Keynes checked all the seventeen underwater depressions and altogether found forty-four eggs. It was a bit of a nightmare transporting them out of the rift as the instance was already gone. If any of them left, they couldn’t return to the same rift.

On top of that, Keynes wanted to take a sample of the swamp water, moss and fungi that grew on the trees.

Anything in this rift was Level 3 and he remembered what Wagner and Hugo had been able to achieve with Level 0 materials. Obviously, Keynes didn’t have their expertise and experience but he remembered everything Hugo had told and showed to him.

Eventually they got everything out of the rift, including scales from the swamp lizards and the skin of the swamp snakes, by placing Bill in between.

“We need buckets and many containers,” Keynes told them. “I want to collect plants and fungi from other rifts.”

Haruka and Bill didn’t know about Keynes’s episode with Hugo and they were very surprised to hear it but asked him to explain it another time. They barely stayed on their feet. Vivena had already gone to sleep.

They’d spent an additional six hours there while Keynes moved the things he wanted from the rift.

Both men soon followed Vivena and went to sleep as well. With the Poison's Regalia and its boost to Vitality, Keynes could stay awake for a little bit longer.

He sorted through the materials they brought from the rift then slapped his forehead.

“I forgot the soil,” he murmured to himself.

Master, there was no soil…

“Of course there was, underwater.”

Oh. You’re right. I am glad you started collecting the rift materials, master.

“Why?”

You can make many nice things out of them.

“If I only knew how.”

Alice didn’t say anything, reading his intent. It would be so much easier to have the answers. He shook his head and proceeded to sort out the materials.

Keynes had no idea what to do with any of them. Eventually, his mind became sluggish and he finally decided to call it a day and go to sleep.

***

They didn’t delve for two days. Keynes and Vivena had to recover their health. They’d some minor wounds. Bill and Haruka did some more work in their camp. Just after two rifts they understood, they’d soon run out of space. They needed more storage room.

Then Keynes asked for a garden.

“How can I build you a garden, Keynes?” Bill asked.

“Doesn’t need to be large. Just wooden containers for soil.”

“I don’t have the tools and materials for that.

After a debate, they dug a few rectangular holes which Keynes would fill with the soil from the rifts. It would be something between natural and standard gardening methods. In other words: a bad method. The three methods existed for a reason. But Keynes couldn’t do anything about it. They needed a garden.

“What are we going to do about the eggs?” Vivena asked while moving around the stuff in the storage room. Keynes boiled inside seeing this. He’d had everything sorted out. “It is a fun idea to stay here and delve the rift but … we need help.”

Keynes flatly disagreed but Haruka actually considered her argument.

“Listen, we must learn how to become self-sufficient. Once we have a garden.” Keynes pointed at the four, half-metre deep holes and grimaced. “We may grow something useful.”

Bill raised his hand. “I will need the bowls for the stew in two days.”

In one bowl, Keynes kept the rainwater from the rift, in the other one the swamp water. He wasn’t sure what he needed that water for. It wasn’t enough to use it on anything and he didn’t have the tools or expertise to research it.

Haruka looked at Keynes, his eyes soft as usual.

“Our initial idea to keep delving this rift may—”

“Wait,” Keynes interrupted Haruka. “The moment you tell others we have a Level 3 rift here, all of this will be gone. I am not sure about your people, Haruka, but people outside the wall don’t care what we want. You will have armies here. This.” Keynes pointed at the storage room. “Must stay between us for now. We are not ready to reveal this to anyone.”

No one said anything for a minute, and then Vivena spoke up.

“Keynes is not wrong. If anyone outside the walls gets wind of this, they will come here to take control of the rift.”

“The rift wasn’t that bad, Har,” Bill joined the conversation. “We have water and food, and if we keep doing this. We should level up soon. I think a month or two here isn’t a big deal.”

Haruka looked into Keynes’s eyes, then glanced at Bill and Vivena.

“You are right,” Haruka said eventually. “I just … for a moment imagined what we could do with this if we had people from our village. But I agree with you, Keynes, becoming self-sufficient is important.”

“In that case,” Vivena asked. “What are we going to do with the eggs?”

They will not hatch, master, Alice said to Keynes. By removing the eggs from the rift, you stopped their hatching process. They will remain in the dormant stage until you destroy them or provide the swamp environment.

Keynes relayed Alice’s message to the rest.

With that little hiccup out of the way, they started preparations for the rift. First came the question of what to use the scroll on.

They settled on the boots. With Keynes being Level 2 and using the epic rarity Poison’s Regalia, he hit the limit of Level 3 items he could use.

Sunny Steps (Exotic)

“It’s so hot but hot is fun!”

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+11 Dexterity

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Hot Trail (Passive)

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+15% Fire Resistance

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{Enchants: Self-repair; Self-adjustment}

[Boots]

Level 3

The boots were good. They boosted Haruka’s Dexterity to 37 points. Though he complained that without Perception on a similar level, it wasn’t easy to move with care. It still was a welcome help and after a spar with Keynes, Haruka grew more confident.

The next several days were soul-crushing.

After the swamp rift came a desert rift with fist-sized orange and red rocks, and fine dark brown sand. That rift was incredibly flat, cloudless and so hot that Bill’s only duty was to create water.

They went straight to killing the monsters and with the rift being only 2 kilometres long and wide, they thought it would be a quick job.

It perhaps would if the rift monsters didn’t turn out to be the stoneback fire lizards. Their passive granted them increased physical resistance and they attacked by spitting fire.

Keynes and Haruka easily dodged their attacks but Keynes’s shortswords and Haruka’s rungu were completely ineffective against the monsters. Their main job was to keep the monsters distracted while Vivena came in and swept the mace, hoping to cause enough damage to kill the monsters.

