Moments later, a wash of mana rushes through me, and the world changes.
When my vision clears, I am standing in a city of stone and wood.
Cobblestone streets stretch in every direction. Somewhere nearby, a horse carriage rattles over uneven road with a steady knocking rhythm. The buildings are packed close together, timber and brick pressed against one another in a way that makes the whole place feel old, lived in, and a little too real.
To either side of me are the people I fought with.
The people I almost died with.
[Layer Population 19/1000]
So that is everyone.
We all made it.
That alone should have felt bigger than it did. Instead, questions rise immediately.
Where is here?
What do quests look like now?
Are there more undead to kill?
Or is it goblins this time?
"Hey, look at that, we made it!" Sheral says, glancing over at me.
"Yeah," I say. "What a day."
"Whooo!" Jake yells, probably the least injured out of all of us.
The rest of the crowd joins in with him, cheering loud enough to turn heads in the street.
I cannot really join them.
Instead, I start taking slow steps away from the group.
Sheral notices immediately and follows me into a nearby alley.
"What are you doing, idiot?" she asks, already sounding annoyed.
"You know..." I start, then have to force the rest out. "I love being with the group, but it's not really my tempo. I know more about this stuff than most people here, and I need to move faster. Progress quicker. Get money, even."
The words come out awkwardly, like they do not really want to leave me. Or maybe I just do not want to admit what I am actually thinking.
Sheral looks at me for a moment, then sighs.
"Well, I won't hold you, Tero. You're a good kid, and I don't think you'll leave us for good. You'll always be welcome in my castle."
She says it like a joke, but there is enough sincerity behind it that it lands anyway.
"Well, thank you," I say. "That's... really nice."
For the first time, I hug her.
It feels strange, mostly because we have not actually known each other for very long, but even so, I cannot help seeing her a little like a grandmother.
"Stay safe, okay?" she says, pulling away before I can get too sentimental. "Don't die."
Then she marks something down on her clipboard.
[Sheral would like to be your Friend]
[Accept] [Deny]
I hit accept without hesitation.
"I'll, um... see you around, Sheral."
"Of course you will."
She heads back to the group.
For a second, I want to go with her.
I really do.
But I stop myself.
Being in a group is not for me. It is for people who can handle that kind of thing.
I am petty and greedy, hard-headed and bad with people.
There is no real place for me there.
So I turn and walk away.
The city is large enough that I can spend the next hour just going from shop to shop, asking questions and seeing who has a quest for me.
One of the first useful stops is a wand shop.
The place smells faintly of wax and polished wood, and the wands on display are much nicer than the basic one I started with. Most of them cost tens of silver or more, which tells me very quickly that proper magical equipment is not cheap.
More importantly, the shopkeeper offers to buy my current wand.
Apparently it is worth 10 silver, though he is only willing to pay 6.
I take the deal.
The wand is not a good weapon for me when I am alone, and now that I can use real magic, I would rather have the money.
The next useful stop is a tailor.
Unlike the wand shop, this place actually has something for me.
"Recently, our cloth deliveries have been stolen by gnolls!" the tailor says, wringing her hands dramatically. "Can you please help us?"
A quest window appears immediately.
[Accept Quest?]
[Stolen Cloth: Retrieve stolen cloth from gnoll hideout]
[Reward: 100 XP & Fine Robe]
[Yes] [No]
[Fine Robe
+1 Intelligence]
I accept without thinking too hard about it.
Then I pause and think about it anyway.
A reward this good probably means the quest is not repeatable, or at least not repeatable in the same form. There probably are not many quests like this lying around either.
That tells me something useful.
This system seems to favor professions and skill growth more than straight combat grinding.
When you craft something, you get two forms of experience, skill XP and normal XP. That means production scales you in more than one direction at once.
Good to know.
With that in mind, I head toward what looks like an enchanting shop.
If anything in this city can eventually let me make better wands, it has to be enchanting.
Unlike most of the other stores, the door here is shut, and a guard stands outside.
"You do not meet the standard to enter this establishment," he says. "Please dress more appropriately."
I walk away without responding.
So that is how the system handles prerequisites here.
The tailor quest is probably my way in.
That is good news and bad news.
Good because there is a path.
