I quickly clicked on the [Accept] button and expined the concept of a quest chain to the others.

  When it was beta-tested in Adventure Incarnate, the pyer response was lukewarm. Two years ter, epic quests were introduced instead since people said they liked to do one big task at a time rather than ten small ones in sequence.

  “To sum it up, each mini-quest unlocks the next one. We simply have to do a few more to unlock the real reward.”

  Schor Wu wrote it down on her scroll. “And these mini-quests are all about fetching items from all over the nd?”

  “Yes.” I read the text out loud for her.

  [Rekindling the Emberstone:

  Using the Dowsing Pendulum, find the five fire artifacts and combine them to form the Emberstone.

  Reward:???]

  “Teacher, may I try it?” Lari tentatively extended his hand towards the [Dowsing Pendulum], which was a red crystal suspended on a red string.

  “Sure, give it a go!” I gave him the item. Seeing the girls eyeing it, too, I said, “You can take turns.”

  Lari held the crystal by the string and let it swing free. It spun around in circles for a few seconds before floating up with its pointed tip indicating the direction we should go. Lari, Kharli, and Mo ran off to find it, and a few minutes ter, the pendulum pointed straight down at an ordinary-looking fist-sized rock which I put in my inventory for safekeeping.

  “Me next!” Kharli held her hand out for the pendulum and no sooner did I hand it to her than they were off, gamboling like excited goats and chattering like magpies.

  Once again, we walked all over the pce. Schor Wu kept on taking samples and writing notes. Thanks to the [Dowsing Pendulum] we easily found all the rocks in no time. When I put them all together, they fused into a rger but still nondescript rock.

  [Rekindling the Emberstone: Quest Complete

  Reward: Emberstone]

  [Quest Avaible: Clear the Cursed Thicket]

  Lari, Kharli, and Mo held the [Emberstone] up and examined every inch. Lari scraped it with a fingernail while Mo dribbled some water on the stone’s surface to see if it would react. No matter how we looked at it, the item was just a regur stone.

  [Emberstone:

  A life-giving stone.]

  Lari turned to me and asked, “Teacher, what about the embers that should be inside it? Shouldn’t it be a burning rock?”

  “There might be a reaction when we finish getting all of the items for all of the quests,” I said.

  The new pendulum we got was identical to the first one but with a green crystal and string.

  [Clear the Cursed Thicket:

  Collect water from the five sacred spots. Mix them together and pour into the cursed thicket.

  Reward:???]

  We set off once again to find all the required quest items, collecting gsses of water from various spots in the river.

  “See what I mean? The quest is making us walk over the entire length of the river to force us to explore it,” I said to the others.

  “I think I’ll send these samples to a better-equipped boratory,” murmured Schor Wu.

  Since I had been the one to merge the rocks, this time I let Kharli pour the water mixture into the so-called “Cursed Thicket” which was just a small but dense clump of bamboo. A [Bamboo Flute] materialized in the spot where she had poured the water.

  [Clear the Cursed Thicket: Quest Complete

  Reward: Bamboo Flute]

  [Quest Avaible: Totem of the Seasons]

  “A flute! Who wants to py it?” I held out the musical instrument.

  Lari and Kharli both looked armed and backed away, so I offered it to Mo who tried to blow on it. She produced some discordant sounds, but nothing else happened.

  “May I?” Schor Wu took it from her and pyed a simple tune on it. She shook her head when she finished and gave it back to me. “It’s well made, but I don’t sense anything else from it. If I hadn’t seen it magically appear with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have thought there was anything special about it. What next?”

  I read the System information about the new quest and raised an eyebrow. “It seems like we’ll just be repeatedly walking everywhere.”

  “What do we have to do this time?” asked Schor Wu. She was in her element, and her expression spoke volumes about her enthusiasm for finding more of the mundane materials the System requested.

  “We need to gather five branches from five special trees and they will merge to form the totem.” I leaned on the bamboo. “There are three more quests after that - [Let Food Be Thy Medicine and Medicine Thy Food], [The Great Aviary Initiative], and [Legends of the Living Earth].”

