– Era of the Wastes, Cycle 218, Season of the Setting Moon, Day 11 –
Terry had not slept much the night before, even less than normal for him. It was no fault of his room at the inn. The room was fine and no one had bothered him. It was not because of one of the recurring nightmares of himself running from monsters either. Even though he had dreamed about fleeing from undead hellspawn, he had slept through it.
No.
Terry did not wake up with cold sweat or in a panic. He awoke because his inner Academy Student had risen his head early by letting his dream-self think about the way he was summoning the layers of divine mana while fleeing.
Waking up with an idea for something he had been wondering about in the evening was not unusual for Terry, but this time the idea shook him awake completely as soon as it had appeared.
Terry dazedly sat up in his bed. He was still in his clothes and armor. Going to sleep fully equipped was a habit he did not intend to drop until he reached his home in Arcana City. He looked at his open hand and observed himself while punching out.
Back when he and his siblings had first began training hand-to-hand combat, Bjorln had drilled into them the importance of basic timing.
Terry got out of bed and began practicing one of the most basic training routines he had ever learned. First, he positioned his arms angled in front of his face. His hands were open. Then he jabbed his arm forward – still with an open hand – and only right before his hand would collide with his imaginary target, he clenched his hand into a tight fist.
Any punch that ended in a fist had a contradicting duality at its core. A relaxed hand did not carry the required impact, but a clenched fist impeded speed. Punching with an improperly clenched fist risked breaking your own fingers, but tightening the muscles too early broke the momentum of your punch. The constriction of muscles required for tightening your fist properly was an obstacle for the movement of the punch itself.
Proper timing was paramount.
A rookie was well-advised to err on the side of clenching their fist too early. Better to punch slower and weaker than to break your own hand. Going beyond average technique, however, required mastering the timing required for both open-handed and closed-fist movement.
Terry subconsciously slowed down his routine. “Fast…” He pushed his arm forward with open hand. “Hard…” He clenched his fist at the last moment before the visualized impact on his imaginary target.
“Fast…” The memory of liquid mana coursing through his channels was etched into his mind. “Hard…”
Terry stopped his routine and instead began channeling mana into the divine hammer inscription. He had always focused on creating the divine mana layers as an instant structure and then aimed at creating them faster and tougher, but what if his initial understanding had already been off?
He had succeeded in creating barriers, but what if the same mental model that had helped achieve this success was impeding his goal of using the inscription offensively?
The renowned divine hammer inscription was a general purpose inscription, which meant that there was more than one way to use it. It was less like a spell and more like a tool for aiming divine mana. Mastering that tool was different from perfecting spell control.
Hard…
Terry knew how to create tough layers of divine mana. He subconsciously clenched his fists. He had always created the divine mana at its destination with the aimed mana manifesting only at the target. Thinking about it brought back the memory of the liquid mana in his body. How the liquid pushed through corners. How it slowly dammed up before rushing forward with increased pressure…
Fast…
Terry tried something new. Instead of creating the structure directly by only aiming for the destination, he spread out the divine mana all the way to the destination and then concentrated on pushing it towards the destination before the structure manifested. He subconsciously opened his hand and punched while picturing mana manifest like a liquid whip.
What if the structure was not supposed to be created already stable? What if the structure was supposed to whip into place?
Solidifying only at the last possible moment. Right before impact…
The hour in which Terry should have continued sleeping, he was training instead. At the end of his training session, he was convinced. He had merely been able to create a tiny flicker of divine mana with his new approach, but his mana detection field convinced him that there was no doubt about it.
That tiny flicker had moved his oscillating mana. Moved not through the interaction with mana, but through a collision in the physical realm. The only way this was possible was if the divine mana created momentum to push the air.
Terry had succeeded! He had created a divine hammer! Tiny and fragile, but still! He had finally figured out how to go about it. The rest was just a matter of time and training. He was grinning one of the widest grins he had worn for years.
It took all of Terry’s self-discipline to not spend the day holed up in his room with his notebooks and inscribed wraps. Unfortunately, he still had to worry about securing a way back to Arcana. He needed money, which meant he needed to find someone willing to pay him. He had to look for a proper job.
