I kept moving until noon of the next day… eating the rest of my food made me stay awake until then. Some fights also made me stay focused, but I never expected to find some eyeball bats outside the dungeon. They probably had escaped many years ago and bred in that area somehow. Still, the people in the surroundings were doing a bad job keeping those creatures around... they were pretty close to the town.
Although I crossed around twenty kilometers, the forest didn’t give any signs of ending. I knew that the forest marked the borders between Dawnshield territory and of another noble family, but seeing on the map and crossing on foot were two different things.
When I realized that I was about to collapse, I found a hollow space in a tree and decided to hide there… I also moved some bushes to help me with that. I didn’t even have time to check if the hideout was good enough, I just collapsed inside.
When I woke up, I was surrounded by darkness… I panicked but soon realized that I was still in the same spot and then sighed in relief.
‘Shit… this is no way of waking up.’
I left the hideout and began to walk in the same direction. I marked some trees to make sure that I wouldn’t get lost, but soon I stopped with that since I didn’t want to leave traces of my footsteps. I had to reach the next town and then leave on the first train. Since the next town was in the territory of another family, I would probably be fine.
‘I guess I will have to shave my head… I don’t have ink for a tattoo, so that is the only way.’
I became quite fond of my white hair, it had a certain glow on it, so it didn’t make me look old, but a bit different. Regardless, if it was on the way, then I needed to dispose of it for now. The roots of my hair were turning white and the dye was losing its color with each time I washed it.
Rayner should still be fighting on the sea against the pirates, so other people in the family must be leading the searches… probably his wives since they didn’t want to lose affection points with him. It was hard to imagine that Jacques would do that, being that I was half undead and he just graduated from the knights' academy and was climbing the ranks of the holy order. As for Gerald, he would be graduating soon.
When the sun was rising, I found the end of the forest and the next town on the way… I didn’t have to stop there, but I decided to wait a bit and clean myself on the nearby river. There was no dungeon around, so the town was quite small, it was only a brief stop for the train.
While checking my image on the river, I made sure that I cut all my hair… now I stood out in a different way. I looked like a monk, but I was too young to be one. There was a monk subdivision in the holy order, if I remember well, they were called the Iron Hand and they had a monastery and everything. To join, they needed the Cleric class, the warrior class, and the brawler class. I thought that they would make some oaths like not having wives and properties, but they could have that.
‘With a scar across my face, I would look a bit older, but a recent one would only make me suspicious… that will have to wait.'
In any case, I waited until seven in the morning before heading to the town and to the train station. I looked a bit haggard, but the guards at the entrance didn’t stop me. I looked around for posters with my face, but I didn’t find any, so I had a hard time holding back my sigh of relief.
When I reached the train station, the train had just arrived… there was a small queue in front of me… the people looked a bit old and I wondered where they were going, it couldn’t be the same stop as me. This time around, I paid thirty Terra coins since I would travel for three hours. The train would cross quite a distance and my stop would be near the border of the empire after crossing two territories.
As soon as I sat down, I felt exhaustion and hunger taking over me… fortunately, there was a restaurant on the train as well, so I ordered some food. When the young lady brought my breakfast, she furrowed her eyebrows while looking at my shiny head. Perhaps thanks to my Dexterity, my head looked like a disco ball.
‘Rayner might want to keep the search for me, but it will get too expensive if he tries to search the whole empire… at the same time, he will basically advertise that I vanished. He probably won’t do that since he was keen on keeping me under the protection of his family name. He is probably doing that because my mother in this world told him to do so… or so the cliches say. Another thing that he can do is pass the message only to those who work in the guilds, it would decrease the commotion caused.'
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There was a certain sense of obligation, guys who are too uptight and worry a lot about honor like Rayner were like that. Still, I couldn’t keep thinking about that forever… I left some problems behind and I had to focus on my future actions until they caught up to me.
My next destination was a city called Ironcliif, it had a weird name because it was also a bustling merchant center as well as one of the first lines of defense of the empire between the human lands, the kingdom of Talimor and the Aesira Empire.
The Aesira Empire floats among the clouds, with its lands built on flying islands. Harpies are the primary inhabitants, practicing aerial combat and weather manipulation. Avians, though once considered outcasts, have gained a place in society as messengers and scouts.
