Whistling echoed down the halls as the former young master walked down. The servants no longer needed to respect him but they all turned their heads as he passed by.

A smile, laid upon his face bewildered every single person he passed by.

His eyes cold, his expression cruel, his smile evil. Anyone could tell, something had changed. Something had snapped.

And he loved it.

---

They stared at me constantly; their eyes followed me wherever I go. Perfect. I need to establish ground here, in this place. Intimidation and confusion is the best way to do that. Both things cause fear, and if they fear me, it means they respect me or at least acknowledge me. If I’m disregarded in my own home, how am I to gather respect from others?

I walked around the mansion as much as I could, showing off my ability to express myself to most of the petty peasants who worked here. Because my soul was not made in this world, it did not get blessed by those element ‘gods’ meaning I don’t have an element. Apparently, that means I’m worthless.

The ceremony last night proved my worthlessness to this world’s standard, but in my old world, it wasn’t skill that made you powerful. It was intelligence, not knowledge, but pure, unchallenged intelligence.

I sensed a new pair of eyes lie on my back, I sneaked a quick glance before turning back again. Leigh. I shook my head. She came this morning to try and console me, in the way a 10-year-old could. It wasn’t long after I woke up that she sensed a change and started to avoid me. She’s watching me, trying to figure out what went wrong.

Something did happen. But nothing went wrong.

I exited those oversized doors, the mansion and the grounds. Apart from the ceremony, this will be my first time out of the estate. But this time I’m free to do what I want.

A large dirt pathway which started from the estate’s gate lead a long line into what I assume to be a village. I noticed the farther I walked, the more the trees started to lose their golden texture and eventually stopped being golden at all. I looked around for a secluded place outside of the estate. With forest on either side of the wall, it’s easy enough to do.

I walk into the forest and don’t stop walking until I can no longer feel eyes on my back.

“Bone devil.”

The ground in front of me erupts and my hideous monster pops out. It seemed he listened to my last command and actually followed me. If his loyalty stands this strong at all times, I can afford to keep him around. He will be useful. Very useful.

“Scout the area. Don’t let yourself be seen and call those two over. This must be done quickly, there is information I require from them.”

He jumped back into the hole he dug, the dirt closing behind him. A useful ability, a useful servant. How he can hear my commands so far deep under the ground I cannot say, but it means that listening to other conversations will be easy.

I sit down underneath the tree and wait, opening the book I had tucked under my arm this entire time.

“Bernard’s List of Monstrous Beasts”

I might as well read up on the types of things I’ll encounter here. Maybe even get information on my own servant. Right now, the only way I can understand him is through those two.

I flip to the first page,

“Chapter 1 – How to not get killed”

----

Diama’s POV

I was sitting in the top of the tree when Ostón burst out of the ground. We talked for a bit and it seemed that Lheos was calling us over.

Obviously, me and Diemo went. It was our job to watch over him after all.

We walked through Ostón’s tunnels slowly. Well… it was more of a crawl. Ostón made these tunnels very weak and thin so they would collapse on themselves later.

With Ostón being so big, I can’t imagine how he even dug a tunnel this small.

It was a long time before we reached light, when I first popped my head out, the first thing I saw was Lheos, reading a book.

“Hey! What do you need!”

I got straight to the point. Even though our job is to watch over him, I can’t stand to be around him. He gives off this unpleasant atmosphere. Ostón seems to like it though.

He looked up from his book, shutting it in the process.

“Did you know this is my first time being outside of the mansion?”

Huh? Is that what he called us for?

“I want to look around a bit before going back. I want to go to the town! There must be a town around here. Or maybe a village. But hat doesn’t matter. The only inhabitants of this world that I’ve seen are you, my family, their servants and those black-robed people…”

“If you haven’t noticed, none of those are normal people. So, guide me around the village!”

As he finished his sentence, Diemo had just gotten out of the hole.

“Huh? You want us to be your guides to a stupid village?”

He nodded. “I figured that you being here, in this world, longer, and not being contained in the mansion grounds would mean that you would have some knowledge, if not a lot of the outside world. Correct me if I’m wrong, I just don’t want to go to town and get lost. I could also use some capable bodyguards.”