Typical.
I’ve spent years stuck in places with little more than time and my brain chooses NOW of all times to get some inspiration for wielding the divine hammer inscription.
Just typical…
Terry naturally understood that his newfound inspiration was largely rooted in his dungeon defense experience. More precisely, in the sensation of liquid mana rushing through his channels. Added to that, he still had to mull it over while continuously using the inscription to move through the sky for months. He understood that the timing was hardly the fault of his own brain.
However, understanding all that didn’t prevent him from feeling grumpy about it. When Terry left his room to search for jobs, the fleeting feeling of elation was already gone and only an unsatisfied expression remained on his face.
***
“Hm…” Terry let his eyes wander over the tall building that served as the local Guild headquarters. It was not quite as large and pompous as the one in Arcana City, but it still looked a lot more impressive than the one Terry had seen in Tiv’s Libra Outpost. It was one of two buildings that marked the city-state’s skyline, with only the palace reaching higher.
Terry never stopped walking while taking in the sights. He did not need to rely on his eyes to see. The sensations from his detection field and mana touch had become ingrained in his instincts. He skillfully weaved through the crowd of people without even paying attention.
More than one person inhaled to chide Terry to look where he was going, only to see the man with his averted eyes sidestep them before they had a chance to voice their complaints, leaving them momentarily stumped, which invited a rebuke from those behind them.
More than one person had their eyes on Terry’s purse, only to find the man covered in shadow fabric stare right at them a moment later.
There were a few audacious thieves that dared to use their mana to investigate the nature of his storage items. They were trying to probe the security mechanisms with their own mana from a distance. The well-made cloaking on the items made it difficult and they had to concentrate fully on their mana sight. They all found themselves blinded by a sudden contraction of dense mana that flashed glaringly right in front of their eyes.
As if that had not been enough of a fright, the intense mana then shaped into finger runes that directly told them to: [Piss off.]
Not all of the thieves were familiar with finger runes directly communicating intent into their minds through mana sight. Those unfamiliar had the shit scared out of them and fled hurriedly.
None of the thieves had ever seen finger runes created directly in front of their eyes, without the accompanying fingers within sight. Together with the way they had been spotted so quickly, this caused even the greediest among them to become wary.
It was enough for all of them to back off and allow Terry to proceed undisturbed. Eventually, he arrived in front of a receptionist.
“I’m looking for work,” declared Terry.
“Good for you,” grunted the man behind the counter. The elf was using a nail file on his fingernails and barely glanced at Terry. The sight of a man whose only claim to mana appeared to be a magic cloak, who was wearing a seemingly random assortment of colors and, by extension, equipment, did not inspire much confidence. He sighed: “Just what we need. More foreign amateurs…”
The receptionist frowned and then put the nail file away. “Well, at least you’re not just trying to mooch off everyone else like so many other visitors, so…” He finally turned his full attention to Terry. “Show me your Guild card.”
Terry decided to ignore the less than welcome attitude. “I don’t have any.”
“Great.” The receptionist replied with sarcasm, but immediately rummaged through some of his papers to get a sign-up form. “Some identification then.”
“I have this.” Terry retrieved his Guardian card and presented it without letting go.
“Oh?” The receptionist’s expression brightened somewhat but a skeptical tone remained. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of those. Usually comes with a nosy busybody attached. Just great.” He tried to take the card from Terry but the card didn’t budge. “...you do realize I’ll have to take it to examine it?”
“Why?” Terry blurted out. He did not like the idea of giving the card out of his hands. The last time someone else had access to his Guardian card, all of his links had been erased.
“Because…” The receptionist realized that, technically, he did not need to take the card. He just needed to inject his own mana. “...whatever.” The man’s expression brightened somewhat when scanning Terry’s mission record. Outdated as it was, it still proved that he was not a complete amateur.
The receptionist removed his hand from the card and began taking some notes. “Now, I just need you to inject some of your own mana into the card.” When Terry did so, the receptionist nodded.
