The tent went silent at Will’s proclamation for several seconds before Emerys exploded.

“How did I not see it?” He yelled, hands waving in the air. “You know nothing and have way too good an affinity for concepts. You come out of nowhere to kill the local terror beast, and summon a sword of desolation to scare the nobility shitless!” Emerys fell to the ground dramatically.

“Maybe you shouldn’t doubt me next time.” Amalise had a note of pleasure in her voice.

“How was I supposed to believe he was a fairy tale come to life?” Emerys replied. “Even now I am tempted to ask if he is joking around!” Emerys jumped to his feet and started pacing. Will and Amalise just watched in amusement.

“You know this changes everything, right?” Emerys asked.

“No, I don’t exactly see what changes.” Will said.

“Look Will. Any time a hero shows up they do something big. They make a name for themselves.” Emerys drew a hand across his bald head. “We were adventurers in rural Frostfell. We weren’t looking for any real notoriety. Sure gods will get noticed wherever they go, but in the country you can’t get pulled into political bullshit.” Will felt a sinking feeling. It was happening again. He would lose it all again.

“Emerys!” Amalise snapped. “What are you saying?” Will looked at her and was tempted to call upon his cold concept to still the roiling emotions he was feeling.

“Hey, at first he was just a guy we were helping out! A guild newbie who needed to be shown the ropes. How could I have known that the result would be exile!” Emerys rubbed at his face with both hands. “No. I know what you are thinking, I am just complaining. Will is a friend, and we don’t abandon friends when they are about to be hunted by people who want to use him as a miracle money machine.” Will didn’t know whether to laugh or grimace at what Emerys just said. Since he had met the alchemist, he had known that people would want his mana source. But the fact that everyone knew that he could make somnite, even though it wasn’t consciously, made the problem even worse.

Emerys and Amalise were good people. Maybe they wanted to get rich off of him like everyone else, but they would have to help him get strong if they wanted to keep him from falling into someone else's hands. But they had been trying to help him even before they knew what they could get out of it. He hoped that meant they were the kind of friends he had never been able to find back on earth.

“It's really not that bad.” Will said. He summoned the small chest that they had gotten from the alchemist’s vault. “I am pretty sure we still have a golden slave in here that we need to divy up.” That got the attention of both Emerys and Amalise, who grinned.

They spent the next few hours splitting up the spoils, and it left everyone happy. They would still need to get the golden slave exchanged, but the rest of the coinage was enough to have them all sitting pretty. That was aside from the weapons and armor as well as the treasures from the Aalto treasury. They gave a few pieces of armor and weapons to the followers, but the rest were entirely unsuitable.

“Unfortunately there are a lot of problems with using magic items not specifically made for you.” Amalise said. “Not only does it require a fair amount of mana to operate your items, less than a quarter of the items you find will be compatible with you. That usually means you won’t be able to put mana into the weapon at all. But sometimes it means that you will get dangerous feedback that can be fatal.” Will was disappointed, but it wasn’t the first time he had been disappointed by this world. He pulled out a sword from his inventory, one that they had looted but which nobody was compatible with. When he identified it he found that it was a simple fiery sword. Amalise thought it would require someone with a fire concept to use it, but Will was sure his heat concept should be good enough.

It turned out he was right. His ability to examine his spirit map was a new sense granted by his mental concepts. However, the sense didn’t just look inward. He could also examine the spirits of things he was touching, including people and enchanted items. He could see the enchantment that had been placed on the sword. He could see how it was meant to line up with the gate in the hand to draw mana from the wielder's spirit whether or not they had a mental concept. The problem was that the spirit map was not the same for everyone. The actual number of nodes on the spirit map varied wildly from person to person, which meant that the placement of those nodes and the corresponding gates also varied quite a bit. That variance was very difficult for a static enchantment to deal with. But Will was a spirit inscriptionist.

Will drew some simple power conduits through his hand. His nodes were not where the sword expected them to be and so the mana Will tried to give the blade didn’t get where it needed to go. But Will could make an enchantment that would move the mana where it was supposed to go. It was a simple fix for Will, but since Spirit inscription didn’t seem to be a well known skill, most people couldn’t do it.

