The Way Ahead

Traveling, Edwin couldn’t help but notice, was rather fun. Yes, he’d gone on vacation back on Earth, but that had always been a high-paced rush to see as much as possible in the limited time at each location. Run here, see that view, pause for a picture, then go through a museum, see the sights, and find a restaurant for dinner. Repeat five more times, then fly home.

He’d enjoyed it just fine- seeing new things was a bit of a reward unto itself- but he’d always found himself exhausted at the end of it all. Now that he was walking everywhere, with nothing but his own thoughts to keep himself company, he felt far more rested than on any of the family trips supposedly meant to do just that. It helped that he finally wasn’t injured (blisters went away easily with a tiny dab of healing salve), wasn’t wandering through untamed forests, and had plenty of food (it helped he only needed to eat about once a day), with easy enough access to water.

Plus, he was in fantastic shape! He was probably closing in on three months on Joriah now, he hadn’t been keeping that much attention to the passing time, but his own two feet had been his primary method of transportation that entire time. Things felt different when it took him an entire day to go as far as he might have in just an hour or two in a car. It was just all so massive, so grand in scope, and he had far more time to appreciate everything he came across.

From magnificent sunsets and sunrises, to the flocks of birds which flew overhead, whose feathers seemed to shine like jewels, to the mountains looming in the distance, glittering like sapphires against the azure sky, and even the unusually crystal-clear brooks trickling alongside the road, everything just felt so more fantastical than what he was used to.

During his breaks and stops for the night (while there was enough light, anyway), Edwin took to reading the Grimoire. It was tricky to parse in many places, and the author seemed to be a bit overfond of their own eloquence, but while Edwin couldn’t fact-check it very well, it still was a wealth of information.

Apparently, the water-filtering ‘Seagrass’ grew in places of abundant life and water magic, and whose blue-green stalks could actually support fish, which could swim through the grass as though it were water. And, if dried in one way, could be spun into exceptionally soft and fine cloth (drying it a different way gave it the water-absorbing properties he had so benefitted from in the tower). Or Mage’s Lichen, which changed color and even glowed depending on the sorts of magic it was exposed to. Spiderless Webs were a type of fungus with a striking resemblance to cobwebs, but were surprisingly nutritious. Royal’s Cup grew leaves which folded into the shape of a goblet, and was nigh-impossible to cut, but had powerful anti-poison abilities if you managed to do so and drank from it. Glowleaf was actually an entire family of plants, not a single species (which according to the Grimoire was a common misconception) with bioluminescent leaves. Glassleaf trees were what Edwin had found in the Verdant, which allowed green light to pass through them in a single direction only. Atir moss had the strange property of...

All the herbology sections came with incredibly lifelike drawings of the substances, which allowed him to recognize a small patch of wild seagrass for what it was, despite its lack of fish. Edwin even took a few blades of the grass for himself, though as he couldn’t properly dry it, just sort of stuff it into his bag and hope for the best, it shriveled up into a state which the Grimoire described as useless.

All in all, Edwin was having a blast, and as he ventured back towards Vinstead (or more accurately, the Verdant), he watched as the empty space slowly became more and more populated. While when he first started, he might see a person every day or two, particularly shepherds and other herders, tending to herds of animals both familiar and strange on the sea of grasses which dominated the landscape, now he would regularly encounter a courier, his enhanced senses barely able to catch more than a few glimpses of the (usually human) runners as they dashed past him, kicking up massive plumes of dirt, carrying some cargo to places unknown. He’d also spot flights of avior overhead, soaring across the lightly clouded skies.

It was always slightly cloudy, though on further thought, had it ever rained at all in the time he’d been here, the thunderstorm from the fighting Royals notwithstanding? He didn’t think it had. Strange. How was this such a flourishing agricultural area, then? If Vinstead really was the primary breadbasket for all of Liras like he’d been told, then surely it must have water from somewhere, right?

In the distance, the walls of Vinstead loomed, and even from this far away, he could make out clouds of airborne figures surrounding the metropolis, like flies swarming around fallen food. Hmm. He should probably avoid entering the city proper, to help throw his pursuit off his trail. It was a minor enough point, and assuming he could restock his rations, and get a few tools, from some store outside the walls, there was no reason for him to enter at all.