I heard about that… floating islands, but it was still hard to believe how they could possibly exist. They had ordinary lands too, but few of them lived in those areas and they didn’t let anyone take over those areas.
Harpies are quite violent, particularly agaisnt humans. That is why the production of bows and arrows is advanced in that place and that was why I was heading there, to find a job doing production work behind the scenes and build my other skills.
The Kingdom of Talimor is a melting pot of various species, particularly half-dwarves, half-elves, and half-orcs. It is known for its tolerance and cultural exchange. The cities are bustling centers of trade and education, where magic, technology, and diverse traditions flourish side by side. The half-elves often act as diplomats, while half-orcs have become renowned for their strength in the army.
Still, even while that looks like the most peaceful place for someone like me to be, things aren’t so simple. Just like the Bastion Empire had things like the royalists, and the holy order, the kingdom of Talimor also had its own organizations… one of them was the Twilight Brotherhood. This suspicious faction is dedicated to espionage, subterfuge, and assassination. They wanted revenge for being looked down on for being mixed races. They constantly invade human lands as well to kill those in power and their armies to weaken them.
I was heading to a difficult place, it was quite dangerous, but the people there had too many problems to worry about a single kid like me finding work there. The city also had a dungeon of Abyssal rank with thirty floors. So, I could obtain experience fighting invaders, working, and going to the dungeon.
‘Fighting for the empire feels quite troublesome… they hate me, after all. I guess I won’t do it unless I am forced to.’
Upgrading my skills to make bows for a while will put me on the right path… I had to increase the effectiveness of all that Dexterity, after all. Since that was also the first big city I was going to work in for a while, then I should be able to find a lot of things that would benefit me in other aspects too. Still, I could only hope that I would have the peace to do so… having to run away again would be too much of a pain.
After thinking along those lines, I fell asleep on the train and only woke up when the train stopped for a couple of minutes in the towns along the way. The passengers who looked a bit old left those towns and the train got quite empty. It looked like not many people wanted to head or live in a place that was constantly attacked by harpies and underground bandits.
The train passed by the mountains that I saw before… through them. They had built some tunnels to cross the mountains, probably with magic. Once we crossed the mountains, I found a land covered in snow and the chilling wind dropping the temperature in the glass windows. I definitely had to buy some thick clothes first and foremost.
In the distance, I could see some large chunks of earth in the sky… it was floating above some clouds and below others. I wondered if harpies were fine with that much cold. In any case, they were too close to the border. I needed to ask around how islands can float, but I imagined that most ordinary citizens would have the answers.
When I looked to my side, I saw a large caravan heading to Ironcliff City… it was hard to see what they were transporting, but it should have been quite valuable since a lot of people were guarding those wagons. If I weren’t in a hurry, I would have joined one of those caravans as an adventurer. Keeping my ranking low as an adventure was quite unnerving…
The train began to slow down when we approached Ironcliff City… the place had a special entrance for the train. Despite the opening that was basically an iron gate, it was surrounded by twenty-meter-high walls of some sort of white stone. As we passed through the walls, I saw that they were at least thirty meters long. The place was basically a fortress.
Although the place was well-known for crafting bows and arrows of all kinds to fight the harpies, the city looked like a maze of grey bricks. Aside from the white snow at the top of the buildings, everything else was grey thanks to it.
There were a bunch of ordinary-looking houses around, but they all had the same shape and size. It felt like they had been made for the whole place with no plans to expand it. Or maybe they were the houses of the soldiers and knights stationed there. Not many people there were walking on the streets, but maybe it was because it was lunchtime.
Once the train stopped, the few passengers left the train and a lot of them that came from the city got in… they had this tired look in their eyes, but they looked quite tough. Maybe they were from a temporary garrison or something.
‘Well, then… what should I do? Look for work first or an inn?’
I heard that a lot of workshops had rooms for the employees, but those were basically sweatshops. Finding a job in that city was easy, but a good job was difficult. I didn’t mind sleeping in a small room at work, but I wanted to be paid according to the quality of my products. While my skills in the Bowyer class were low, my Dexterity could make up for it.
In the end, I decided to check all the places that were selling bows and see if they were recruiting and their offers.