188 - Preparations

Cleaning 3 -> 6

Body Tempering 1 -> 2

Alexandra closed her journal and took a deep breath as she looked at the spotless guild hall. Mostly spotless. At least, she’d left nothing in plain sight, but she wouldn’t recommend snooping in the darker corners of the room.

She’d spent the entire afternoon and night working on it, and she’d only cleaned a single room. Granted, it was the most important one. At this stage, she wanted to focus on getting the main hall ready for opening. The rest of the building could wait.

When they abandoned the old school, the city left a large portion of the furniture behind. Alexandra suspected some councillors had hoped to relocate teaching here in the future. As a result, rows of benches and tables lined the room, and a podium stood opposite the door. On the side, a large kitchen stood next to the stairs leading down to the basement.

Everything was mostly clean now, but it didn’t look like the reception of a guild hall.

The benches and tables neatly aligned in rows, and the stately podium gave it the air of an old cafeteria. Which it was.

“If this is going to work,” she muttered, tapping a finger against her chin, “we need to completely rearrange this place.”

She needed a proper reception counter near the entrance to process quests and register new adventurers. Heavy wooden notice boards had to be mounted on the walls to host her quests. Beyond that, she would need to convert the room into a tavern, breaking up the rigid rows and rearranging them into clusters where groups could plan without tripping over one another.

Her quests weren’t quite flexible enough for all of it to matter, but she was playing the long game.

She stared at the room with fresh eyes, feeling the weight of exhaustion lifting from her shoulders. It was a massive undertaking, but the foundation was finally laid.

Before she could get started moving benches, the heavy iron front door creaked open. A gust of cool morning air swept into the hall, followed by a cheerful voice cutting through the silence.

“Good morning, Guildmaster! How was your date?”

Alexandra looked up to see Willow stepping through the doorway and groaned. “Not a date. But the food was great.”

“Whatever you say, Boss,” Willow teased.

“Stop calling me like that.” Alexandra tapped Willow’s head.

Willow chuckled. “Fine. Fine. I have good news. You know how expensive magical light can get, right?”

“Only in theory. I have no idea of the actual numbers.”

“Well, what if I told you I found a way to make it free?” Willow asked.

“You did?” Alexandra grabbed her shoulders.

Willow grinned. “Remember the stained glass in the Iron Library’s refectory? I won’t claim I reached even a sliver of Master Alamarian’s mastery, but I do have a working prototype of a cheap imitation.”

Alexandra opened her mouth. “Isn’t that enchantment centuries old? Are you sure you can replicate it?”

“Five hundred years old,” Willow said, raising a finger. “And, in fact, I cannot replicate it. All I can do is equip the windows with small copies that will need regular maintenance. They will also stop working if the sky is overcast for too long.”

Alexandra hugged her friend. “That’s fantastic. How long do you need?”

Willow pulled away from the hug and frowned. “If it’s just the ground floor, a month. One more for the training ground on the third. The second floor is trickier since the corridors and many rooms don’t have windows. I’ll need to find a workaround. The issue is even worse in the basement.”

“One month…” Alexandra whispered. “It’s starting to feel real.”

With the help of Kyle’s Paladin squad and Zeynep, Alexandra got to work preparing her guild’s opening. They moved furniture around and commissioned new pieces.

She also took time to formalize her operational processes. Considering how young her guild was, such things were bound to evolve with experience and depending on how her quests would change over time.

For now, under Torak’s advice, she settled on charging members a fee on registration. To make it palatable, a membership would give access to quests, but also to a discount on drinks served within the hall. Giving away booze was illegal, but there was no law against discounts.

Each quest could be completed once a day. She would structure her contracts so that adventurers had to stop by the guild every time they started a quest. She wanted to make sure they had a reason to come back to the guild hall.

Trusting Torak’s advice, Alexandra set the opening day two weeks after Willow was supposed to be done with the lighting enchantments of the first floor. The Silver-rank was hard at work, spending most of her days perched on the high window conversing with ambient mana.

The official publication supports the author who wrote this chapter, but the text here was reproduced without approval.

Alexandra was interested in the process and took the time to observe in case she could glean inspiration from a more experienced enchanter. But her style of enchantment was more… coercive than Willow’s and wouldn’t mesh well with something that was built to last.

She left the planning of the opening all to Torak, who delegated most of it to Cem.

Time passed. Progress was slow. There was so much to do that even several Golds working together couldn’t take it easy.

Twelve days later, Alexandra hit level nine. She’d been so absorbed in the guild that she forgot about it.

