I did a full turn before Treepo and Gregory.

“Looks good, right?” I said with a huge grin on my face.

Mo and his apprentices had done an absolutely amazing job on my first set of light armor. The stingknight queen chitin had been slightly shaped and buffed into a gorgeous, dark breastplate, riveted to the firm leather beneath with polished copper rivets. The rest of my back and torso was covered in layers of smaller pieces of the chitin from the drones. The shinier queen’s wing scales were used to accentuate the look, covering the abdomen and used on the pauldrons. The set was rounded out with bracers for my arms and greaves and tassets for my legs. The buckles were all done up in a matching polished copper.

“I still can’t believe how little this cost,” I gushed to my familiars, who weren’t sure what to make of me and my excitement over the armor. I assumed that by providing almost all the materials myself and outsourcing the work to the apprentices, all I really had paid for was a bit of copper and some of Morag’s time. “Almost a shame to wear it. It’s going to get ruined next time I get my ass handed to me by a beast.”

I would wear it, though. I was coming up to an age where my body would start to grow quickly, and this armor wouldn’t fit for more than a couple of years. I was going to get the most out of it in the meanwhile. It pained me, a bit, that pretty well no one except for Treepo and Gregory would even see it. I looked good.

After experimenting a bit with some magic, I found that I was able to cast a 5-point magic solidity spell directly on the armor, kind of like a protection spell for the armor. It cost some extra MP to maintain that, but it provided a little bit of a defensive boost to the chitin, which would hopefully keep it from getting destroyed too quickly. I planned to start using my 5-point magic barriers a little more liberally in combat, too. My MP had grown a decent amount over the last couple of levels and it let me be a bit more casual with my magical choices in battle, especially when combined with a growing inventory of potions.

The beasts around Mirut weren’t even that much of a challenge anymore, and I was significantly better at using my blades, so I could save on MP during combat that way, too. Of course, it was because I was getting closer in combat when using blades that I felt like I required armor, so it was a bit of circular logic.

Well, if my armor gets ruined, I can always hunt another stingknight queen, I thought to myself. Not that I particularly wanted to.

* * *

I stood on the beach outside of Mirut, watching one of the last rocky shieldbacks of the season lay her eggs. There was still a substantial mystery present for me to solve. I knew that rocky shieldbacks were a naturally-evolved beast, since the baby, turtle-like creatures that hatched from their eggs were not rocky, but regular shieldbacks. The rocky shieldbacks were also a magical beast of some sort, as they contained magic crystals.

As far as I knew, there were only two ways for beasts to evolve. The way I evolved my familiars, as a tamer, involved feeding them the magic crystals that I harvested from the rocky shieldbacks. That was a bit problematic, because there was no way for the rocky shieldbacks to grow in number if one of them had to die in order for another beast to evolve. There must be other sources of magic crystals in the world, and following that trail back, there must ultimately be a natural way in which they were generated.

The other way beasts evolved was in a dungeon, but as far as I could tell, the dungeon twisted the evolutions into darker, stronger, more violent versions of what they could be. I was also reasonably sure beasts couldn’t exit a dungeon once captured within. I had only a couple data points with regards to dungeon evolution, as I had only tamed and evolved beasts called polerats and vicaws to compare against what I thought were their dungeon-evolved counterparts.

I never really got a great look at those smaller dungeon-evolved beasts, but I had done battle twice with what I was confident were dungeon-evolved ramhogs. I decided that it was time to try and tame and evolve a ramhog from the jungle for comparison, and they had just migrated back to the area after winter.

Thinking about the dungeon while wearing my new armor, I realized with a jolt how lucky I was that I hadn’t encountered dungeon-evolved stingknights, or even worse, a dungeon-evolved stingknight queen. I shuddered at the thought of an even larger stingknight queen, with a huge stinger which probably would have been made of the same biological metal that seemed common on the beasts that were twisted inside the dungeon. I shook my head and tried to forget the image my mind had formed of such horror. I refocused on the beach and the present moment.

I dispatched the rocky shieldback after she was done with her eggs with a small apology and added the corpse to my inventory. I dismantled it and set about cutting the meat into parts to sell to Bosh.

Taming a ramhog could be a different kind of challenge. I had tamed all my familiars the way I was taught, which involved infusing my MP into a piece of food and feeding it to them. I usually infused a piece of high-value meat for this, as every beast I had encountered was an opportunistic meat-eater. It was easy to bait the obligate carnivores with meat, but despite the ramhog’s strength, I had only seen it hunting for fruits and nuts. They scavenged and wandered near and far for tasty morsels, and meat-based bait might not attract the kind of attention I wanted for this endeavor.

I worried about the ramhog’s main attack, a basic charging headbutt. Though basic, it packed a wallop. I needed to stop the attack, and limit the beast’s movement. If I could hobble it, I might be able to get the upper hand and produce a situation where I could tame the creature. I needed a strong rope or chains if I had any chance of making that work.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

I could probably buy some thick rope around the port. After I finished wrapping the rocky shieldback meat into leafy packages, I placed my armor back in my inventory and headed back into town to make, and then spend, some money.

* * *

As I approached the piers in search of rope, I noticed quite a lot of activity. The large square, which sometimes housed traveling merchants who came through by ship, was full of newly erected stalls. The crowd of locals buzzed as they examined the various wares on display. I remembered that Timur had mentioned a convoy was coming to town, and assumed that it had arrived.