A bit of poking around had turned up something of a market, set up alongside the outer walls of Vinstead. Among the colorful fabrics and stalls, Edwin spotted something which seemed perfect. One of the storefronts, really just a table laden with miscellaneous travel-related goods in front of a bored-looking green-haired kid, maybe twelve years old, had the same sorts of strange, brown, vaguely fruity loaves that Lefi had bought last time they were through here. Most were already wrapped up in something which seemed reminiscent of parchment paper, and Edwin found himself remembering that just because Joriah had all the trappings of a planet in the mid-1300s, that didn’t actually mean that it was. Did they even have paper back then?

“How much?” he asked the… Keen Assistant, indicating towards the rations.

The question knocked the boy out of his stupor, and he shook his head, “Sarry, wha?”

“The loaves. How much per?”

“E-uh-one ager each.” He seemed to switch what he was saying midway through, was he changing his price? Or maybe he just had a bit of a stutter.

Ah, whatever. He didn’t feel like haggling. He ran through what he remembered Lefi saying about the currency system. A copper coin (ves) was the smallest unit, and one hundred and twenty of them made up one silver (ager), which in turn was sixty per gold (grai). Standard coin weight was sixty ‘grains,’ which to Edwin felt something like forty grams. In any case, it had been really disorienting to Edwin when Polyglot stopped translating each coin name as just copper/silver/gold and instead started using their actual words. He tried to get himself to think about them by their actual names, he ought to try and actually learn the language at some point, but he kept slipping.

In any case, one silv-ager each seemed perhaps a little pricey, but then again, he didn’t exactly have a very firm grasp on the corresponding currency value. Perhaps it was totally reasonable. In any case, he still didn’t feel like haggling over it, not here and not with a kid who would probably haggle him into the ground if he were a junior shopkeep of some form. He wanted to preserve some semblance of dignity. Edwin pulled out a small handful of coins and deftly stacked twelve ager on the table, “Very well.”

The boy picked up each of the coins and flipped them between his fingers, studying each with the same sort of intensity Edwin had come to associate with Skill usage. Checking their purity or that they weren’t counterfeit, perhaps? If there was a skill for that sort of thing, did that mean the scale was developed exclusively for alchemical purposes, or something similar? That was an interesting thought, though it did explain why none of the stalls set up had any sort of measurement tools, if Skills just took care of all of that. His thoughts, and associated zoning out, had attracted a curious gaze from the boy, and Edwin shook his head by way of apology, “Sorry, sorry. Just lost in my thoughts for a moment.” He quickly scooped up his dozen loaves, packing them away in his belt and backpack, then nodded farewell to the green-haired lad.

Honestly, if the whole green-hair thing weren’t so common, Edwin would have likely gotten distracted by that as well. He hadn’t really noticed it the first time he had come to Vinstead, too distracted by everything else, but probably a good half of the humans wandering around (the halflings seemed to be unaffected, the vibrant gnomes seemed to just have green as one of their more common natural hair colors, though did that work the same way?) had the unusual color across their head. He had yet to see a green beard, though he couldn’t recall if that was because green-haired individuals didn’t have beards or just because the beards maintained more normal coloration. It probably had something to do with the Verdant’s proximity.

At least, if he were looking for the origin of people with strangely green aspects of their integumentary system, he’d look at the giant, magical, and untamed forest right next door. He wished he had some way to analyze the hair, though. From what little he recalled from his anatomy class, sharpened by Memory, was that hair color was the result of two different types of melanin- their names escaped him- but that was what allowed for the variety of browns, reds, and blond hair colors back on Earth. Was green hair the result of a third type of melanin, then? Or something else entirely? He didn’t even know where to begin trying to determine that sort of thing, though, so he let the question fall by the wayside.

Edwin continued his foray through the crowds, looking for a few more materials which he’d need if he were to properly try and survive in the wilderness. He wasn’t going to blunder around like normal, he was going to prepare and do this properly. His search led him to a stall attached to a smithy, where he picked out an axe, a shovel, a small saw, a really sturdy knife, and a hand drill for twenty ager, and at another stall on his way there, a few good lengths of rope for a half ager (sixty ves, and yes, they did just cut the silver coin in half) before he left the market, purse much lighter.

