CHAPTER 13 SOCIAL STUDIES
I stood up from where I had been sitting on the ground as my ascension finished. My body felt completely different. I felt infallible, although I knew that Garrus could still probably put me into the ground if he chose to.
“Finished up? You weren’t out for as long as I thought you’d be.” I looked over to where the voice came from. It was Penny, I glanced around. Everyone was in completely different spots than they had been just a few moments ago. I thought time had fully stopped but that didn’t seem to be the case.
My confusion must’ve showed on my face, Penny was giving me a concerned look. “Everything alright?”
“Yeah… Yeah, just trying to get used to everything.” Since my vigor had jumped up massively, all of my senses drastically improved as well. I had already been slightly overwhelmed with my sight and hearing before, but I had managed to keep it under control. This tipped the scales over though.
“It looked like time stopped when I started my ascension, but everyone was in different spots when I came out. What’s up with that?”
Penny just shrugged, “Dunno. Lots of mages and researchers have tried to figure it out, but the most they can guess is it’s some weird dimensional thing. Time apparently doesn’t flow uniformly or something like that so it speeds up, slows down, goes in circles, goes backwards, flips upside down, and turns inside out. At least that’s how Karif explained it to me when I asked him.”
Alright then. I wasn’t going to worry about the timey-wimey status shenanigans then.
“Ah, Alex! You’re finished. Good, how did it go? Get any blue classes for your troubles?” Garrus meandered over slowly with George. It looked like they had been sparring together up ‘till now. The ground nearby was all torn up.
“Surprisingly no. I expected to see one or two blues, given that I’d had some when I first chose my classes, but I didn’t get any.”
“That makes sense,” Karif, came over from where he had been resting as well. “The options you get from tier to tier will hardly, if ever, have the same classes available. In early tiers, however, the most strength comes from stats. How many points did you gain for ascending?”
“I got 150 points to my stats.”
Garrus frowned, “Only 150? That’s not as much as I was expecting. If you divide that amongst the seven stats that’s only twenty points per stat. Not really that big of a gain. I was expecting something more like 500 for what you had done.”
“No, not 150 total. I got 150 per stat. If you’re looking for the total that should be about 1,050 points.”
“What? Now that’s what I’m talking about!” Garrus laughed heartily, giving me a powerful slap on the back that knocked the air out of me. “Your stats are higher than some adventurers in the second tier!”
I gave them a cheeky smile while Garrus nodded approvingly.
“I was thinking we would try to get you into the second tier, but honestly with that kind of strength you’re strong enough to join us on some lower end missions as is.”
I frowned slightly, “You think that’s a good idea? Sure I got a juicy power bump, but I don’t want to try and bite off more than I can chew.”
“You’ll be fine. Think about it this way. You have the stats of a tier 2 warrior and tier 2 mage combined. You’re significantly more sturdy and stronger than the average adventurer is and you can heal yourself. Normally there’s a tradeoff. High strength, low intelligence sort of stuff, but you don’t have that problem which means realistically you don’t have an obvious weak point. An opponent would just literally have to overwhelm you completely to get an advantage. The main reason for that is your third class, it’s giving you massive stat gains and has allowed you to accomplish what you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to, giving you strength very few would ever achieve. Normal people generally don’t get the option to get a third class until the third tier. And you started with it.”
I guess that made sense. I was still slightly skeptical, but Garrus seemed to think it was fine and he hadn’t screwed me over yet with his advice, so I decided to trust him.
“Come on, let's head back and we’ll find something we can do.”
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We made it back to the town several hours after noon and walked into the guild. Garrus walked up to the request board and took a look at several of the requests before yanking one down and taking it up to the receptionist. After a short conversation she stamped it and he came back over to us.
“Alright, this one should be good for us. There’s been a string of disappearances in Muldren. The creatures in the area aren’t too strong so we should be fine barring any surprises.”
I raised my hand in the middle of Garrus’ sentence and waited for him to finish, “Yes, Alex? What’s your question?”
“Where’s Muldren?”
They stopped for a moment before Garrus sighed. “Right, I forgot you know nothing about this world. Alright, Karif and Penny, you help teach Alex basic geography. George and I will gather some basic supplies for us. We’ll head out tomorrow.”
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And with that, Garrus marched right out of the building. Karif just shrugged, “Well, let’s head over to the town library. It’s not particularly big, but there should be a couple of books that can help us along.”
“Ah, I can’t read your language either.”
Penny sighed, “This is going to suck.”
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Karif had to spend more time just telling me what the books said rather than providing me with stuff I could glimpse through and read. We did manage to get a hold of a map of the continent, it was pretty sparse on its detail but it would suffice for the moment.
“So we’re around here. Vinwood isn’t on this one for some reason so I can only assume this map is several hundred years old.”
Karif pointed to a spot on the southern edge of the continent. Even further south was a mountain range with a small gap in the center that led to the forest. Beyond the forest was uncharted.
“So Vinwood is part of the Seltas Kingdom. To the north of us is the Empire of Alixia, so Seltas is kind of locked between the Empire and the Elthin Mountains. Vinwood is currently the largest town this far south. There’s a bunch of small villages around, but Vinwood is centralized between them, so lots of the villagers will come here to sell and buy and overall just do general trade. From there we have trade that goes north to the next biggest town, Farlene. And from there they do trade with the capital, Elendar. From there trade branches out to the north, east, and west. And creates a nice flow. Our trade goes up and brings stuff back down when they return and that’s how goods are constantly exchanged between the cities within the kingdom.”
