Translator: Pai_

A land dried to a reddish-brown hue, dotted with one or two trees here and there, and a horizon far in the distance painted yellow with dust.

Due to the wasteland sprawling beneath Hisaril Hill, it was impossible for large villages or cities to form in the vicinity.

There wasn’t enough food to sustain a large population, nor were there any special local products to justify importing food from elsewhere.

Thanks to this, Turan had to walk across the wasteland without encountering a single person.

Although it was a fresh landscape that couldn’t be seen from the hill, that novelty didn’t last long. By the time a full day had passed, he was already sick of it.

Half of him wanted to enjoy the experience of his first journey, and the other half wanted to conserve his magic power in case something happened. So he walked somewhat slowly, but even that was at a pace no different from a normal person running.

Had an ordinary traveler been walking, it would’ve taken them three days just to get here.

Yet, seeing nothing but barren land around him, it seemed he had passed without encountering even a single village.

In any case, since he had no worries about food or water, he figured he’d eventually reach somewhere if he just kept walking...

“Come.”

Stretching his hand toward the sky and giving a command, a bird flying in the distance approached and perched on his arm.

Commanding animals had become as easy as breathing ever since he obtained magic power, and he could do it effortlessly.

Turan broke the bird’s neck with his other hand, plucked its feathers with a knife he pulled from his bag, and skinned it.

Finally, he made an incision on its neck and concentrated, causing blood to spill out.

‘Let’s see…’

From the flowing blood, a dark red, sticky mass dropped out, and then clear water separated and floated to the surface.

A spell that extracts drinkable water from blood.

It was one of the techniques he had learned from Keorn, and it was hundreds of times more efficient than creating water out of thin air.

After filling his leather water pouch with the extracted water, he ate the roasted bird meat along with some goat cheese he had with him, solving his meal for the time being.

How long had he walked after filling his stomach?

Just as the sun began to climb directly overhead, he spotted a group of people descending a low hill in front of him.

There were six of them in total.

All of them were men, dressed in cloaks covered in dust typical of travelers, with short swords strapped to their sides, likely for self-defense.

They were pulling a large cart covered in cloth, which suggested they might be merchants traveling between villages.

While he had never met them directly, he had heard stories about people like them occasionally visiting the villages at the foot of the hill.

When Turan stepped in their path to block their way, a middle-aged man, who appeared to be the leader, asked with a wary expression:

“Who are you to block our path?”

“I’m a lone traveler. Could you tell me if there’s a city nearby?”

At his polite question, the men, who seemed to be merchants, tilted their heads in puzzlement and exchanged glances.

At that moment, Turan noticed that some of them were looking at him with sharp gazes.

Not merely cautious, but mixed with desire, a hunter’s gaze as if they were eyeing prey…

The leader spoke again, in a tone far ruder than before:

“If you follow the path we came from, you’ll find Murei City. Just follow the wheel tracks, and unless you’re a moron, it shouldn’t be hard to find.”

At the somewhat unpleasant tone, Turan slightly furrowed his brows but nodded.

He didn’t feel like arguing over why they spoke so insolently.

After all, he was the one who had abruptly blocked their path to ask a question, and they had, in the end, given him the information he sought.

“Thank you.”

After nodding his head politely in thanks and starting to follow the wheel tracks as instructed, one of the merchants stepped in front of Turan, blocking his way.

The man’s face bore a sly, despicable smile as he looked at him.

“Hold on. If you’re going to take something, you ought to give something in return. Were you planning to take the information and just run off?”

“First, open that bag of yours. Looks like you’ve got quite a bit stuffed in there.”

Before he realized it, the merchants had surrounded him.

Some of them had even drawn their swords, exuding an energy that suggested they wouldn’t hesitate to strike the moment he resisted.

“Bandits?”

“Call it a side hustle. Just leave the bag behind and get lost. We’ll let you keep your clothes, we’re not fans of taking lives unnecessarily.”

Turan’s heightened sense of smell sometimes allowed him to detect emotions in the form of scents emanating from living beings.

It wasn’t something he could sense all the time, and it only applied to those nearby or to particularly strong emotions.

Right now, the scent coming from the bandits surrounding him was like that of predators just before sinking their teeth into their prey.

The claim that they would let him go was a lie. Most likely, they wanted him to give up the bag willingly to avoid staining its contents with blood.

