When Nathan felt the sun on his face, he opened his eyes.
Gone was the void, and gone were all of the stars. Two suns shone in the sky instead, each weaker than what he remembered from Earth, and a Jovian band of rings hung between them. And Nathan knew the band to be Jovian because the rings of Neptune were dark and the rings of Saturn were not so much a set of rings as a more cohered band of orbital dust; this was a central blue-white halo of a ring in the sky, covering a full handsbreath, flanked by a rainbow of reds covering a further two hands on each side.
It was a glorious and alien sight to him, but he tore his eyes from it anyway.
He stood at the outskirts of a forest, one that was more spindly scrubland than majestic verdure. The cries of birds and the chittering of small mammals mixed with the rustling of leaves and the unidentifiable noises of what Nathan would call critters—beetles, worms, flies, and the other creepers and crawlers of the world. Overlaid over all of that was the burbling of the river that ran, neither rushing nor sedate, not ten feet away from him; he followed it with his eyes through the termination of the forest, and grunted in recognition.
There was a town there, or perhaps a fortified village. It straddled the river less than a mile away from where he stood, walls high and gate closed. In the clear air, he could easily read the major elements of the three flags that flew from the towers which flanked that gate—the lower one held a black book on a blue background, the center was a checkered red-and-gold, and the top one bore a blue river across golden fields of grain, emerging from the green of a forest.
Ah, he thought to himself. The holdfast of Freehold Trimarin, fiercely though nominally independent. It tithed to the Red Hand Cartel, which despite its organized crime origins had largely returned to its roots of a mercenary security company, maintaining order in the wastelands; the red-and-gold represented its promise that neither aetherspawn nor kith would draw Trimarin’s blood, or the Cartel’s own blood would answer for the failure.
The Cartel didn’t wage even defensive warfare, not since the Second Century and its Troubled Decade. But Trimarin was a sound holdfast, and nobody wanted to risk its health by conquering it—and for what gains? One would gain the obligations of defense and acquire only a marginal town that subsisted on a smattering of taxes from the passthrough trade, what little untainted hunting there was in the woods, and the labor of the Landed Classes. And hence its flag at the top of the mast; and not the flags of the Royal Council, the Aerated Republic, or the Warborn, which were its closest neighbors.
“Aetherbite,” Nathan swore, “it’s… well, okay, it’s not exactly a hellworld. Post-apocalypse? Definitely post-apocalyptic. And a litRPG? Classes and mana and experience, levels and all that bullshit. Aide, I am going to be grumpy at you about this, I can tell.”
Reader: Nathan was not grumpy about it, when the time came. But let that be known in its time, and in the proper manner of a story being told.
There wasn’t a proper road or even a well-trodden path running from where Nathan stood to the gates of the town. There was, however, a riverbank which appeared to him to have decent enough footing, and he set out on the walk without any hurry.
He took stock of himself and his equipment on the way.
He was dressed as a traveler, a seasoned and experienced one who spared no expense but was not himself a crafter or enchanter. His boots were of knifehopper spine-leather, treated with oil from haughty aetherfish airgills to add to the general mundane invulnerability of properly treated knifehopper hide a near-immunity to acid, water, and temperature; they, along with every other stitch of clothing he wore, bore basic enchantments for comfort and self-repairing, or his feet would have been stewing in sweat within moments. His pants and shirt were of alchemically treated cotton, flexible and durable while still being breathable, and his gloves were of a thinner and more flexible knifehopper leather. In the pleasant warmth of the spring sun he wore nothing more in the way of clothing, but the weight and balance of his hiking pack included his travel coat along with his formals: black trencher and pants and a white shirt, all of far lower quality than the clothes he actually wore.
That pack contained most of his worldly possessions, which were few in number but included a truly comfortable pillow which paired with the bedroll strapped atop the pack—the single most rune-dense item in his possession. Two canteens hung from his bandolier along with a dozen mundane and two enchanted cartridges for the thick-barreled pistol that hung at his belt, with a well-used but well-maintained machete swinging from his other side. His hat in its rainbow of colors was on his head, and the sign of his calling was upon his brow in the shape of the same book which floated beside him, his familiar companion.
“Saucer,” Nathan said in amusement. “What’s cooking?”
In response, the primordial, protean piece of soulbound equipment floated in front of Nathan, rifling open to display what seemed like an arbitrary page in its middle.