While not explicitly advertised, the cards carried a rough means to identify their owners, or rather their owner’s mana signature. It was not really a separate feature and more of a by-product of the card’s use. The more contact with a specific mana signature those cards had, the more in sync they would become. Quicker reaction to the mana. Clearer mana lines on activation.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
While it did not strictly identify the intended owner, but rather the most frequent user, it was often taken as a means of identification, or at least as further evidence. It was hardly fool-proof, but good enough for most purposes.
The receptionist was filling out the form for Terry and muttered. “...track record in dungeon work…” Eventually, he paused. “Age?”
The Guardian card only recorded the time of Terry’s earliest mission and taken courses. It did not verify his age since people could start working as a Guardian at different stages in life. Terry and his siblings were among the youngest Guardian trainees. Only extreme cases like his possessed cousin Matteo would start mission work even younger.
“Uhh…” Terry was at a loss.
The receptionist looked up and raised an eyebrow. “I did not consider that a difficult question. Age?”
“Uhm.” Terry tried to order his thoughts. “What date is today?”
“Ah.” The receptionist nodded. “Just arrived from long travels, I take it. Happens sometimes. We have the Setting Moon.” The elven man was looking at Terry and waited for him to finally answer the question.
“Cycle 218… uhh…” Terry still muttered in thought, which caused the receptionist’s eyebrow to sneak up once more. “Uhm. Hard to say.”
“Are you kidding me?” The receptionist was exasperated. “How old are you? It’s not like I care, but some work has an age restriction. It’s not that hard of a question, is it?”
What kind of work has an age restriction? The Guild in Tiv let Matteo participate in death hunts when he was barely sixteen…
Focus.
Weirdo.
“Not a hard question.” Terry tried to explain himself. “What if someone spent dilated time in dao chambers? Or aged through magic means? Or…?” He furrowed his brow and tried to recollect if he had other experiences to account for.
The receptionist stared at Terry for a moment and then grumbled while shaking his head. “I don’t even want to know.” He caught Terry’s gaze. “Look, I don’t care. You tell me a number and I’ll write it down. As simple as that, see?”
“Twenty-two.” Terry finally replied. Ignoring all the complicated nuances, that was his current age since last season.
“Great.” The receptionist filled out the form. “Well done.” The elven man made no attempt to hide his sarcasm, but Terry didn’t care. Eventually, the elf reached the last question. “Do you want to also open an account to deposit your earnings?”
“You mean I can deposit money here?” asked Terry.
The receptionist rolled his eyes at the display of ignorance. “Yes. We also function as a bank. If you show your Guild card, invoices will be sent here and billed to your account. If you overdraw your account, fees will apply. The fees are at our discretion. Better fees for better adventurers.”
Terry was feeling conflicted. On the one hand, his inner dungeon hoarder recoiled at the idea of giving something away for someone else to look after. On the other hand, he had often found himself broke and a bank deposit was like an additional safe-guard if he split his money between his storage items and there.
Eventually, the latter argument won out. “I’ll take the account.” Terry retrieved half of his current money and placed it on the counter.
“Look at that. I had figured you were broke.” The receptionist began counting the money. It was a lot more than he had expected.
When Terry had sold the magic sword, he had no idea about the local currency. He had preferred smaller nominations over the larger coins with the assumption that he would be able to use them at more places. He had been proven right when paying for food and shelter, because it was more appropriate and practical to pay in smaller coins.
The large number of coins had not bothered Terry when they were in his dimensional bag, but seeing it all on the counter looked ridiculous. He almost felt bad for the receptionist, who had to correctly count all of it.
“Why gold?” Terry involuntarily blurted out. “Or silver and copper?”
“What?” The receptionist continued counting without lifting his eyes.
“Why use these metals as a currency?” Terry thought he might as well try to get an answer to satisfy his curiosity. Arcana had used mana coins before the barrier broke and backed the point system at the Guardians and Guild since then. Tiv and Thanatos were both using specific paper notes – their own fiat currencies. He stared at the pile of metal pieces that was straining the poor wooden table. “Just seems impractical.”
