"E-eh! What was that again? It's at the tip of my tongue." Kerleun crazily scratches her hair to recall an essential piece in her memory. "Aha! Capacitor, I have a low Capacitor. it's like I have a pile of many many many foods, but I can only eat very little. So I can only pass the food to someone else and depending on them, they could use more energy from the goodies!"
Although Melantha got the gist of it, her hand-on-hip posture does not seem impressed with Kerleun's poor explanation.
"Kerleun is someone who has access to important powers but was an incapable dummy that can only pass them over to someone who can use them huh?." Mordred teased as he playfully juggled the three souls emitting poignant silvery trails.
"Hey! Because I'm toooo smarty and beautiful that there won't be fairness if they made Kerleun supah strong!" She hit his shoulder with her tiny fist in objection.
"She's like a constitutional monarch but instead of a country, she reigns over the power of the Earth. She shares the reign by signing you as her parliament, or what she calls the blessing. Since she has little to no power in the governance due to her low Capacitor, you get to make the laws depending on your abilities, of course, both parties had to approve." Mordred explained his thought-out comparison.
"In even simpler words, she's just a bridge to power." She pulled in the captured floating souls only for them to be devoured by her and Mordred through their heads' orifices.
"Yes Darling." The line of souls nipped his orifices with their coldness.
They had 27 souls as the prize in this battle. From the extra one soul from the shapeshifting goblin, they had an even number of 28 pushing the collected souls to 144 for each of the couple.
"Eh? Am I being undervalued? And why do both of you eat those souls? Are you demons?" She slumped her legs wide on his shoulder like a curious baby. "Bohooo! Ma goldies are stuck underground." Her pout pulled down.
The couple has realized that Kerleun is solely overly curious and overreacting most of the time yet indifferent to the things she has nothing to do with. She does not hate the Dead Raiser and their conduct, she only cares about retrieving her goldies and is a little timid in doing it alone.
"Just a little annoying yet you're still a great help to my wife. Don't feel too bad now, we'll get your goldies as promised."
"Yay! You're the best Mordred!" She soared high in happiness.
Silly as she may be, he's still grateful for Kerleun. With Melantha's granted ability to mold the soil into humanoid figures, she no longer needs to look out for a useful corpse. Plus it also improves the duration of the summoned golems as she coordinates the soul and the golem together, equally using her mentality for the soul and her body's energy to keep the vessel in motion.
According to Kerleun, the reason why she's so surprised that Melantha was able to use golems even at the initial stage was because it takes a lot of energy and earth authority to control and maintain a golem. She has not taken into consideration that what Melantha summoned was similar to pseudo-golems.
Rather than the sole Earth power, she has been using Kerleun's blessing mainly to keep the Earth materials such as soil and mud intact. In significance, the soul remains the driver and the fuel to retain their continuous motions.
"Darling, we'll be needing more help to retrieve Kerleun's goldies."
"Piece of cake." She positioned underneath where Kerleun was hovering, indicating her goldies' location.
Instead of summoning golems to dig out Kerleun's goldies. She unsummoned the three golems and swayed her hand like an orchestra's conductor to lead the soil away from the center, creating a pit with stairs.
Doing their assignments, Clux and Aleges pushed out and flattened the pile of soil congregating on the sides to clear out a pathway with their bare hands, while Mordred checked on the spoils of the battle.
He rummaged through the pool of crushed bodies and found: two unusable wooden maces that had become fragile because of their cracks; a slightly torn three robes that survived due to their elastic materials; a dented thick book and bronze bird cage; and a fully intact flaxen rope.
"Kerleun do you know what was written here or how to operate this thing? I saw the man before summoned a soul similar to a banshee." He flips through the pages of the book, the unfamiliar language's writing is stroking his brain with dizziness.
"Huh? How would I know!? The book does not communicate with us, Earth Harmony does not work that way."
Her goldies were within her reach so she has more patience in dealing with Mordred's incessant questioning. A good mood polishes relationships smoothly.
As he had guessed, Earth Harmony automatically translates the words of a party based on their intent and converts them to messages that the receiver can easily comprehend. Since the book is a non-living being with no intent to convey a message, to understand what was written, the reader still has to depend on the letters in the book.
"Any ideas how valuable are these two?" The sun dipped within the horizon as the moon cast shadows of the rope he had raised by the hand and the other item he raised by the birdcage hook.
Beyond the obvious, an inquiry on what those items are for was unnecessary, they are to trap a certain rackety fairy. Regretfully, as the couple has inbuilt abilities to capture souls, their loot can only be traded in exchange for a more practical good or currency in case they have any future travel expenditures.
"Hehehe! We can get more goldies by scrap selling them in the town." She landed on the birdcage's bars with sparkly money eyes.
"And how do you spend them wisely little miss?" Melantha was carrying a small gold pouch bulging with gold coins.
"MA GOLDIES!" She plastered her greedy smirk on the bag like a tiny koala, only hearing the clinking of her gold coins and disregarding Melantha's teasing.
"Food! Food!" Aleges and Clux were rubbing their grumbling stomach pitifully, they were hard workers demanding a fat reward of meat at dinner time.
