Kael left me with a few things. We had talked some more before I left and the man gave me a decent amount of advice and some reading recommendations, most of them on where to go from here to get a nice grasp on life here and prosper.

One of them was the District Encyclopedia, a meaningful history of all the districts and their relationships. The other was the Adventurer’s Guide to Dungeoneering. That one was expensive, but he had given it to me for free.

Which was strange because I wasn’t expecting kindness. But as strange as that was, old people tended to be like that from my experience. They had personal beliefs that had withstood millenniums worth of time. And while this guy was immensely generous, I’d met some folk who were quite the opposite as well. I’m sure I wasn’t the first half-demon he’s met and I might not even be the last.

I was just lucky this guy was a more progressive elf, both in his personal beliefs and his practices. But then again he was probably a worshipper of the Mother Tree herself and that was one of the most accepting deities within the recognized divinity, even accepting some of the Dark Lord’s lesser minions into her fold after the war.

The last book was called Politics in Asrin; A Modern Guide to the Politics of Today. That was a mouthful, but I’d bought it at a local bookstore anyway, along with the local paper and one of those oracles that people kept telling me to get.

I’d then wandered through the streets, trying to not get too tied up with the wonderous nature of it all, and found a small inn alongside the edge of the district. It was built directly into the cavern wall and was much quieter than the rest of the district, even though it had its fair share of traffic.

And it was cheaper. Apparently, spots near the caverns themselves were highly sought after for financial reasons, and anywhere near one of the root transport systems was about five times more expensive than this.

The inn had nice lodging with temperature control spells and dull skeleton servants.

That was also another thing about this district.

It was a part of the Three Crowns of Asrin City. A crown was a group of districts all tied together by economic and political relations. There was a crown for down-side, a crown for top-side, and a crown for high-side. And they were all ranged in a circular pattern relative to each other.

District 87 was the latest addition to the down-side crown. The biomancey here had boosted the economy and the population into the sky. It has two million residents as of now and multiple markets for all things life. The skeletons, for example, were not corpses but rather lab-grown bones being used for necromancy. District 87 also provided blood for almost all the vampires within the greater Asrin City and human flesh for all the zombies as well.

It played a huge part in the rise of ‘necroplasey’ and the acceptance of the undead into the general population. They used to be shunned because of their food needs but now that zombies could farm flesh mushrooms and vampires could grow blood with a couple of spells or buy it themselves, they became no different than anyone else.

Then there was the false body market, which had increased the number of adventurers coming through here, plus the healing and cosmetic applications of biomancey had made it become one of the most profitable districts within the city.

I rubbed my head as I put the books down. That was what the books told me.

I’d been at the inn for a couple of days and all I’d been doing during that time was reading. No food, no bathroom, just reading.

Dammit. I always did this type of thing. I would end up over-studying for days and on occasion, weeks at a time if I remembered to go to the bathroom and eat.

I sniffed underneath my arm and yakked.

Nastiness.

And my stomach sounded like Grunder’s drill, it wanted to eat and empty itself out at the same time.

I groaned and waddled to the bathroom.

That was also something new. Bathrooms. Maybe it was because of the magic density here or the absurd amount of innovation that was constantly going on, but Asrin City was always the most magically advanced place throughout all of the realms.

Toilets were one of those things.

I rested my ass on the magical porcelain throne and released my worries. A few minutes later I felt some of my mana slip away as the desecration was sucked away by magical waters and into some abyss of the night.

Absolutely magical. I’d have to figure out how that worked one day.

I normally would just bury my crap back in the Woven Forest, or just leave it in the wild. At best, I’d use an outhouse but this was better than all those options.

But the longer I stared at the toilet the stranger it became.

I didn’t sense any actual enchantments on this thing and the mana it had taken from me seemed to be sent away instead of being used up in this enchantment.

I frowned and flushed the mechanism again. Again, something pulled at my mana but this time, I pulled back and refused to let it have any.

And the toilet flushed anyway.

“What in the hells?”

I fluhed again, and again it did its duty without my magic.

“It’s a mana siphon,” I mumbled.

The toilet wasn’t a thing of magic, but someone had made it take mana from the user under the guise of functionality.