I looked at him with disbelief. The right and left hand of the green-eyed god are meant to babysit a kid around in a village? I have to think of an excuse…

“We can’t go.” Diemo spoke up with the same intentions as I have. “Our eyes are green remember?”

He chided Diemo. I got annoyed.

“Tsk, Tsk. How stupid do you think I am? Again, you’ve been in this world longer than I have. Your bodies look about 13. If you’ve been here for 13 years, you would damn well know a way to bypass that problem you have about your eyes. I don’t know how you would do it though. Maybe a blindfold? Maybe a spell? All I know is that you have a way to trick the populace of this world into thinking that you are one of them.”

His logic struck center. Diemo was smart, but Lheos seemed smarter in this case. Although I don’t want to admit it.

“Fine.” I said. “We’ll go with you. Don’t except us to be happy about it though. We’re meant to watch, not help.”

Diemo sighed. “I didn’t want to move today. Why did I have to move today?”

He reached for a satchel on his side and pulled out two thin shards of glass.

Lheos looked at them in surprise and whispered something under his breath.

“Contacts? Really? In this world? That’s weird…”

I heard something about ‘this world’. But that was it. I grabbed two magic lenses from Diemo and carefully placed them in my eye. I remembered the last time I messed this up. It shattered and…

Ugh. Bad memories.

Lheos smiled.

“Your eyes are blue now! Crafty!”

Ostón seemed happy too.

“Okay, now we just go down the dirt road right?”

Diemo nodded his head.

“It leads to the nearest village, Bale. Your family gets their supplies from there.”

Lheos clapped his hands together…

“Okay! Lets go! Bone Devil, hide.”

…and started to walk off in the lead, expecting us to follow him. Ostón jumped into the earth, the rumbling sound he makes as he digs a tunnel slowly getting farther and farther away.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Lheos has gotten used to Ostón. He’s also gotten used to using Ostón, which I didn’t like.

I succumbed myself to my fate and started following him. Off we go…

---

Haha, off to the village we go! My first time too, what shall I do?

I know!

I’ll go get myself in trouble!

I need information on this world. What I need the most right now is information about the people that live here, the people that make up the base of this world.

I need to know about the fortunate, the unlucky and the desolate. I need to know.

I skipped down the road in glee. I’ll be getting that information very quickly.

I could here those two demon twins still following me. Good. They are important.

As we got closer and closer, the trees started to shrink in number, the thick forests turned into smalls copses into singular trees that dotted the vast fields of grass and farmland.

I looked around me, anywhere I looked I saw farmland. That… can’t be right. Wasn’t this supposed to be a village? How can a village have these many farmers?

I turned around to the demon twins.

“Hey… why are there this many farms around here. Shouldn’t there be only a few?”

They looked at me in surprise.

“This is a normal number of farms for a village. They need to feed the people after all.”

What? What do they mean feed the people?

As I was walking backwards, a huge shadow enveloped us.

When I turned around, I saw a massive wall that stretched for a long distance.

“Did we pass the village and head to the city?” I asked.

Again, they looked at me in surprise.

“This is the village. Cities are way bigger.”

I looked back up at the wall.

Huh? This is a village.

“Why does a village need gigantic walls like this, and why so many people?”

The male, I think his name was Diemo, spoke up. “To defend from the monsters. If we didn’t build these walls then monsters could easily come in and slaughter the civilians, and obviously we can’t build walls everywhere so we stuffed as many people as we could into these small settlements. This works well as the amount of people inside can easily maintain the walls and farms outside.”

I stared in disbelief at the massive structure. Apparently, this is only a village…

Wait. If this is only a village, does that means there are more out there!?

I wondered about the settlements in this world. If a village is as big as a city district, then a town must be as a big as a castle city…

How big do the cities get then?

I threw out my knowledge of settlements from my head. I can’t use another world’s logic in this one, even if they are similar.

We approached the wall and reached a massive gate.

Two guards waited outside. They looked at us confused for a brief moment. As if a bunch of kids wouldn’t be walking by themselves outside the cit- I mean village gates.