  “Teacher, if you’re bored, we can do it ourselves and bring you the items when we’re done,” said Mo.

  I chuckled. “I’m not bored. This is rather nice, isn’t it?”

  Schor Wu took out a very rge sword from her interspatial storage. “How about I liven things up by flying us around?”

  “Oooh!” I walked to her side to look at the sword more closely. It was like an absurdly huge anime sword, seven feet long and a foot wide. “A flying sword! I’ve only heard about that in legends.”

  The other cn members I had seen liked to fly, but they didn’t use swords. Either they used a flying vehicle like an ox cart or carriage, or they flew without using tools.

  “It’s not as comfortable as your carriage, but this is the traditional flying sword of the Wu cn,” she said with a proud smile.

  “I want to fly! I want to fly on this awesome sword!” said Kharli.

  “Me, too!” said Lari. “But how will we all fit on it?”

  “Schor Wu means one by one, I’m sure,” said Mo.

  “With your permission, Lady Violet?” said Schor Wu.

  “This is an amazing opportunity. Thank you.” I smiled to see how eager they were. “Go ahead, the kids can take turns while the rest of us stay here.”

  “Who wants to go first?” asked Schor Wu.

  Kharli’s hand shot up faster than the others, so she went first. Schor Wu let go of the sword which floated two feet above the ground. Schor Wu stepped on it, her feet diagonal on the bde, but her torso twisted so that she faced forward. We helped Kharli step on it and position herself in the same way.

  “You can hold on to my arms,” said Schor Wu. “I’ll use qi to keep our bodies steady, and I won’t fly too high or fast. Please give me the pendulum.”

  Lari handed the item to her, and she activated it to find the direction they should fly.

  “Ready?” Schor Wu asked.

  Kharli nodded, and the sword flew up slowly and steadily, as straight as an arrow to the north. I hadn’t even bothered asking if it was safe since I was confident that the kid’s tutor knew what she was doing. We followed them with our eyes. They were about ten feet high and the speed was only as fast as I could run full tilt. A few minutes ter, they descended into a small grove of pine trees and disappeared from our sight. They soon reappeared and flew back to us.

  “We found it!” Kharli waved a green branch full of leaves and weird-looking bck fruits at us.

  She stepped down, and Mo repced her on the sword. This time, they flew east to fetch a branch.

  “These fruits look like apples, but they’re bck!” Kharli handed me the branch. “I found it lying on the ground.”

  Lari’s eyes gleamed. “May I try one?”

  “No way, we need this for the quest!” I was curious about the fruits, too, but this was a key item. Who knew what would happen if it wasn’t intact? “Just wait until we finish everything. You’ll see that this bck apple isn’t worth jeopardizing the final reward.”

  Mo and Schor Wu returned with a branch with green apples. Lari and Schor Wu then went south to retrieve a tree branch with red apples.

  It should have been my turn next.

  “Um, I think I’ll pass. I’m not good with heights,” I said. “The kids can take turns until we finish all the quests and we should also walk towards the door now. I promised the staff they could see today’s results.”

  “Lady Violet, I’d like to measure the qi here one st time before you complete all of the quests,” said Schor Wu.

  “No problem,” I said.

  I walked back to the doorway with whichever of my apprentices was currently earthbound.

  Kharli and Mo then went with Schor Wu to get the st two branches that had white and golden apples, which completed the set of all the items we needed. I spread a picnic bnket on the ground and pced the branches on it. They all dissolved into green, red, white, bck, and golden lights which merged together to form the [Totem of Seasons].

  I had expected the totem to be a carved wooden pilr, but it was a small, fist-sized statue of a dragon.

  [Totem of Seasons:

  A small wooden statue of a dragon symbolizing power, wisdom, and protection.]

  “It’s cute, isn’t it?” I showed it to the others.

  “I think this is a child dragon,” said Mo. “Look at those big round eyes!”

  “Yes, the proportions do seem childlike,” said Schor Wu. “I can’t sense anything unusual from it.”

