Hazardous Journey

Diary of Amaro De Quester

Day 216

Gnomadness said it with a chuckle: "More gnome pain, more gnome gain!" After I had helped the gnomes to avert disaster, he had offered me and a few others the opportunity to serve as a test subject for a recently discovered device he was able to operate, or shall I say manipulate? Apparently, it re-aligns how a human resonates with the fauna here in this roaring subterranean wilderness.

My curiosity was piqued for I had heard rumours of an odd creature crawling through the depths of the jungle on rare occasions. Similar in appearance to my beloved rotworms but with crystals adorning its massive body. A plunder patriarch.

Well, I now know that Gnomadness certainly lives up to his reputation, and even more so to his name. I should have taken heed of his subtle warnings:
While a high resonance is more likely to lure a patriarch out of hiding, it will make other creatures here much more hazardous and ferocious than they already are.

Moreover, I had to slay a particular primal beast as some kind of shock treatment to have my resonance altered by Gnomadness and his device. He referred to the procedure as raising my personal "hazard level". The higher my hazard level, the more it resonates with the environment and thus, will make primal creatures more savage in my presence. Certainly not the most intriguing outlook.

Nonetheless, the urge to see the majestic, yet fragile plunder patriarch in action convinced me to knock on death's door numerous times. For my comrades, it was the prospect of wealth and power.

And so we started to venture out into the jungle day after day to reach for our dreams. Whenever we had killed the primal menace, we went to Gnomadness afterwards so he could raise the hazard level for our next trip.

It was brutal, and our dreams soon turned into nightmares. All our expertise and skill paled in how well the creatures adapted, how their blows hit us harder, how they seemed to dodge our attacks with ease, how some of them died just to bring an even more vicious abomination to life.

Yet, we also grew faster in strength and we earned enough profit to sustain our operation, all in the hopes of coming across a plunder patriarch again.
Our first encounter with such a creature was literally breathtaking. The patriarch didn't pose a threat but it was surprisingly fast considering its massive and sturdy body. It almost escaped us as it was gliding through our elemental fields. Eventually, we had it cornered and chopped away at it till its corpse revealed a most spectacular piece of equipment brimming with raw power.

Gnomadness was only mildly impressed. Somehow, he had already accumulated quite a number of these objects. "More gnome pain, more gnome gain," he urged me to push ever onward and promised to reward me with one of those pieces once I have subjected myself often enough to his hazardous experiments. I shall prevail.