Bad because there is no fast one.
My next stop is a general goods store, mostly because I want a map.
The cheapest map they have costs 1 silver and 20 copper, and even that only gives a rough outline of the nearby area.
Then the shopkeeper says something much more interesting.
"For 5 silver, I can teach you how to make your own maps!"
"Oh?" I say, more surprised than I should be. Most game systems do not go this far into utility skills. "Um, yes. Please. That would be great."
I hand over the money from my inventory, and another window appears.
[Learn Cartography Skill for: 5 Silver]
[Cartography is the study and art of making maps. Maps made by someone with the Cartography skill can be sold directly to vendors and will be system evaluated for quality and accuracy.]
[Accept] [Deny]
I hit accept immediately.
Maps are expensive. That means this is probably a good investment.
Hopefully.
The downside becomes obvious right away, of course.
To make a map, I actually have to explore the area first.
Which makes the whole thing riskier than it sounds.
"Can I also buy a pencil and parchment?" I ask.
"Yes!"
[Buy 1x Pencil for: 5 Copper]
[Yes] [No]
[Buy 1x Parchment for: 20 Copper]
[Yes] [No]
I hit yes on both, and the items spawn into my inventory.
After that, leaving the city is easy enough once I ask a guard for directions.
Outside the walls, the land opens into a calm forest dotted with the occasional house. Compared to the dreary undead woods around the tutorial village, this place feels almost healing. Deer move through the brush. Small woodland creatures dart between roots and shrubs with almost no concern that I exist.
A short walk brings me to a signpost.
One side points toward Dusk Falls.
The other points toward The Meadow.
The naming could be better, but the tailor did say her cloth comes from people in The Meadow.
So I head that way, sketching the road and landmarks onto my parchment as I walk.
Scale and placement are the easy part.
The hard part is making my hand do what I want.
This is one of the obvious downsides of my current stat spread. My Intelligence is high enough that I can picture exactly what I want the map to look like, but my Dexterity is still bad enough that actually drawing it is frustrating.
It creates a nasty little feedback loop.
For a moment I consider balancing my stats out more.
Then I dismiss the thought.
Not yet.
My magic is still too rough for me to start spending points elsewhere.
A few hours into the walk, I find my first gnoll.
It is a genuinely ugly thing, like a humanoid hyena with a heavy club in its hands, standing right in the middle of the road as if it owns it.
If it were a real person, or even a real predator, it would have spotted me by now.
But I am still outside whatever invisible aggro range governs life here.
[Level 8 Gnoll]
That level is both higher and lower than I wanted.
Higher, because I had hoped this quest would be easy.
Lower, because enemies that low are not going to be useful for long-term grinding.
Still, a fight is a fight.
I level my spear and charge.
For a second I think it will not work the way it did on the zombies, because the gnoll actually moves like it is trying to dodge. Then I realize it is just running low, chest forward, weapon raised.
So I adjust.
A quick shift of my aim, one committed thrust, and the spear punches into its chest.
The kill is clean and simple.
[Killed 1x Level 8 Gnoll: 1 XP]
Just like the zombies.
The moment it dies, it loses all weight as a living thing and turns into little more than a sack of moving rubber collapsing on my weapon.
Then another window appears.
[Loot: 1 Copper]
"Well," I mutter. "At least the grind won't be totally pointless."
After following the road a while longer and killing a small trail of gnolls, I decid to take a break.
The newest spell idea I have is simple in theory and maddening in practice.
What I want is a locating spell, something that works with a map.
The idea would be to use mana and a physical map together so the spell can mark the location of a desired object or destination.
What I have so far is this: use an item augmentation rune as the base, then layer a dispersion effect over it. Spread mana out like a mist, let it search, then feed what it finds back onto the map.
The problem is imagination.
Mana is not matter.
Or at least, not in any way my brain is naturally equipped to understand.
It can be stretched far beyond what feels reasonable, and if the caster is skilled enough, it can carry information, structure, or effects across that distance. But trying to imagine a resource as both scalable and precise at the same time feels fundamentally inhuman.
Most of the time, when I try, the mana just runs away from me.
So this one is going to take longer than the others.
A lot longer.
[Mana: 0/150]