The receptionist grumbled with annoyance. He made a note to not lose track of the current sum and made sure to properly separate the coins already counted from those still to be counted. Then, he sighed pointedly and lifted his eyes to look at Terry. “Because the new government has learned from the mistakes of the previous queen. An arrogant woman who believed she knew better than all the king’s ancestors. That woman believed she could run the country with printed money and she nearly ran the whole country into the ground. Thankfully, the new government, for all its other faults, is more sane and finally pegged the currency to gold again.”
Odd. Are they sure that paper money was the reason for their problems? Seems to work in other Empires. Thanatos and Tiv, well Tiv might not be a good example either, but for other reasons. It seems to work in Thanatos at least.
Terry tried to remember a passage from the Warlord’s Inquiries that dealt with economics. He was sure there was a statement about pegging a currency to material goods. The passage did not come back easily to his mind. Economics and politics had not been of particular interest to Terry when he had been trapped in a cell. Perhaps he could look it up again later. He still carried the book that Damian had given him. The whole concept of singling out specific metals appeared strange.
Seeing the varied expressions of thought, skepticism, and incredulity that were plainly flashing across Terry’s face, the annoyed receptionist grumbled some more. “Do you have any other questions to prove your ignorance about the country you chose to move to? Or can I return to my task of counting those coins that were never intended for large transactions?”
Terry was not used to having his honest curiosity be rewarded with unbridled snark. In a slightly flustered tone, he mumbled: “Go ahead. Uhm, thanks.”
“Polite, now that’s rare.” The receptionist muttered and returned to his counting task.
That’s it! Terry finally remembered the passage from the book or at least the beginning of the discussion. ‘Tying the worth of your currency to mined materials translates to strictly limiting the growth of your overall economy to the growth exclusively in the mining sector.’
Odd.
Terry was curious how a proponent of the system would reply to the Warlord’s critical observation, but he did not think the elven man in front of him would appreciate further questions. Therefore, he wrestled down his inner Academy Student to let the receptionist focus on his business, so that Terry could proceed onto the next point.
Soon after, Terry was standing in front of a blackboard that displayed the available mission work and he was trying hard to remember all the warning signs of rookie traps that his Uncle Samuel had mentioned in the past.
The good news was that there were plenty of jobs Terry could take. The bad news was that the most profitable ones were separated into two categories: Those that required significant travel time and those that were allocated by a quota system.
Terry ruled out several mana corrupted hunts that would require days of travel. While the pay-off on its own appeared good, it looked different when taking the travel time into account. The pay per day ratio was worse than some of the regular work contracts.
Perhaps when I can skip some nights of sleep? Or when I’m out hunting for myself?
Terry decided to prepare a proper schedule for his jobs. He picked one of the jobs for which he would have to wait his turn. If he had understood the receptionist right, then his previous experience should shorten the wait time somewhat.
The paper in Terry’s hands was a mission to collect mana cores from a dungeon. From what he had researched, there were two dungeons not far from the city’s border. One low-level and the other in the middle ranks. The work was profitable and the times when Terry had been squeamish about entering dungeons were long gone.
Compared to what he had faced in the Valkyrie’s prison dungeon and the curse containment tomb, even an average veil tear did not seem as intimidating anymore. A part of him was looking forward to testing his improved scouting and battle abilities in a regular dungeon. Perhaps it was reckless, but he also did not feel like teaming up with strangers at this point.
Of course, he did not plan to abandon all caution. He still carried some of the Mark-and-Recall scrolls as well as some other dungeon tools they had purchased in Arcana when diving for cores after the barrier had broken.
Terry retrieved one of his notebooks and sketched a weekly calendar for himself. He marked the times he should be allowed to dive the dungeons.
He selected a bunch of other job posters that dealt with filling up mana containers. Some were for research into mana decay in general and others were part of quality control on the decay rate inside a new local product line of containers. Fortunately, aspect impairments were not disqualifying and those jobs were a perfect fit for him.
Even though the nominal pay was not that high, the pay per time invested was great. It would not take Terry long to fill the containers up and it was easy money. Unfortunately, the client only required a limited amount of containers filled per day.
