This book was made in order to register my own thoughts as lived through my hectic life. Those who know me at the present surely know how I was during my young days, when I would travel to the four corners of the world to document everything that I came across. Ahh... to be so young and full of energy again... I miss those days, though a part of me can only pray to the gods that age has finally forced me to stop my reckless adventuring. Was it even reckless, though, considering that for the better part of it I made the journey accompanied by the Maiden in White, who might still be one of, if not the strongest adventurer of the continent?

Well, I can confidently say that, during our travels, it certainly didn't look like we were doing anything dangerous, although, looking back at it through the lenses of age and experience; I can't help but be amazed that I managed to live long enough to be writing this book right here and right now. But I digress. First things first, we should start from the beginning, right? It simply won't do for me to start my own biography from the end like this. No, no, no. Regardless of how much I despise the stiff writing of academia, I simply can't bring myself to completely ditch all the rules dictated by it. Well, so be it. Let's work our way chronologically through time until I have hopefully made you, my dearest reader, privy to everything that happened during my long, long life.

So... the start of my journey, huh... well, I can say right off the bat that it wasn't a pleasant one. I know, I know, that's spoiling the fun, but don't worry, it should be more than obvious why I say that once the thread of my past has been unknotted fully by yours truly. Anyway, it is also appropriate to say that the previous statement was a clear understatement of the life I lived before setting myself free. Yes, I was forced to liberate myself, to free my own body, mind and soul from the clutches of the village where I grew up on.

It might sound bad, and I assure it that it was, but it probably wasn't near as terrible as my heavily biased mind remembers it. But oh well, there's little I can do besides retelling the story as faithfully as possible, even with that doesn't amount to particularly much. Regardless, I, as any other author should strive for, make now the vow to recount my misadventures as faithfully as I recall them. If you, for some gods-forsaken reason, acquired this book without knowing anything about me, then I welcome you, and I hope you'll enjoy this little life story of mine. I am Penny, no surname, an archmage by profession, an explorer by love and a historian by hobby. Can you even call it a hobby if I have been nurturing it for the past half a century? Who knows? I would consider it to be so, hence why I insisted on calling 'hobby' throughout my whole lifetime, though you might be inclined to disagree. I doubt I will be alive by the time you pick up this book, but, even if I am, I doubt the words of a reader or another would do anything other than inflame my ego by making me know that this silly biography has garnered so much attention.

I was born on the distant village of Psomí, though I neither expect nor hope that you know of it. After all, it would definitely be stranger if you asked a random passerby on the capital about the name of a village on the outskirts of civilization, mostly isolated and too far from anything even remotely important to be of any use. The only reason it even had the right to give itself a name was because the bread made there was quite the local treat for those who could afford it. It managed to get the attention and the investments of the filthy rich merchants and the insufferable nobles. It is funny, truly, that no matter where I go, no matter with how many of them I interact with, they all appear to me as the same filthy, greasy and disgusting specimen, no matter how much their makeup and fine scents try to make it otherwise.

Of course, it would do me no good to overly generalize, as it would make me no better than the so-called pinnacle of our society, whom I every so often catch speaking ill of the peasants, the merchants, of other nobles, of the maids. No, I'm sure there must be at least a few good nobles out there somewhere, but the overwhelming majority of rabble who insistently reiterate the same old, outdated saying that nobles are favored by the gods and that they are more important than the common rabble makes it consistently hard to find them. Heck, I recall that the time when I had to find a needle in a haystack was both more fun and easier than the futile, almost hypothetical mental exercise that is finding decent nobles.

That, however, matters little to the discussion at hand, which was about... umm... oh, yes, my village! Silly me, forgetting what I just wrote. I will admit, though, it's surprisingly fun to bash with abandon at the slimy nobles with the help of my mighty weapons: the pen and the paper. As if I was wielding a study shield and a sharp spear, I embarked on my journey to stab, stab, stab those annoying, self-righteous pricks until they bleed to death. Sadly for me, though not for them, I was never able to get my opinions though with actions, always choosing instead to fight with words. Even now, that had seldom changed, as you can see.

