Alaric was no longer going to be boring.

His fish pupils lit up in excitement, filled with new ambition. The previous boring soul that Alaric possessed was now going to be completely overwritten.

He looked at the lake, the meager small lake filled with meager small fish. This would have to change. Alaric sucked up his previous tears back into his eyes, leaving them now freshly moist. There would be no time to cry tears of sadness. From now on, life would be about indulging in greed and rising to the top of the world.

Alaric looked at the bag of money. It was a reasonable sum, the most his parents could afford. The only purpose of this money would be to convert it into more money. Alaric through about what he would be able to do with it.

”Buy a weapon and start killing beasts to make money?” He thought. He considered becoming an adventurer. In this world, being an adventurer was high risk high reward. It was a cutthroat profession, hunting beasts and monsters in dangerous locations to reap their rewards. Some of these rewards were just from processing the corpses of the beasts, such as horns and bones that could be transformed into better weapons.

Some of the treasure was getting things that the monsters had. Some monsters were smart, and had enough intelligence to have greed, and would covet human treasures. Often when I high level monster died, it would be a mad dash to find their stash of treasures. These treasures range from magical artifacts and just straight up cash in gold.

”Nah.” Alaric thought. At this point, he was just a “normal” guy with fish pupils. He did have some innate strength from farm work all day, but this wouldn’t apply well when slaughtering titans or dragons. Of course strength can always be enhanced through magic as well as magic accessories.

But Alaric didn’t want to go to school for magic. That is what his sister did. The market for magicians and mages is extremely oversaturated right now, everyone wanted to be a mage. So unless you were some kind of prodigy who could pulverize titans with a flick of the wrist, you would have little to no chance in the battle mage department.

Many mages now were reduced to less adrenaline filled jobs. Most of the time their magic wasn’t even good enough to get them a job in a magic adjacent field.

”I’ll pass on magic for now.” Alaric thought.

He also didn’t want to be a farmer. Once he would become a farmer, there would be no real expansion in his life other than getting a bigger field. Although he was used to farm work, he found it boring, and didn’t get much fulfillment out of it.

“Fishing could be good!” Alaric glanced into the pond, seeing his reflection in the water. His pupils were shaped like a fish, so it seemed like an obvious course of action.

Something clearly had changed about his brain and functioning after the thing went inside him.

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”I don’t really want to think about that now… whatever that was I’ll just ignore it. It’ll probably be revealed to me later.” Out of mind out of mind was Alarics approach to the strange thing he fished up. He just wanted now to focus on reaping the benefits from whatever about him changed after it occupied him.

He considered fishing. In this world, fishing, like adventuring had many levels. There were the casual fishers, who would catch fish for eating primarily. They wouldn’t do it as their full job, but just to switch up the meal once in a while. Stale bread and potatoes got old after a steaming hot second.

There were professional fishers too. People that caught fish full time for their job. They would have scaled up business, having boats and nets to catch a large amount of fish to sell. This was the level up. It was a stable job, and relatively safe.

There was one other class of fisher. The suicidal insane fishers. Occasionally in the news there would be things about people fishing up insane things from random areas. There was some innate element of fishing that sometimes allowed for miracles to happen.

Just recently, in the ocean there was a fisherman who reported fishing up a magical orb of the sun. This skyrocketed the fisherman’s power, and now he was a solar archmage.

But getting something like that out of the water was insanely rare. It would be akin to winning the lottery to fish up such objects. The conditions for any object such as that to be fished up were seemingly impossible to predict, and fishing with the aim of catching up such rare items was a losing game.

Many believed that it didn’t exist, and that the few times there had been results, it was just to fabricate an interesting story.

Sometimes the amount of patience and fore planning one would have to have to fish up such things were astronomical, and most intense fishermen would go their entire lives without fishing up something so extraordinary.

There were many dangers too. Just like how there were conditions that could be set to fish up insanely powerful artifacts, there were also conditions that summoned dangers. Also in the news recently, there was an old fishing couple who were causally fishing on the river when they pulled in a swarm of locust piranhas that tore them to shreds.

In order to pursue what was dubbed “Esoteric Fishing” one would have to be lucky, insane, and willing to sacrifice it all in the name of fishing.

The amount of mental willpower one would have to have in order to pursue Esoteric Fishing made it so that there were asylums dedicated to housing Esoteric Fishers that had gone insane in their quests to obtain treasures from the depths of the waters.

This is what Alaric wanted to do. He had already seemingly fished up an Esoteric Fish, and didn’t want to waste his luck.

But he had two primary goals. Not only did he want to become an Esoteric Fisher himself, he wanted to bring it into the mainstream.

In the past, magic and adventuring were seen as useless jobs. Who would care if you could make a spark out of your hand if someone could just rub sticks together and get the same result.

But that changed over time. Through efforts in marketing, and the establishment of celebrities and folk figures who were centered around magic, it became the lucrative industry for the people running it today.

This is what Alaric wanted to do. Bring Esoteric Fishing into the mainstream, and be able to fill the world’s oceans with his wealth.

He was resolute. There would be many challenges in doing this, and many of them would be questionably legal, but he didn’t care. All questionable legal troubles could be overwritten with power and money.

There were still many elements about Esoteric Fishing that he didn’t know, and would have to learn about on the way. It was still a relatively unknown element of life, but looking at his fish shaped pupils in the reflection, he knew that it was true. And he knew that he would be able to find a way to the top.