There were also five champions instead of four like in two earlier rifts. But they were lucky that four out of the five champions were of a common rarity and only one was rare. It still took one hell of effort to defeat them. Even without skills, champions were stronger than average monsters with powers.

The rift reward was a disappointment: a single Scroll of Identification. The only things out of place they found in the rift were black flat pebbles with a very smooth surface. The most bizarre thing about them was their temperature. Despite the burning heat, the pebbles were cool. Keynes and the rest picked twenty of these pebbles and got the hell out of the rift.

After treating their sunburn, they ate, slept and then entered another instance of the rift.

A week later, Vivena finally hit the Medium stage. It took ten hours to teach her the lesser aura control. And then she complained about her spiritual companion.

“That was exhausting,” she said when they got out of a cave rift, where they’d defeated centipedes. Over the week, they managed to decrease the clearing time to 6 hours. Mostly because of the items they found.

Bill took the uncommon rarity Gnarled Wand that decreased mana consumption by 5% and granted a skill called [Arcane Bolt]. It dealt magical damage to monsters and most died after four or five hits. Champions took on average over 10 hits.

Bill had mana for 18 hits, so he’d kept the wand for the hardest champions.

From the eleventh rift – one where trees themselves were monsters – Bill got a Scroll of Random Teaching. It gave him Lesser Cooking technique which also included rift monster meat. Despite the initial disappointment, it was a massive boon. Bill was able to prepare food from Level 2 monsters now without the risk of harming anyone – with the exception of Keynes who had the Purified Body buff which protected him. It also told them that a proper cooking technique could purify the meat as effectively as a purification ritual.

The difference between Level 1 and 2 meat mostly boiled down to the amount of energy it provided. Then came a boost to stamina, health and mana! The stew still lacked proper flavour but no one complained.

Keynes returned the Poison’s Regalia to Vivena upon her reaching the Medium stage. She kept the mace unidentified as she didn’t wish to stress her core with two epic items. She also got an uncommon rarity Dexterius Ring that buffed her Dexterity by 5 points.

Keynes took only two things from their loot – the rare rarity Unrelenting Shirt that gave him 3 points to Strength and Dexterity and decreased physical damage taken by 5%. With both shortswords in his hands, it buffed his Strength to 29 and Dexterity to 34. His Dexterity was almost as high as that of a Level 7 human essence ascender.

The other thing was the second Scroll of Random Teaching found in the thirteenth rift. It gave Keynes Lesser Knowledge of Wind Currents. It convinced them that the ‘random’ wasn’t truly random. Both of the scrolls granted something that fitted Keynes’s and Bill’s general theme. Keynes was ready to use his Level 2 scroll but Alice begged him to not do it. She didn’t explain why though.

But Keynes’s main power up came from a different place. The 14 rifts they had cleared pushed him to new heights and he was rewarded with maxing out his Strength which temporarily boosted his strength. It was a noticeable increase. Unfortunately, he was unlucky with the essence cultivation. The essence he got was too weak to break through the strong barrier of his core.

After hours of an argument, Alice admitted that he needed a technique to fix that but said nothing more.

Haruka received the rare rarity Wind’s Band which granted him [Wind Burst], +4 points to Perception that he badly needed and 5% decreased damage taken from wind affinity attacks. [Wind Burst] dealt minor damage and pushed enemies backwards, confusing them for 4 seconds – 2 seconds in the case of champions.

Their little camp grew as Keynes kept bringing more stuff from the rifts. He planted many random plants filled with random soil – all from the rifts.

Keynes also returned to exhaustive training, hoping to max out his Will and Dexterity as soon as possible. Sometimes he’d spar with Haruka but the other man wasn’t comfortable fighting humans.

With every rift, they grew stronger, then in the eighteenth rift, they encountered a boss and two sub-bosses. Even with their items, the fight was difficult. Keynes once again marvelled at the absurdity of Vivena’s Talent. She alone had cleared the first rift with more monsters than any other rifts they encountered.

Their moods were lifted when Keynes found the hidden door. They’d already gotten three hidden compartments from earlier rifts and found the two dimensional pouches and a Ring of Wood that no one used currently as it affected only wood affinity spells which none of them had.

“Do you feel up to it, Keynes?” Haruka asked, his voice weary, although his eyes were keen and curious. What Keynes liked about Haruka and Bill was that they weren’t greedy, never complained and always showed consideration for others.

While Keynes could think he was like them, he knew he lacked the same qualities.

“Yeah,” Keynes replied. His body was full of shallow cuts. The boss was called a razorback and had been fully covered by sharp bony spines. Its passive returned damage to the attacker. The harder they hit it, the more damage was returned. Keynes had Vivena’s old coat on. It boosted health regeneration. Bill had also brought a bowl of stew for him. They’d prepared it the moment they realised the rift had a boss.

Unlike the first rift, this one was a single two-kilometres long and at least five hundred metres high grotto.

“Are you sure you don’t need a rest?” Vivena asked from the spot where she sat leaning against a boulder.

The grotto was lit by the moonlight that came in through slits in the ceiling.

“I am.”

Keynes approached the hidden door with anticipation and used his Talent on it. Like with the first one, his mana was sucked out of him and a splitting headache hit right away. Haruka steadied him and Vivena joined them a second later.

They slowly moved inside. Keynes kept his eyes squinted as the bright electrical light hurt him. After they descended the flight of stairs, they found a table with four items on it.

Four skill shards.

“Damn,” Bill smirked. “This is wealth.”

Haruka accepted the jab at his earlier words with a solemn nod.

“We don’t know which skill shard is for whom,” Vivena noted.

“I think it will be obvious once we check them out,” Haruka said.