Chapter 13

Chapter 13

When Alice stepped through the gates and into the city, her first impression was architectural chaos. At least in the outer region of the city, the buildings were strewn about like a giant had casually tossed markers in random directions and people had then built exactly where those markers landed, regardless of how much sense it made. Much of the town was still under construction, with people transporting building materials and workers ... everywhere.

There were huge plots of vacant land right next to filled in areas, with a few skeletons of buildings still being filled in here and there. From much farther away, she could see the construction of a large landing area for ships underway. She could even faintly see someone dressed in a white dress that seemed absurdly out of place ordering around groups of workers while giant blocks of construction material floated in midair around her. At the very least, it put to rest any lingering fears Alice had of witch hunts, or any similarly nonsensical problems of that vein. The woman was openly and obviously using her magic while throwing orders at people, and they obeyed without a hint of hesitation.

Despite the seemingly random building placement and general chaos, however, Alice was also surprised to see some seemingly modern aspects of city-planning. Unlike what she had expected to find once she learned of the technology level of this world, there were still clearly marked streets and sidewalks, although currently the streets were still under construction. Furthermore, she could even see an occasional ladder down into what she assumed was a sewer system, covered with some sort of reinforced wooden cover to prevent random entry or accidentally falling in.

In a daze, Alice stepped forward, trying to take in her first steps inside of a city in nearly three months. Things she had tried to avoid thinking about in months flickered through her thoughts. People. Friends. Family. She could at least find one of the three here.

And the other two were still missing from her life, possibly gone forever.

Alice shook away the dark thoughts inside of her head, and instead focused on scanning her surroundings. The guard outside of the gates had said to find the guardhouse, where she could at least get acquainted with the town a little bit. That was a good place to start, before she did anything else.

The guardhouse wasn’t too hard to find, since it was one of the few buildings made out of stone in a sea of wooden buildings and areas still under construction. It also had a giant block of stone with the words ‘guardhouse’ written on it, probably leveraging the fact that 100% of the population could read as long as they had functioning eyes and were old enough to talk.

She proceeded into the building, briefly surprised when she saw another eleven guards sitting inside and eating lunch, their combat gear still partially on. Perhaps to quickly get to work if stronger monsters attacked the farms outside? It seemed like a plausible guess, at least.

The person at the desk, by contrast, gave off a feeling similar to one she might expect back on Earth – that of a person working a boring desk job and waiting for their shift to end.

When he noticed her, he looked up. “What do you need, citizen?”

“The guard outside the gates said you could help me? Something about getting acquainted with the town, or at least recent news?”

The expression of boredom on the man’s face didn’t quite leave, but at the very least, Alice could tell that he was paying a bit more attention now.

“What kind of information are you looking for? What’s the reason for the request?”

“I haven’t been in civilization for a few months – I need an update on what’s going on in the area.” The bored expression on the guard’s face finally disappeared, replaced with a scowl. Alice nearly left, uncertain why he was so angry, before she realized he wasn’t mad at her.

“The damn Sigmusi have been everywhere lately. There’s all sorts of nonsense going on in the background these days. One of their spies took out the mayor of Riverbranch and five of the city’s best mages in the middle of the night. How the hell they managed to deal with five damn mages in the middle of town is beyond me. One of them was even rumored to have two post-50 perks, or a combined perk, for System’s sake! I hear the whole town is up in arms.” He snorted. “Besides that, those bastards upped the bounty on both mage cores and live mages again, trying to stir up troublemakers. Fucking bastards don’t even have the decency to just declare war and be done with it, so they stick to this quiet war shit and kill off our best and brightest in the background instead.”

Alice frowned. Despite how random some of the statement seemed, they contained a wealth of information she needed to parse over. The guard outside of the gates had also mentioned something about the Sigmusi Empire as part of her entry statement. And... bounty on mage cores?

She was, as far as she knew, a mage. If she wasn’t mistaken, there had been a feeling of warmth behind her heart when she had formed her magic seeds.

Come to think of it, the corpse she had found was missing a heart, as well as the area around it. And was carrying a magic book for some reason.

Alice was suddenly very, very nervous.

Quietly, she moved back to the docks section, searching for an area where she could sit back and observe for a while. After some searching, she found what appeared to be an open-air market and settled down to watch.

It only took a few minutes for her camouflage skill to activate, although the guard who briefly strolled through the market about an hour in seemed to know someone was lurking around and spent a minute or two looking for her. He could clearly sense her, and knew she was doing something, even if he couldn’t quite pinpoint her location. She quietly retreated from the market, then deactivated her perk. She waited for several minutes, hoping for the guard to go away, before she moved back towards the market. She didn’t want to miss her best opportunity to sell the book, after all. This time, however, she avoided activating her {Camouflaged} perk - it seemed like it would be far more trouble to be caught using a stealthy perk in public than it was to look like a person wearing a weird toga thing.