“Halt. What is your reason of entering?”

“I want to explore the village!”

The guards nodded and opened the gate. A short but dark tunnel led to a bright end.

We walked in.

?. That was way too easy. What if I was a bandit? Would you just let a bandit in? I decided to consult my guides about this.

“Hey, uh, Deimo. Why did they let us in so easily?”

He spoke while he was walking.

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Well, what if I was a person with malicious intentions? Would they have let me in so quickly? They didn’t even ask for my name! I could just walk in there and cause of a bunch of trouble!”

He laughed a bit.

“They know you’re from the Xapos mansion, and before you ask, no. It’s not because of your clothes.”

I looked down at my completely black clothes.

“Then how did they know?”

“Like I said before, this world is overrun by monsters. The cause? Unknown. Most people think the green-eyed demons did it.”

He closes the distance and whispers in my ear.

“Trust me, we didn’t.”

“There are four gates. One for each direction, north, west, east and south. We walked through the south gate. The only human settlement there is your family’s mansion. Since there are so many monsters around not just anyone can walk through the south gate. Did you notice how there are no monsters on the pathway between your house and the village? It’s because your family has guards placed there. Capable ones too. They defend against most of the monsters. The ones that get through are killed or turned around by magic.”

It makes logical sense. I can understand good logic, as well as respect it.

“I see. A bandit couldn’t just walk through the south gate, not only would they have to walk past the guards, they would have to bypass the monsters. Interesting.”

That brings up another point. The guards at the gate must have understood that logic as well. If gate guards are at this level of intelligence, how intelligent is the rest of the populace?

We finished our little chat just as we exited the tunnel. A moment of darkness turned into a years worth of light. I was temporarily blinded by the amount of sunlight that beamed on my face as I looked up.

As my eyes readjusted I could see a giant castle city, with houses everywhere, stacking the walls. They all lead up to what seems to be a court on the top of it all, in the center of the ‘village’.

The houses around the entrance were of those in the middle class. The cobble streets were clean and there was no garbage strewn around like anywhere around the world. It was decent.

Not what I excepted or hoped for.

Farther up the hill, the better the houses got. Around the middle there was what seemed to be a trading district. Even farther up was where I assumed the rich lived and finally as I observed before, the court at the very top of the hill, in the very center.

This amount of planned architecture is astounding. Sure, the houses looked like the more common urban sprawl but it was still so organized.

Either everyone in this world is smart, the education system here is good, or they have some very smart government and important officials. Maybe all three!

We walked past the middle of town. People gave us weird stares as we passed but then went back to whatever they were doing. Are strange visitors common?

Now to do what I came here for.

I observed the people here. Most of them are doing okay in life. They have mediocre homes, jobs and families. They also seem a little bit plush…

I saw two kids come out of a house. I noticed this elsewhere too. Seems like the average number of children is two.

The clothes they wore were exactly what I imagined for a fantasy realm. Common village folk clothes. Peasant folk? Whatever you would call it.

But there was a huge difference here than in my old world.

Gender equality.

I noticed that there were a lot more men at home playing with the children than there would be in my world. Albeit its not a lot more but in my old world, this would be something you would find once in a millennium. Men worked, women stayed and helped the children.

Here? Both men and women worked and both men and women assisted the children.

Amazing, their civilization has already trumped ours!

“Hey, Lheos. Where are we going?”

The girl asked an obvious question. I already figured that she would be the dumb one out of the two, she did seem stronger in her beast form. I guess the brain, brawn conflict in humans is still present in this world. There is no perfect balance…

“Hello?”

She says it louder.

“Oh right. That’s a shopping district up there, right? The one with a bunch of colours and tents? We’re going there.”

She nods and continues to not bother my important observations.

I looked at the houses more carefully.

They were your normal fantasy style houses. Cobblestone base with wood walls and pillars. A few windows here and there, flowers and a few other decorations…

Then I saw it.

Rain gutters. The gutters went right around the roof and then underneath the floors.

They collect rain and put it in a sewage system? Or maybe they use the rain for water? Wait, how do they get their water?

