Chapter 1917: Rash Decision

The first floor of the Aldoria labyrinth had not changed in the months since Quinlan Elysiar walked into it with a shabby spear and a borrowed stance.

The same pale stone corridors ran ahead of the family, lit by the same veins of soft blue light, and the same first-floor trio still held them: Steel Carapace Beetles the size of hunting hounds, red-eyed Shadow Wisps trailing their tendrils, and thorn-plated Bramblebacks the shape of angry boars.

What had changed was the party.

A beetle charged the group from a side passage, mandibles wide, and Ayame cut it in half without looking at it, mid-sentence, her katana back in its sheath before the two halves finished falling.

"As I was saying." The petite samurai walked at Quinlan’s right, arms folded, chin up. "I understand the sentiment, Quin. Truly. We were robbed at that gate once, and my petty primordial never forgets a perceived injustice done to him like that."

"Forty bronze," Quinlan agreed pleasantly. "I felt as if they sucker punched me."

"And that’s precisely my problem." Her gaze narrowed up at him. "You avenged a forty-bronze grudge with altering national policy. The level 1 Commoner-class you with the spear could afford that grudge. The ruler you commanding three peoples and counting is spending a nation’s future on it."

[You’ve Slain Steel Carapace Beetle (Level 1). You’ve Gained 0 XP]

The notification chimed at the edge of Quinlan’s vision and he dismissed it without a glance.

The first Steel Carapace Beetle he ever killed on this floor had been worth three experience points. It had also cost him a great deal of shouted coaching from the samurai now walking at his right, who had twice deflected its mandibles off him before he found the joints himself.

"So think it through with me," Ayame pressed on. "Is it truly in this nation’s interest to have crowds camping in front of every labyrinth door? You saw the queue outside, and that was with the entrance fee. If we take it away, it’ll run down the hill, past the barracks, and out of sight."

Another beetle scuttled out of a nook toward Seraphiel’s bare feet. Iris’s hand snapped out sideways, caught it by the shell, and threw it into the walls, creating an ugly painting art. She didn’t even seem to realize what she’d just done, moving on with zero emotion on her face.

"Nothing," she reported flatly. "It gave me nothing."

"We’re passing through, not farming," Serika snickered. "Deep floors, remember?"

Ayame ignored the exchange entirely. Her arms stayed folded, chin up, and she was not finished.

"Farmers are already abandoning their fields to chase a better tomorrow, Quin. Now they heard ’free’ and will drop all their plows. And most of them will get exactly what a level three farmhand gets on floor four."

Her voice stayed level, but it had weight in it now. "They’ll die or get crippled, in the thousands first and then the hundreds of thousands. We’ll lose millions of farmers due to this policy change."

The corridor forked, and the family flowed around a beetle that had planted itself in the middle of the junction, rattling its shell in challenge at the eleven people currently walking through it.

Lucille patted it on the carapace. It exploded into gore and loot a moment later. Lucille was already three paces past it.

"She’s not wrong," Aurora noted from the back, a step behind Kaelira. "The gate fees were a filter. An ugly one, but a filter."

"They were," Quinlan agreed.

He walked on for a few paces, hands loose at his sides, the blue wall-light sliding over his casual black.

"You bring up good points, Ayame. There’s going to be chaos. Crowds will camp the gates, people will brawl over corridor rights, and plenty of hopefuls will walk in and never walk back out. I’m not blind to any of it. I just think most of it solves itself with time."

"The crowds thin out on their own once the stories of the dead start coming home."

"And the dead?" Ayame pressed on.

"The dead were given a chance. That’s all I care about." He said it without flinching. "A farmer who dies on floor four got to try for his potential. Under the old fees he’d have died anyway, just slower, at age fifty, with a crooked back and rotten teeth, having never once been given the chance to realize his potential."

"And if one doesn’t die? If one in a thousand climbs?" Quinlan’s eyes lit up.

"Then our nation just created a future cornerstone. Someone who’ll reach heights where a human lifespan stretches into centuries. The strongest of them will still be building our country a thousand years from now, long after every fat noble who ever charged a gate fee is dust."

"One in a thousand," Ayame repeated. "And the other nine hundred and ninety-nine are gone."

"Their gear stays where they fall, though," Kaelira said slowly, working through it aloud. "A spearhead doesn’t rot down here. Neither does a shield, or a decent set of greaves, or plate that only needs the blood scrubbed off it."