“Alright. I suppose I can use you guys for practice.”

“What?”

Turan spread his palm wide and swung it horizontally, imagining a small breeze he created multiplying its force hundreds of times over.

A gust of wind, growing in strength as it consumed his magic power, instantly swept through the six bandits and sent them flying.

"Aaaaagh-!"

Indeed, amplifying a physical breeze he made himself instead of simply conjuring wind turned out to consume much less magic power.

This, too, was one of the techniques he had learned from Keorn, much like the spell that extracted water from blood.

Looking at the scattered bandits, one of them didn’t get back up, his neck appeared to have broken from the fall. Another was limping with what seemed to be a broken leg before collapsing on the spot.

Turan turned to the four remaining bandits who were staggering to their feet, now covered in dirt, and used his second spell on them.

The first step was to untie the water pouch at his waist.

The water oozing from its opening quickly transformed, radiating heat as it took the form of sharp ice spikes. At his gesture, one of the spikes shot forward and pierced the abdomen of a bandit.

Apparently, this was supposed to be a spell useful in areas where there was plenty of water nearby.

“Arghhhh!”

"I'm sorry! Please forgive me!"

As the bandit with the broken leg threw down his sword and begged for mercy in a desperate cry, Turan felt dissatisfied with the spell he had just used.

The speed, power, and accuracy of the flying ice spike were ridiculously inferior compared to his slingshot skills.

Well, given that slingshotting was a technique he had honed all his life, it was no surprise there would be a stark difference compared to simply casting a spell.

As an experiment, Turan controlled a second ice spike, spinning it a few times in the air before firing it. This time, it flew several times faster than before and pierced the neck of a bandit who had been trying to flee.

"Die-!"

At that moment, two bandits, who had been cautiously creeping closer, suddenly let out a battle cry and charged toward Turan.

He had planned to kick them away, but changed his mind, stomping hard on the ground instead.

Instantly, several large earthen spikes erupted from the reddish-brown wasteland, piercing through the bodies of the charging bandits.

It was a technique that could only be used on soil-based terrain, manipulating the ground to rise and reshape into a weapon.

“Urgh…”

They were just weaklings who could’ve been taken down with a single command to die, but by roughly testing his skills in this manner, Turan got a sense of how to handle future battles.

He also began to understand which of the techniques he had learned over the past three days were useful in combat and which ones aligned best with his aptitude.

The man who had been stabbed in the stomach looked like he wouldn’t last much longer, so Turan slowly walked toward the last survivor, the one with the broken leg.

Keorn had taught him to never show mercy to lowlifes like these bandits one might encounter on the road.

If you spared even one out of pity, that person would one day repay your kindness by harming ten innocent people.

Turan intended to follow that teaching to the letter.

“Ah… ah…”

The man, trembling in fear and even wetting himself, froze as Turan reached out toward him. But just before finishing him off, Turan voiced a question that suddenly came to mind.

"Let me ask you one thing."

“Y-yes, sir! Wizard sir! I’ll answer anything you ask!”

Perhaps clinging to the slim hope of salvation, the bandit ignored the pain in his broken leg and bowed his head repeatedly.

“Why did you attack me without a plan? A lone traveler could very well turn out to be a wizard like me, as you can now see.”

If Turan had been a bandit himself, he would never have attacked someone like him.

Even putting aside the basic moral rule of not harming those who meant no harm, wasn’t it just common sense to assume that someone traveling alone through a wasteland like this might have considerable skill?

It wasn’t as if they had anything reliable to count on either.

After hesitating briefly, the bandit answered the question.

“T-that’s because… you bowed your head, sir…”

“What?”

“When our leader spoke rudely to you, you lowered your head and greeted him politely… so we naturally assumed you were just an ordinary person.”

So it was a kind of test, speaking rudely on purpose to gauge his reaction.

Since Turan had found it too bothersome to argue and simply nodded in response, they had judged him as weak and tried to satisfy their greed.

“Thank you. You’ve taught me something valuable.”

In a desolate place like this, showing weakness would only provoke others.

As payment for this lesson, Turan placed a finger on the forehead of the last surviving bandit and commanded his death.

At the very least, the man was able to die painlessly.

* * *

The cart the bandits had been pulling was loaded with various necessities that would have been difficult to produce in rural areas. Judging by the fact that the items didn’t seem heavily used, they didn’t appear to be stolen or looted.