I shook my head in wonder and went back to my bedroom.

“What a scam,” I muttered as I rang the small bell on my desk.

A few moments later, a skeleton came up to greet me. It was a lanky thing and its bones were unnaturally white. Necromancy wasn’t uncommon in the woven forest. I had sneaked by undead hoards and fought off a zombie or two during my time in exile from the Rathor Clan.

And this thing barely qualified as an undead in my senses.

Necromancy was a strange school of magic but it almost always involved death in some way, and the reason for that was because living things had their own mana pathways, and generally any living was already designed to move and fight in one way or another, so you rarely had to rethink the design before casting the spell.

Stolen story; please report.

But this wasn’t an undead. This thing was made up of bones grown in biomancey labs and barely had any mana conductivity of its own. The bones were barely better than stone and the body could barely hold mana, much less use it.

But I guess it would be of little consequence to a mage’s mana pool. There must be a fifth or sixth-tier mage who runs this place, and they were clearly not a necromancer themselves.

“I’d like a bath and a meal, please. Bath first then meal second, about an hour from now.”

The undead construct stared at me for a bit before nodding slowly and waddling away.

Jeez. The spirits attached to this thing were low quality as well. I could summon more intelligent spirits while pissing with my eyes closed.

I could have gotten a room with a private bath but that would have been a little too much of a strain on my wallet.

I barely had enough cash to last me a month as it was. And assuming I was staying at this inn for a bit while I found some work, I would need every dollar I could get.

I waved my hand and my suitcase opened itself. Another wave, then a towel and a change of clothes popped out of it.

I grabbed them both and my staff and waved the door open before heading down the halls and into the lower basement.

The halls were huge. They were wide enough to fit three horses, which made sense if you considered the vast amount of size variation between species in this city. But it also meant a longer walk to the basement area and a strange mixture of fellow tenets. There were orcs, kobolds, elves, and even one troll and goblin pair. I wonder how that worked.

Actually, it made sense for those to be at this district of all places, though I shouldn’t be making assumptions.

And the largest one of them all was the goliath. She was tall, at least eight feet tall and I had to squeeze by her even with all this space.

I had to stop myself from staring. I was used to giant spider women, but not giant women-women, with regular legs and limbs.

It freaked me out for some reason.

But I kept my cool and finally got down the stairs to the lower floors. I found one of the human-sized washrooms and claimed it for my own, casting a third-tier cleansing spell just for safe measure.

After that, I turned on the pipes and cleaned myself thoroughly in the hot water. I almost moaned when the water touched my skin. There was no plumbing in the Woven Forest, at least not if you were a regular guy. Nor was there any plumbing deep-side.

I’d been casting water spells and growing magical plants for most of my needs down there.

But by the gods was this amazing. Warm water rinsed my skin of filth and dust. And for the first time in a long time, I didn’t think.

Until my stomach growled and reminded me of my other needs.

Eventually, after about an hour, I sighed and stepped out of the washroom, both cleansed and hungry. I wore my clean clothes and my dirty ones lay damp and dirty on the floor. I grabbed my staff and cast again, a tier three spell this time.

The clothes suddenly stood upright, possessed by the spirit I had summoned.

“Clean up and meet me upstairs,” I told it and the spirit nodded and walked towards the shower with a bit of my soap in its sleeve.

I smiled at it and walked out.

Spirits were fun. That was one of the reasons I was so good with them and also the only reason I preferred to summon them instead of using less costly spells with a more refined purpose.

Like with the clothes, I could have cast cleanse and gotten them clean immediately. But it was more fun this way, and honestly, what was the point of magic if wasn’t fun?

Magic had always been fun, but that was mostly a problem for me. I would learn a bit about one type of magic before turning away and learning about another.

If I had to pick a specialty, I suppose it would be spirit-summoning and construct-creating school, though I was only good at those because they were so damn fun. Even when I was still within the Rathor clan, I lacked friends due to my half-demon nature, and being able to create your own friends had always appealed to me.

It was half the reason I loved magic so much. You could just dive into it, learn it, and make it yours.

But that was a long time ago, back when I was a kid.

