GoT: LB Chapter 06-07 (Patreon)

Quest Complete!

Blood and… Blood- Sacrifice a creature in a blood ritual. Awards more instinctive blood magic, unlocks more quests

New!

Blood and… Blood, Part 02- Sacrifice a human in a blood ritual. Awards a portion of that human’s remaining lifespan, separate blood storage, and 10 mutation points, which unlocks more quests

It felt odd, suddenly knowing more about blood magic. I was equivalent to a servant of R’hllr who spent their entire life studying the magic. No, I was beyond that now, because they didn’t have the instinctive know-how I did. I could even determine blood connections through tasting blood now, not sure when that would come in handy, but it was something I could do that I wasn’t sure anyone else on the planet could.

I was trying to speedrun as many quests as I possibly could before we’re forced to leave the castle. That was why Gerold and I were currently standing in front of Elia Martell. I explained what I wanted, and Elia Martell asked out of curiosity, as if she couldn’t understand what I wanted. “So… You want me to give you one thousand gold, just to hold onto for a few minutes… Then you’ll give me twelve gold as payment for just letting you hold the gold for those few minutes?” I looked at Elia as she bounced her baby in her arms.

It was an oddity to see in this world, most noble ladies had wet nurses to take care of their children, but she didn’t; matter of fact, neither did my own mother. Maybe it was a Dornish thing to want to take care of your own children. She was beautiful, and as I checked my memories and compared her to Lyanna Stark, I’d pick her every single time.

Lyanna Stark was fine… Just not someone I’d go out of my way to bed, except for the fact that she was a Stark. Rhaegar also only wanted her for her blood, as much as you wanted to say it was out of love, he would still be with Elia if she could still get pregnant. 

I asked her for the money for two reasons: one, I knew she had it. My uncles were practically paupers, so it ruled them out; most of the other people might have asked more questions than I was comfortable with, and I knew that she would most likely agree to it, just to see what came from my scheme. She handed over the money in a sack… A thousand gold didn’t really look that impressive.

It was heavy; I’d guess twentyish pounds. These sacks might have had more than one thousand coins in them. It only took me weighing the coins for the quest to complete.

Quest Complete!

Money is its own power- Acquire 1000 golden dragons. Create 1 golden dragon per day in storage space, which unlocks more quests

Hidden objective completed- Find a loophole to accomplish a quest. Awards separate coin storage, and can no longer use this method to complete the quest

New!

Money is its own power, Part 02- Acquire 10000 golden dragons. Create 10 golden dragons per day, double coin storage, 10 mutation points, which unlocks more quests

Now, she might have given me the money if I had just asked, but this entire situation will stick around more in her mind since I gave her a hefty portion of money. Some might think that a thousand gold isn’t that much; they’d think that the kingdom was millions in debt to both Tywin and the Iron Bank, but that’s highly irregular. No, if a House had a few thousand gold saved up, they’d be considered wealthy; only the truly rich could think that a thousand gold isn’t a big sum.

That’s why the tourney rewards after Robert took over made no sense. Anything over a thousand gold and you’d have a target put on your head, for 10, 20, or even 40 thousand gold, people would be willing to risk everything to steal that from someone. I’d put money that most of the time it would end up in the same person’s pocket, and that would be the Master of Coin Petyr Baelish.

She looked at me questioningly before I handed it over again as we ran off. I had just given up every single coin I received from the starter bundle, Gerold had to ask. “Did you really have to give all the money away, Alexander?” I checked my space, feeling that the coin space was now part of my abilities. I pulled the stored coin out and showed it to him. The space was already larger than the soul space I had by quite a bit. It could possibly hold 30 coins or so.

It wouldn’t even take two weeks to make back the money I spent, leaving a lasting impression in Elia’s mind. I knew she knew me, but I doubt she really ever thought about me. That odd interaction might stay with her for weeks, and when she sees me again, she might remember it. The two quests I accomplished were the only easy ones I could knock out. Now I had to wait, hopefully I’d have enough money to do other things I wanted…

A few days had passed, and I convinced my uncle to look for a bird vendor. People bred ravens to sell, and I was told that sometimes they kept other birds as well. I crossed my fingers as we entered, hoping for an eagle to be available. No eagle, but he did have hawks… And a vulture. I wanted an eagle mainly for its strength and size. I tried to remember things I knew about vultures.

I didn’t remember much; they were carrion birds, which meant they ate dead corpses and could handle rotting flesh better than other birds. They were big, but seemed kind of wimpy for their size. The choice was taken out of my hands as I saw the looks Gerold… I’m just calling him Darkstar in my head, the look Darkstar was giving the vulture.

“How much for the hawk and vulture?” “Fifty silver stags.” That was overpriced, but I didn’t really care. “Can you break a dragon?” His eyes rose at the coin as he stuttered. “Ah, n-no. Do you have anything smaller?” “How much for the other hawk and four ravens?” He had to leave to write down the prices, possibly correcting his overcharge as he noticed my uncle in white armor standing outside the building.

“That would be… A hundred silver stags.” I kept adding more and more things to the list as I also bought a chameleon, several bags of food for them, and specialized equipment until he could finally take the dragon and pay me back twenty-three stags in change.

I formed a connection with the hawk, which was trivially easy. Wargs could make it easier by making the animal more comfortable, but I didn’t need to. Even children with almost no willpower to form connections with direwolves, which were magical creatures, forming a connection with a bird, even one smarter than normal, took little effort. 