Will nearly dropped the sword when it burst into flames. He quickly put it out to the laughter of Emerys and the scolding of Amalise. He was quickly banned from more experimentation before he got some sleep, which he readily agreed to. He was exhausted.

When Will woke up it was the next morning, and he was feeling much better. Even a few nightmares hadn’t managed to ruin his sleep. He got up and went outside to find a follower cooking a meat heavy meal of bacon eggs and steak he had cooked in a variety of ways. Will got a heaping plate and sat next to a table that had also been set up. He tore into the food, surprisingly hungry, and found that he wanted seconds. Apparently the follower knew more about godly appetites than Will thought. Of course Emerys came out and polished off three heaping plates of meat and eggs, so maybe large portions were just standard.

Will kept going through the items from the alchemist, sorting them as best he could. Most of the stuff was alchemy supplies, both tools and ingredients. There was a desk with a large amount of paperwork that amounted to little Will could understand. The alchemist hadn’t kept a good experiment journal, with all his findings written in cramped hand in free spots of overcrowded paper. Maybe an experienced alchemist could make heads or tails of this, but Will couldn’t. His organization was cut off when Emerys announced it was time to go.

Will climbed on top of Koma while everyone else got on their horses, and they made their way down the shore to a street paved with cobblestones. It was a paved street seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and Amalise explained that the rulers of Brythorne had gone to great expense to try to civilize the land. Most of the land was safe for the first few miles from the shore, and you were guaranteed to find good, well maintained roads in that area. But something about the inland made a lot of monsters, far more than you could find anywhere in frostfell. It made Brythorne a dangerous place, but one where a lot of wealth and power could be found.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

They found their first town only a few hours later, and Koma assumed his smaller size so as to not scare the locals. But that didn’t seem to matter when they entered the town. Every shop they approached closed their doors and shutters to them, putting out signs that said ‘for Brythorne Natives ONLY’ or something similar. Will might have been offended if the town hadn’t been crawling with what looked like refugees. The refugees looked bad, with their clothes tattered and haunted looks in their eyes. The worst part was that even if you cleaned them up they would still be identifiable as outsiders. They had a thinner frame and a darker complexion than the people of Brythorne, who tended to be more heavily built and completely pale from the dreary weather. Of course, that meant that Will and his friends were also turned away. Even being gods wasn’t enough to get on people’s good sides in most cases.

Eventually the group left. They had decided not to shop in this town. Even the shops that would sell to them had inflated their prices outrageously. Except that it seemed that those prices were not quite so outrageous after all. They visited three more towns of varying size over the next few days, and while few were quite so hostile as the first town, prices were bad. It wasn’t even just them. Shop owners seemed to be trying to give reasonable deals to the locals at least, but every shop owner had to close up early. There simply wasn’t enough to go around. Will felt so bad that he even sold some three hundred pounds of bear meat to a butcher for cheap. He knew that the meat was worth more than a copper slave for a pound, but at the same time, he may have just saved the man’s shop. The man was elated however, and that was enough for Will.

The farther south they went the more crowded the roads and towns became. It was hard for Will to see, and he wasn’t satisfied with the explanations he was given. There was a war between the kingdom of Lynvera on the western continent and the Holy Rhothian Empire to their southwest. Apparently it is all that the Kingdom of Lynvera could do to hold back the advance, and anyone who didn’t want to be embroiled in the fighting were fleeing instead. Will wondered why Lynvera didn’t close their borders to prevent the mass desertion of their people, but they hadn’t. A significant number of those people had crossed the sea by barge or boat to Brythorne where they found themselves starving in the streets.

“Brythorne imports food, and a lot of it.” Amalise told him. “There is very little land for farming because of all the monsters. Usually Brythorne fishes and supplements their seafood with the proceeds of selling their monster based exports. Potions, weapons, and other things. The problem is that the Kingdom of Lynvera was a large exporter of food, and now they barely have enough to feed themselves.”

“Hey, was the Kingdom of Lynvera named after someone?” Will asked.

“Sure, if you mean after the ruling family. After the creator of the system was hunted down, one of her sons started the Kingdom of Lynvera. The rest of the family stayed with the Terralux Corporation however.” Will looked at her weird, but then opened his map to find a rather large country called the Terralux Corporation in the north of the western continent.