Anyway, as I said before, my little, cozy village was known in the region by its exquisite bread, a true delicacy for the high-class men. Even though the transport was hard and took quite some time to reach any settlement with anyone who could even afford to eat the breads, the entire village had been developed around the making of this particular type of food, perfecting through the generations until they had achieved near perfection in their craft. The whole village worked as a collective, each participating in some way of the process, even if not directly. My parents, for example, worked with fixing ovens and sewing clothes, in special aprons.

My father was a strong man, both physically and mentally. I mean, I can't even fathom the mental fortitude he must have had to keep in contact with me even after I left the village for good. He had muscles bulging from everywhere in his body, even from places I didn't even know had muscles. Of course, his job, mainly physical, made it so that his physique was strikingly good, especially when considering that he had been trained from a young age by his own father. Ever since there had been bread produced here, there had also been oven-fixers and builders to make the places where the bread would be actually made. My dad wasn't the only one bearing an exhausting, physically intensive job in the village, but he might have been one of the most enthusiastic about his own job, always wearing a wide grin on his face, doing everything he could to alleviate everyone else's load, be it though bad jokes or genuinely, caring moments of counseling to the young.

If only he wasn't so oblivious to the changes happening right below his nose, things might have turned out differently. Even now, decades after I last saw him, I still regret the words I said, the actions I did. To be fair, though, it is reasonable to expect a teenager who had bottled up her true feelings and dreams her whole life to do some unreasonable actions. Life rarely goes the way you want it to go, and I just had to learn how to move forward with the awful card I've been dealt by fate. Delegating all the wrongs of my life to fate alone seem kind of cheap, though. On the majority of the time, the difficulties and tribulations of my life were caused by myriads of different ailments and problems, by reasons I may never figure it out.

Hah... but that doesn't matter much. As I said, I had to learn entirely by myself how to deal with the cards I was dealt, and, looking back at it, I think a pretty good job at it. What does matter it writing about my mother before it slips out of mind. Funnily enough, Marta was the complete opposite of my dad. While he was strong, bold, and prone to helping others, my mother was the very definition of a recluse. She did her job as good as anyone else, but she made no effort at all to interact with other people or helping anyone. She made from her job her entire life, to the point where she would barely even glance at me before returning to her job. Jorge, my dad, oftentimes tried to make Marta try new things, but the stubborn woman insisted on focusing solely on her job, which is why I think she was so devastated by the decisions I made. I don't regret it, though, since even now I don't really feel anything compelling me to inherit her job. I still wonder if she ever forgave me, but I don't really tend to dwell on these thoughts too much. Too depressing for anything other than a moody autobiography. Well, I don't think I can run from it any longer.

So, to start things off, I first need to explain how I decided to become an explorer. That's the easy part. I became an explorer because I have always loved exploring everywhere, ever since I was a child. Anticlimactic, no? Well, no matter. Ever since I was a little girl I loved running around, finding different things, rare things, everything that caught my attention I would bring to my parents to see. I didn't have a lot of friends, since most parents didn't think I was a good influence, as I was always making up excuses to not start learning how to sew like my mother. A kid that refused to take up her duty and insisted on playing all the time on the woods was bound to make other kids ditch their works in favor of playing too, which was why my contact with the neighboring kids was very limited. I've heard stories about how some people saw their neighbors who grew up with them in their little villages as brothers or sisters.

I've never experienced anything of the sort. I've never had a sibling, be it by blood or by creation, but that didn't bother me too much. I was usually too entertained by myself that I seldom noticed the stark contrast between the way that I was treated and the way the rest of the kids on the village were. Looking at it now, I can't believe how utterly stupid I was to not notice it. It was so obvious that I'm reaching the point where I might actually try to build a time machine just to return to the past and slap my own head. Sometimes, one mom or another would make the kids' a treat, something that, for some odd reason, only ever happened when I was in one of my outings deep into the woods. I would only learn about the event later on when I returned, which usually made me a little downcast for the rest of the night. Sometimes my moody humor wouldn't even last that long, as my spirits were always immediately lifted every time I showed my dad something interesting I had brought back.

Sadly, these small moments never lasted long. My mom, in all her wisdom and with all her experience, absolutely despised everything that I decided was novel enough to show to her. Little old me simply couldn't understand that it was simply because my mother hated most things, and the fact that I decided to concentrate my time on such futile things instead of learning the craft of sewing only served to get even more at her nerves. It rarely hit that point, but there were times when she would start screaming at me, telling me on a loud and clear voice about how much of a disappointment I was, and that I would have begun working on our profession since a long time ago. These outbursts were normally pretty quickly mitigated by Jorge, but never before my younger self had time to swallow the bitter and hateful words being thrown at her.

