Glorious. That was the only thought filling my head as I finally had a taste of actual food for the first time in too long. Laying back in bed afterwards, I had talked to Sophia for a while before coming up with my list of priorities during my stay in town.

1: Find out what plants are edible. Now that I have a taste for decently cooked food again I cannot go back to how things were before.

2: Get access to a shitload of paper. I can probably finagle some with a tree, a couple weeks and some magic, but I would very much prefer to just buy it. I’d rather start figuring out ways to attack with magic more directly.

3: See if a blacksmith can either upgrade my weapons or straight up replace them.

4: See if this town has any maps of the surrounding area.

5: Sign up with the adventurer’s guild.

I would have also added a search for interesting and helpful books, but the same problem with spoken language applies to the written one as well. It’s very much possible to write with intent to get around it, like the solution to the speech problem, however, it takes significantly more mana to do so. This means that far fewer people have the ability to write entire books that translate intent, with very little demand for it. The only people who are really interested in buying any are traveling merchants and adventurers, both groups of people generally having far more money to spend then the average Joe, inflating the price even further.

I spent my first few days in town starting with number 2 on my list. I found a lot of people who had access to paper, but none willing to sell to me. Eventually I found apparently the only bookstore in town that sold blank diaries, so I bought 3. One for mapmaking, one for plants, and a spare one to use for whatever I might need. Once I had access to paper, I spent another few days creating a spell based on cameras that would allow me to record the way light reflected in my surroundings, and transplant that onto paper. The first part was easy enough, just using the concept of light to snap a picture of whatever I was seeing at the time. The difficulty lay in the printing process, as I couldn’t just shine the picture onto a piece of paper and have it stay there, it would just disappear once I stopped casting the spell. I ended up having to use a compound light and fire spell to burn and engrave the picture into the paper, making all images come out in black and white. It took a lot of practice before I could figure out how to stop just lighting the page on fire.

For my next and primary objective, I went around house to house, and whenever I saw someone with a garden, I would stop and ask them about the plants they kept, where they could naturally be found, how they could be used in cooking, and different ways to prepare them. This took a whole week, but my previously empty diary was now jam packed full of pictures of fruits, vegetables, and herbs, along with notes on how to find and cook them all. I would not suffer as I had done previously. This just left the blacksmith, the guild and the map.

Considering that adventurers were among the only people in this world who frequently traveled for their jobs, I deduced that the most likely place for me to find a map was at the guild, so I combined those two and went to take care of them first.

The guild was not quite what I had expected. Normally, when you think of an adventurer’s guild, it’s a large and noisy tavern, filled with ruffians and well-meaning hooligans. Pretty female receptionists pouring everyone drinks and manning a counter, handing out jobs on flyers. However, the inability to effectively communicate through writing made flyers pretty much obsolete. This meant that every job had to be verbally offered and accepted. This meant that clear communication was very much a necessity, so no one was drinking. Also, you didn’t want everyone hearing who was taking what jobs, so there were a lot of small sectioned off areas where you would speak to a receptionist one on one to figure out what job to take, giving off an impression disturbingly similar to the cubicles in an office space. And finally, because the receptionists were all expected to be in a private enclosed space with a potentially violent and ruffian-esque adventurer, none of the receptionists were young and beautiful dainty little ladies. They were all big and strong men and women who would be able to defend themselves if things started getting rough.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

I walked up to the counter where receptionists were dispatched as needed, and before I could open my mouth, one of them spoke first.

“Diego here will help you register.”

Confused, I glanced between the woman who had spoken to me, and the man she was gesturing to, unsure of how they knew why I was here before I even said anything. Seeing my confusion, Diego politely explained: “We work very closely with the town guard. They took notice of you when you entered, and given that you didn’t show a guild plate upon approaching the gate, the guard was able to realize that you were not affiliated. However, it’s also clear that you can survive on your own in the wild and take care of yourself, so it’s pointless to test you further to make sure you’re ready to join. I must inform you though that despite your prowess, all new adventurers must start off at the lowest rank. I apologize for the inconvenience, but those are the rules for new hires.”

I considered his explanation for a moment, then nodded in acceptance. That sounds perfectly reasonable. “It’s cool, Diego right? Please take care of me.”

He led me into one of the cubicles, where he explained the whole adventurer system. It was pretty standard stuff, with one interesting exception. Apparently, they had decided to name the rankings after the usefulness of different materials for weapons and armor. From lowest to highest the rankings were:

Wood

Bronze

Quartz

Iron

Steel

Mythril

Bone

I asked why Bone was considered higher than Mythril, a fantasy metal famous even in my world. According to him, it stemmed from a legend about an ancient man who wielded a spear crafted from the bones of a god. I made a note in my mind to ask Sophia about god stuff later. I mean shit, if demons, angels, and monsters are apparently real now…what about deities?

Diego continued explaining the standard procedures that adventurers followed when arriving somewhere new and taking jobs. Apparently, adventurer’s guilds also functioned as an inn for travelers, free for our use. Turns out I had wasted a head on my inn, but can you really call food that good a waste? I do not believe so.

He then handed me my new guild plate. On a simple leather bracelet sitting on my wrist, there was a curved wooden plaque, carved with some design I didn’t understand. Apparently once I met some sort of criteria the guild had, they would replace the wooden plaque for one made of bronze. He had me run my mana into it for a couple seconds, stopped me, then explained:

“The plaque has been enchanted to act as your identification. If you run your mana through the bracelet, the word on it will glow in response. This is a security measure so that someone can’t steal someone else’s plate and take jobs they aren’t adequately prepared to handle. A way to protect ourselves from liability. Do you have any more questions?”

I looked at my wrist, running mana through it and confirming it did in fact work the way Diego claimed it did. I only had one pressing concern at the moment.

“How do you enchant things?”

40 minutes later I was walking through the door of the nearest blacksmith. I was grateful that I had pushed it off for last because now that I know enchanting is a thing, I’m gonna be busy as hell for a while. I only had two weeks left in my inn and I would spend the entire time tinkering around with it, and enchanting all of my equipment. According to Diego, enchanting was functionally just a pre-programmed magic spell. You engraved an item with some symbol or word filled with a specific visualization, and then ran mana through it. This was less open ended and, depending on the materials used, considerably less efficient than casting the spell yourself, but it had two very major benefits. One, user friendliness. It didn’t matter whose mana was running through it, as long as a separate security enchantment hadn’t been placed on the item, you would be able to use the spell with the exact same visualization as whoever had engraved it. The second part is that enchantments were stackable. You could carve both a waterball and fireball attack into the same stick, and run your mana through it, and it would summon both. The final secret advantage? I had a background in programming computers, and had a theory that I could use that knowledge, that way of thinking, in order to make extremely complex spells that had never been seen before in this world.

I glanced around the blacksmith, my priorities changing from what they used to be. I had heard that this guy had made some of the best enchantments in town, and wanted to take a look at what he had made, to find some initial goals for myself, starting projects as I made my way into the field.