01.28 - 8 Kids? Are You Kidding Me?

For a second, I looked paralyzed at Tia, while her child remained stuck with only the feet visible.

Alfred was applying traction to the baby's feet, while Akane applied pressure on Tia's lower abdomen.

It didn’t solve the problem.

At least not yet.

Should I intervene?

“Do it already! You can’t raise the dead!” Tia finally screamed at me.

That shook me out of my daze.

Kentaro looked at me in horror as I grabbed a knife and raised it.

“Hurry up,” Tia cried out.

A well placed cut and a good amount of blood later, the generous episiotomy did its work.

With the newly freed space, the baby's head slowly emerged.

Alfred later told me that it cried and began to breathe seconds later, but I was too busy closing the first wound I had ever intentionally inflicted on my trusted companion.

The baby was a healthy boy.

Ryu Ryusei.

It had a good ring to it.

Fitting for a half dragon.

The following births in the months after that were a lot less dramatic.

The first to arrive was Koharu’s daughter Inari.

Followed by Akane’s twins, Nagi and his sister Nami.

Isabella was the last of the initial trio. Little Hermes was a healthy boy.

Shortly after, as winter gave rise to spring, Loreley’s daughter Ariel was born, followed by Reiko’s son Kei.

All went well, not the least because of Alfred's exceptional help and lessons learned from the prior deliveries.

Before Summer was over, Dawn was expecting a child from Kentaro due in early Spring.

This hit me out of left field.

The reactions were divided.

For some reason, Tia, despite her earlier proclamations, just shrugged it off with another ‘family is different.’

This should end up as the last of the eight.

We had talked it out with everyone shortly after Akane’s twins were born, it was clear that six were enough, hell, I wondered if I could spend enough time with all of the kids as it was now. Family sizes seemed to vary wildly. Smaller families were the norm in the big towns, not so much in the rural areas.

But we didn’t need help on the fields, and I didn’t plan to stay here for the rest of my life, to be frank. Surely, no one would recognize us in a decade or two. Heck, I could even teach the others Transform, though pushing it to a sufficient Level for nine people with an, as of now, low to medium sized Energy pool seemed like a challenge.

Geber, Isabella, and I worked in the now up and running new alchemical workshop to create some infertility potions. The recipe wasn’t too fancy, it was widely used in Akane, Koharu, and Loreley’s former line of work, but we still had to buy some ingredients.

One line from Tia stayed with me, rent free in my head ever since then: “You can’t raise the dead.”

Raising the departed was usually regarded as the domain of Necromancy, but barely animated corpses were of little interest to me.

But there was one more Class I had mostly ignored:

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// Envoy Lvl. 13

Soul Catcher

…

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Unlocking and improving ‘Soul Catcher’ at all had been a pain already, but it was a price I was willing to pay back then when it meant keeping Tia and Dawn at my side if it came to the worst.

I pushed Envoy up to Level 19 and unlocked ‘Vessel Creation’.

What did it cost?

Two years worth of adventuring in the form of Class and Skill points.

I just hoped it would be worth it.

On a less ominous note, the much planned water mill was up and running, the crafted trees were in full bloom earlier this year with a little help of a little Floramancy, the fields were doing fine, the vegetable garden had been expanded, and the twelve of us had moved into a fancy house. Not fancy fancy, but a great step up from the old 5 person house now inhabited by Tia, Dawn, Kentaro and Ryu.

Alfred and Geber were left with full control over one of the small cabins each.

The sanitation had been vastly improved with running water and waste disposal, the kitchen had moved, and there were now two separate bath tubs.

The fields were extended, but not by much compared to the prior year. There was just no point beyond basic self sufficiency. We could trade for most of our additional needs and add to our own production by selling other goods sourced from our own work.

Reiko rejoined Kentaro and me on the regular hunts early in autumn. The meat preservation cabin had gotten an upgrade too and now held thrice the initial capacity.

The winters were now mostly spent expanding the established network of mine shafts within the mountain, gathering ore and some additional gem stones from time to time. The former were smelted in one of three new furnaces, while the later was usually used in alchemical potion creations. We also refined some of the metals gained that way through transmutation.

One of the mine shafts nearly collapsed and was flooded with hot water after I dug into an underground spring probably next to a nearby magma chamber. The new supply of hot water, combined with some further Geomancy and a few engineering feats led to a couple of nearby hot spring pools available all year round without the need for fire magic.

Leisure aside, I spend most of my leftover free time with the kids who slowly but surely started pointing, walking, and talking. Most of the child care was done in rotating teams of two. Giving the others time to eat, sleep and relax a bit in the meantime. It seemed to get a bit easier as the month went by, or maybe it was just the routine kicking in.

I was busy preparing some additional wooden people and horsey figurines for the kids when Akane came to fetch me because something was wrong with Dawn.

She went into labor soon after I arrived at their house.

More than a month before the regular due date.

A premature baby.

With no access to modern tech.

Not the absolute worst case scenario, but certainly among the top.