Will helped where he could, selling the huge amounts of meat he possessed to people at dirt cheap prices. He had yet to make a dent in the bear meat, and was starting to think he could solve the food crisis on his own until a dirty man tried to drive a knife into his chest as he gave the man a steak. The strike was pitiful, and couldn’t even harm him past his constitution. However he acted on instinct and hit the man so hard the man slammed into a wall and slid to the ground, not to get back up. A crumpled piece of paper stuck out of the man’s pocket, and Will pulled it out to find a bounty note. A surprisingly good picture of him with Koma in his giant form and a bounty of three gold lords to whomever brought him in alive. Apparently the man couldn’t read, or he might not have tried to kill Will. The note was quite explicit that they wanted him alive.

That was far from the first attempt however. Some tried to kill him, but most tried various schemes to try to kidnap him. It didn’t seem like any gods had been enticed into the chase just yet, but three gold lords was enough for anyone to try their luck. Will realized that he needed to get out of town, especially once he saw people plastering up the bounty posters everywhere. Instead of leaving with his group, he paid a merchant to let him hide in his wagon with Koma. The group would lead the pursuers away and deal with them in the privacy of the forest, while Will laid low. However Will realized something was wrong when they stopped about an hour out of town. Will first thought that his friends had caught up. It was earlier than expected, but not out of the question.

But when he heard the coarse joking and laughter of unfamiliar voices, he realized he had made a rather large mistake.

“Come on out, bounty boy!” A voice called. “And keep your hands where we can see them!”

Will reached for his concepts. He had retrieved the bracelet from his inventory days ago, and after cooling off it had found its place on his wrist again. It didn’t work quite so well now as it did before, but it was good enough until he could make it to the adventurers guild to get a new one. He considered taking it off, but his concepts were lively again after the long nap they had taken following the Somnite incident. He didn’t want any mistakes. Still, his boosting skills at least showed some improvement because of it. His strength boost now gave a 150% boost, and his all around boost gave 130% to all his physical stats. It was a respectable amount, but Will wished he had that 50000% boost he had for that one moment when he had been drugged.

Will stepped out of the wagon to see that he had been surrounded by a group of bandits. They were dirty and wore mismatched armor, but their swords looked deadly enough to Will. A part of his mind speculated that the rust on their blades would slow their weapons as they passed through his flesh. Since gaining that small advantage would require WIll getting cut quite badly, he quickly abandoned that train of thought with a shudder. Besides, the bandits were jeering and demanding his attention. The merchant was standing amongst the bandits, rubbing his hands together like a cheap cartoon villain.

“Hello guys,” Will said in a friendly tone. “What's all this about?” The lead bandit grinned, gesturing to himself and his nine men.

“We have a friend you absolutely have to meet! Why don’t you come with us and we can introduce you!” His voice had a patronizingly friendly tone, and he seemed to bask in the laughter of his subordinates.

“I am sorry, but it seems like I have other plans at the moment, can we come back to this another time?”

“Sorry bounty boy. No can do.” And he and his men moved in. Will summoned the flaming sword as well as a set of armor that appeared under his wolf fur cloak. But then a growling so deep and loud it shook the ground stopped everyone in their tracks. Koma leapt from the wagon, growing to full size in an instant. He lowered his head until he was looking at the bandits eye to eye. Koma had a dangerous malevolent look that Will had never seen before, and it mirrored his own rage. He had tried to avoid conflict. Now it was time for them to die.

The bandit leader stepped back a pace as he looked at Koma. Stupid, foolish bandits. Did they not read the bounty notice? It said he had a dire wolf companion. Will’s sword burst into flames, and that was enough to break the momentary stalemate. Half the bandits turned to run, while the other half pulled their swords for a desperate battle, but none of it mattered. All the ones that tried to fight found out how sharp Koma’s teeth were, while the ones that ran felt what it was like to be cooked from the inside. It took seconds for all the bandits to die, only the leader had any power. He had been a mortal cultivator who had not progressed very far at all. The only one left alive was the merchant, but Will didn’t leave that problem unattended for a moment longer than he had to. The merchant went the way of those that ran.

Will was going through the loot he had acquired when the rest of the party caught up to him.