Karif went into a full on lecture of the economics of just the Kingdom alone and how the newly crowned queen had made major reforms that pulled the nation out of the rut it had been in and brought it up to be one of the competing superpowers in economics. Despite being a small country it now had enough wealth to compare to nations that had thousand year histories despite only being 500 years old itself.
Eventually he got to talking about the other countries.
“Alixia borders us to the north. So there’s not many places we can go so a lot of our trade goes by sea. To the north of Alixia is the Great Lake of Omnikiah. It doesn’t fully block off Alixia, but it serves as a massive border to anyone coming to the country. They either have to cross it by boat or go through these small land corridors on either side of the lake. They’re small enough that Alixia has managed to build walls on both of them to prevent any sort of invasions. Trade can still pass through there, it’s just harder to do so.”
He seemed really focused on trade and money flow, “Karif are you a merchant?”
He stopped mid sentence, “Is it that obvious? I’m not quite a merchant, but I come from a merchant family. We do a lot of trading and my father managed to do quite well for himself. That’s most of where my education came from, and I tend to hyperfocus on that.”
“It’s fine, I was just curious. You knew more about economics and trade than I would’ve expected normally so I was just curious.”
He nodded slowly before continuing, “The countries that border Alixia on either side of the lake are the Dukedom of Bratvers and the Melistinia Theocracy.” Karif pointed to the spot to the north west of the lake and the north east side respectively.
“The Dukedom and the Theocracy have a long history with each other dating all the way back…”
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After roughly 6 hours of Karif telling me about each country and giving me a small description of their history and notable people in the modern era. He brought himself back to the current situation.
“So we’re here.” He pointed at Vinwood, or rather its approximate location on the map. “And we are headed here.” He pointed to another nondescript place to the west of Vinwood.
“It should be roughly two days of travel to get there.”
“Okay, that’s better than I thought it would be. Should be exciting.”
“For both our sakes I hope it's not.” Karif said with a light chuckle.
“Out of curiosity, what’s that forest on the southern edge?” I pointed to the forest on the other side of the mountain range.
“Ah, that’s the Forest of Nalthien.”
I stopped abruptly, my mind instantly started racing.
“The Forest of Nalthien?”
“Yeah, it was named after one of the ancients that lived before the Collapse. Elfs have a strange history. They have different little pocket communities. All of them live within that one settlement, and they each correspond to a specific ancient. These ancients were powerful. Apex creatures on the level of dragons and gods. The ancients weren’t necessarily elves. In fact no one knows exactly what they were. Scholars have posited many things about them, but given that the only thing we have to go off of is the hearts they left behind we don’t know a whole lot about who they were or what they were trying to accomplish. The elves have an idea, but they would quite literally die before saying anything. Which just makes your situation all the more strange. Why did they hand theirs over to you? What was their purpose? What did they hope to accomplish by putting you in danger? Why send you here?”
“The name of the Heart that I have is Nalthien.” I whispered, glancing around to make sure no one was around.
Karif nodded slowly, “I see… So that means there was actually a settlement of elves in the forest?”
“I thought you knew that already since it was called the Forest of Nalthien?” I said with a frown.
Karif shook his head, “No, we knew what it was called. But anyone that has gone to explore it in the last 500 years has never returned, so we don’t have anything recorded about the nature of the forest.”
“Huh… Weird… You said something about a collapse?”
“The Collapse. We don’t know what caused it or why it even happened. But about 2,500 years ago every nation that ever existed was simultaneously wiped off the map. These were nations that, at the time, had existed for nearly 5,000 years. They were strong. All of them were, and they were all destroyed practically overnight. Everything after that in history went dark. Recordings of history didn’t start to spring back up until nearly 1,000 years after that. Many of those nations had helped pull us out of a dark age before that. History before the event was sparse as it is so we don’t know a whole lot about that. The texts mainly just mention specific icons of those ages, heroes, scholars, kings, and the like that helped develop people and strength to overcome the enemies of mankind. All in all, it’s a very interesting topic due to all the mystery that surrounds it.”
“Yes, it certainly is.” I generally loved stuff like this, it was exciting to hear about a major event in history that happened that no one knew about. It got my nerd blood flowing. Usually. For some reason that didn’t happen here. Maybe it was because it was more real, it was right in front of my face. I didn’t like it, I don’t know why.
I did want to look into this further, but I’d need to get stronger than I was now and head north. To some other countries that had been around a little longer and see who knew what.
In the meantime I needed to focus on going to a village and uncovering a string of disappearances. The ancient apocalypse could wait.
Penny had fallen asleep at the table while we had talked, I don’t know why Garrus made her come with us, she wasn’t the type to be interested in ancient history the same way Karif was.
He gently shook her awake, “Penny. Penny, come on. We’re leaving.”
She looked up groggily, blinking at us before stretching with a loud yawn, “About damn time, what time is it even?”
“Time to go meet up with Garrus and get some dinner. Come on.”
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We walked into the guild and found Garrus and George sitting at a table together, we sidled on over and joined them
“How did your lesson with the professor go?” Garrus gave me a coy smile.
“Pretty good, got a general idea of the world's history, national geography, important places, peoples, and groups. Also managed to figure out where Muldren is.”
“Great, we’ll head out of here shortly after dawn. Any questions? No? Let's eat and get an early night then.”