The night passed comfortably, with Rino just occupying himself with fabric production. Midnight came, and Rino waited for it. This was the moment he had been waiting for!

Ping!

===

Side Quest #6

Objective: Build a Clay Kiln

Tutorial here.

Reward: Bone Crafting Recipe.

===

For a while, Rino did not move. Was this a prank? Where was his daily quest? Shouldn’t that long-winded chain quest be marked completed? He wanted that Textile Crafting Skill!

As Rino raged, Ark silently apologised. The lich had been working very hard for a noble cause. However, they also needed to push him a little back into the actual direction. The side quests were created to assist Rino in skill acquisitions. They were not the actual purpose for his reincarnation as a lich. The kingdom would not build itself weaving silk and dying underwear.

Phil returned with Stephanie, who still looked as if she wasn’t in the wrong. The Goddess glared at Rino and ignored everyone. She was going to wait for Rino to slip up. The moment he failed to deliver results for his daily quest, even by one second, if it wasn’t a chain quest, she was going to make him dance in agony with her punishment system.

Rino looked at his new side quest in deep thought. There was a pattern here somewhere. He was already aware that the Gods who sent him to this new world as a work slave could hear his thoughts. In fact, they must be really bored Gods for listening to his every thought without missing a single thing.

The pattern started early on now that he thought back about it. The first sign should have been the divine voices sending him messages directly into his skull. They only stopped doing it frequently after Rino made a comment about their intelligence and wealth. He should have known it was not a coincidence.

The next sign happened when Rino was testing out voice projection using mana through his thoughts. He must have sent those amplified messages to the Gods until they could tolerate no more. There were only two reasons why they would offer him a quest with a reward of thought projection skill. The first was their inability to tolerate his yelling in their connection, and the second was their inability to close the observation channel. They might be in a position to constantly monitor him and had to put up with whatever he did.

The following signs were very obvious with the chain quest development. Rino didn’t think of it earlier because he was still getting used to this world. However, the mud-brick quest did not have the necessity of becoming a chain quest even if traditional manufacturing methods required several days of sun to dry those bricks before baking. Rino was a magician. He could have dehydrated them the same way he did to those flax stalks. However, the Gods deemed it a chain quest after Rino’s arguments in his thoughts. This meant that the Gods only knew what Rino knew and showed.

The odd reward for an uninterrupted sleep was also something the Gods picked out after listening in on Rino’s thoughts. He appreciated the good intentions, but Rino wished they’d think of the order in priorities a little more. To enjoy quality sleep, there were many preparations to be done. If anything, Rino would have prefered to learn some more useful basic skills like dark magic manipulation.

The Gods gathered to listen to Rino’s monologue cringed a little. Were they too obvious? Also, Phil felt slightly bad when Rino said that he would prefer a useful reward like learning dark magic to sleep. It might have been their collective decision to give a reward based on the difficulty of the quest done. However, the things that Rino have done so far did not match the quest difficulty. The lich went over and beyond their expectations. He definitely deserved better rewards than simple things like a dye recipe.

For Rino, the most obvious pattern came in the form of rewards. When he refused to work on the daily quest because of the lack of rewards, his boycott worked, and the Gods received a hint. Their intentions were clear. They needed Rino to be their arms and legs. Unfortunately, he was such a lazy b*astard that the only way to entice him was with rewards. The textile crafting skill was given to him when Rino complained about being nude and putting up with just a single salvaged cape. His cape burned away, and it suddenly became a priority.

The Gods weren’t complete *ssholes in Rino’s eyes. In fact, they were good business partners from his experience. What he needed, they provided in the form of quest rewards. What they needed to be done, Rino had to fulfil in the form of quests. It was a fair system. So far, Rino could read their intentions simply by viewing the kind of rewards they offered in the quest.

So why were they now giving him a useless reward such as bone crafting recipe? Where was his dark magic?! Did the Gods hate the idea of automation so much?!

He could understand the need for a clay kiln. But they had to be kilning him! They undiscovered mine as a clay mine, he could understand. Clay was very useful. Those pottery skills? Rino can find some uses for them in the future. Having a few earthen jars or basins would be great if he ever had to dye fabric again. In fact, Rino could make himself a lovely bathtub with that skill. That was fine.

Clay kiln was something he needed to bake the mud bricks. Rino can understand that. He had no problems with the purpose of the quest. However, he had a problem with the reward. Why bone crafting of all things?!

Firstly, Rino did not see a lot of living creatures in his desolated area. Bones came from animals and people. There was a material shortage unless he went all the way back to the grave he came from.

Secondly, why in twenty-seven lives would he want to learn how to craft bone? He was a skeleton. It felt somewhat ominous to be doing so. Rino simply could not understand the need for bone crafting at all.

“That’s it,” Rino decided. “I’m not going to work until they change this d*mn reward.”

As a form of protest, Rino lay in his bed and tried to sleep. However, the curse of becoming an undead only made him crankier.

Up above, the Gods looked at each other. What should they do?