Status: Hale
Name: Nathan
Displayed Class: Traveler (Level 23)
Displayed Origin: Foundling
Hidden Class: Millionborn (Level 1)
Hidden Origin: Millionborn
Subclass: Tomebearer
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Class Progression: 18%
Body: Early Refinement [0/1 Traits Earned]
Spirit: Early Refinement [0/1 Traits Earned]
Aether: Nascent
Displayed Affinities: Travel (Early), Tome (Early)
Hidden Affinities: Universal (Nascent)
Skills: None
Quests:
…
Feat of Body — Body Trait
Feat of Spirit — Spirit Trait
…
Parcel Delivery (Trimarin) — Progression
Parcel Pickup (Trimarin) — Quest Progresses
Read 10,000 standard pages — Skill
…
Travel 1,000km on foot — Mapping Skill, Progression
Travel 1,000km through specific biome — Skill, Progression
Travel 10,000km by water — Skill, Progression
…
Feats: [Locked]
“Well,” Nathan said slowly, “I’ve seen worse. I mean, that doesn’t say much, I’ve read a lot of web serials and also I’ve tried to read the handwriting of doctors and lawyers alike. What font is that, anyway, Pacifico?” He shook his head, starting to walk towards the town in the distance. “Not particularly quantized. Skill-light, obviously. Three stats and I only have two of them. I’ve seen worse.”
There was no response to his words, save for the sound of Saucer’s pages gently closing. It floated next to him as he strode, feeling as though his body was lighter and stronger than he had expected. The backpack was perfectly balanced and rigged, but even so he was fairly confident that he would be able to walk for a longer time, and at a faster speed, than he could have unladen before Natasha’s sudden entrance into his life.
His eyes were picking out details in the fields and along the riverbank that they wouldn’t have before. His ears were distinguishing between birdcalls and picking up more rustles and splashes than he might have, and he could smell loam and weed and the sharp scent of the river with a striking clarity.
“Everything is just more,” he murmured happily. “Even my voice. It’s smoother, richer. I have more control over it in probably every way? And I’m noticing more about it. I guess that’s what Early Refinement means. I wonder if going through whatever that entails is going to be permanent? It could kind of suck if I became better, faster, stronger, and all that jazz and then it all got reverted away. Though I guess there’s always the possibility that the transitional period would be automatically handled, all hail the handwave.”
This and more thoughts filled his mind as he walked. He worked through various languages as he did so, chasing down cognates both true and false and practicing cadence and rhythm in everything from Rkaik to Tradertalk to the whistles of Modern Aerie; he wrote characters and glyphs in his mind, drawing them out until their nature and meaning clicked into place and then branching out into their sibling- and cousin-languages; he read several pages of text in seven different languages courtesy of Saucer’s flexibility, an attribute which did not surprise him at all.
And before he was ready for it, but after he’d gotten bored of preparing for it, he was standing before the gates of Freehold Trimarin.
“Who goes there?”
Nathan craned his neck up, meeting the eyes of the armored woman—though he could not tell; but he would learn this with time, and not very much of it, when she introduced herself to him after his entry—with a considering gaze. Armored, he thought to himself, in chain with reinforcements here and there. Crossbow, no other visible weapons. Some sort of speaking trumpet looking thing at her belt, though. Her hand was near the butt of her crossbow, but not touching it.
“Nathan, traveler and wanderer,” he called up to her over the not-inconsiderable tens of feet between himself and the top of the wall, eyes flickering over the finely mortared and uniform stone. “Come from beyond the bounds of Trimarin’s holdings to spend the night, and I’ll be moving onwards in the morning.”
He felt the pressure of her gaze, something more than physical. “By what right do you ask a non-citizen’s admission, traveler and wanderer?”
It was mostly ritual, not quite a formality. In times of peace, at least—in wartime, it would be deadly serious. “I am an abider of the laws,” Nathan offered, “come on legitimate business. I owe no fealty to any enemy of this realm, and intend no harm within its borders.”
“What is your business, that you describe as legitimate?” By the interest and intensity her face held, she’d already figured it out; she had divined, through whatever means, his Subclass and drawn the correct conclusions from it. “I am Ellen, guardswoman of Trimarin, holder of the Watchduty at this time; and I ask this of you.”
“It is said that as many days as there are in a man’s journey across the Settled Lands,” Nathan spoke, mangling a quotation from George Herbert Palmer's translation of Herodotus' Histories, referring to the courier service of the ancient Persian Empire, “so many are the men that lope along the road, each man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.
“Call me Nathan,” he finished with a smile. “I come bearing your mail.”