If the same thing happened to me today, I sincerely don't know if my mother would live still. I know this sounds extreme, but trust me, I doubt you would want to live through fifteen years of constant abuse simply because your dreams didn't align with what your parents wanted. It was painful to go against her, since everyone is always taught that their parents are always right no matter what, and questioning this quote becomes harder the more it is repeated by everyone around you. It is a self-feeding loop, where the more you hear and speak the magic words the more you start to convince yourself of them, making it so that every time a disagreement happens it always appear to be the kid's fault. On this case, though, this supposition made by most adults and even by the majority of kids couldn't be more wrong.

After all, as far as I'm concerned, the only thing I had done wrong was not complying with what my parents wanted for my future. And yet, in that little mind of mine, too young to properly understand the intricacies of life, every confrontation made her feel worse than a heretic burning on a stake. It was as if my refusal to take upon herself to continue the family tradition was the biggest shame I could ever feel, as if I had been reduced to a mere pile of garbage every time I tried to convince my parents to let me do my own thing. Of course, this horrid feeling little prevented me from escaping into the woods anyway, though I can't help but ponder about the long-term psychological effects of it.

It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. Whenever my parents tried to convince me to learn to sew, my legs automatically began to run, almost subconsciously moving towards the closest opening on the house there was. If it happened to be a door, good, I would be running for my life in a flash. If it was a window, then it would be marginally more complicated, as I needed to jump up and then drop down before making my escape, which allowed my parents to get closer to me and, sometimes, even catch me before I could flee. This was the worst situation, since mother would continue to berate me and insist that I stop doing such useless things while my dad, usually so sweet, turned on the form of an ass-whooping demon.

With everything combined, it only served to drive me to push further and further into the forest with which I was steadily growing more and more familiar as the years wasted away. It reached a point where I knew more hiding spots than the hunters who had spent their entire lives bringing food to the village. I learned how to hide, how to hear the predators from a distance, how to survive for extended periods of time with only my clothing. This period probably played quite a big part on why I finally decided that enough was enough.

It also probably helped that my parents finally decided to put a stop on my antics. They wanted to make me learn the joys of my profession by force! Of course, that only pushed me further and further away from them. The yelling became commonplace in the household, and even the neighbors began to ask my parents to quiet down. Things continued to escalate quite rapidly for the next few years, reaching the point of physical abuse. At least they tried to take that route, but, if they thought they could easily catch and harm a girl who, at that point, was more beast than human, then they could only be delusional.

Delusional, huh... that's a nice word to describe my parents, in special my mother, who only knew how to replicate the same teachings that she had learned as a girl. It didn't made the things she said to me any less hurtful, but, at least now, I can see that, from an outsiders perspective, she was simply trying to get me to do the things that she herself had learned while at my age at the time. However, little young me couldn't possibly make such an analysis, resorting instead to answer these rather forceful attempts to make me submit to her will, to make me nothing more than a miniature version of her, was to isolate myself even more.

I've started to spend more and more time on the woods, returning very rarely once my body began screaming to me, begging me to get some rest on a proper bed and eat some nicely-cooked food. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't as if I couldn't sleep anywhere I wanted or that I was bad at cooking. It was just that there were some things that I simply couldn't replicate with my crude lifestyle. No matter how much I tried over the years, my ability to cook with raw, unprocessed ingredients was subpar at best, though I have to admit that I haven't spent that long developing that skill. I don't even think I managed to max it out.

It's just that there was just so much to see, so much to explore, so many sights of wonder to witness, that these more basic stuff were more often then not put aside to a later, never to be determined, date. That didn't mean I didn't invest time in such things, but the skills' levels are a clear reflection of the less-than-desirable amount of time I spent developing each of them. After I met Kary, then? That was when I completely gave up on mastering those skills. Of course, that backfired tremendously when it turned out that nobody in our group was a good cook, but that is a story that does not fit this introduction.

