Our first goal was to reach the nearest town. For me everything I knew from the world map were just the points, lines and some names. I knew where something was located but I didn’t know what that would be.
When I asked Kylie for information on the difference between a town and a village she explained everything in details. Those definitions were used by all 5 races as far as she knew. But not every race had every kind of socializing.
“In order for the kings to rule their races they need to manage the places where their people live. But it is too much for only one person to manage a whole continent so there are some rules.
“Villages are the smallest places with at least 20 people and are located everywhere on a continent. As there is nothing noteworthy, they are managed by no one. The inhabitants have to follow the law and are all rather poor and simple farmers but have a lot of freedom on what they do.”
“After the village there are towns in case of size. It has to at least have 300 people living in it to be called a town. It is often surrounded by a wooden fence for defence and they are also located everywhere on the continent but not as much as villages. Sometimes a village gets managed by a person from a nearby town, and the inhabitants have different jobs like collecting and selling woods, building houses or a guard at the entrance to the town. It depends on the town but most have inns and even different guild branches. In rare cases you can find some form of nobility in a town.”
The word guild and noble system picked my interest a lot and Kylie noticed it. She said if we were to reach the next town, the receptionist of the guild will explain the guild system to me and she will tell me the noble system later so I had to be patient.
“Next up there were cities. They were big. They had up to 10.000 people living in it and were surrounded by a wall for defence. A city would be the focus of everyone’s attention. It has everything from a blacksmith to a lot of restaurants. From Inns to every kind of guild and moreover it is were a lot of nobility would reside in. There are only about 10 cities in every continent.”
“Last is the capital. It is the largest city of every race and some even hold up to 100.000 people. The royals, the family of the king and the king himself are living in the capital and it has every feature a normal city would have and some more. I don’t know them because I have never been to a capital but it is said that the capital of the dragons has something called hot springs.”
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That was all I got for short introductions.
“So now to go to the noble system. It only applies for humans though. The highest human existence is the human king and the royalty. Second in influence to the king are only the 4 provincial lords who are responsible for ¼ of the continent. It is divided into north, east, south and west province. After that is the rank of earl, followed by count and the lowest noble is the baron rank.”
That were the 5 ranks of the human nobility system. For all other races there is only the king who rules over them and some kind of military ranks, even Kylie had no idea of. She only knew of the human system because it was really famous but the other kings didn’t want it in their country.
“All humans with no rank are called lower born and have to bow their head to nobles and follow their rules and wishes. The same rule goes for lower nobles to higher nobles. And all humans have to follow the king’s and royalties orders. You can only become a noble by birth or by marriage but almost no noble would marry a lower born person than themselves, because it would lower their status.”
That was a rather bad system, if I take my interaction with all the humans I met before into account. They are bound to abuse their authority and discriminate against other humans. Sure there would be nobles with goals and ideals for their people but that would only include a few, right?
So we were on our way to the nearest town which was called Merrill town by the locals. It had a population of 500 beastmen and it had an adventurer guild as well as a few inns.
At first I was full of energy and wanted to explore the whole town as fast as possible but the problem was, we had a little amount of money. Again I asked Kylie for help for information.
“There are Copper, Silver, Gold and black Gold coins. 100 Coppers are worth one Silver Coin. 100 Silver Coins were worth 1 Gold coin and 100 Gold coins are 1 black Gold coin. The normal monthly income of someone of a town is about 5 Silver Coins.”
We had a budget of 12 Silver Coins which were all provided to me by Kylie and the entrance to town alone would cost 3 Silver Coins per person at the beast continent. But that only applied for beastmen and half beastmen like Kylie. It varies from town to town how much money someone from another race had to pay. So I would have to pay a lot more for my entrance.
The only two ways to not have to pay for entrance was to have a guild card or to own a house in town. Actually it is also possible if you are a noble but none of us were. As nothing of those 3 situations applied to us we had to pay.
Kylie was against sleeping outside all the time so she suggested to hunt for monsters so when we visit the adventurer guild later we could hand in some of the things we would get from hunting for money, so we could afford to sleep at an inn. She guessed that with the rest of the money I would be able to buy some paper and a pen.
It was a good idea because I could also test out some things regarding the usage of the black mana. We hunted for 3 hours and I stored the teeth, leather and some other things Kylie told me were of some worth, in my white space. I was now able to switch from it back to the real world and the other way around in a few seconds but I was unable to breakthrough with the usage of the mana from the black sphere.
So we went to the entrance where we only saw a guard standing with no one else around. Kylie went ahead and asked him how much my fee would be and told him I would be a human. In the end she succeeded to get my entrance fee down to about 4 Silver and 50 Copper Coins while she had to pay the normal 3 Silver Coins.
When I entered the town I saw a lot of people. Some beastmen children running around while some of the adults were buying or selling daily needs like food or clothing.
This was the first town I entered and with sparkling eyes and the urge of getting the information I desired, I headed together with Kylie to the adventure guild branch.