Chapter 6 The Way Of Fire

Our journey continued; it was more subdued after that. The person who was taken was just like me, another hopeful adventurer who wanted to become someone. Fortunately, I was pretty sure that the talon that was through his body killed him before he had to suffer too much.

For the next four days it was hard for me to sleep as I kept replaying that scene. It easily could have been me. What I needed was a library so I could focus on something else. Finally, we reached out of the forest to see fields of grain. It took another day but we finally saw the city.

The cities, towns, and even villages had one huge difference from the ones in rank 0 worlds: all of them had walls. They were not to defend against other people, although sometimes that came in handy. No, they were to protect against monsters, which was a concept still a bit hard for me to understand, but that bird definitely helped sink in that I was no longer in a safe world.

The city itself was quite massive, but the buildings weren’t tall, and if I understood correctly, only about half a million people lived here, which was still quite big for an out-of-the-way rank one world. It seems that the higher in rank you go, the fewer people you find, which kind of makes sense.

"Thank you for your help. You did an excellent job. Here's a little bonus," the caravan master said, lowering his voice for the last part. He handed me two gold coins.

"Thank you, I appreciate it," I responded with a grateful smile.

He just waved me off and went to do his work. Most of the caravan masters understand that fresh adventurers don't usually choose to be guards. So, I have found that if you do a good enough job, they usually pay you a little bit for the effort.

On this world, two gold coins actually meant a decent amount. It was mainly because this place was not in any major travelling pathway between worlds, which meant most of the things were made on this world, which brought the cost down quite a bit. All the other things that you needed to bring in were in comparison quite a lot more expensive.

You also got paid less for your work, but I wasn’t here to make money. I was here to level up while making some money to keep levelling up. Who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky with some drops. But that will all depend on what maps I will get. One positive thing was that I was no longer going to have to travel to get to a portal of a map, as things worked differently with grey maps.

This city looked a lot more like my home, as the buildings looked made by skilled craftsmen instead of workers. From the looks of it, there was still electricity, but there were no self-propelled vehicles. I think they called this kind of technical level closer to medieval, but what that meant I had no idea.

The Guild here owned a large portion of the city. This was one of the larger Guild compounds in this world. The reason why this city had grown so big and had so many adventurers was a crafter who lived about 400 years ago. It was his hometown, and he didn’t want to leave, but he got good enough to actually build map devices.

While you could move one, it was really troublesome, so the city had a lot of them. And since mapping has become a lot more popular than going out and fighting monsters in the open world, this city has grown quite big and prosperous enough to support its population.

There might have been better choices for me to go to, but there was also a lot of training for fresh adventurers here, plus this world had a fire affinity, and apparently that affected map making, which meant that there should be more maps with fire themes.

As I entered the adventurer compound, the first thing I noticed was the noise. It was quite a lot higher than I expected it to be, but the reasons for it became clear soon enough. While the place where I lived before had more adventurers, the liveliest place was the training grounds, but barely anyone had enough money to continuously go there. Apparently, here things were different as the training grounds were filled with adventurers training in all sorts of weaponry.

There was also a lively marketplace where adventurers traded with each other. I only needed to walk a few steps inside the market to see my first map. It was a stone circle with symbols on it. Putting that thing in a map device would create a portal that you could go into. There would be monsters there at least most of the time, and killing them would give you loot—mostly monster parts that crafters can use.

"75 gold! Grey Grass Fields map!" the person yelled, trying to sell his map. If I understand it correctly, you could purchase blanks and use crafting items to make maps or buy already-made maps from the Adventurers Guild or other adventurers.

When I made it out of the market, I stumbled onto a new one. This one was a lot more organized with huge lightboards filled with listed maps and items and how much they cost, with little descriptions behind them. This was the official Guild marketplace. While things were more expensive here, you were also guaranteed you wouldn't be scammed, as apparently that's quite a big problem.

I walked past all of this to a more calm reception area and went in line to wait for my turn. "How can I help you?" the receptionist asked, and I quickly answered. "I’m here to register myself as a resident of this city; I’m a fresh adventurer."

"Of course, I will start the process immediately. Please, I will need your thumbprint." It took a bit to get the paperwork done, but I was now officially a citizen of this city and could now use the portal devices here.

While they didn't cost anything to use; there was the sign-up sheet as absolutely every map device was in use, and you only got one day of use before you need to sign up once again. "Is there anything else?" the receptionist asked.

"Not right now, thank you." While in my previous guild compound, everything went through the main reception area, here it was split up into multiple different sections. The one that dealt with money was quite busy, but I went to another one that was less busy that was meant for signing up for training or if you wanted to stay in the dormitories, which I did.

Now I had my room key, and I did want to go and just rest after my long journey, but I needed to sell three of my wild tickets to get some money. They were something I couldn’t afford to keep as I was afraid they were going to be stolen. I didn’t want to sell the fourth one even if it could be stolen, as I think it would be too valuable in the future. Hopefully, I am not making a mistake by doing so.

There were many people close to the money section of the Guild, as everyone knew thieves targeted wild tickets as they were the best things to steal, as they were untraceable and worth a lot.

There were many people yelling to buy tickets, offering 500 gold coins; those were obviously fake. The more real ones were 300 gold coins, but I didn’t go up to anybody and just waited, acting like I was browsing the market that was nearby.

Eventually, someone who was offering 290 and wanted to buy five gave up and started to walk away. I let him get closer to the market and then looked at him, and when our eyes met, I widened mine. "It's been so long! I didn’t think we’d see each other again. Come, let’s talk there," and with my thumb, I pointed towards the money reception area.

He looked at me a bit confused but then realized what was happening; he smiled. "Damn, I thought you were dead. Come, let's catch up." We walked a little bit, talking about the weather. "I only have three, but the price is good for me." He gave me a nod, and we continued to talk about nothing in particular.

"Hey, didn’t I owe you some money? Let's go and get that taken care of; it's really been eating at my heart," and just like that we were in line waiting and still talking about useless things like the worlds we had seen. "I would like to transfer 870 gold coins to this particular friend of mine. Isn't that right?" I gave him a nod while showing him that the tickets were in my hand.

With the transfer was being confirmed, I gave him my hand to shake and he took it. "Thanks, man, this means a lot to me," he said.

He just waved me off, and after we let go of our handshake, the tickets were now in his hand. I didn’t leave immediately as I gave him enough time to check that the tickets were real. He then gave me a big smile. "This was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. Why couldn't every deal be made like this?"

I just waved to him one last time and left. This was something I learned from one of the older caravan guards. Apparently, he had a brother who was an adventurer; he was really proud of that fact and basically every night he told us stories about his older brother and the stories he told him about being an adventurer. I listened well into the night to every one of his stories, and while I believe almost all of them were exaggerated, it wasn't hard to figure out what was true and what wasn't.

During the journey here I was stolen from twice; each time they got two copper coins that I had in my fake money pouch. It's better if they get something than nothing at all; some call it the thieves' tax.

Whatever the case might be, I’m glad that my money is now in my bank account and I could use it outside the Adventurers Guild. If I didn’t have a bank account set up, I just would have had to deposit all the coins into the Adventurers Guild, and getting those back would be difficult.

Now it was finally time to rest, but I was a bit disappointed that the room wasn’t as good as my other dormitories, but at least the mattress was fine enough. The security here seemed better, and I’m pretty sure it would be easier to come through the wall than to try to bust that door down. Still, I barred it and even put a chair in front of the lock so no one could just open it if they picked it open.