  After everyone got a chance to look at it, I took the statue back and put it in my inventory. “The items we got right now don’t look like much, but I think this chain of tasks will have a spectacur finish.”

  We continued with the rest of the quests. [Let Food Be Thy Medicine, and Medicine Thy Food] asked us to find five wild berries and [The Great Aviary Initiative] was a search for five feathers. Lari, Kharli, and Mo went fearlessly whizzing off in all directions and returned with the stuff we needed. The items combined into a [Five-Colored Pill] and [Feathered Scepter].

  “Okay, this is it! Someone tell the others in the house to come, and I’ll fix the settings to allow them to enter. Schor Wu, it’s time for your st reading,” I said when we arrived at the spot in front of the doorway.

  “This is the st task?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  My three apprentices went out to fetch the staff while Schor Wu got new qi measurements again.

  [Legends of the Living Earth:

  Draw this symbol on the ground and pce the Bamboo Flute, Totem of the Seasons, Five-Colored Pill, and Feathered Scepter on the four corners and the Emberstone in the middle.

  Reward:???]

  The runes were simple enough to draw, but I had trouble drawing a perfect circle until I used a makeshift compass made of two sticks and a string to do it.

  Fengying, Deming, and the other staff arrived as I was putting the finishing touches on the symbol.

  “My dy, this pce is so beautiful! The air is so fresh and the fields are full of flowers!” Yinuo’s eyes darted from pce to pce, her face glowing with unrestrained wonder.

  The others also complimented me on acquiring such a magical and lovely piece of property.

  “It’s much bigger than I thought it would be.”

  “They say the gods had doors to incredible pocket dimensions.”

  “The one in Mount Deer was supposed to lead to a nd where everything was made of white smoke.”

  “I like this one better.”

  “There was one with a ke made of wine and trees made of meat.”

  They gathered around the circle I had drawn and chatted about this and that as I waited for Schor Wu to finish. When she gave me the go-ahead, I gestured for my apprentices to join me by my side and said, “Gather round, everyone! You’re about to witness a momentous occasion.”

  One by one, I put the [Bamboo Flute], [Totem of the Seasons], [Five-Colored Pill], [Feathered Scepter], and [Emberstone] in their proper pces. The five items and the symbol I had drawn glowed a bright white for a split second before disappearing. I had expected them to combine to form a new item, but they dissolved into thin air.

  I almost stumbled as the earth beneath our feet began to shake, and my hair whipped around my face as the wind picked up, carrying with it the scent of ozone.

  Looking up, my breath caught in my throat. There, suspended in the darkening sky, a vast circle of light bzed into existence. Intricate runes and symbols traced themselves in burning gold against the clouds, their patterns spreading outward like a blooming flower. The circle must have been hundreds of feet across.

  By this time, my people were all used to such heavenly phenomena and weren’t rattled. They whooped with excitement and pointed up at the sky.

  The very air seemed to hum with power, making my skin tingle and the fine hairs on my arms stand on end. As the final symbols locked into pce, pulses of energy rippled outward from the circle's center, sending waves of color cascading across the sky and then down into the earth.

  The tremors intensified, and we all watched in fascination as the earth itself began to rise and take shape. Five humanoid forms three times my height pushed up through the soil, their bodies a patchwork of stone and rich earth. I couldn't help but smile as the nearest one turned toward us, its "face" a simple arrangement of smooth rocks that somehow managed to convey curiosity.

  The glowing symbol in the sky pulsed thrice more than died down.

  [Legends of the Living Earth: Quest Complete

  Reward: Five Golems]

  I was just about to expin what they were and call for a celebration when I got a System notification. The popup box was outlined in a scary red color and had skulls on all four corners.

  [Warning: Wild Golems]

  [Golems in the area have become agitated. If not tamed quickly, they may break free and cause significant damage to your property. Tame them before it's too te!]

  [Combat Alert]

  [A hostile force is approaching! Prepare for battle. Equip your weapons, and armor, and gather necessary supplies.]

  LinMeili