He was content, though. The quality of the tools he’d gotten were easily comparable if not superior to modern-day Earth gear, power tools notwithstanding. Incredibly, despite how much stuff he had in his pack, it still didn’t feel all that heavy. Magic for the win!

Granted, the unfortunate side of magic meant that Edwin had to stay vigilant against invisible thieves, though how he was supposed to do so, he wasn’t entirely sure. His coin pouch had been moved to sit on the inside of his belt, behind his temporarily tucked-in shirt, which was probably sufficient, though in a world filled with Skills, was it really enough? Well, it was still present even once he had escaped the press of people in the city outskirts, so it must have been.

It was only once Edwin had left even the outskirts of Vinstead that he got his first glimpse of the Rhothos River itself, namesake of apparently this entire region, and his first instinct was that it couldn’t possibly be that large. The water seemed to stretch for miles, though most of it was on the shallow side. It honestly looked like the river had burst its banks and flooded a massive valley with uncountable gallons of water. But nobody seemed to take any note of it, like this was perfectly normal. In fact, there were even a few buildings in the middle of the lake-river, held up on stilts.

Edwin snapped his fingers. It had to have cyclic flooding of some sort. Regular times of the year when the river burst its banks and irrigated the surroundings, inundating it with nutrients, like the Nile. That, combined with whatever ‘life magic’ came from the Verdant, would probably truly turn this place into truly unmatched farmland.

Actually, did he really know if there was something magical about the Verdant? Everyone seemed to think there was, but maybe that was just the result of the regular floodwaters and particularly rich soil? Sure, the sorts of things you could make with talsanenris berries were pretty overtly supernatural, but in a fantasy world there were all sorts of ways that sort of thing might end up happening. Still, he did have experiences with train-sized predators, though that didn’t absolutely require a magical forest.

There was a road traveling alongside the bank of the Rhothos, which Edwin absentmindedly took as his mind wandered hither and yon, internally debating whether he would ever really be able to figure out if a place was ‘magical’ in the sense that he knew it, or just a place with exceptional, but ultimately mundane, qualities? The people here would have no frame of reference, who knows what all had been chalked up to ‘just magic’ as a result of them simply not knowing any better?

Well, that’s what he was here for, anyway. He’d just find some cave or promising tree, come up with some clever survival solution, and become a reclusive alchemist-scholar. Yeah, he rather liked the idea of having his own private hidden base, a place he could really call his own. That would be his goal for now, and hopefully he had given his dwarven pursuers enough of a slip that they would have no clue where to find him. It was in large part because of those pursuers, whoever and wherever they may be, that he didn’t set up shop in a city, but solitude had its own benefits beyond the purely emotional. He wouldn’t need to deal with keeping people up with explosions or foul smells, he’d be the only one in danger of one of his experiments going wrong, and just in general, there was a reason chemical plants weren’t near residential areas. Of course, there was also a reason that chemical plants weren't out in the middle of nowhere, either, simply due to the amount of stuff they regularly needed....

Shut up, brain. It’s a great idea. It’s also really cool. Let me have this.

This close to Vinstead, there were all sorts of individuals, patrols of generally human guards, barges traversing the shallower sections of flooding, appearing to be planting something even while the water was still rushing beneath them, and laborers hauling sacks of some kind or another. Most of them seemed to be human, which struck Edwin as being rather odd. Vinstead had so many avior that it almost seemed like they were the most populous species in the entire region. And yet, nearly everywhere outside of the city itself (and the caravan) he had found had been human-dominated.

Well, not counting the Blackstone Citadel or that one halfling village. The thought of the halflings made Edwin cringe at how he had just sort of vanished after all the help they had provided for him, never saying thanks or providing any sort of acknowledgement beyond a quick nod to the village chief, whatever her name had been. Without Almanac to remind him of people’s names, they tended to quickly drain out of his mind. Not that it mattered that much when he wasn’t with the person in question, he supposed.

He spent the night in one of the shrines Lefi was so fond of, dedicated to Curicna. It didn’t have much, but a mattress, no matter how primitive, was far nicer than sleeping on the ground. In some respects, he almost wished he could take one with him, but ignoring the logistical nightmare of trying to do so, stealing from a probably-real god didn’t strike him as terribly wise.

Well, he could always make one himself. How hard could it be?