“Welcome, prospective adventurers, to the launch of the Adventurers Guild!”

Horg stood in front of the inaugural branch, a line of clerks and staff behind him. Off to the side, towards the Tamers Guild building, Rena stood in support.

In order to put on the best show possible as the new Guild Master, I had outfitted Horg with some new armor and a fancy new sword. Rather than army gear, he wore a sleek set of dracosaur scale armor, and standing tall with a commanding presence his voice projected over the audience of interested people who had gathered to be there that morning.

Wearing my “going out” illusion of Bil, I glanced around at the many faces who were staring at the leader of the organization with interest. Many freelance hunters were present, as well as some of the local city guard, a number of mages, some younger priests and priestesses, and a number of children who appeared to be apprentice age, likely interested in the potential of getting in early with the new institution. A couple of mages who recognized this alias caught my eye and nodded, and I nodded back before turning back to Horg’s speech.

“My name is Horg, and I am the Guild Master of this inaugural branch of the Adventurers Guild. Behind me are the clerks and staff who will be able to register you as an adventurer and provide you with goods and services. Inside, you will find the quest board with available jobs that you, as adventurers, can take, depending on your adventurer rank.

“Everyone is welcome to join, and we have foraging, collection, and errand quests for those still near the start of their journeys as adventurers. We also have hunting quests for those further along, rewarding hunters consistently with fair prices for bringing additional meat into the city.”

Horg continued with some simple, surface level explanations about what the new Guild did and offered, and what adventurers could expect to be doing in order to earn a living as a member.

“We will now partially open the doors to the public. For today, we ask that you enter in groups of five at a time with a clerk so they can give you the tour and provide more information, and who will then take your group through registration if interested. We ask that you be patient and wait outside until the next clerk is free as we cycle everyone in and out on this first day. If you have places to be, feel free to return later, as our clerks will be giving tours and explanations all day. Tomorrow and onward, you can come as you like and register or ask questions at the information desks and begin using the other services our guild provides.”

As I watched, a number of people milling about left, seeing the size of the crowd, and others moved forward to get in quickly. Horg motioned people over, forming them up into loose groups—sized and organized to reflect the average party we expected groups to require for higher ranked quests, which was part of the education the clerks would be imparting—and started sending them in, staggered, with the clerks we had trained for the opening day.

I held back, simply observing, until someone came over. “Bil, right? You worked with us on the construction of this place one day.”

The man seemed familiar, and when I noticed the magic meter on his wrist, it clicked into place. He was the only mage who had owned one already when I spent the day helping. “Oh, hi. Yes, but sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

“Call me Don.”

“Well met, Don. You thinking of joining this adventurer business?” I asked, purposefully feigning some skepticism to take the temperature of the average mage in the capital. Well, maybe not average, since he already went out of his way to get a meter.

“Rumor has it,” he said, leaning in and lowering his voice. “This guild will have some pretty exceptional magic recovery potions for sale for members. If nothing else, it’s worth it for me to join if I can get my hands on some, since it’ll let me take a lot more construction contracts.”

I nodded. “Stonework is your focus, then?”

“Pretty much. I’m decent at moving water and air, but not so great at fire, it just wipes me out.”

“You ever see any combat with your stone magic?”

Don paused, frowning. “Like with the army? No, thankfully. I’m much more suited to construction and civic work.”

“What about hunting?” I pulled a stone from my inventory out of my pocket, floating it above my hand and reshaping it as a simple stone arrow. “It’s a little intense to fire them fast enough, but it does the trick just like one fired from a bow.”

“Huh, I’ve never tried. I’m a bit of a city boy,” he said with a nervous laugh.

“Well, I think the Guild has a training yard with some shooting ranges if you want to give it a shot in a safe place. Might be worth a try, especially if they’re selling potions that can top you back up on magic quickly so it doesn’t cut into your regular work. Probably some easy money to be made in your downtime bringing in some game.”

The stone recompressed into an orb and I tucked it back into my pocket. I figured that if I could encourage a few mages to get out there and hunt some beasts using their magic, once they started raking in some extra experience and growing the skill faster than they would moving stone around for construction, mages would start to see the benefits. It would strengthen the available mages for the Kingdom’s civic purposes as well.

“That’s… something to think about, I guess. Thanks for the tip.”

I parted ways from Don, who stepped forward to try to get in one of the next tours, and made my way over to Rena.

“Looks like it’s going good so far,” I said. Rena looked at me in confusion, and I realized she was not familiar with my Bil alias. I lowered my voice. “Oh, I’m wearing an illusion. It’s me, Pilus.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“Ah,” she said, turning back to look at the crowd. “Yeah, if half these people wind up registering that’ll still be a huge success for day one turnout.”

“Should have some strong synergy with the tamer side of things too, once people start taking quests and heading out. The bigger hunts are going to need to haul skids or pull wagons to bring back the beasts.”

“Not that we have the tarands or wagons to sell to them right now.”

“Yeah, yeah, working on it.”

We stood in companionable silence for a while, watching people go in and out of the new Adventurer Guild.

“Say, Rena. I’ve been thinking, and… I think it’s about time I hand off my role in the Tamers Guild.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m a little busy with my, uh, new job, and I just can’t give the Guild the attention I used to. I’ll still support it from the background and arrange what I can, but the day to day leadership that it requires is only going to grow as this branch takes off, and I need someone who can properly balance that against the eastern branches and continue working on spreading it to the west and south, which I can’t do given my new, uh, position.”