It seemed the initial assumption that they had once been merchants wasn’t entirely wrong.

However, it would’ve been too cumbersome to take everything with him, so Turan simply took the money they had on them and abandoned the cart. Then, he resumed following the wheel tracks.

As he moved in the direction of the city, he noticed that the reddish-brown wasteland gradually gave way to patches of grass and an increasing number of trees.

With his destination now clear, he began running at several times his previous walking speed. By sunset, he finally arrived at Murei City, the place the bandit leader had mentioned.

“Wow…”

Turan let out an exclamation at the sight of the city sprawling below a low hill.

Beneath the setting sun, over a hundred people, at least from what he could see, were walking along the streets or working.

The combined population of the villages at the base of Hisaril Hill barely reached thirty or forty people.

For Turan, who had never seen so many people gathered in one place in his life, it was an astonishing sight.

As he entered the city, he walked slowly, weaving through the people while marveling at his first-ever glimpse of a bustling urban environment.

The buildings, made of dark brown bricks, were all similar in style and ranged from two to three stories tall. Some even had small stalls set up in front, as if selling goods.

The passersby didn’t seem particularly interested in one another. Even when they crossed paths, they neither struck up conversations nor exchanged greetings.

Turan quietly observed them before selecting one of the most relaxed-looking fruit vendors to approach.

“Excuse me.”

“Hm? Customer?”

“No, actually… I was wondering if you might know where I can find an ‘inn’.”

He had learned about places where foreigners could stay from Keorn.

If it was a city, there would almost always be such accommodations available.

However, the fruit vendor didn’t even fully listen to Turan’s question before snorting dismissively and shaking his head.

“If you’re not buying fruit, get lost!”

That rude attitude made Turan momentarily stiffen his expression.

Was he supposed to get angry here to avoid being looked down upon?

But then again, it might also be an unspoken rule in the city that you had to buy something before asking a question.

After briefly contemplating, Turan nodded and pulled out his coin pouch.

“Alright. How much is this?”

“An apple is 2 Dopit. You look like an outsider, but if you’ve got other coins of similar size, I’ll take those too.”

When he asked what a Dopit was, the vendor explained it was the local copper coin used in this city.

Among the money Turan had taken from the bandits, there were a few coins that matched the description, so he handed them over and purchased the fruit.

The apple was a fruit he was seeing for the first time in his life, but it looked shriveled and smelled unpleasant, far from fresh.

“If you follow that road straight and take a left, you’ll find a house with a blue roof and a picture of a beer mug on it. That’s the inn.”

Finally having learned the inn’s location, Turan walked along the road, taking a bite of the apple as he went. He immediately spat it out and tossed the fruit onto the roadside.

It was horrendously sour and astringent, to the point he wondered if it might even be poisoned.

Fortunately, the vendor hadn’t lied about the inn’s location. If he had, Turan had been prepared to return and teach him a sharp lesson through magic. As he approached the place described, he spotted the inn.

Upon entering, a young barmaid approached Turan.

“Oh my, what a handsome oppa! Are you a guest?”

“Hmm.”

Turan simply nodded in silence.

He was a bit flustered by her outfit, which was so loose it was nearly transparent.

He had heard that such places often had women who served drinks and sometimes acted as prostitutes as well, but hearing about it and seeing it in person were completely different experiences.

“How much for a night?”

“16 Dopit. You can also pay 1 Rum if you have it. If you have other types of money, you’ll have to ask the innkeeper.”

He asked what a Rum was and learned that it referred to a silver coin.

After handing over the payment, the barmaid smiled sweetly and subtly leaned her body against Turan’s shoulder.

“If you sleep alone, the room might feel a little cold. Shall I warm it up for you?”

“No, thank you.”

Keorn had repeatedly warned him never to get involved with barmaids or prostitutes in inns.

Most women in such professions were carriers of venereal diseases. While powerful knights or nobles with strong disease resistance might not suffer themselves, they could unknowingly infect other women they were with later.

“Instead, I’d like to ask you something.”

What Turan wanted to know was whether there were any magical beasts nearby with bounties on them.

Killing magical beasts would not only allow him to absorb magic power and grow stronger, but also earn him extra money as a bonus.

However, instead of answering, the barmaid pointed to a large barrel of alcohol nearby.

The second realization he gained after descending from the hill was that in a city, no question was answered for free.