Keeping an eye on the Map, I progressed slowly toward the closest village they had indicated. If I ran out of Portals, I’d probably use the points from Shao and Miki to keep going. I hadn’t expected my primary mode of travel to be Portals, and it was certainly a waste of such a skill, but it was efficient for what we were doing right now. The map kept me orientated so that I never ended up lost.

To be clear, my Map skill long had the map of Aberis filled out by looking at maps created by professional Cartographers in Aberis. In the absence of having visited an area, the map updates with the most readily available data. At the moment, that was any maps that I had studied since I had been here. Any area I visited was filled with an increasing amount of information. I couldn’t travel just anywhere on a map. It needed to have a certain level of detail first.

From what I understand about the Map skill, most people would need to survey the land in order to update their Map. Where simply seeing an area instantly gave me an update to the map that clearly showed every detail, the original Map skill required a bit of work to fill out. At the very least, someone had to consider all the variables and actively keep updating it. Since skills purchased with dungeon points always represented their highest tier, my Map was like a level 100 skill, which is why it worked so smoothly for me.

With the studied maps, it wasn’t necessary for me to be in an area to see said area, but the details were only at the level of the map, and if the map was drawn incorrectly, then the map in my head would also be off. Only by seeing it by eye do I have the maximum level of detail, which is also a requirement for Portal.

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I was interested in how much an area could change before Portal ceased to work. After all, buildings came and went. Trees grew and were cut down. Even the landscape would change with time. I had to assume that eventually any place that I teleported to would eventually change to a point where I’d need to return to it and update my Map information if I wanted to have an accurate enough picture to Portal there. After all, I had to picture a place in my head, or select a target, to create a Portal, and if I pictured a place that no longer existed, then it didn’t work.

Unfortunately, portals were rare enough that there was no documentation on them that I had been able to find. Everything I learned was from trial and error. Was this how scientists felt trying to figure out the world before I could conveniently read about gravity and how tornados formed in science books? This world was kind of like that. Only I seemed to have the cheat of a system that told me what I was earning and unlocking, but even this only went so far.

It took only two portals before we were close to the city. I didn’t leap right into the city for obvious reasons. We didn’t know whether Bandits were in the city or what we were entering. However, in the distance I had seen a lot of smoke, and now that we were closer, I could see a billowing cloud along with the smell of blood and fire.

“Were we too late?”