"M'Love! Look at what I have found." She passed him an unordinary black rock.
Squeezing the rock to examine, the rock was denser, heavier, and harder than any ordinary black rock. There were grains of fine powder that reattached to the rock like magnets whenever he rubbed them off with his thumb.
"A magnetite iron ore." His vertical pupil enlarges in delight.
Magnetite iron ore was one of the finest types of iron ore, a material with huge significance in advancing a race's civilization by allowing them to wield and invent iron technologies.
"I've seen the town's guards in iron armor. Either this territory was so rich in iron ores that they did not bother searching the vicinity for more, or they were so cheap that it was a fool's errand to make equipment themselves when they could be traded and sold easily to a smelting capital." He continued voicing out his thoughts.
"Darling, we can temporarily reside underground to mine resources with my earthen abilities. If iron ores sell less than our efforts and are not an efficient choice of income source. In abundance, they're still beneficial when smelt for better equipment, and an iron golem is sturdier than my current mud and stone golems."
"The cave hasn't totally collapsed and we could build our temporary shelter within the hollows of the underground." She carried on with her suggestion.
"Agreed. This will be a nice hiding spot too, but before that let's hunt for food shall we?"
"Food!"
"Good-good!" Clux and Alleges holler in agreement.
------
In just a day, thanks to Melantha's outrageous earth powers, in addition to bending the earth, she sculps out stone spades for Mordred, Clux, and Aleges to craft their spade shovels to help out in rebuilding the inconspicuous underground cave entrance, from the once narrow sliding slope, they replace it with stone stairs for better mobility.
As a final touch, after they flatten out the surface to turn it back to its original look, they cover the cave entrance with the same flat stone, forage purple shrubs, and mossy grasses.
Underground, from the original two tunnels, they made an extra tunnel where Mordred was busying himself as he squats, gripping the crude wooden handle of a stone knife, he was slicing off the stem of a white mushroom from its cap. Lastly, with the placement of the mushroom's gills facing down on the moist cave floor, he extracted the mushroom spores.
Since stone is less susceptible to destruction than the lizard horn knife, Melantha has molded stone knife blades after she was blessed by Kerleun.
"How was the mushroom cultivation going M'Love?" She laid her plump bosom and hung her arms to his neck lazily.
Ignoring her pervading muddy scent, he finished up by filling the last piece of the mushroom cap to their big patch of rows. Carried by the bear carrier, currently made of stones, they gathered an abundance of white salty mushrooms from the waterfall of Jilted Sap Forest before they left.
They dig out the farm area and dump the corpses deep from the last battle to serve as fertilizers. With stone hoes, the damp top of the soil was tilled in preparation for the mushrooms.
In case they decided to permanently live underground, they had to have a reliable source of food. Not just plants that could grow underground but also they had to plan on rearing animals for meat sources.
"Now we wait for Salt Mushrooms to grow." As he gave her a piggyback ride, they arrived at the center of the cave tunnels.
With the couple's demo on how to make a makeshift bed out of dry leaves and sticks, Aleges was tidying up a small four-legged bed intertwined with flax grass, while Clux was rubbing a stick on a skinned wooden pole. When a tiny smoke and spark spouts, he throws in dried plant husks and as he puffs and huffs on the husks, he enlarges the fire.
The goblins have some quality learning genetics, in his theory, these could be coming from their inbreeding with humans. He also hypothesizes that the goblin that can metamorph into a bipedal wolf was a mutation from an inbreeding with a certain creature that has the innate ability.
The couple did ask Kerluen about the shapeshifting goblin but she does not know what they are called and the reason for their bizarreness.
Unsurprisingly, the boisterous Kerleun got bored after a day with them so most of her time was spent in town, how could she not if all they did was arrange their underground home, hunt the wild, and gather forest materials they could use?
"Getting the hang of it huh?" He smirked in amusement as the hard stone of the floor scratched his soles.
They created a stone floor area to keep the fireplace dry since the underground cave dropped the oxygen level to as low as 11%, increasing the difficulty in making a fire.
At the side of the fire, Mordred grabbed a chunk of limestone clay, an abundant material in caves, and dried it next to the fire before crushing it between his rock and the flat stone that serves as the tabletop. While Melantha at the other stone board pulverizes a cobalt blue quartz, the same quartz that emits blue hues at the cave walls.
They mix the two ingredients, pour a small amount of animal blood, and batter them together into a round ball of mud dough. With their palm's force, they molded the clay dough into pot shapes.
By utilizing stone knives, they smoothened the exterior and carved their handwork with elegant calligraphy in English letters, Gnukwyn, derived from their old family name, Godwin, to commemorate their past lives. As Melantha said, they can remain as happy memories that they can extend in this life.
With their beady eyes glistering in curiosity, Aleges and Clux have become side audiences as they marvel at the whole process.
Melantha's power can certainly easily shape the molds into perfect pots or any utensils, but the key point why the couple had handcrafted from scratch was for the two learners. They had to learn the basics that can be replicated with their own hands.
As they cook and serve their meats from the hunt for the daily feast, they let their ceramics harden for an hour before perfecting them with a little dark scorch from the heat of the fire.
Ceramic technology has been acquired, but what are they mainly for?