The train ride was pretty comfortable, the vehicle could move around forty kilometers per hour and it was ten meters wide, so it had plenty of room for people to sit on both sides of the vehicle. I had a seat for myself since I stayed away from the entrance and kept my hood on.
‘I need to lower my hood a bit, while it also hides my ears… Rayner is the one who has real power, and it will take a while before he hears about this. I don’t think that he will look for me if my death isn’t confirmed, but… I guess his first wife also has some power.’
Jacques’ mother was a high priest, after all. She was pretty close to the top of the holy order and her father was the leader of the whole institution. I don’t know the guy, but if his grandson and daughter are to be used as references…
‘No point in thinking about that. The next town has a dungeon with ten floors. I need to explore it a bit and get two classes and enough money to move further away from this territory.’
The trip lasted for one hour and soon I disembarked. The place was called Pirla and the dungeon was twenty minutes away from it. I lowered my hood a bit to show my face around, but the hood didn’t fall that much to show my ears. No one was paying attention to me since a lot of people were leaving the station.
I read that this town wasn’t famous for anything, aside from receiving a lot of new adventurers. It would have been convenient if the monsters were ordinary goblins, but I couldn’t ask for everything to be that easy. In any case, the monsters were horned wolves and their parameters inside the dungeon were low, so it was fine.
‘Well, first stop… the adventurers guild.’
I was still in the Dawnshield territory, so it was surprising that a dungeon that didn’t belong to the family was so close. The reason for that was the classes that could be obtained there, they weren’t combat classes, so the nobles didn’t feel like they needed to buy their rights. Rayner also knew that trying to buy all the dungeons could cause some problems... having some allies in the guilds was a good thing.
As I left the station, I found that while the town was pretty simple, it was clean and organized. Some guards were patrolling the place and they were wearing the crest that I saw in front of the gate of Rayner’s home. It was a shield with the sun embedded in it. They seemed calm enough, so it was fair to assume that they hadn’t heard anything yet.
‘I need a bow too… I want to create my own, but that will have to wait. Can’t let myself be noticed by my own creations.”
The town housed around three thousand people, so the number of weapon shops wasn’t that high. Still, they had enough stuff for beginners in stock. At the first shop, I found an ordinary bow with a quiver filled with fifteen ironhead arrows. The whole set cost four terra coins… the same price as two of the old models of my slingshot.
‘Ten Terra coins for the fare of the train, and four more now… I only have six left. Maybe I should have shaken off that merchant.’
It would be risky, but I was starting to be mindful of my expenses… I didn’t have to do that before since food was always available. Now I had to consider food, lodge, repairs, and so on.
I only slept four hours tonight, so I wasn’t in the best shape, but I had to make as much progress as possible today. After putting the quiver on my waist and the bow on my back, I headed to the other side of the town where the adventurers' guild was…
The adventurers guild was hard to miss… it looked like a saloon from the old west. Everything was made of wood and looked a bit run down as well. Still, what stood out was the noise coming from it. It was only nine in the morning, but I could hear laughs coming from a distance… noise that only drunkards would make.
As if that wasn’t enough when I got close enough, the entrance broke after someone passed through it while flying… it was a boy who was around fifteen. His eyes had turned white and his cheeks were swollen probably thanks to some punches.
The laughs coming from the guild echoed more loudly than before and then a tall and muscular woman showed up and then spat in front of the entrance.
“Touch my ass again, and then I will smash your balls the next time.”
The woman had short hair was quite tall and muscular and a roughed-squared face… she didn't seem older than thirty, so she probably used some crazy substances to become as jacked as that. Another possibility was that she had a bit of the Collusus blood in her veins. She was tall, but she wasn’t four meters tall like the Colossus I had read about.
“What are you looking at?”
The woman glared at me and said that. I was just passing by, so I just shrugged before she snorted and returned to the guild. As I had expected, the adventurers guild of that place was more like a gathering of ruffians. It was still morning, but people were already drinking and partying, or perhaps they were just continuing from the night.
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On the other side of the place, there was a balcony, in one side, there were a lot of bottles of booze and someone was filling some mugs with beer or something that smelled like it. On the other side, there was a more quiet area with the board of the missions of the guild.
The guys around looked at me for a moment, but soon they lost interest and resumed their drinking. On the balcony, there were two women. The one serving the booze and food was wearing quite a skimpy outfit, revealing a lot of skin and her insane cleavage.
