Laurent looked at the huge gate in front of him and shifted a stride behind, letting his summon take the lead. He might be trying to leave from here but that didn’t mean he would relax his vigilance. They would surely recognize him as a necromancer and that their scout had already been converted to be his summon but it would still be better if the goblin did the talking, because; he knew the language, the general information, aka, common sense of this world and the other nuances.

Amidst the foggy night which limited visibility, the guard goblin standing atop the watchtower was dutifully working without daring to take a rest or slack off. Anyone who disobeyed the rules set by the regime were thrown into the prisons to work for lifetime with all their current and future generation’s fate similarly following the culprit.

Just as he was turning around, out of a corner of his eyes, he spotted a hazy darkness in the fog ahead of the gate. He thought of the few scouts which had been sent to eliminate the army of opposing world and shouted,

“Report your platoon number and the name of your commanding officer."

Laurent watched his goblin shout back with similar intensity,

“Platoon 9 reporting, Lieutenant Thûrgon in command.”

The guard above the watchtower verified the information with a book nearby, then asked once again,

“Name?”

“Xyldar”

‘Good to know, I even forgot about asking for his name amidst the busy schedule I had.’

Laurent inwardly mocked himself but on the other hand it should be alright as in the long run no one would expect a necromancer to remember the names of all the soldiers in his army.

The guard atop the watchtower cross checked the name with those written in the book and indeed found a Xyldar in platoon 7. But he still had some doubts about the second person so he tried to maximize his senses. It was a common technique which used the evolved psych to feel beyond the physical limits such as hearing, smelling, seeing, and know of the situation.

Immediately his eyebrows shot up as he saw that Xyldar had a faint link with that man. It almost always meant that the person was a Necromancer and the person was now their summon. But he didn’t feel any anger towards the man for killing their kind. The goblins were brought up as such since empathy towards their kind would increase the chances of rebellion when they see the suffering they go through.

Seeing that he was a human, he would still have to welcome him in their settlement as humans were the rulers of this world. Not only because they were rulers but also because goblins were one of the weakest races in this world and it was only logical to not antagonize the other races.

He quickly opened the gate and notified the settlement to send a guide to help the human settle without any difficulties. It would be alright if he had no backing but a tremendous boon if he had backing of a powerful alliance and managed to put in a good word for them.

Laurent immediately saw the huge gate made of intercrossed metal wires open inwards with a creaking sound, unpleasant to the ears. His undead beckoned him to follow inside where he saw that a few other goblins stood, looking his way.

‘Are they waiting for me?’

He followed after with a steady pace without showing his lack of familiarity with the place. In his past life, he had never left the earth despite being a peak tier 3. He was pretty sure he was in the upper echelons of combat prowess but it was probably because his father was worried about his safety that he didn’t get to leave earth to participate in the more dangerous fights.

When they reached in front of the goblins, one of the taller ones came forward and spoke in a language which sounded completely foreign to him. He had been conversing with his undead purely through the link between them and hadn’t considered this problem. As if knowing what was on his mind, a system notification popped up in front of him.

[Your undead summon is offering you the skill ‘Myriad Languages’]

[Accept?]

[Yes/No]

He readily accepted the skill and a set of information drilled into his brain.

[Congratulations! You have learnt a new skill - Myriad Languages (Basic)]

A skill could be learnt as soon as you bought it or someone gave it to you. It could also be learnt through repetition and practice. Each skill had a level of mastery which depended on the time you spent trying to improve it and personal modifications or innovations in using it. As far as Laurent knew, it went from Basic > Intermediate > Advanced > Expert.

“It seems our young hero here left his home in a hurry to make some name for himself.”

The goblins had quickly stopped talking when they realized he didn’t understand their language, resuming only when they saw the understanding flashing through his eyes.

Laurent didn’t agree or disagree with their statement, neither did he bother trying to make up something. If goblins were every bit as what Xyldar told him, they wouldn’t prod him any further either. And they didn’t.

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It seemed as if the situation wasn’t exactly new as the taller goblin shifted subjects without showing any embarrassment at being disregarded.

“Would you allow me to take you on a tour of a city? We can provide you with a place to stay and eat. Your living costs are on us except the resources for leveling up your evolution and such.”

Laurent found it was admirable they even did so much. No wonder people would want to visit the planet despite the cruel sights. He agreed to the proposal and strolled around the city while the guide pointed out all the stuff he could possibly use.

There was even a training hall which specifically stimulated your training area according to your wishes depending on what skill you want to train in. There was no such thing in his world. When they roamed the market area there was even an entire section of shops dedicated to selling resources which would help with evolution and such things.