I wiggled through the throng of excited housewives and curious sailors, peering up at the various merchants and their displays. There was a ton of interesting stuff to look at, things I had never seen and other things which I had, but never with this level of quality. I stared at a gorgeous blade on display at one shop, but the shopkeeper shooed me away before I could even ask about price. It was likely far more than I could afford, anyway.

I saw one shop with pieces of jewelry: brooches, rings, necklaces, and even a circlet or two. I was pretty sure no one in Mirut could afford most of this stuff, save for maybe Nodel’s family, and it would be all the more expensive with the price of travel added to the base cost. One necklace caught my eye. It looked like a pearl necklace, but the orbs were blue instead of pearl. I knew that magic crystals were largely just considered a nice-looking blue crystal by most, and that it was used in jewelry. They were valuable, but I doubted their true value was well-known, though I assumed somewhere, someone was using their magical potential.

“What stone is that?” I asked the shopkeeper. “It looks like polished blue crystal.”

The shopkeeper was clearly bored and frustrated. She had likely fielded countless window shoppers and moved very little product. At least, I assumed that was why she even bothered to respond to a child like me.

“Blue crystal?” she asked. I reached into my pack and pulled a magic crystal from my inventory, and showed it to her. “Ah, beast crystal. No, I don’t deal in beast crystal jewelry. It’s tacky.” she clarified.

Huh. So there was another common name for magic crystals. That was good to know.

She lifted the necklace up to show me. “These are deepwater pearls. Rather rare, since the blueclams that make them live quite deep in the sea, so they’re hard to fish up.”

“It’s very pretty,” I commented, and the shopkeeper returned it to the display.

I badly wanted to appraise the item, but I still hadn’t figured out how to appraise items outside of my inventory. Were the so-called blueclams native in this region? I was sure that those deepwater pearls shared some kind of similarity to magic crystals. If there was a mollusk in the ocean that naturally produced condensed magic from the magic element that I theorized was in the atmosphere, which presumably diffused in the ocean as well, then all it would take was a sufficiently strong shieldback to eat one up in order to evolve into a rocky shieldback. I was excited at the hypothesis and the possible explanation for a mystery I had been pondering for years.

Perhaps I could use water and air magic to dive deep enough to find some of the clams. I could tame another whaloid to help me descend, if necessary, I thought to myself as I continued window shopping.

I was bouncing ideas around my head when I noticed a stall with no customers at all. I paused, and walked towards it, curious what wares a stall might sell that would attract so little attention.

As I got closer, I saw rolled parchment and tomes, and my excitement grew even larger. Not many people in Mirut were literate, save for the magic researchers at the local institute, so of course a stall with books wouldn’t be popular. For myself, a bookstore was one of the most exciting things possible. Knowledge was power. I hurried over and greeted the bored shopkeeper.

My eyes danced over the various volumes of bound parchment and rolled parchment, but stopped and grew wide when I saw what was spread out on display front and center.

It was a map. Not a world map, but it showed a huge region. It was the whole of the Horuth Kingdom and even some of the surrounding territories. The map showed mountains to the north, the desert around Haklan and the start of another kingdom further south, and the plains which extended east past Gurt, a whole network of towns and new regions.

“How much for the map?” I asked, fighting to control the excitement in my voice.

The shopkeeper glanced at it, then at me, and grinned a predatory smile. “Three silver.”

I guffawed. That was highway robbery, even factoring in travel. Parchment was expensive, as was ink, and clearly the mapmaker was talented, but three silver would feed a family in Mirut for many dozens of days. I rolled my eyes and started to walk away.

“W–wait,” the shopkeeper stammered, glaring at me. “Two silver, five large copper.”

I turned back and narrowed my eyes at the man. I considered a moment, then feigned a low level of interest. “Hmm. What else do you have?”

* * *

I grinned ear-to-ear in the confines of my bedroom, studying my prizes.

After the most intense haggling session of both of my lives put together, I was pretty much broke once again, spending far more than I intended to on parchment products. I came away with the map, of course, but also three quires of blank parchment, which were each a count of twenty-four parchments that measured slightly larger than what I was familiar with from my mother’s grimoire. Once cut and bound, they would probably measure the same.

Both the map and the blank parchment were tremendous treasures. I had been forced to maintain everything I knew in my head, memorized, with no means of recording any information at all. I was eager to start transcribing my theories and experiments into notes of my own. I wanted to start my own grimoires, my own potion recipe book, and something I had yet to encounter anywhere: a bestiary, collecting all the knowledge I could about the beasts of this world. Seventy-two sheets would give me plenty of room to start transcribing my knowledge and thoughts. I still needed to source ink and figure out how to write effectively with a quill. I briefly wondered if I could fabricate a ball-point pen of some kind, but set that thought aside for later.

The map was a work of art, but also a huge source of information for me, as well as a source of inspiration. I knew that I would be leaving Mirut, eventually. It was nice to reincarnate into such a peaceful, quiet, sea-side town, but what made for a nice childhood also made for a dull adulthood.

The call to adventure had long since awoken inside me. I had a world to explore. Magic to learn and even, maybe, new magic of my own to create. Beasts to meet, fight, tame, and evolve. Dungeons and the mysteries within to uncover. I smiled even wider at the world that lay before me.

This map was only the beginning.