On the other side, there was a woman of around twenty years old wearing glasses and clothes that made me recall those traditional German parties. She was writing something down or trying to, she was losing her focus quite often thanks to the noise.
“Hello, I would like to become an adventurer.”
The guild receptionist raised her face and studied me. I felt like my body was being zapped a bit and that told me that she was using an identification skill or her glasses were doing that for her. Fortunately, my ring of misformation could alter my information, even my age and name. Right now, what she could see was this:
Name: Regis
Race: Human
Health: 70/70
Regen: 0.1 per hour
Mana: 70/70
Regen: 0.1 per minute
Stamina: 70/70
Regen: 0.1 per minute
Traits:
Classes:
Aptitudes:
Experience: 00
“Regis, is it? The registration fee costs five terra coins to produce your adventurer card.”
I felt my heart shattering, I was going under faster than the speed of light… will I even have enough money in one week to buy food?
“Okay.”
I paid the lady the five Terra coins, I felt that I reached rodeoman levels of not giving a fuck when it comes to money. I want to stay in the town for a week to save the Terra coins for the train fare, but maybe I will have to walk or something.
“Please, wait for a bit.”
The receptionist left to the back of the guild but soon returned with a card. It looked like it was made of stone…
“Thanks for waiting. With this card, you can accept the jobs at this guild and it will register your progress before reaching the next rank. Your current rank is Stone, and you can accept jobs on the Stone and Copper ranks. To reach the next rank, you need to obtain five thousand mana core points.”
I could see some of my information in the card, but it was the fake information, of course. Aside from that, there were the Mana Core Points: 00. I received them by selling mana cores at the guilds and completing some missions based on their difficulty. I knew all that already, but I had to confirm other things.
“Is there anything else I need to know?”
“For now, you only need to know the rules in all guilds. No drawing your weapons inside the guild or in the cities and towns unless you are being threatened. You can’t harm our clients either. You can’t lose your card and you can’t give up from a job without returning to the guild and informing us and also paying a fee that is equal to twenty percent of the reward of the job. To change from one guild to another, you need to at least increase your rank to Copper. As your rank increases, you will gain some benefits that will be disclosed in due time.”
I nodded and then proceeded to check the jobs list. I only found jobs in Stone, Copper, and Silver ranks. It made sense since anything more difficult than that would require one to go pretty deep into a dungeon or go on a job very far away from the area of the guild.
The ranks were Stone, Copper, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Mithril, Adamantite, Obsidian, Crystal and Aetherium. Each one had their own requirements of points to be increased… someone with luck didn’t have to complete a lot of jobs, but someone unlucky would have to fight a lot.
‘I need a knife to dig out the mana cores… finding them is supposed to be hard, but I found a trick thanks to those books that I read. I basically had to touch the corpse of a monster and then look for the toughest parts of their bodies… the mana core would usually be there.’
Need a Delivery Boy
Objective: Deliver a package from the blacksmith to the mayor’s office before sundown.
Reward: 10 Breeze Coins, 10 Mana Core Points
Herb Collector
Objective: Gather a specific set of herbs for the town’s healer from the nearby forest.
Reward: 20 Breeze Coins, 20 Mana Core Points
Carpenter's Apprentice
Objective: Help the carpenter with a small project.
Reward: 30 Breeze Coins, 25 Mana Core Points
All the stone-rank jobs were things like that. Doing chores for others. They took a bit of time too, so it would require someone to do them for a while reaching the next rank. Fortunately, there were plenty of jobs to hunt down the wolves in the dungeon. People in the town wanted their meat, hide, teeth, and claws for all sort of purposes.
For those who came from another place and had some classes already, those wouldn’t be that hard, even without combat classes, but those who were planning to get one usually would need a party to get theirs first, if they wanted to return unscathed.
Having more people would be more beneficial since more stuff could be carried, but I didn’t have that luxury, I needed to stay clear since interacting with others was the same as inviting danger. Besides, parties are usually formed by those who have old friends, people that they can count on to watch their backs.
‘I guess I should focus on gathering mana cores and the wolves' claws. They are pretty valuable and a lot of people need them… I can stock them up and then just deliver those for the clients.’
I didn’t know how many I would be able to hunt by myself, so I decided to pick a quest to get five sets of horned wolf claws. That would be a good way to measure my skill and my actual strength.