Apparently, liches had limits too. When Rino woke up, it was still pitch dark.
His bones felt heavy, and the lich could barely move. Thankfully, it wasn't time for daily quest reset yet. He should not have passed out for too long.
The cave was quiet, and Rino tried to remember what he did before this. Ah, yes. He summoned forty-eight goblins and felt a sudden mana drop. Did summoning goblins take up so much mana? Rino was unsure. However, he was very thankful that he was a lich in a cave full of lingering resentment energy from the murdered goblin tribe. If he wasn't here when he fainted, Rino might not have recovered any of his depleted mana.
Thanks to the severe mana depletion, all his summons were cancelled even if he could still feel their soul bonds in his shadow. The lich could only remain motionless on the cave ground while meditating and thinking of the most negative thoughts he could. As ridiculous as it sounded, Rino might soon run out of depressing thoughts. His uses for mana severely outweighed the miseries he suffered in his previous life.
Rino needed a mana farm badly. He finally understood why dark mages were such despicable people. It was like a gambler being dealt a shitty hand of cards in a poker game. The only way to win was to cheat.
Even if Rino had to cheat, he wanted to do it in the least annoying way. Humans and animals required feeding. Rino was not that diligent at keeping living creatures living for too long, even if it was for the sake of creating torture farms. Hence, there was only one solution.
He had to sacrifice a few free slaves and embed soul fragments in them to boost his mana capacity. He needed to make a pit of continuous suffering beneath his farmhouse so that he could still wake up and recover his mana if something similar to this happened in the future.
It took Rino many hours to finally recover his manas to a safe level before he trudged his way back. He was still too weak to summon any of his minions, so Rino walked with his tattered grass woven sandals. It was hardly a week, but already, these sandals look like they were hanging by the last weave.
Unsurprisingly, it was daytime when Rino reached the cave's entrance. Luckily for him, Noir's present was very good at deflecting deadly sun rays. Rino did not want to know what would happen if he were to catch on fire and trigger his high-speed regeneration abilities now when he was low on mana.
The soul splitting spell should activate itself if Rino's main body vaporised, but Rino really did not want to take any chances. He was so close to death in only the first week of his revival. This new world should not be underestimated.
When Rino finally closed the door of his humble farmhouse, he threw himself onto bed immediately and waited. It was very dark in here without enough magic to power the fireballs. The fire in the fireplace also died out with nobody to feed it wood over the night. The only light that filtered into his farmhouse was through the poorly made doors.
Rino eyed the kitty door. The wood was still there. However, his feline friend was no longer in his basket.
"Noir?" Rino projected his thoughts just loud enough for anyone within the compounds of his house to hear.
There was no reply. A sinking feeling settled in Rino's non-existent gut. Where did Noir go? How did Noir leave his farmhouse? The door should be too heavy for a cat to open.
Rino felt perfectly miserable. Without Noir, his new chance at life was nothing but an empty shell. All he wanted was for the black cat to greet him and allow him to nuzzle his face in that furry underbelly. It would be better if he could cuddle with the talking cat for comfort after his mana depletion, but the little creature was nowhere to be found.
Sulking, complaining and brooding, Rino remained that way until a new side quest popped up.
Ping!
===
Side Quest #9
Objective: Craft a pair of durable shoes.
Reward: 8 hours of sleep.
===
Rino did not have to look at his feet to know that those grass woven sandals had fallen off. The long walk back pushed the breaking sandals to their limit. Thinking about it, Rino could really use a bath. His feet and mantle were muddy from the long hike. He should not have flopped onto the bed so quickly.
As Rino got up to fill the bath manually, he started thinking about the side quest. What kind of materials would he need to craft a pair of durable shoes. On that note, what was considered durable?
In his previous world, the poor used hemp fibre to make shoes. Rino could do that. However, those shoes didn't last for too long. Perhaps two months at most if they travelled as much as Rino did on a daily basis. The richer people, like merchants and nobility, wore shoes made from animal skin. Leatherwork was a messy job, and Rino did not know how tanning leather worked. What he did know was the grossness of the process.
No leather. Rino decided to stick to the basics. He would make the shoe sole out of wood to prevent fast wearing out from walking too much. At the same time, he will dye the linen and double the fabric to make a stronger cloth for his shoes. He only lacked the glue to hold everything strongly together. Without enough mana, Rino could not use the teleportation pad to the trees with resin.
Sighing silently, Rino looked at the reward longingly. Eight more hours of sleep. If only he was able to use magic, he would finish his work in a jiffy.
The water he carried to the clay bathtub was cold, and Rino sighed. Everything he automated using magic stopped working after he collapsed. The heat circles in his reservoir stopped working for a while, and Rino's clean water supply was looking a little low.
What a disaster! Rino scrubbed his muddy toes with the torn cape he turned into a cleaning rag. Once he had his mana back, he was going to start mass-producing everything again.
Now that he had a lot of time, Rino recalled how he could have summoned a few goblins to pack up and carry over useful items from their goblin cave to his farmhouse. It was a case of finders keepers, so these goblins should have no complaints. There was no need to summon all forty-eight of them at once.