Terry paused when deciding on how to add the mana provisioning missions into his schedule. He could probably fill up the daily quota in less than fifteen minutes.
Perhaps in parallel during my early practice…
He simply made a note next to the week and then moved onto the remaining job postings.
If it had been just about making a living, then Terry would not have anything to complain about, but he wanted money fast. He did not want to spend another year before reaching Arcana again.
No matter how Terry looked at the different mission options, he would sit around for most of the week if he just stuck to what he already knew. There were not enough cullings or gathering missions to fill his days.
Terry was happy to discover a pretty simple transport task that was even a regularly issued mission. The task was basically to safely transport some merchandise from one end of the city to the other. The high payment was justified by the amount of goods to transport. Most people would probably have to organize carts, horses, and guards to transport everything.
Terry did not plan to do any such thing, however. He possessed an authentic crafter’s pendant from Arcana and he still had not seen the limits of its dimensional storage.
He continued looking around while filling in his schedule. However, no matter how he looked at it, there were still too many empty hours. The missions that caught his eyes were mostly those he could take care of quickly or that were sadly allocated by a quota.
Eventually, Terry resigned himself to also consider jobs that would pay by hour instead of by result, which brought him to the escort mission and bodyguard section on the job board.
He ruled out the escort missions that required longer travel times or moving away from his real destination. Most of the remaining missions were about following some merchant or other across the city and into various business meetings, which did not sound pleasant at all.
“Flower Protector?” Terry reached a guard mission that carried a weird title. Is this about guarding a garden? A garden would be stationary. No travel time…
Terry carefully read over the contents. To his pleasant surprise, it only required him to stay in a building and act as a guard. He would act like some kind of bouncer on demand, which basically left him free to train while getting paid for doing it around there instead of anywhere else. The hours were late but only started after noon and he could even negotiate days off, which was perfect for fitting it into his schedule.
The only catch was that the job required an interview with the client that Terry had to pass first if he wanted to accept the mission.
Worst case, I fail. So what?
Terry did a quick mental calculation. If he accepted all those missions, and comparable jobs for the upcoming weeks, then, depending on how the dungeon work would go, he might be able to scrape enough money for a ticket together in a couple of months. Hopefully, even before the next season would start.
Feeling quite good with his prospects in reaching his destination, Terry was about to leave the Guildhall when he spotted the news board. Sadly, it was hard to preserve his good mood after seeing the regional news. Death tolls. Missing person reports. Pictures of devastation. Accounts of undead hellspawn ravaging villages and towns.
Terry could not help but remember the group of undead hellspawn he had sensed months before. He had barely made it out of the folded space with its mana-cursed fungus army when he had to face off with martialists like Shen’s mother Mei and then he encountered the hellspawn on his way away from them.
Terry had been so tired back then. Sensing the undead hellspawn, his mind had immediately jumped to fleeing and avoiding the horde’s trajectory.
He had fled and escaped.
The news showed him what had happened to those unable to do the same.
It made him feel sick.
For a moment, Terry wondered why he was feeling like that. In the folded space, he had rarely lifted a finger when he had discovered people at risk of dying. He did not know the martialists. He did not know their conflicts or whose fault it was. What reason would he have to interfere?
In the folded space, there had only been a handful of people for whom Terry felt somewhat responsible and those were the people with whom he had some semblance of a relationship like Guillermo or the Blazing Sun Sect siblings.
Most of the times Terry had chosen to interfere anyway, he had come to regret it later. Save someone from a beast only to be attacked by them for the beast’s remains afterwards.
While he had felt sickened in the folded space, this felt different.
Picturing the potential threat to his home had made Terry choose to stay behind in the pocket realm and to face the threat. However, only a few days later, he had chosen to ignore a threat that was already roaming his native realm.
Terry closed his eyes.
He just wanted to go home.
Home to his family and friends.
Home to his peace.
Terry suddenly felt extremely tired. He did not feel like job searching anymore. He just wanted to return to his room and lose himself in practicing the divine hammer inscription. Something to quiet his incessant thoughts.
***