Coming back to the chronological, abbreviated story of my life, what made me finally ditch that little village was a single comment thrown offhandedly by my mother in one of our rare family dinners. I still remember that day all too well, from the clothes we were wearing to the food that had been served. I can even quote the outrageous thing my mother said! Most of you who read this book, still fledging younglings, probably don't realize how hard it gets to remember specific days or events as life continues to pass by, but trust me, it does. And yet, I still remember that moment as if it had happened just before I sat down with my pen to write this introduction.

It was a clear night, devoid of any clouds in the sky, which allowed the full moon to shine as brightly as the sun, illuminating the entire world with its pale, gentle light. When I was walking from the dense forest to the stone houses of the village, I could see glimpses of the infinite points that were the stars, spreading endlessly through the night sky. Despite the clear moon, it was still hard to navigate through the forest, in no small part thanks to the denseness of its foliage, which managed to block quite a bit of the moonlight. Still, I continued walking forward, for I hungered for some decent food. Funnily enough, what caused me to flee was the direct result of my inability to survive out of berries and badly cooked meat.

So, here's a quick rundown of what happened that night. I won't go into too much detail, since this meeting and its fallout deserve an entire chapter dedicated solely on it. I arrived home, as abruptly as I always did. Without saying a single word, I moved with the shadows towards my room, trying to make as little noise as possible, as if I wanted my parents to not even know I was there. Of course, it was futile, since, even if they hadn't realized I was there, they definitely heard my old wooden door closing with a band behind me. Now, I could have gotten in through the window, but that idea left a sore taste in my mouth, as if doing that would make me less human than them.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Of course, looking at it now, it was nothing more than my own stubbornness, but, at the time, I didn’t really know what would happen to my fragile mind should it think of itself as less developed than the two monsters in human form who lived in that residence, which, over the years, became to lack more and more of the warmth a home should have. It had devolved into a cold building, almost devoid of any affection. Even the relationship between my parents had worsened, with my mother getting more and more violent every time I visited, while my father continued to passively accept everything with hollow eyes.

It was a sad scene, but one that I couldn't help but stare at with detached eyes. These were not my parents, just a much as the place I was in at the moment was not my home. It was a house, for sure, and those two people, almost strangers by then, had definitely birthed a child with the same name as me, but, as my interactions with them grew more scarce, I found myself having trouble in accepting them as anything more than acquaintances, people whom I would sometimes meet whenever I decided to leave the comfort of the forest. Contrary to what I felt, though, my mother became progressively more aggressive, trying and failing again and again to make me either stay at home by her side or marry with some other kid from the village, kids from whom I was kept far, far away during my entire life.

A barely disguised threat, that's what that was. She wanted me to choose my bad end, allowing me to make the decision of how I would spend my entire life starting from now. It made me disgusted, to see the person who was supposed to care for me, to take care of my needs, to show me the workings of this world, speaking with such sparkling eyes about the wonders of marriage. I was barely fifteen, and she already considering marrying me off to someone I didn't know. From a few seconds, I looked at her as if she had grown a second head, though she remained completely oblivious to my judgmental stare, too engrossed in her own fantasies to notice anything amiss.

Startled by the bizarre things my mother was spouting, I turned to my father, hoping that he would be just as surprised as I was, hoping, from somewhere deep within my soul, that he wasn't in cahoots with mother, that he had, for once, gone against her will. And yet, I was left disappointed. Staring at my father, I could see that he refused — or was unable to — look at me in the face, almost as if he was afraid to see the expression I was making in response to their wicked plan. By that point, I wanted to scream, to cause a fuss, to watch the whole village come together to see the clowns performing in their circus stage.

I controlled myself, though. I continued to eat, still staring pointedly at both of the detestable people sitting across from me, one of them refusing to spew garbage from her mouth, and the other simply accepting everything that was happening, completely compliant with the plan to force her daughter in a marriage with a boy that she had never properly talked to. It was sickening, repulsive, disgusting, and, most of all, astonishing. I knew that they — and by 'they' I meant mostly mother — wanted to keep me in the village, learning the profession I was supposed to exert, but I don't think I ever expected things to go that bad.