Over the next few hours, she found out that the kingdom used a coin system for currency, based around ‘small’ and ‘big’ coins of various metals. Small copper coins were the smallest denomination of currency, followed by big copper coins, each of which were worth five small coppers. one big copper could purchase one skewer of meat and vegetables from one of the stalls in the area. Four big coppers made up one small silver, and five small silvers made up one big silver. Ten big silvers made one small gold coin. The coins likely had actual names to them – however, as it currently stood she mostly noticed the difference in coin size and the value of the metal.

Luckily, she also saw a few people selling books at stalls that sold ‘odd things.’ Each book was sold for a handful of large silvers, although the price seemed to vary some from book to book. Those stalls also sold a variety of other strange objects, an esoteric collection of nick-nacks, odd-colored crystals, old rings, and other things that she couldn’t identify.

After observing one of the stalls for a while, Alice decided to try her luck selling her book to them instead. There was no real reason to sell to a bookstore if there was a place to sell here, after all. Furthermore, she had seen a boy in even more ragged clothes than hers sell a few things to this stall already, so it seemed relatively likely she could get away with doing the same. Trying to seem like she belonged, Alice walked up to the stall.

The stall keeper gave her a glance, and his eyes contained a gentle sparkle as he looked at her. “What can I do for you, miss?” His voice was calm and relaxed.

“I am looking to sell this book.” Alice pulled the book out of her makeshift basket and showed it to the stall owner.

The man frowned, looking over the book for a moment, before turning back towards her. He looked much more closely than before, taking in her dirty appearance and her clothes, before his gaze relaxed. “You aren’t used to this, are you?”

“Huh?”

“Poverty. You look pretty enough that your charisma is well above 100, right? Not to mention you were sitting at the edge of the market for a few hours, watching everyone to see how everyone was acting and how to copy them. You also move too slowly for your dexterity to be above one hundred, although I would wager it’s pretty close. Slum girls don’t get that kind of stat build from living in poverty, and even if they come to the frontier afterwards to make a new life for themselves, their stats take quite a while to fit into whatever new life they’re making for themselves. Now, you could end up with a stat build like yours if you were a fallen noble,” he said, giving her a thoughtful glance. “However, you don’t have the demeanor of one of those brats. ” Alice flushed and shook her head. The man let out a good-natured chuckle.

“So here’s what I’ll tell you. Your book there is worth a bit more than the usual ones, since my {Appraisal} says it’s a book about magic seeds. Most places, there are always a few newly baptized mages that would probably value a book like this quite highly. That being said, newly baptized are also usually poor and desperate, unless they found a master or joined an academy. And right now, this town doesn’t even have 20 mages between its walls, and every one of them is experienced or already under the wing of a teacher. The people that come this far south, mostly, are the desperate and those looking to start a new life for themselves. Other than the mages who owe a favor to the city lord, most mages are still up north, closer to the capital where they can keep living in comfort and luxury, and the new ones tend to stick to their academies, an enchanter, or the army. This book is quite valuable in the North, but down here it’s dead weight, I’m sorry to say.”

Alice felt incredibly disheartened. The stall owner’s demeanor had been open and honest the whole time, and she didn’t think he was lying to her. However, if her book didn’t have much of a market in this region, then it was truly dead weight. Gold was worthless if there was nowhere to spend it, and, similarly, the book wasn’t useful anymore if she couldn’t sell it. Worse, if someone knew she had the book and tried to rob her, it would place her in a dangerous situation, which meant that the book was almost a liability rather than something useful.

“However,” the man continued, with a kind smile, “I’m a travelling merchant. Since I move from town to town, I might actually have a chance of selling that book. It probably won’t sell for months, but you seem like you could use a little help right now. How about I buy it for a golden sun?”

Alice felt her eyes grow a little hot. She knew he was overpaying - some of the other books she had seen were also on magic, and had still only gone for 7 or 8 big silvers. “Thank you very much.” She said. She gave the merchant the book, and he handed her a small golden coin in exchange.

“I hope that whatever is happening in your life, you manage to recover from it and move forward, young lady. Ah, or perhaps you prefer to be referred to as an adult now? You do look about the right age...” he gave her a good natured grin. “Either way, I hope things turn out well.”

Alice’s hands shook a bit, and she turned back to the merchant. “Thank you very much.” She repeated, her voice dropping a bit.

She turned around and left. She walked to the side of the road for a moment, clutching the golden coin tightly in her fist as if her life depended on it. She took a few deep breaths in and out, calming her nerves. Today, she had spoken to another human being for the first time in months, three times in fact, and she had been terrified. She had prepared and watched before talking to the merchant, preparing and running over possible scenarios, and it turned out... fine. He had been nice.

After a few more minutes, she straightened up. She needed to find a tailor, maybe take a bath, get something to eat, and then she wanted to find a library, if there was one in the town. If there wasn’t, she would figure it out later. For now, she had things to do.

And as she walked, unnoticed by her, her footsteps were firmer. She moved with purpose that had been lacking for the past few months. She had something resembling a plan, which she had been missing since she had been dumped into this foreign dimension.