We made it back to the castle and got our personal ravens settled in before Darkstar finally came up to ask me for a favor. “Teach me how to do that eye thing, bird jump, or whatever it's called.”

Chapter 07

I hadn’t really thought about teaching other people magical abilities, but it made sense. Darkstar was from a martial and magical family, which should increase the odds of him having some warging ability, but it was hard to explain to him. How did I tell him just pick the vulture as your target and willpower at it until you swap into its mind?

The three-eyed raven said that about one out of every thousand people are wargs… But that wasn’t considering how heavily skewed it was toward royalty. Most of the Starks could Warg; it was in their blood, but at the same time, we had the blood of Dayne, Targaryan, Blackwood, and Hightower. He didn’t have any Stark blood; at the very least, it would be heavily diluted, but out of all those magical houses, you’d figure he’d have a better chance at being a warg.

It was also based around specific animals for most houses, but I could see Darkstar bonding with the weird bird just because he thought it was cool. I tried my best to guide him, but it wasn’t clear if it was possible or not, and I left him to try and learn it himself. Three days later, his vulture came flying into our room, and from the smug expression I thought it had on its face as it looked at me, I knew he succeeded.

We flew through the city together as I just now realized how great being a bird was. As a bird, I could fly out of the range of the constant stink of the capital. You don’t think about things like that when you want to live in these worlds. The food sucks, hygiene is far behind the times, and people are just far more stupid and harder to hold a conversation with, just because they don’t know enough to have an opinion. 

Everything besides the beautiful women and magic was worse than our world. I would need to get into cultivating crops sooner rather than later, and a good portion of my money would be spent doing just that. The ravens are bred to be able to fly long distances, but other birds that were born for long travel would be better to transferring notes.

For long distances, albatross made more sense, especially for getting letters to and back from places faster. I wasn’t sure they had that homing gene, but warged animals tended to be smarter than non-warged animals. If I wanted pure speed, peregrine falcon, and I might eventually get them all, but perhaps a bigger, stronger warg would make more sense.

I needed to find out if anyone caught and raised bears in the capital. I doubted it, but there was always that chance that someone did, and I could get a baby bear as my second warg. If I couldn’t get a bear, then a lion, if I couldn’t get a lion, then a wolf, and finally, if I couldn’t get a wolf, I’d have to settle on a large breed dog. I was getting way too into my warging ability. The bird was enough for now, especially since we were moving out soon.

We’ll be going out soon to join forces with the Tyrells. The war had officially kicked off with Robert fleeing back to Dragonstone and Ned back to Winterfell, where they would get their troops. Marching was going to suck, especially since we didn’t have horses; only our uncles did. Talks were made on whether it was worth taking us, and when it came down to it, it made more sense for us to go.

We bought a mule to help transport our equipment, and we took turns riding on it as most of our day was spent walking… Then we’d make camp, help with chores around the campsite, sleep, and walk again. Did I mention how fucking boring it was in this world? Especially for children, my feet had blisters, and I had a better physique than some of the other squires who came along with us. I regretted not buying two mules; I was slowly building up a stockpile of coins and might be able to convince a knight to sell his horse later on. But we travelled like that for two weeks before we finally saw combat.

It was small skirmishes, not nearly important enough for us to intervene, and my uncles kept me out of it, even though I needed to participate in one of the battles in order to accomplish one of the secondary objectives of the main mission. I couldn’t focus on just that; I needed to keep getting stronger, as I couldn’t do anything in a real fight, for the sole reason of my size.

It really only made sense to grow my magical powers over my physical ones right now, because they’ll make a bigger deal in what I could help accomplish in this war.

…

One month later…

“Here you go, Buttercup. I got a nice and tasty carrot for you to eat.” I ended up buying a lame horse before it was put down, then Darkstar helped me sacrifice a boar to help it recover from its injury. Healing with blood magic was fairly straightforward; there wasn’t much risk involved, either, and it helped me get a horse for one-tenth of its real value in the process.

I hadn’t really begun making any money, but I’d done a good job at spending what I’ve made so far. Right now, I was trying to build up my own force, the biggest problem with that is that I was still a child in the eyes of most. Even when I offered them more coin, no one wanted to listen to someone they viewed as inexperienced, and that left me with very little hope of actually participating in a battle.

I needed to kill to get stronger, and the best time to do so was during war, but I was still too young to be taken seriously, with many people actively stopping me and Darkstar from participating. That’s when I got the idea, we didn’t need to participate in our human bodies. We could both warg, and a bird pecking the eyes out of a soldier would definitely count toward participating in one of said battles.

He didn’t have to take part, but I wondered how a vulture would fare compared to a hawk when it came to fighting. I still held out hope to get an eagle, but Spade was good enough that I wouldn’t sacrifice him even after I got a bigger, stronger bird. I was nearing the ability to have two wargs, and soon, possibly in the next few days, I would be able to.

Warging into a horse was a terrible idea, and I wanted a strong fighting type animal next. Then I’d worry about getting a sneaky animal for eavesdropping further into buildings. I could warg into my bird while I held a rodent of some kind, drop them off, then warg into the rodent and hide in buildings, even poison people when they least expected it.

That was the idea, at least. I wasn’t sure how long it would take to unlock the third warg, but I knew it wasn’t going to be nearly as fast as unlocking my second. We approached the next battlefield, which was the first actual fight with over a thousand men on each side that we’d take part in. My uncles even knew they had to fight, which left us back in the camp to do what we wanted to do. I gave Darkstar a quick nod before warging into Spade. I flew above the battlefield as I looked for my target, eventually seeing a juicy target off by himself.