I spent the next day much the same as the last. I deliberately went out to play with Cluma this time, rather than being unilaterally recruited like yesterday, hoping for at least one more point in a physical stat before tomorrow. With that done, I returned home to hone my magic skills. Fortunately, my day's effort was well rewarded.

Dexterity increased by 1

Skill [Far Step] advanced to level 4

Skill [Minor Speed] advanced to level 3

Skill [Minor Strength] advanced to level 4

Skill [Mana Control] advanced to level 3

Skill [Mana Finesse] advanced to level 3

Intelligence increased by 1

Skill [Enlarged Mana Pool] advanced to level 5

Class [Apprentice Mage] advanced to level 2

How I'd missed days like these. My skills hadn't levelled this fast since I first picked up [Inspection]. In fact, my skills hadn't levelled this fast ever. My spells were definitely growing faster than my older skills, plus I had more skills to level in total. But it wasn't as if boosting my mana pool by three and a bit was going to let me [Far Step] home. Dexterity would no doubt make my walk home more efficient, but endurance was what I needed to keep going, and lots of it at that. That had already increased recently and was unlikely to increase again any time soon. [Minor Endurance] would almost certainly have the same time limit as [Minor Strength] and thus be useless for a long journey, and [Enlarged Stamina Pool] wouldn't aid in regeneration even if it let me walk for slightly longer. Loath as I was to admit it, there was nothing I could do to make our trip home tomorrow any easier. Then again, I didn't know Mum's endurance. She could have a hundred in there for all I knew. She certainly trusted me enough, so it was only fair that I trusted her in return when she said it wasn't a problem.

The next day, I had to get up earlier than normal to be ready for when Henry left. We climbed into his almost empty cart, which was thankfully being pulled by what looked like a perfectly normal horse. Mostly. It did, for some reason, have red spots on its otherwise grey hair, but at least it didn't have feathers, missing heads or a neon colour scheme. The cart was lightly leaden with some wares produced in the village he was bringing to sell, but not a huge amount. In fact, that raised an interesting question.

"How do the crops grown by the village get to market? They wouldn't all fit in this cart."

"The merchants' guild sends their own transportation to pick it up. If it was only going to Dawnhold, we probably could carry it to town ourselves if we gathered up every hand cart in the village, but a lot of our food gets exported. They use enchanted storage devices that can carry large amounts of crops while preserving them."

So bags of holding were out there somewhere, as was a merchants' guild. Cool.

I fired off spells while we travelled, but refrained from sinking into [Meditation], preferring to watch the novel scenery. Alas, it turned out to rapidly get very repetitive. Our village was on a flat plain of grassland and scrubland. There was a forest to the west, and Dawnhold was situated to the east. On our journey, most of the land we saw was uncultivated. It seemed strange to have a farming village so far from its closest town when all this unused land was available. I could think of an argument that being next to the forest was useful for access to lumber, but given that wood wasn't burnt for fuel, that was largely a one-off advantage while building the village, so I didn't see why it would outweigh the ongoing inconvenience. This land didn't look any less fertile than ours, either. Maybe it was something like the village originally being built to produce charcoal and the elves objecting, but if so, no-one had ever mentioned it. Once again, I remembered that I was in a cart with two responsible adults and didn't have to think this through on my own.

"Why was our village built so far away from Dawnhold when all of this space was available?"

Mum and Henry shared a look, but it was Henry who answered. I knew my parents didn't know an awful lot of geography, so maybe he knew more.

"Politics. It's easier to claim land when it's settled, so settlements are spaced as far apart as practical to cover more area."

"Huh? Who are we claiming land off?"

"No-one. All the land around here was unclaimed until fifty years ago. The forest is an elven domain, but they have no interest in the eastern plains."

"Why was it unclaimed? Who occupied it before?"

Henry pulled a what-a-stupid-question face. It wasn't a face I was used to people pointing at me.

"No-one occupied it before. That's why it was unclaimed."

Okay, I saw my mistake; I was applying Earth logic. Earth was heavily populated, and there was no such thing as unclaimed and unpopulated wilderness. There were unpopulated areas where living was impractical, such as deserts, but they were still claimed. Even Antarctica was claimed, and by about a dozen different countries at that. Freely available, viable, unoccupied land was an alien concept for me. Apparently, I'd acquired a geography teacher. Even better, a captive one who was stuck with me for the next hour.

"I don't know anything about the surrounding countries. For that matter, I know very little about our own. I don't even know the name of our village."

"Well, that last one is easy. The village doesn't have a name. It's just 'the village'."

"Doesn't that get confusing?"

"Not really. Most people don't travel much, so everyone has their own idea of where 'the village' is. Maybe the nobles with their fancy maps have some name written over each village, but if so, they haven't felt the need to share with us little folks."

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

"What about the countries, then?"

"Dawnhold extends from the elven domain to the west as far as the sea to the east, covering all the eastern plains. It extends as far as the southern slopes of the mountain range to the north, and I think the southern border is some sort of river. There are dwarven settlements in the mountain range, but I have no idea if they claim land beyond it. The dwarfs say there's a dragon in the mountains too, but if so, it has never revealed itself to us. As far as I know, there's no-one to the south."