Silently, I finished my food, picked up the wooden bowl and slowly went to the kitchen, carefully avoiding opening my mouth, for I knew that I would not be able to stop the stream of insults and swears that would commence upon opening it. My mother, finally realizing I was giving her the silent treatment, start to get as red as a tomato, and I swear I could see some smoke coming out of her years. Her cheeks twitched as her eyes narrowed, the happy smile she was wearing but a second ago all but transformed into a demon's frown. More than angry, that woman was furious that I still refused to go by her rules, that I still dared to resist, that I was still not the submissive puppet she could order around that she had always wanted, that I still had the gall to come to this house and refuse to respect the beings who refused to show a speck of respect towards me. Inside of her mind, everything became twisted, to the point where she somehow thought that she was on the right for trying to hit me with her wooden spoon.

She screamed at me, said that I was a horrible daughter, that I should just die in a ditch at that point, that she was tired of patiently waiting for me to see the errors in my ways. Enraged and blinded by fury, she began throwing at me everything that was within reach, from the tableware to the chairs. Of course, none of these were able to so much as graze me, since there was no accuracy to her throws. She simply used everything on her arsenal to take me down, hoping that something would hit. It might sound shocking to you, but they didn't. Instead, they flew right past me and into the walls, embedding themselves with sharp noises that made me genuinely worry about getting hit. I had to wonder if the years of lashing out at me had rewarded her with some sort of berserk skill.

Still, that wasn't the time to ponder about such things. For now, I needed to make my leave, for I had seen enough, suffered enough on the hands of that woman. That was the moment when I decided to take my leave, forever. Never again did I return to that small village on the outskirts of the kingdom, my only interaction with it being though the letters my father began to send me long after I began my life as an explorer and adventurer. I don't even know if the place still exists, since I haven't been to the region for a long, long time. Maybe it perished to its old-fashioned, almost brainwashing, ways, or perhaps it still stands strong, making bread for the rich, unbothered by the inconvenient and unpredictable variable that I was.

After darting through the front door, my weird beliefs still influencing my actions, I silently made my way to the village chief's house, a slightly bigger place than the rest of the village, though not substantially so. After all, this title simply meant that whoever held it was the most qualified person to lead the village, something often decided through popular vote. Different from some systems, though, the chosen person stays until they either resign or grow too old to exert their power, and, by then, another chief is chosen. Of course, if the village chief was caught mismanaging the resources, he could very easily be stripped away from their position, which would be passed down to someone more capable.

Since there were never any big conflicts in the village before my appearance, there were very few moments when the chief was removed from their job, and these moments were usually treated with the utmost seriousness. The current chief, however, had always been quite earnest and diligent with his job, working tirelessly to ensure that everything worked flawlessly. He was a good man, even after his age began catching up to him, and he was quite the respected figure in the village. Sadly for him, though, I was precisely on my way to his house, more specifically, to the unguarded vault where the village's money was stored.

I know, I know, this is awful, and I should be ashamed of myself. Well, I was! And I still am, for that matter. Every single time that these memories resurface I want to bury my head six feet under the ground and let myself get killed by asphyxiation. I am very aware of the awful things I did, and my brain, as terrible as it had been becoming at remembering things, never allows me to forget the many, many mistakes I made throughout my life. Every night I lay awake at my fluffy bed, every day I spend drinking tea and reminiscing about the past, I think about these mistakes, both the big, ugly ones, and almost harmless ones, who did no bad to anybody other than my own conscience.

At that moment, though, with my head high with adrenaline, few things mattered more than getting the necessary money for me to make my escape. I quietly entered the silent house, its inhabitants fast asleep for quite some time now. Using the stealth skill I acquired through my long time of exposure to the wilderness, I sneaked past a few rooms, until I reached the chief's office, its door wide open, almost as if inviting me to take a peek inside. Slowly, I entered the simple room, mostly left unadorned in order to favor the practicality of furniture.

On top of a shoddy-looking table sat a small pile of papers, all the recent record of our trade with the nearby city. That mattered little to me, as I began to scan the room meticulously, tried my very best to find the place where all the money from the transactions recorded on the papers was located. It took me a few minutes to find the hidden compartment, though it was more because of my own inexperience when dealing with such things than because of its hiding place. In fact, it was a very simple hiding spot: below the floorboards. I didn't know from what exactly the village chief was protecting all those coins, since there had never been any incidents involving bandits around this region, but I had to admit that, should I not be looking specifically for it, I might not have spotted it.

