My eyes lit up despite my aching body. I used magic hands to grab the floating rock and drag it towards me. Once I had the rock, I directed the humans to retreat. I was pretty sure that mud monster wasn’t dead. It was a five star monster, after all. The only other five star monster I’d ever seen was The Terrible, and the only reason we’d beaten The Terrible was because the Immortal of Desire had helped us by telling us its weakness.
And after seeing this floating rock, and connecting it with the shooting star from last night, I figured I had a pretty good idea of why we’d been able to take on this five starred mud monster, too. I figured the floating rock had been a meteorite, and it had hit the shallow lake, which explained why there was no impact crater, and it may have hit the monster as well, weakening it.
We gathered the people that had gone searching in the nearby area, and rested at a good distance from the small forest. There were a lot of wounds and injuries among the people that had fought the five star monster, and it was a miracle that nobody had died. Even though I was incredibly tired, I mustered some energy and began treating the worst injuries with medical magic and first aid techniques. So far, the medical magic that I had learned could only do things like help clean out cuts, apply pressure, do some basic incisions and superficial surgery. I’d even figured out how to give people stitches.
We made our way back to the encampment, and were greeted by a whole bunch of worried people. After thanking everyone for their bravery, announcing our victory, and forbidding anyone to enter the little forest with the small lake, I limped over to my shack and took some well deserved rest.
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I woke up the next morning, hungry and with parched lips. Dawn had not arrived yet, so there weren’t too many people around. I greeted the night watch, and asked them if there was anything left over from their dinner. Elder Brol appeared from his hut and saw me from a distance. He walked over, heard what I was asking the watchmen, and invited me over to his tribe’s camp. Apparently, his tribesmen had been up quite late last night, celebrating the safe return of their tribesmen.
He re-lit the smoldering campfire, put some more dried meat in the pot, and gave me a hearty meat stew. I downed it with some fresh water, and thanked the elder for his hospitality. Looking around, elder Brol’s Ibog tribesmen were all fast asleep, even a couple of people that were supposed to be on night’s watch. I knew elder Brol would give those two a stern scolding after they woke up, since that was the kind of guy he was.
“Weren’t you up late last night too, elder Brol?” I asked.
“I was up longer than I usually am,” he said, “but at my age, seeing the moon for too long can be quite dangerous for your health.”
I chuckled. In more ways than one, huh. “Have people been wondering about the shooting star?”
Elder Brol nodded his head. “A shooting star? Now that’s an interesting name for it. We have stories for things that come from the sky, but nobody in living memory has actually seen anything like it. The tribesmen are curious. I am too.”
“Well, if you help me gather a few things after we’re done eating, I’ll let you be the first one to see what this thing can do,” I said as I pulled out the meteorite and showed it to elder Brol.
The purple-haired, muscular elder stared hard at the strange rock in my hands, and agreed to helping me out. I asked him to gather some monster hide and charcoal for me. I also asked for a clay pot that could be filled with clear water. Elder Brol called over a few people who had just woken up, and gathered everything that I needed.
Dawn broke and the tribesmen began to awake. The night watchmen disappeared into their shelters. A small crowd gathered around me as I prepared to show off the meteorite. But first, I had to prepare the monster hide, which had had all its fur removed and was fairly even now. I stretched the hide straight by piling up some stones on its edges, and judged if it was going to be big enough. Well, even if it wasn’t, I could always sew together some more hide if I needed it to be bigger.
I picked up a piece of charcoal and made a small mark in the middle of the hide. Then, I pulled out the meteorite once again and let the people see it. Many tribesmen were impressed by the way it looked, especially since the only other metallic object they’d ever seen were the copper tools and weapons I’d helped them make. But this one was different. It had a shine to it; a luster that caught the eye and made you wonder what the object was. It caught your attention and refused to let go.
I’d filled up the pot with water. I took a large, waxy leaf, and put it on top of the water. Then, I lay the small metallic meteorite on top of the leaf, and let it go. The meteorite bobbed a little on the leaf once I let it go, but soon, it settled on the water’s surface and began to move. Some people pointed and made a few comments. The metallic meteorite seemed to be turning on its own. I assured people that I wasn’t using magic hands to move the object, and asked if anyone else was doing so. Once they replied in the negative, I smiled, and told them that we had just received a great blessing from the universe.
“This, my friends, is a lodestone!” I said, emphatically.
“A lodestone?” repeated elder Konri, who had just woken up as well.
“Yes,” I said, as I touched the little rock again and forced it to face a different direction. The rock swung back to its original direction again, which made a large smile grow on my face. “This little stone will help us explore far further than we have ever explored before. It will also help us map out our surrounding area, which was something I had been meaning to do anyway. It always helps to know what is around us, and to be able judge the surrounding landscape with a single glance.” I went back to the stretched out hide, and made a small arrow in the top corner. I made the rest of the compass rose for good measure, and orientated myself towards the North, as well. Since dawn had just broken, I could also now confirm that the sun in this world also rose in the East and set in the West.
After answering a few more question from the people who had gathered around me, I started work on the map. My body was still mildly aching, but the excitement of exploration suppressed the dull pain. I gathered a few people, and told them to help me measure the distance and directions to various landmarks, natural features, and bodies of water nearby. Since we didn’t have any advanced measuring equipment, we would have to make do with steps walked and estimates of time, but now that we had the lodestone compass, we could be sure that we were measuring in a relatively straight line.
I mapped out the distance and direction to the river that very same day. I also measured the same distance in the other four cardinal directions, and put a large rock in each location to mark the edges of what I considered the outskirts of our encampment. I returned to the encampment and drew up the river and the stone landmarks that I had created, at the very edges of this first map. I filled out some of the things we had seen along the way, various thickets and shrubs little creeks and stuff like that. Soon, we had a functional map of our immediate surroundings, complete with a rough key measured in steps.
Over the course of the next few weeks, well into the winter when expeditions for food and resources took longer than ever, I tasked the various hunting and exploration parties to bring in their estimates for distances they were crossing. Only one party could have the lodestone at a given time, but that was good enough to help me fill out a few more hide’s worth of our surroundings.
Soon, I had made a separate hut for the long, stitched together monster hide map that detailed, in a rough fashion, everything up to the sea, the tundra, the marshlands, and even a long way towards Bek Tepe.
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