feet poking out of a small door beside the fireplace. His old room. It was actually two cupboards with the wall separating them knocked down. It was designed to hold stacks of wood to feed the fire. As a kid, it had been fine, but it had grown tight and a bit more cozy in recent years. But it was still his space. It felt weird seeing someone else down there in it. The crone never touched his space. The only other person who’d been down there was Shika, and that was at least five years ago.

  He looked forward to seeing Shika again. The zombie girl might be an immature menace sometimes, but he missed her. And the crone had instructed that he try to contact her father first. It was his primary lead.

  He dipped the bowl in a bucket of stale water beside the fireplace then sat down at a table off to the side, clearing away a jar of pickled radishes and replacing it with the scrying conduit. The bowl should be able to connect with hundreds of different locations. He channeled into the water, trying to sort out and connect to the right place. He winced as different images flashed and pierced his mind’s eye.

  On a few occasions he had performed the divination spell before, but never without the crone’s direct supervision. The one time he’d tried as a child to use the bowl to contact Anna, the crone had placed a hex on him that removed one of his eyes and placed it up in a nearby tree, splitting his vision. She hadn’t removed the hex for over a week.

  Eventually he connected with the right mirror and the water rippled. It showed only the inside of a bag at first so he waited patiently.

  “Why are you staring at a half-eaten apple and a chicken bone?” Ione said, peering over his shoulder.

  “I’m connected with the necromancer the crone told me to contact. I think it should notify him and he’ll take it out any minute now.”

  “Hello!” Ione called into the bowl. “Anyone there?”

  That, apparently, worked. The bag immediately jostled, the view of the apple replaced by a man with ruffled hair and cracked spectacles. Kizu noticed a few streaks of gray in his hair now that he didn’t recall before.

  “Kizu? Is that you?”

  “Hey, Hone. Sorry to contact you out of nowhere.”

  “No, no. It’s no problem.” His eyes flickered around, examining Kizu’s surroundings and Ione to the side.

  “The crone told me to get in touch,” Kizu said. “This is my friend Ione.”

  “Hm, pleasure, pleasure. What is this all about? Nobody knows exactly what happened to the crone, though there are certainly rumors….”

  “She’s in hiding,” Kizu said. Not entirely untrue. The crone implied she put herself in the prison on purpose. “I want to know about the Emperor’s assassination. She said you would know more about it.”

  “I see.” Hone frowned as he considered. “I’m not entirely comfortable with this conversation. Not to say I don’t trust you Kizu, but you never know who might be listening.”

  “You’re welcome to come here. I can give you and Shika access to the hut.”

  The frown deepened and Hone looked over his shoulder, as if checking on someone. Likely Shika.

  “How about you come to me?” Hone offered. “You can finally visit my home. I recall you crying at my departure once because you wanted to travel with me but the crone absolutely refused.”

  Kizu’s cheeks burned. He’d barely cried. And he’d been lucky the crone found it so amusing, she normally didn’t put up with him throwing a fit.

  “I was eight,” he muttered. “I wanted to stay with Shika.”

  “Well, now after all these years, you can come. Simply head to the northern end of the village and continue down the road until you hit an old farmhouse. I have no plans to leave soon.”

  “Okay, we’ll make our way there tomorrow morning.”

  Hone nodded slowly. “Yes, tomorrow morning. Children grow quickly. I look forward to reacquainting myself with you again after so many months.”

  With that, the connection broke. Kizu frowned at it, not quite certain how Hone had broken the connection that Kizu had initiated. There was still so much he didn’t understand about divination spells.

  “Well, we have the rest of the day to ourselves,” he told his companions. “How about I show you around the area nearby so you don’t get yourselves in too much trouble?”

  Kizu had a secondary reason for inviting them on a tour of the grounds. He planned to start scavenging for brewing components and stashing him in his spatial storage ring. He was surrounded by the ingredients he was most familiar with and wanted to stock up as much as possible while he still could. And, while he planned to also raid the crone’s remaining supplies, there were a lot of common things in the area she didn’t bother stocking up on. After all, she always had him on hand to fetch them for her.

  Mort joined them again as they exited the hut. He hummed his content as he pounced on Anata’s head, nearly knocking over the thin girl.

  Basil and Ione asked him questions about the area and Kizu happily filled them in, telling them stories about the different things they saw.

  “It acts as the lightning rod for this region of the jungle,” he explained, telling them about a massive black tree. “It got infected by an infestation of iron beetles a few years ago but a particularly bad storm hit and it was struck multiple times in rapid succession, killing the beetles and leaving their corpses speckled throughout the trunk’s inside.”

  “There must be a mineral vein nearby,” Ione commented, examining the ground. “They wouldn’t have burrowed into the tree otherwise. Maybe one of its roots made contact?”

  “You might be right. I extracted a few to help solidify a brew once and found they were surprisingly potent. It might make sense if there was a mineral deposit nearby.”

  While they theorized, Basil folded up a giant leaf into a green hat and perched it on Anata’s head. He then started to try to do the same with some more leaves, turning them into an oversized tunic tied together with jungle grass.

  Kizu flicked his wrist to create his new ice blade and used it to help cut a chunk out of the dead tree. Mort hopped over and helped pry out some of the dead iron beetles from inside the hole. Then Kizu stashed both the wood and the beetles in his storage ring. The two rings complimented one another well.

  “That’s new,” Basil said, looking over from the grass hat he’d begun to weave.

  “That’s only because you weren’t around last night,” Ione said. “He came back from town with the thing and wouldn’t stop swishing it around. Don’t get too close, he cut a chunk out of a book shelf.”

  “It’s useful,” Kizu said defensively.

  “Only so long as you don’t cut off another one of your limbs with it. You really need some training with it. Why do you think I never summon weapons?”

  “I figured you didn’t want to go through with the effort of using them.”

  “Well, yes. Or the bother of learning how to use them.” Ione grabbed a stick and quickly sketched a summoning circle in the mud. A few seconds later a massive wicked blade, stained a deep red, protruded from mud. The hilt reached Kizu’s shoulder.

  “I’m feeling a bit left out,” Basil said. “Watch this.”

  Basil lifted an arm and it went transparent down to the elbow before melding together and solidifying into an ivory blade.

  “Is that painful?” Ione asked, flicking the bone blade.

  “Only if I allow it to be. I can turn off pain in parts of my body. Otherwise, it would be excruciating.”

  Anata looked from Kizu’s ice blade, to Ione’s summoned sword, to Basil’s bone.

  “Here.” Kizu tapped the enchanted ring, breaking the ice sword from it, and passed it to Anata. Then he flicked his wrist and recreated another.

  “You’re a horrible guardian,” Ione commented.

  Kizu opened his mouth to protest but was cut off as Anata attempted to swing the blade, only for it to fly out of her hands. Basil barely managed to deflect the sword with his bone blade, narrowly avoiding it slicing him in half.

  “Okay, you might have a point.”

  Ten Blood Curse Academia chapters (5 weeks) ahead of Royal Road.