Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) by Alex Oakchest (book suggestions txt) 📕

of the Wrotun clans' social pyramid, and as such was not allowed to choose his own profession yet. Young Tasgario would need to serve Galatee in whatever way she saw fit, until either a leaf above him – one of his relatives – died, or Galatee deemed him fit for elevation to Fifth-Leaf.

“What is it, Tasgario?” she said.

“They say there’s an oasis a dozen miles out west. A few of the others are going to look for it. I’ve never seen one before, and I was wondering if I could go?”

She thought about it for less than a second.

“No. I might need you to brew my tea later on.”

“You might need me to?”

“Correct. Anything else?”

Tasgario looked crestfallen, but he merely shook his head.

“Good. Now go and refill the water jugs in my chamber,” she told him.

As Tasgario headed toward the surface door and then went underground, Galatee looked at the wasteland around her, one that was starting to look more like a town. Only slightly, but the shape was forming. The clan was making dents in the armor of nature.

The buzzing of wasteland wasps was usually drowned out by the clink of shovels biting into dirt these days. The rattles of snake’s tongues and the scampering of insects were replaced by the bangs of hammers and the crunch of gears in crudely made pulley systems. Instead of morning birdsong, the early wasteland hours were filled with worker songs, the lyrics of which were things like ‘move the bloody trolley closer!’ And ‘who took my godsdamned shovel? I only set it down a second ago.’

At least there were results to show for their labor, these coming in the form of two rows of wooden houses all lined up together. Nothing fancy; just simple lodges with places to sleep and escape the sun. Of course, Core Jahn was to thank for a lot of that. Though the clanspeople helped with fetching materials and the like, Jahn could construct a dozen houses before a clan builder had even erected a wall.

It might not look like much, but to Galatee it was the first sign that this was a settlement and not just a bunch of tents erected in the middle of the world’s backside. Seeing the wooden lodges had raised the spirits of both clans better than a barrel full of goblin whiskey, and it made Galatee grateful that Reginal put his fear of thermal pockets to one side so he could agree to their construction.

It was all coming together, and it was only fitting, then, that they were to have a naming day today, where their new home would be immortalized.

“First-Leaf Galatee?” said another voice. “Good morning.”

This was a young voice of goblin ethnicity, but Galatee was surprised to see that it belonged to Devry, Chief Reginal’s boy.

He was seated in a chair with a blanket over his thighs, and his glass orb floated beside his head, half the sphere filled black with the poison it zapped from his body. Poor boy.

There was a peculiar smell coming from the lad. A sort of sour smell, like carrots left in the sun and already on the turn. There was no point mentioning it to him. In a place where people labored in the sun so long they barely had time to wash, bad smells weren’t so unusual.

“Devry. What are you doing awake so early?”

“It is clan custom to wake before the sun is ready to beat on us, isn’t it? Pa always says that the first to the well draws the deepest bucket.”

“Your father doesn’t seem to follow his own sayings,” she said, noting Reginal’s absence.

The boy didn’t say anything, and Galatee knew she should have kept the remark to herself. It wasn’t very chiefly of her to talk like that, especially not in front of Reginal’s son.

Looking at Devry, she changed the subject. “What’s the book you’re holding?”

Devry held it up. The title read ‘A Farewell to Manacles.’

“This? It’s a story of the slaves in the Viborg Dynasty. Of how the Grand Ruler Gall was trying to build a two thousand-feet high wall all around his kingdom, to protect his city from nearby hordes. He used an army of slaves, ones disciplined into working by the crack of their foremen’s whips.”

“The horde stormed the city, as I recall.”

“That’s right; they didn’t finish the wall in time. You know your history, First-Leaf?”

“Lad, when you’re as old as me, what some people call history, you call memories.”

“You were around in the Grand Ruler’s days?”

She laughed. “I was being facetious, but I know the story. Grand Ruler Gall never finished his walls in time, and the horde took the city. He lost his home, his people, and finally, his life.”

Devry nodded. “But his grandson, smuggled from the city when the hordes came and raised far away, came back years later. He took the city and drove the hordes away again.”

“And as I remember it, he finally built the wall, didn’t he?”

“He built it with the descendants of the slaves of the old Grand Ruler. They survived both invasions, because slaves are never killed in battle. Everyone needs a slave, no matter who they used to work for.”

“So, he completed his grandfather’s legacy.”

“But he had to change things to do it,” said Devry. Galatee was struck with how old the lad sounded. It was as off-putting as it was impressive. “Do you remember what he had to change, to get his wall built?”

She thought for a moment. “He made the slaves free men.”

“And, as free men, the city belonged to them too. That meant the great walls weren’t just forced labor, but defenses for their own city. The Grand Ruler’s slaves took fifteen years and didn’t complete even half the walls. The freemen finished them in six.”

As the story turned over in