Rena hummed. “I suppose that makes sense. Who do you have in mind?”

I glanced down at the formerly wiry brunette, who had grown further into adulthood over the last couple of years. She had grown taller and gained some muscle from all the farm work, and her scarred hands and arms were a testament to years of handling unruly beasts.

“Pretty sure there’s only one person for the job. What do you say, Guild Master?”

Surprise flashed over Rena’s face. “Me?” She paused, taking on a contemplative expression as she gave it some real thought. “Oh. Wow. Well, yes. Thank you, Pilus. I won’t let you down.”

“I know you won’t,” I said with a grin. “We can meet up later and discuss it in more detail. I’m pretty sure you already know everything you need for the role, and I’ll always make time to sit down with you if you need, but we can talk through any lingering doubts first and then make it official.”

Rena nodded, barely masking her growing smile, and I patted her on the back before heading back towards the Adventurers Guild. I joined a group, took the tour to make sure it was going well and see what needed work still, then left without registering, since the mage Bil did not actually exist and did not need to clutter up the registration area with a non-entity’s false information, especially on the first day.

Over the following days and weeks, Horg and I worked through any surprises and figured out where and how we could make improvements and streamline the operation, but overall it was a strong start and we were still seeing a lot of continued interest in membership as word spread.

It was not the perfect Adventurers Guild I had in mind, which became obvious over the spring and early summer. As a way to formalize hunting, it was a massive success. Nodel’s team tracked the data about meat availability and sales in the capital, and we were unquestionably providing more protein and overall calories for the community than in years past, and the Guild was able to eventually find a balance whereby they could maintain hunter quests on their own without subsidy from the crown. Both Guilds worked closely together when it came to beasts, to make sure that the hunting quests and the tamer quests were not treading common ground and that they were not stepping on each others’ toes.

Since the capital region was so well managed, though, there just were not really that many “big bad beasts” that needed more difficult kill quests to manage. The capital occasionally got news that pannid packs were hunting along the northern roads, and the Adventurers Guild was able to put quests out for that rather than force the Kingdom to respond with the army or let convoys get attacked, and so the roads were a bit safer in a way that was a bit better economically. Guard jobs for convoys started to get organized through the Guild rather than sorting individual contracts, but that was only really viable from the capital to Fespen and back, until other branches opened.

Mage adventurers that actually fulfilled quests were rarer, but some did make an attempt at hunting and time would tell whether they saw the rewards for that or not, but potion sales were exceptional in any case. Between the magic meters, the potion measurement artifact that I finalized, and the integration of some trusted brewers working with the Guilds, the market was pretty thoroughly dominated. Independent potion makers generally only made weak potions, but once they were also ungraded when compared to the Guild potions, most mages stopped trusting them.

To handle that, the Guild began offering a grading service for freelance brewers, and over time the market adjusted. Of course, the best potions always came from the Adventurer Guild, where I had let some of the brewers in on my big secret about using beast crystals or deepwater pearls. We were limiting how many we would make at once, on account of early fishing trips bringing back limited supply, but the increase in available magic in circulation meant that a lot more civic construction could be done and adventurer mages had a lot more value in the field, hunters or healers or otherwise.

The most important service, to me, that the Adventurers Guild ended up providing was how they helped the apprentice-aged children who would otherwise have slipped through the cracks. Not every child was able to secure an apprenticeship, after all, and some apprenticeships fell through or needed to be ended prematurely due to changing circumstances. In many of these cases, those children ended up significantly worse off than their peers, and had less options as they entered adulthood.

The Guilds provided options for general education, mentorship, and training that otherwise would not be available to these children. It was ultimately decided that no child under the age of adulthood could advance beyond Stone rank, and to balance that across the Tamers Guild we introduced a Stone rank membership there as well, for children, restricting them to rank G and F beasts until they were older or unless they had an adult mentor, but it still provided ways for pre-adult teenagers to make their way without falling into poverty or hopelessness. Once adults, they would swiftly grow as Tamers or Adventurers given all that they learned on their journeys to adulthood.

* * *

I wrapped my arms around Sera as we gazed out at the city through the palace window. The late summer dusk was gorgeous, and the hint of cold in the air as night fell spoke to how soon another fall would arrive. The last year had rushed by, and our happy marriage had been a large part of why the time seemed to just melt away. The swell of her belly was just starting to become noticeable. My face broke into another large smile, which it had been doing a lot of late, as I thought about our future.

The Guilds were going well, the new ideas I had brought to the Kingdom were largely making positive change, I was surrounded by friends and family and people that I loved, and I was starting my own family for the first time ever.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy in my life,” I murmured in Sera’s ear. She would understand the full meaning of that, as I had told her about my first life on Earth and being reborn in this world. It was not just the happiest moment of merely the nearly twenty two years of this life, but also the few decades I had lived before.

Seranedra turned her head back towards me and kissed my chin, lifting a hand to place it on my cheek. “It’s my happiest as well, my love.”

We continued to cuddle and watch as night fell over the capital. I knew that life was always in flux, and that change was certain, but in that moment, I hoped things could stay that way forever. I never wanted to be anywhere else.