"The labyrinth preserves all of it," Quinlan confirmed.

Aurora caught up to the shape of it, and her fingers stopped their absent counting against her thigh. "So the next hopeful walks that same corridor and picks it all up. Every farmhand who dies down here arms the one who comes after them."

Silence held for a few steps, apart from the crunch of a Brambleback that had made the mistake of charging Blossom and met her gauntlet mid-charge, thorns and all.

Ayame walked several paces without saying anything, hunting for the hole she had been certain was in there somewhere.

Forty bronze had lit the fuse, but the reasoning underneath it was cold, and it had clearly been finished long before the gates ever opened.

"He’s not stupid, just infuriatingly arrogant," Iris said, to nobody in particular. "Everyone always assumes he never thinks before he acts. Shouldn’t a loving wife know differently?"

"...You did not just say that," Ayame’s eyes narrowed.

"But I did."

"...I’ll deal with you later." Ayame’s chin came down a degree while looking at Quinlan. "I know you’re not stupid, and I know you do think. But I also know that you can be emotional and impulsive. I just wanted to make sure."

"Much appreciated," Quinlan grinned. "This is the job of my adorable second in command. You’re doing perfectly."

"...Hmph."

Two forks and a flight of stairs later, the beetle corridor gave way to a wider gallery, and Aurora decided the first problem had been settled long enough.

The alchemist had worked her way up the group to his left side, platinum hair catching the wall-light, already three moves down the road.

"Then solve the next one," she said.

"You’ve just drained the farms into the labyrinths. Millions will abandon their homes, most never to return. So now we will have less food produced. But then another of your directions is that healing should be more accessible to the common folk, which means that despite the mad rush of farmers to their deaths, overall fewer people will die young, which means more mouths to feed, not fewer."

She ticked it off on her fingers. "More mouths, fewer farmers. That’s not chaos that time solves, Quin. That’s a famine with a schedule. We need an answer before Iskaris starts eating its seed grain."

"Once again, that’s right," Quinlan agreed.

His hand found her hair as they strolled, fingers sliding slowly through platinum, and Aurora leaned into it on pure reflex while her expression insisted that this was serious statecraft.

"Which is why it’s time for the new era’s cornerstones to shine," he continued. "Tell me, my gorgeous alchemist. Why does everyone assume alchemy means healing potions?"

"Because it is always applicable and pays well," she said instantly.

"Because war made it always applicable and pay well." A Shadow Wisp darted at them from a nook, red eyes glinting; a thread of his wind removed it from the conversation.

"But what if there’s no constant war waged all across the continent?"

"...We’ll need to adapt."

"Yeah. Adapt. How about some soil fertilizers, brewed by the vat? Soil transmutation, turning exhausted dirt into prime black loam. Growth elixirs that cut a harvest cycle in half. If an alchemist can rebuild a man’s ruptured organs, why not a field’s?"

Aurora stopped walking.

She had gone wide-eyed, and her mouth moved before her composure caught up with it.

"There were experiments," she muttered. "Verdanal’s fertility tinctures. The Loamwright trials. Early prototypes, years ago, some of them actually worked..."

Her fingers came up, counting again, faster now.

"But they never spread. Rulers wanted every alchemist to mass brew potions for their endless wars, so it was efficient to focus on the few that assisted soldiers win their battles. And the nobles who owned the land had no reason to want bigger harvests. Overproduction crashes grain prices. Cheap grain shrinks their rents. And millions of tenant farmers suddenly out of work, wandering the roads..."

She looked up at him. "They buried farming alchemy precisely because it worked."

A beetle chose that exact moment to charge her flank. Kaelira’s rune-etched backhand removed it from existence without anyone, including Kaelira, acknowledging the event.

"So the knowledge exists," Quinlan said. "It’s just been sitting in a drawer, waiting for a ruler who profits from feeding people instead of sending them to war."

He spread his hands as they walked.

"What if the world opens up to us? The Restriction won’t stand forever. What if my portals and Iskaris’s fields could move grain to nations facing famine, anywhere, in an afternoon?"

His primordial eyes flashed with the light his girls knew well, the one that redrew maps.

"Or what if we conquer a new continent, and its farmlands burn in the fighting? We could make our newest citizens’ first experience of my rule a full granary instead of an empty one. Nobody rebels against the man feeding their children."

His girls were smiling now, slow and wide, one after another down the line.

"And I have other ideas too," he went on.