The magician leads Kaulder through the thick red forest until they reach a protruding cliff overlooking a sight of splendor. Rivers weaving the way through forests containing beautiful shades of green, red, and purple until reaching the horizon line where they meet with the sinking sunset. Snow-peaked mountains surround the entire area except for one small opening where the setting sun shown through. On both sides of this opening the peaks of the mountain tower over all the rest. It is surreal. Kaulder is captured in the moment, until the magician unexpectedly nudges him in the side.

"Hey" the magician starts, "find a place to lay down. We are stopping here for the night." His words seemed blunt and without emotion, but Kaulder could notice a slight wariness in his voice.

The magician finds a place next to a large tree. He grabs a knife out from his coat and carves markings in the trunk of the large tree that look like complete gibberish to Kaulder. All of a sudden the markings light up a deep ocean blue and the area around begins to spark with blue lights until finally the tree is engulfed in an energy field. The magician sits down and proceeds to get comfortable for the night. Kaulder stares blankly at the energy field surrounding them. The magician noticing this and quickly answers Kaulder's unspoken question.

"It's a protection spell. No regular monster can get in or out until it has worn off, which will be in about 10 years...."

Kaulder's eyes widen in disbelief, 'Did this crazy old man just lock us in a force field!'

"...Or if I break the spell by destroying the marking." Kaulder can hear the magician udder a quiet chuckle as he turns his masked face the other way.

"Why didn't you use the forcefield back at the cave, or in the town?" Kaulder asked with a mocking tone.

The magician spoke whilst turned the other way saying "Well.. this is a special tree. I'll teach you about it some other time." The strange man then feels his mask noticing the new hole that has revealed his eye. He sighs and closes his eyes.

Relieved, Kaulder takes a seat against a nearby tree. He is exhausted more than he had realized and his mind immediately begins to drift off, thinking of his life, his family, and the better days of the past. He closes his eyes, remembering the good times, and missing his alcohol, until finally, he fell asleep.

A young boy is with a woman with long red hair holding his hand as she stands next to him in a forest. It's quite apparent due to facial features that this is Kaulder and his mother.

"Mom, will I really get to see dad? It's been so long!" The young boy says overjoyed.

His mom looks down at him and smiles at his bright expression. "Yes honey, your dad's just as excited, its quite cute." The younger version of Kaulder smiles a deep smile and closes his eyes. As soon as he opens them he sees the dream world has shifted, the space around them had turned from a peaceful forest to a space devoid of any surroundings. His mother's face has a look of surprise as there was a dagger sticking out of her chest. Kaulder cries silent tears in shock.

"Ah.. ah." His mother manages to escape from her voice before falling.

"No! NO!" Kaulder screams out as the dream shifts once more into an alleyway with men laughing all around him, kicking him, punching him, until a voice resounds out. "Stop tormenting the kid, let's give him a chance to join us, you were all orphans too, were you not?" A man with a large build says as he walks into the alley. Kaulder's eyes landed upon him in awe.

The men quickly stand up right and look at the large man with respect, some shaking nervously like kids who have just been caught.

"Y-yes boss!" One of the thugs mutter, the large man's eyes look down upon him with a smug expression. He then points to the exit of the alleyway. The thugs all leave quickly.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Kaulder had a wide-eyed expression, with a face that seemed to say "Your strength is respectable!".

This just made the man slightly grin, in reality Kaulder was just shocked, unbeknownst to the man who had assumed Kaulder was just a random orphan kid.

Lights flash. Monsters surround Kaulder, and then they attack him all at once.

Kaulder wakes up startled. His heart is racing, pumping adrenaline with at speed and force of a bullet train. His eyes are dazed but quickly readjust to his surroundings. He realizes it was all a dream. His tense muscles relax and his face forms a complicated look. There were things that made sense but others he could not explain. On one hand, he found the man in the alley intriguing as he didn't remember ever meeting him, on the other he was quite upset about the image of his loving mother. He did not remember his mother dying in the way she had in the dream.

He shakes his head in frustration and decides it was all just a messed up dream.

Kaulder yawns and looks around, noticing that the sky was sunny once more. A strange sight to him was the appearance of birds in the sky, it was like a fresh air had been fanned onto him.

'Huh. I guess there are still some animals left here. Will I ever be able to leave this place?' Kaulder thinks to himself sadly. As he was about to get up he hears a voice.

"You're awake. That's good." The magician says right next to him, this makes Kaulder slightly jump.

"Y-yeah. Anyway, what do I call you? You've never told me your name, I'm Kaulder." The magician has a calm expression until Kaulder finished his sentence.

"Kaulder Stark."

When Kaulder says this, under his mask the magicians eyes widen with disbelief and his breathing grows heavier. Kaulder of course saw one of his eyes open but ignored it as it wasn't that strange, the man before him was quite mysterious after all.

'Stark.. Stark.. STARK! Why does he have THAT last name? You'd think fate has played enough tricks on me by now..'

"I'm.. Sander St- Strim." He replies simply, this threw Kaulder off a bit. It was unusual for the picky, strict man before him to stutter.

"Anyway, we need to create some tools that we will need to create our base. This will be slightly dangerous as we need to use the wood I had casted the barrier on for materials. While we're at it, we may as well create a few portable barriers, they're not as strong because the tree is dead, but it should stop five attacks." Sander says with a neutral voice.

"After this is done, if we have time, I will teach you more about magic, as well as other important knowledge. Do you accept?"

Kaulder nods his head profusely as they begin to cut the tree down with an axe Sander had magically made appear.

"So, what are those symbols you carved into this anyway? And how does it even work?" Kaulder asks.

"Oh, yeah. See, these symbols have the power to imbue names into things which gives them power based on it, it's only capable if you have mana though. It's quite annoying to learn as you need to understand a whole new language which is only written, I have been studying it for quite a while and have only learned one fourth of the symbols." Sander replies before using his strength to aggressively chop into the abnormally hard tree.

"Why's this tree so strong?" Kaulder asks, exhausted.

"This is a Dense Mana Tree, its basked and absorbed in mana without being disintegrated because of the excess mana, quite rare actually." Sander replies once more with a masked smile.

Finally after an hour of chopping, mainly because Kaulder had to take breaks, they chopped the tree down.

THUD.

The tree falls over with a very loud noise that shook the surrounding area. Kaulder was worried but Sander thought it was quite casual.

Sander wipes the sweat from his forehead and lets out a slight sigh before easily chopping the tree into smaller pieces.

"Now that the hard part is done, the mana connection to the ground is severed, so its pretty easy to break if you use mana because it tries to bond with it, quite stupid if you ask me." Sander states as he begin to create tools with the tree.

He creates wooden chisels, axes, pickaxes, 5 portable barriers, and finally two nunchucks. This particular action makes Kaulder slightly excited.

"Obviously we can't slice the beasts with wood and this being the easiest weapon to use for our purpose.. it'll do." Sander then begins to carve out more strange symbols onto the items.

One by one the objects lit up with mysterious blue lights that was simply awe-inspiring, coupled with the gusts of wind that caused nearby trees to sway and grass to be pushed against. It was simply beautiful. This simple action made Kaulder even more motivated to learn about magic.

"Now that that's done, lets continue onto the next thing. Sit here with me" Sander then sits down and Kaulder sits on the opposite side with him.

"Follow my directions as I say them, first close your eyes."

With a deep sigh Kaulder closes his eyes and is ready to listen to Sander. It was finally time for him to learn more about magic.

"Tell me. What do you see exactly when you close your eyes?"

'What do I see? Isn't that quite vague? Oh well, may as well do as told for now.'