“Haha!”

I looked around and say a few kids playing around a stream of flowing water, behind the houses. I craned my neck to see where they went.

It seemed to flow past the houses and into somewhere in the wall. For where they started? It seemed like they started at a large basin of water at the very top, right beside the courthouse.

Is this like an aqueduct? The ingenious system the romans used?

I was bewildered. Their civilization really is better than ours.

This system was truly amazing and the place they found to set it up is amazing too. The hill is very gentle, the opposite of a cliff, yet still angled enough so that water flows down quickly. I don’t know what’s happening underneath built must require a lot of work. Then they built an entire city’s worth of housing on top and left enough space for a shopping district. Finally, they built a wall around the entire thing.

Amazing.

That’s all I had to say. Really.

And not once have I seen poverty. Not once!

After a long trek up the base of the hill, we reached the shopping district. A plethora of colours assaulted my eyes, they all said, ‘come here.’

I walked to the nearest stand. Simply two sticks sticking out of some dirt with a carpet hung over it. The products were just some fancy trinkets.

“Hey kid. Wanna buy something?”

I looked at the man. Scruffy was the first thought that came to mind.

“Uh, maybe later.”

“Ok, you come back later now, ye hear?”

As if. I browsed through some other stores. There were a lot of products here, most of them should be useless to a common villager but there were a lot of sales going on.

What I was surprised to see was that there was no one selling any food.

“Hey, Diemo. Why is there no one selling food anywhere?”

*Sigh* Did he just sigh at me?

“If you look around hard enough you’ll find maybe one.”

“That’s not what I meant! I mean, why isn’t there a lot more, or maybe a big store with lots of food in it? Why is these only these stupid trinket shops?”

*Sigh* Did he just do it again?!?

“Have you been listening. I thought your logic was pretty good since you figured my bluff out so quickly. I told you this many time but I’ll tell you again. There are many monsters in this world. Travelling is too dangerous, and if you want to travel safely, you need money.”

“Okay… go on.”

“Getting food from outside sources would be too risky, that’s why most of the people here grow their own food. Most of them are farmers.”

“But if they don’t sell their food, how do they get money? No one is selling food here!”

“They don’t sell their food. Food is used like a currency here. In villages, you must pay taxes. Here, taxes are paid through food and pure supplies, or money, if you have it.”

“Wait, wouldn’t that mean there would be a surplus of food? There was a whole ton of farming space out there!”

“Yes, but most of the land is split up. The farmers farm their small section of land. They pay their taxes on harvest day and keep the rest of the food for over the unfarmable days. That way there is no surplus.”

Ah, that’s why they looked a little cushiony than normal. Not fat, nor skinny, just a little extra. Like a modern person in today’s time. I expected all of them to be gaunt like our world.

“Goodness. This world is so advanced. The places where they do sell food, they are manned by...?”

“The court officers. Using some of the extra food they get (because they do get a lot), they sell it to those who work here…”

He twirls around.

“In the shops! Of course, the shops could just trade food for their products but currency does exist here.”

Wait. If they don’t sell their food, how do they get money?

“That’s a problem. If they don’t sell food, how do they get money?’

“I said if you had the money. The only people that usually have money are the rich and shops here. The system gets really complicated if you add money into account, do you want me to explain it still?”

The demon girl spoke up. “Please don’t.”

I ignored her. “Yes, please, I would love to hear more about this world!”

He smiled and seemed happy to explain economics in this crazy village.

“Hehe, this isn’t the right place for a bunch of little kids from above to be walking around…”

Right as Diemo was about to explain where money fits in this trade system this ‘village’ has established I noticed the surroundings had changed considerably.

Dirt everywhere. Broken buildings and shattered windows. Crying kids and desolate faces.

The slums. I found them!

“How did we walk down the dirt tunnel without noticing?”

The dirt tunnel, what does he mean? We walked down a tunnel?

A man walked out of an alleyway, grinning.

“Hey boys, it seems that these kids don’t know where we are! Lets show em where we are…”

The various people around us walked into their homes quickly and shut the doors.

I smiled.

“Perfect… I was looking for you!”