Still, it wasn't particularly difficult to spot the weird square on the ground, the wood around its edges much more worn off than the rest of the boards. After finding it, I took some of the coins inside, about a third of the total, which was a bit more than six gold coins, and left as quietly as my skills allowed me to. Once outside, I began to run for my life, afraid of what would happen to me should someone catch me in the act. And so, I ran as fast as I could, leaving behind my rather miserable life and embarking on a journey that would change me to my very core,

A few days running later, I arrived on the city closest to Psomí, with a name that I have long forgotten. For the first few days, I felt overwhelmed by the liveliness of the sprawling city, its size and diversity impossible to compare to my little village. After a few days sleeping on the trees outside the walls of the city, though, I decided that it was enough of sightseeing for the moment, and that I should focus on finding a job. After all, if I only spend the money I had brought with me on an old piece of cloth badly knitted and hidden between my breasts, I would sooner or later be completely out of coins to use.

With that, my journey through the ranking of the adventurer's guild began. Making my love for exploration a rentable job was quite possibly one of the greatest thing humanity as a whole has ever done to me. Over the next five years, I tirelessly worked on building both my strength and my reputation, rapidly climbing through the ranks with my highly rated service. At age twenty, I had finally reached B-rank, which was quite formidable, although not unheard of, for someone as young as I was.

On these five years, plenty of things changed. I didn't grew any more, though I still towered over most humans with my impressive 1.5 meters of height, but I moved to the capital, bought a small house on the outskirts of the city with the money I had been slowly accumulating. At some point, it seems that my father found out where I lived, though I am still uncertain about how in the world he did that. Still, the fact remains that, after he caught wind of my many bountiful exploration through ancient ruins, her tried one last time to convince me to come back to the village, arguing that I could study the history of the bread there, with them.

Of course, that idea was shot down immediately, and I made sure to state that, as well as the reasons for why, on my return letter to him. After going through my endless list of reasons for why I didn't want to return, my dad finally accepted that I would not be back any time soon, and he finally gave up on convincing me, changing instead to polite, yet surprisingly warm letters asking about my wellbeing, my adventures, and some other miscelanious stuff. It was nice, knowing that he was trying to repair the bridge he had burned so many years before, but it was too late to amend the relation completely, for the damage he had dealt to me, perhaps even unknowingly, was still far too great.

At age twenty one, I was chosen to embark on a mission to the city of Táfos, where a bunch of scholars would study the ruins, and they needed the protection of a bunch of adventurers to make sure that everything flowed well. It was there that I met for the first time Kary, the being that now goes by a multitude of name. Killer in White, Pale Death, Specter of Death, Spirit of the Forest, Undying Adventurer, among other monikers with varying levels of fear and awe. When I first met her, I couldn't help but wonder about her identity. After all, I don't think there had ever been such a find on the ruins of such an ancient place, and I doubt there ever will.

She was weak, oh so terribly weak, but by the gods did she grow quickly. I guess that was to be expected, since her instructor — and mother figure — was none other than the Blade of the Kingdom, Asteria. During our journey back to the capital, she trained endlessly with other adventurers, pushing herself as much as her body would allow her to, and then beyond. Despite her weakness when compared to me, our talks during the day quickly made me fond of the girl, who appeared to have grown in an environment even worse than the one I grew up in, if that's even possible for you, my dear reader, to imagine. After all, I doubt you are among the ones who suffered the relentless abuse from the ones who gave birth to you, though, if you are on that tiny range of abused kids who have grown to have enough money to acquire this book, then I can only say that I am sorry for everything that you went through.

Knowing my history and everything that I managed to achieve during my long years of exploration, these might sound like fake words, devised to trick and comfort the mind, while at the same time providing no actual healing, no deeper meaning at all, just a shallow message to calm the mind of the reader. And, while it might seem that way for those who were thankfully never abused by their loved ones, I want to make sure to let this message out there for the unfortunate ones who had:

Know that you are strong, that you survived the worst, and that life can seldom reach anywhere near the ugliness it displayed when you were young. Know that the worse is over, and that there is no need to keep in touch with the people who touched you, who harmed you, who hurt you. Know that there are people out there who have gone through the same thing, experiences extremely different, incomparable to one another, and yet still resembling each other in some twisted way. Know that you can seek out help, reach out to those who you know you can trust, seek out the aid of magicians specialized on the mind, though this option in particular might be largely unavailable for the normal population, thanks to its almost abusive price.