There were also a lot of other reasons as to why I had generalized in my magical education.

Magic, in terms of theory and application, could be divided into two parts, types and schools. Types were a definition of the method of magic, elemental magic, barrier magic, bloodline magic, whatever it was. Type defined how the magic happened and it was a description of the metaphysical process that happened when you cast magic.

Schools were purposeful and were defined by how magical practitioners chose to understand and practice their magical prowess. Necromancey, for example, was a school. You needed to practice soul-type magic, life magic, spirit magic, and possibly even enchanting in the higher levels of necromancy.

But that wasn’t to say the two were mutually exclusive. Barrier magic, for example, was complex enough to be both a school and a type of its own. In truth, all types of magic got complicated when applied at the higher end of their capabilities but that was another thing altogether.

I had spent my decades dabbling in all types of magic but had never tried to apply them to any school directly. And though I had a basic understanding of all the types I dabbled in, I rarely trained in one type long enough to even be considered a basic master in any of them.

If I had basic mastery of life-type magic I could easily become a farmer of sorts, producing crops in a field somewhere with a wave of my hand.

If I had mastered multiple types like life and death I could even be a biomancer. No, not a biomancer. Biomancey involved more than just magics. It was anatomy and study, knowing humans, dwarves, beast folk, all the variant species, or maybe specializing in one of them.

It would involve literal decades of study, millennia even, if you wanted to truly master the field.

I walked back into my room to find a skeleton and a table had appeared in the center of it.

My face scrunched in confusion. Why wouldn’t the skeleton just lay my food on the table in the corner? Why bring its own table?

It hit me after a moment.

“Weak spirits?” I mumbled while casting a detection spell.

Detection spells were seen as costly things, but in truth, the spell’s intensity was determined by whatever you were inspecting. And the easier ones were designed to read not the magic itself, but rather the effects it caused.

It was the difference between staring at the sun to determine whether it was day or not or just looking at the ground and looking for the light. It wasn’t foolproof, but I doubted this skeleton was a tier-ten undead construct.

My mana sank into the spell for a few seconds and I saw the arcane. The world melted away as I saw the small tear within, a connection tethering a spirit from the astral realm to this one. That was common enough, all souls existed in the astral plane, and everyone had their own connection to their body.

But that was only true for natural beings. This connection was barely open. It couldn’t barely fit an ant’s soul much less a person’s.

That meant this spirit was dumb. Dumber than dirt.

I also saw the minor animation spells and binding matrices left on the bones, giving the body force and adhesion.

The bones were cheap, biomancied bones, not real undead.

After an instant, the magic blinked and I understood.

I’d seen necromancy before. It was commonly practiced in the Woven Forest, but this thing was probably one of the weaker undead I’d ever witnessed.

But it made sense. It was a constant mana drain on the castor and the spirit not only acted out the tasks but also maintained the connection between this realm and the astral one.

That meant it was a constant drain on the mana of the castor, at least a good thirty units a day. Factoring that in the number of skeletons at this inn, about fifty, that equaled to about 1500 mana units being drained per day.

Add in natural mana recovery and… the owner of these constructs would need to be a seventh-tier mage at least to have that type of consistent mana output and live comfortably, he was most likely higher than that, somewhere around the ninth tier probably.

Huh. I wondered how much he got paid.

I could manage a quarter of that many skeletons and be comfortable having them work around the clock. But then there was the cost of the bodies and the inevitable permits, licenses, and certifications I’d probably need.

Not to mention my half-demon nature. Sure this city was accepting, but Kael had been a stroke of luck. He was far kinder than I had expected him to be. Most people would fire me on the spot if not outright attack me for my bloodline.

I could try to keep it a secret but all it would take is one cleric or holy mage to wander around, notice me, and then promptly expose me, which I knew they would do.

I frowned as I dug into the food before me. Getting a job was going to be tough.

I’d been hated for my race, even back in the Woven Forest, and that place had all kinds of demons and dark magic. But the demons there were all contract-bound summons or enemies and I was not either of those.

“Adventuring, huh?” I mumbled as I swallowed down a cut of meat. “Might be all I can do at this point.”