Wait, what? I thought Dawnhold was the town name, not the country name, and he didn't give a single name for the surrounding countries. He didn't even make them sound like countries. Not only that, but from here I could see a mountain range in the north. Admittedly, it was a very long way away, with mountains being quite big and obvious even from a distance, but they weren't half a country length away. What I wanted to ask was why the country was named after a small town like Dawnhold rather than the capital city, but piecing together all the little clues I suspected that would result in Henry pulling a face again. Instead, I went with something safer to confirm my suspicion.

"How far away is the sea?"

"About as far from Dawnhold as the forest. Maybe a little further."

Yup, suspicion confirmed. When he said 'export' earlier, he wasn't just talking about other towns. He meant it literally.

"How many towns and villages are part of Dawnhold?"

"Dawnhold is the only town, hence the name, and there's about a dozen villages. Some of them are bigger than ours, but none big enough to call a town. Dawnhold has a population of over a thousand, after all."

Over a thousand... And he thought that was big? Adding on a dozen villages of a hundred or so each, this 'country' had a total population that was unlikely to be more than three thousand... That would barely even qualify as a town back on Earth. My old workplace was bigger than that. Fifty percent bigger, in fact, all beavering away in a small nest of buildings. But then Henry had said that it was only settled fifty years ago.

"You said that this area was only settled fifty years ago, but where did the settlers come from?"

"One of the original settlements. The Emerald Nest. I don't know exactly where on the continent it is, just that it is west of the forest and south of the Scar. You'll have to ask someone a couple of generations older than me if you want to hear stories from before the founding of Dawnhold."

This was getting weirder and weirder. Original? What was original about them? And what was the Scar? That sounded majorly ominous. "What are the original settlements?"

"The cities built and populated directly by the earth mother herself."

What? I thought it was just this world's creation myth, but there's a set of explicit 'original cities'? This was the first time I'd heard that. And 'populated' by her? Did she walk through the streets plopping out babies? Wave a hand and magic an already aged population into existence? Trying to keep a level voice, I continued questing. "I've not heard much about the earth mother. Can you tell me more about her?"

"There's not much to say. After the initial creation of the world's races, she's kept to herself. There are plenty of stories telling that you can meet her by reaching the bottom level of the great dungeon, but no stories I've heard tell of anyone managing it."

Given the low population of the world, along with how certain Henry was sounding here, there was another question I couldn't avoid asking. "How long ago was that initial creation?"

"About three hundred years, as far as I hear it. The elves could probably give you an exact figure. Most of them were there, after all."

My eyes must have opened so widely in surprise that I worried my eyeballs would fall out. This world was only three hundred years old? It was no wonder there was so much unpopulated land. That was what, ten to fifteen generations? Unless the initial population of these original settlements was into the millions, there was no way to populate a whole planet. Probably. Again, I was making an Earth assumption about the size of the planet. But that was beside the point. What I wanted to know was how had no-one told me this before? "So the earth mother created this world less than three hundred years ago?!"

"Ah, no. She didn't create the world. The world was already here, but it was completely dead. The earth mother blessed the world with life. I don't really know a lot of this stuff. It's not really important, so it's only people who are interested in history who look into it. You're visiting the library, aren't you? It should all be in there."

I wanted to scream. Not really important?! You tell me that some sort of goddess literally populated this world only three hundred years ago, and it's not really important? Fortunately, the outburst I was desperately holding in check was swallowed up by the appearance of Dawnhold in the distance. As with our village, the town had no walls. The first buildings on the outskirts looked like residences, although given our villagers' habit of conducting business out of their homes, that didn't mean much. Outside of that were cultivated fields, so even the town inhabitants seemed to be farming. Mum had remained silent through our conversation, but interrupted my long distance evaluation of Dawnhold by speaking up now that we were done.

"That's very interesting. I didn't know most of that. My mother told me that life was created by the earth mother, but that she wanted her creations to find their own way in life and vanished, never to interact with them again. I didn't know it was so recent, or that there was a dwarven settlement so close either."

Personally, I was more concerned about the dragon than the dwarfs. Everyone kept saying there were no monsters around here, and then Henry suddenly springs a bloody dragon on me. I'd have had words to say about that if he hadn't distracted me with everything else. The fact we lived in a 'country' of three thousand. The fact the world was three hundred years old. The fact that there were swaths of civilization that had been alive since then. The fact that some goddess apparently waved life into existence and then buggered off to leave us to our own devices. How much of that was true? If it was some sort of creation myth, I would expect it to be set at some indeterminate point in the past, not only a few hundred years ago. Nor would there be claims of a swath of civilization being alive since then, or of a specific set of settlements identified as being originals.

ding

For your research into the past of the world, [Curious] awards 1 soul point.

Given today's revelations, I felt that one was well deserved. Plus, it made up for my lack of magic skill ups; the continuous stream of shocks had knocked any thoughts of practice out of my head. I suspected that the short amount of time I was going to have available in the library wasn't going to be anywhere nearly enough. How was there a comprehensive library in a town of a thousand that was less than fifty years old, anyway? Our cart had almost reached the outlying buildings, so it wouldn't be long before I found out.