Well, with all that gloom out of the way, I will speed through my life from beyond this point, since my editor keeps pressuring me to finish this chapter quickly and that I shouldn't be adding so much information to what amounts to just an introduction to my own biography. After my initial meeting with Kary, I didn't think much of her other than the fact that she was quite interesting in her own right. When we reached the capital once more, I bid farewell to her and the adventurers who had been hired as well. For some time after that, I didn’t hear anything about the girl, until, one day, I arrive at guild and guess who I find there, with a lean and tones body, wearing all-whites that were somehow still darker than her own skin? Yep, it was Kary, the Killer in White herself. She was looking for a beginner’s quest to start her journey through adventuring, much like I had done years before, though she was there out of her own volition, encouraged by Asteria, while I had to deal with some... unpleasant circumstances that lead me there.

I guess there is a lesson to be learned from all this, which is that, even if the starting point of two people are the same, even if they end up meeting during their short walk through life, the paths they might have taken to reach such a point might differ tremendously. I hadn't thought much about it until now, but it's quite nice that she managed to find people who were willing to accept her despite her... rather unique features, especially considering everything that she had been through, as she later told me during our adventures.

As a good senior, I pointed a good quest to her, which she happily took from the board, handed to a random receptionist, thanked me, and immediately went on with her day, her eyes blazing with the determination to complete her quest, which was simply hunting a few wild rabbits, as quickly as possible. Within the next few months, the girl's rank would skyrocket, reaching the rank where I was with unparalleled speed, her unorthodox way of fighting and her deadpan personality making her all the more endearing for the adventurer community, She became an idol to them, so to speak, a beacon of light that showed them what they could become if they put all their efforts into it.

After that, I joined her party with a few other talented individuals, forming a small group names Light Knights due to our strength and the whiter clothing out party had adopter. It was an incredibly unfitting name, considering that, despite the 'light' word assuming righteousness, bravery, courage, and whatnot, there were just so many flaws with the individuals of our group that my mind couldn't help but question if there was some correlation between being deranged and strength.

Slowly, our achievements grew, until we passed right through A-rank and went straight to S-rank. But, by then, our prime had already passed, and most of the group was already thinking about settling down. After all, what use was there to all the fortune they had amassed after two decades of adventuring other than to make them not need to work anymore? Why should they keep risking their lives for more riches when what they had could last them their entire lifetime?

Simply put, they had no reason to keep on going, which made our entire party crumble from the inside out. Eventually, there was just me and Kary, both of us driven by our own objectives, mine, of seeing every archeological site on the continent at least once, and Kary's, of exploring the entire world or die trying. We parted ways there, as the silence without our old member felt deafening. It's a funny thing, that the girl who had grown up used to the silence of the forest now crave for the loud and boisterous voices of other humans. I had grown throughout our journey, and it was only then that I realized it.

For the next decades, I kept exploring, meeting with old legends, working with them to uncover the secrets of times long past, while at the same time always trying to know what Kary was up to, in which part of the continent she was causing chaos. Time comes for us all though, and it was no different for me. I grew old, too old to go out on explorations anymore, too old to walk up a flight of stairs. Sometimes I feel pathetic, thinking about the husk of woman that seats on her comfortable chair, writing with a trembling, bony hand her own memories to the best of her mediocre abilities. At the same time, though, when I look at everything that I have done in this life of mine, I can't help but feel immense pride in everything that I managed to accomplish, everything that I managed to build for myself and for others.

Even while seating on this chair, writing out what I can remember from my own past, I few like my story isn't over, that there are more that I can still do before Death inevitably arrives to take me away from this plane. Even with all the hardships I encountered through my life, I can't say that I regret living it until this point, enjoying every moment, every sensation, to its fullest. Even while being one step away from death, I still feel so full of energy, as if I am still able to do the same feats I did when I was young. Even with all my suffering, I can puff out my chest and confidently say that I am happy, and that I was happy

~~~ First chapter, 'Introduction (not really)', of Kelly the Archmage's biography, titled 'The rough road to happiness - the biography of Kelly, the strongest archmage' ~~~