Daily quests summary: Twelve Quests Completed -> +120 exp, +1 STR, +6 DEX, +3 CON, +1 INT, +1 PER

Daily Quest Streak: 168 -> 180

You’ve achieved a feat: Overachiever

Overachiever: Reach 100 in all stats before Gold-rank. +5% All Stats.

The achievement came as a surprise. Taking all her achievements into account, she now had forty bonus attribute points with a further increase of thirty-five percent. It was really starting to add up. In fact, her achievements more than doubled all of her base attributes.

Meanwhile, restoring an old building wasn’t the most efficient way to grind her skills.

Cleaning 6 -> 10

Accounting 5 -> 8

Sitting next to a window on the third floor, she looked at the city with a smile. Skill levels were nice, but she had a perk to evolve. Alexandra returned to her journal and flipped the pages to the relevant section.

Level up! 8 -> 9

Class perk selection available.

Choose your level 9 class perk evolution. Which perk would you like to evolve?

• Streak Enhancement

She only had one choice. The final perk evolution of the Bronze rank.

“Let’s go,” she whispered in anticipation.

Streak Enhancement (Iron) has evolved into Streak Enhancement (Bronze).

Streak Enhancement – Improve the bonuses received for each streak milestone. Applies retroactively to all streak milestones that have already been achieved.

Insistent Quester IV -> Obsessive Quester IV

Alexandra watched the change happen in her journal and frowned. Aside from the rank of the class perk, the wording was exactly the same.

She turned the pages to check on her daily quest section where the streak bonuses were displayed.

Quest Journal

Daily Reset: 06:00

Streak: 180 Days

Next Milestone: 250 Days

Streak Bonuses:

• + 10% All Stats

• + 10% Skill Experience

• + 10% Experience

Daily Quests:

• Slay five mud elementals (5/5)

Alexandra blinked. Then she rubbed her eyes. Not only had the display format changed, but the new bonus was excellent.

Ten percent more experience meant that her dailies would give her eleven instead of ten. For every ten quests, it would be like she was completing another for free. Accounting flared in her mind as she ran a quick calculation. She needed 450 experience to reach Silver at level ten. What would have taken her forty-five days would only take her forty-one now.

Four days saved.

And that’s before I reach the next milestone and upgrade the bonus.

Alexandra smiled. This class perk evolution turned out as good as she could have hoped for.

Feeling great, she took a look at her full status.

Name: Alexandra Ward

Class: Heroine of Quests

Rank: Bronze

Level: 9 (0/500)

Strength (STR):103

Dexterity (DEX):116

Constitution (CON):122

Intelligence (INT):113

Perception (PER):113

Bloodline: Blood of the Verdant Lord

Class Art:

• [Quest Journal] – A living record bound to its bearer. Generates daily quests tailored to the surrounding environment. Completing quests yields experience, rewards, and contributes to an ongoing streak. The longer the streak, the greater the bounty.

Current Streak: 180.

Class Perks:

• [Quest Ledger] (Bronze)

• [Adventuring Contract] (Bronze)

• [Streak Enhancement] (Bronze)

• [Contribution Points] (Bronze)

General Skills:

• [Giant Slayer] (Rare) - 13

• [Solar Core Control] (Rare) - 4

• [Inflict Weakness] (Uncommon) - 15

• [Dark Bolt] (Uncommon) - 14

• [Life Curse] (Uncommon) - 14

• [Drain Life] (Uncommon) - 10

• [Aggressive Assimilation] (Uncommon) - 8

• [Manyfold Style] (Uncommon) - 15

• [Mana Persuasion] (Uncommon) - 5

• [Rays Of The Sun] (Uncommon) - 7

• [One Among Many] (Uncommon) - 3

• [Beer Resistance] (Uncommon) - 1

• [Steady Balance] (Uncommon) - 7

• [Solar Collapse] (Uncommon) - 4

• [Running] (Common) - 10

• [Reading] (Common) - 10

• [Basic Hygiene] (Common) - 9

• [Basic Herbology] (Common) - 4

• [Basic Enchantment] (Common) - 10

• [Tracking] (Common) - 8

• [Solar Affinity] (Common) - 6

• [Cleaning] (Common) - 10

• [Diving] (Common) - 1

• [Swimming] (Common) - 3

• [Familiar Contract] (Common) - 8

• [Accounting] (Common) - 8

• [Destroy Rock] (Common) - 10

• [Body Tempering] (Common) - 2

Achievements: Defiance III, Obsessive Quester IV, Insurrection III, Uprising II, Rebellion II, Bronze, Overachiever