The World Dragon's Heir

Chapter 681: Repurposed Magic

General Marshall brought out a large blanket and began setting out weapons on it. The loot that he had purchased from Dominic.

"Listen up, everyone! This is what we have obtained, along with twelve tonnes of food that is currently in my storage ring. Wistover Duchy is willing to continue doing business with us, so as long as we can keep up our end of the bargain, we no longer need to fear a poor crop.

What we promised him was spell gems with a value equivalent to this.

Duplicates of the basics are fine, they are raising their own militia to protect the Duchy, but the rare and exclusive magics have a higher value, so if you can make them, or have extras already stored, please turn them over.

I know that the Army has the means, and now we will have the weapons to drive the monsters out of our homes." He shouted.

The crowd cheered, though most of them still looked rather startled to see the General so lucid.

Normally, he was a man of very few words, and the Trolls would do most of the speaking for him, while he did the combat planning. Nobody was a better tactician than he was, but that was almost entirely on a primal level.

General Marshall had an astonishing sense of danger, and intuition into the likely ambushes and tactics of the monsters.

Soon, they were piling spell gems on the blanket as a form of exchange. It was an unspoken trade system, everyone had some idea what the spell gems were worth, and what the weapons were worth.

The General reserved the four rifles, handing them directly to the officers in the Burlish Resistance Army. But other than that, everyone just picked and paid for what they could get.

Interestingly to Dominic, the spears actually went before the pistols.

Not because they were short on valuables, he could see them sorting through bags of spell gems for the rare ones, then topping the payment off with the common body enhancement spells.

It was just that they knew the spear so well, and that was their role in the battle. So, they wanted the best spear they could get, and the soldiers who were archers now were the ones who picked the pistols.

It kept their battlefield role, while improving their firepower.

Dominic watched the gems collect, and tried to guess what some of the gems were for. The majority of common gems had a distinct shape or colour that made them easy to identify without actually inspecting them.

But some of these were completely new to him.

There was one that seemed to flicker with yellow fire inside a red egg-shaped gemstone, and he was certain that it should be something valuable. But he couldn’t tell what the spell was from here.

Once all the weapons were chosen, the General brought the blanket full of gems over, and sheepishly shook the sand off it.

Dominic winked at him and held out an empty flour sack.

"Just dump them in, and I will shake the sand out. It’s all good. It looks like we’ve made a fine trade today. Come back whenever you want. I suspect that it won’t be too long, as most of that food is perishable."

General Marshall laughed. "We bought out all the canning jars that your warehouse had. I think that we can make the food last a bit longer than shelf life."

Of course, it would last a long time in a storage device as well. But that was a different matter.

Once he had his payment, Dominic waved goodbye to the resistance fighters, and the mages closed the portal, leaving him standing at the gate with a bag full of spell gems and a burning curiosity.

The first thing that he did was to take out the gem that looked like it was burning inside.

Being so fancy, he assumed that it had to be some sort of rare and powerful spell, at the very least. The more interesting the spell, the more beautiful the gem was. It seemed to be a universal rule to spell gems.

[Spell Gem of Flamestorm] area damage spell. Creates a zone of intense fire around the caster or a designated location.

That was cool, though possibly impractical.

Throwing fireballs at enemies was fun, but this was intended to target a specific location. For a defensive battle, it was much less useful than for a raider setting camps on fire.

That wasn’t the only good one in the bag, though.

There was a gem for [Earthquake] an Earth Element favourite of the mages which could shake enemies off their feet and throw stones straight up into a horde of enemies.

And then Dominic found a curious red gem that his [Sorcerer’s Spellbook] identified as [Shuriken Wall] when he recorded the new magic.

[Shuriken Wall] creates a line of rotating blades that travel forward at high speed.

It was a magical mobile blender.

That was going to make such a horrific mess the first time that he used it on Goblins. Something like running a tiller through the battlefield.

No, this spell could actually be a wonderful tiller. If he used it on the surface of a field, it would till it perfectly in seconds. Perhaps not the intended use of the magic, but it would revolutionize the preparation of cropland.

Especially for fields that hadn’t been worked in a decade.

"Amie, come check this spell out. I need a lot of copies of it made. I want to distribute it to the mages to till fields for the new farms." Dominic called.

The small mage jogged over to where he was standing, and inspected the gem in his hand.

"That’s certainly a unique one. Imagine what it will do to a line of Goblins?"

Dominic chuckled.

"That was my first thought as well. Then I realized it could be aimed to till the ground it passed over. For overgrown fields and gardens, this would give them freshly turned earth in seconds.

It will get them ready to go after their first harvest so much faster, and it will help with our lack of tractors and farm equipment. At least long enough for the factory to catch up, and someone to find a way to incorporate this into a plow."