As far as he knew these were all immensely helpful if one wanted to level up in the early stages. Again, his world only had an extremely basic version of this, ones where people put up stalls for what they didn’t need or wanted money off it.

There was a system shop as well where people put up all kinds of skills and resources. But on a larger scale like planet or world, it was simply difficult to gain significant traction unless you were famous or the things which you were selling were important. Else it was these local shops which majority of the people went to.

Next up were battle arenas where you could fight people and earn a fixed amount of money plus how many people came to spectate your match or participated in betting. It was all interesting to Laurent as none of this existed on earth.

There were a couple other things but they weren’t worth mentioning. He was given a device similar to a phone, but not explained how to use it. It seems using the phone like device came under common sense, then he was shown the way to his living residence which was a beautiful but small mansion, more than enough for one person.

When he was finally left alone, Laurent withdrew Xyldar into his Spectral Vault and settled onto the sofa. Maintaining a summon was a drain on four energies however little it may be. Like now, all four of his energies which were full at 15 had reduced to 14. It might be a good tradeoff considering the summon was by his side for more than a couple of hours but one had to keep in mind that necromancers didn’t just have one summon, they had an army of it.

The resource drain would lessen as he worked on it or used the evolution tree but it would still be present. It was one of the reasons necromancers and beastmasters could never focus on a lot of other things. All their evolution progress, time spent practicing and researching was geared towards increasing their energy pool, lessening the consumption for maintaining the link and increasing their absorption rate of energies.

Laurent began thinking about what to do next now that he had secured a living place. Should he still be going ahead with the initial plan of leaving this place through a teleporter? He organized all the pieces of information he had up till now,

1. There were resources which could help him level up his evolution tree. The later stages of the evolution tree weren’t free like the basic ones, some needed additional resources on top of the basic four energies to begin the process.

2. There were training spots here. He didn’t know how effective they would be but he had some hopes given how advanced this world was.

3. There were corpses here. It could be one of the most important reasons which might perhaps even convince him to stay. Given the development of the world, he might even be lucky to stumble upon a tier 1 or 2 corpse out in the open seeing how even his level 1 summon didn’t hold them in high regard.

After listing out all the points, he thought of the downsides,

1. Xyldar said the royal army was slaughtered, so someone will come to investigate, maybe remove all the opposing world forces if they are still on the planet. It isn’t necessary that they would go around investigating every weak person like me right? Very unlikely.

2. No one knows me here, but then again. This shouldn’t be that big of a problem if what Xyldar said was true about being able to form an identity here. A world typically had a population of 1 trillion in the start with 100 planets, an average of 10 billion per planet.

There were no complete downsides, both of them could be avoided and weren’t directly harmful to him unlike how the advantages would directly benefit him. He thus decided.

He would stay.

If he spent the time given by the system only to run upon encountering the briefest of trouble, then he would keep running all the time. He would need to face the trouble to actually grow. First things first, he summoned Xyldar again and asked him to take him where he could make an identity.

The streets, buildings, hospitals, and other architectures were made with sophisticated design, although intrinsically different from earth signified that the technological advancements of this world, or at least this planet were in no way lagging to the Earth.

Xyldar, who was walking ahead turned around and said,

“Master, the place where you can form your identity for now would be the adventurer’s guild. Their identity holds sufficient credibility in numerous places while also not delving deeply into the background of members. It is near the outskirts of the city to better facilitate the communications and convenience for its members who frequently go on missions. We’ll need to head there through a vehicle.”

Laurent boarded the vehicle which his summon rented and gazed around, it was similar to the cars on earth but with modifications which leaned towards speed and defense rather than comfort. He inwardly thought,

‘Maybe the cars on earth would go through the same change after the Great Awakening.’

He paid the driver 2 mana crystals and exited the cab following his summon who was looking in another direction. He followed his gaze to the huge building in the distance. But before he could scrutinize the structure any further, a voice caught his attention,

“Hey, human. Take me to the hospital. Quick!”

It was barely a whisper. He turned his head to where the sound was coming from and witnessed a truly grotesque sight.

The man, if you could call him that, was entirely covered in blood from head to toe, with numerous black and blue spots where blood had coagulated. He had only one arm and half a leg remaining, of which the remaining leg looked like a stump of meat. Laurent couldn’t imagine how much pain one must suffer to drag an open flesh wound across the ground bearing the weight of the torso. His clothes, or rather, rags only covered a select few areas on his body, barely hanging on. A part of his skull at the back had caved in and one of his eye sockets only held some mangled flesh. Flesh hung from various places on his body, he could even see his intestines spilling out from near the abdomen area.

Just when he was about to order to his summon to go fetch the man, another one intervened,

“Kill this man!”

It was filled with pure wrath.