The Way Ahead - Book 2 Read online

  THE

  WAY

  AHEAD

  — Book 2 —

  Kaleb England

  aka NorskDaedalus

  To my beta readers

  Roland Hansson, Aelia Aeldyne, Pel-Mel, Magma,

  Pastafarian, Heavenly Daoist, and w1k3d

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from Podium Publishing.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 by Kaleb England

  Cover design by Podium Publishing

  ISBN: 978-1-0394-1292-7

  Published in 2022 by Podium Publishing, ULC

  www.podiumaudio.com

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 By the Buy

  Chapter 2 Into the Unknown

  Chapter 3 An Axe to Grind (With)

  Chapter 4 Branching Paths

  Chapter 5 Feyday

  Chapter 6 Starting Hand

  Chapter 7 Faeted Introductions

  Chapter 8 Unusually Helpful

  Chapter 9 No Place I’d Lather Be

  Chapter 10 Contractual Obligations

  Chapter 11 The Scientific Method

  Chapter 12 Reconvene and Reassess

  Chapter 13 Starting from Scraps

  Chapter 14 Fire Rocks!

  Chapter 15 Last-Minute Tuning

  Chapter 16 Putting Down Roots

  Chapter 17 Skillful Applications

  Chapter 18 Assume a Spherical Path in a Vacuum

  Chapter 19 High-pH Training

  Chapter 20 Running into Trouble

  Chapter 21 All in the Execution

  Chapter 22 e^x=book

  Chapter 23 Nice and Slow

  Chapter 24 City Troubles

  Chapter 25 Social Niceties

  Chapter 26 Back to the Grind

  Chapter 27 Training Will

  Chapter 28 A Blast from the Past

  Chapter 29 The Wheel Turns Ever Onward

  Chapter 30 Two Paths Diverged in the Verdant

  Chapter 31 A Classy Ascension

  Chapter 32 Taking Things to the Next Level

  Epilogue The Silver Legion

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  By the Buy

  It was nice to be on the road again. Since his crash landing on Joriah, practically the only times that Edwin had actually enjoyed himself had been while traveling. Sure, technically the bulk of his time spent on the System-dominated world had been in a single place, namely Blackstone citadel, and he wouldn’t exactly consider “forced into Alchemy-centered slavery” a good time. Then … well, yeah. The only other place he’d spent more than one night since then was in the company of literal serial killers. That the two locales he’d stayed in had both ended with a furious fight for his life was probably a telling sign.

  Still, traveling in itself was rather fun. Yes, he’d gone on vacation when he’d lived on Earth, but that had always been a mad rush to see as much as possible in the limited time allotted for 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, Edwin felt far more rested than he had 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 (what with the fact he only needed to eat about once a day) and easy enough access to water.

  Plus, he was in fantastic shape, though he was really getting scruffy. His hair was definitely getting long, and it was nearly blond from how much time he’d been outside. It was probably some three months he’d been on Joriah now, not that he’d been paying 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 that 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 much 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 Zosiman Grimoire Alchemy manual. Of all the things he’d looted from the serial-killing bandits, the Grimoire was decidedly the most valuable. Oh sure, the alchemical notes that their leader Niall had left behind were morbidly interesting, but Edwin didn’t particularly care to read about the several uses that ground avior bone could be put to.

  While the Grimoire was tricky to parse in many places and the author seemed to be a bit overfond of their own eloquence, and while Edwin couldn’t fact-check it very well, it was still a wealth of information that he was delighted to have available to him, particularly in the area of magical plants.

  According to the Grimoire, water-filtering seagrass grew in places of abundant life and water magic, and its blue-green stalks could actually support fish, which could swim through the grass as though it were water. And, if dried in a particular way, the grass could be spun into exceptionally soft and fine cloth (drying it a different way gave it the water-absorbing properties Edwin had so benefited from in the tower). Mage’s lichen 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 that folded into the shape of a goblet and was nigh impossible to cut, but it had powerful antipoison 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 actually something Edwin had encountered in the Verdant—the massive, magical forest that he’d first crash landed in—and they 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 Edwin to recognize a small patch of wild seagrass for what it was, despite its lack of fish. He even took a few blades of the grass for himself, though since he couldn’t properly dry it, he just sort of stuffed it into his bag, hoping for the best, and it shriveled up into a state that the Grimoire described as useless.

  All in all, Edwin was having a blast, and as he ventured back toward Vinstead (or more accurately, the Verdant), he watched as the empty space he traveled through slowly became more and more populated. When he first started out, he might see a person every day or two, particularly shepherds and other herders, tending to animals both familiar and strange on the sea of grasses that dominated the landscape, but 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 dust, carrying some cargo to places unknown.

  He’d also spot flights of avior overhead, the humanoid birdfolk 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? Well, other than that one time two insanely powerful mages had summoned a thunderstorm as part of a battle in the skies of course. Edwin … 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 get water from somewhere, right?

  In the distance, the walls of Vinstead loomed, and even from this far away, Edwin 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 any pursuers off his trail by not leaving a paper 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. It wasn’t like he had any particular incentive to meet Tara or Rizzali, though come to think of it, he wouldn’t mind asking the latter a few System-related questions he had … no, not yet. He’d stay outside the walls.

  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 that 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 the last time they came through here. Most were already wrapped up in something that seemed reminiscent of parchment paper, and Edwin found himself remembering that just becaus
e 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, gesturing toward the rations.

  The question knocked the boy out of his stupor, and he shook his head, looking at Edwin with really wide eyes. “Sarry, wha?”

  He seemed almost stunned to see Edwin. Really, were customers so rare? Ah, whatever.

  “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.

  Either way, Edwin 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 coin (ager), which in turn was sixty per gold coin (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 the Polyglot Skill 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—actually, he ought to try and just learn the language at some point—but he kept slipping.

  In any case, one silv—no, ager—for each loaf seemed perhaps a little pricey, but then again, Edwin didn’t exactly have a very firm grasp on the corresponding currency value. Perhaps it was totally reasonable. In any case, even if he was being massively ripped off, 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 was a junior shopkeep of some kind. Edwin wanted to preserve some semblance of dignity, so he 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 had any sort of measurement tools, if Skills just took care of all 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 had the unusual color across their head.

  The halflings seemed to be unaffected, and the vibrant gnomes seemed to just have green as one of their more common natural hair colors, though did that work the same way? Edwin 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 seeking 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 of his anatomy class, sharpened by his Memory Skill, hair color was the result of two different types of melanin—their names escaped him—but that was what allowed for the variety of brown, red, and blond hair colors back on Earth. Was green hair the result of a third type of melanin, then? Or something else entirely? Edwin didn’t even know where to begin trying to determine that sort of thing, though, so he let the question fall by the wayside … for now. Someday, he’d return to the question and figure out what made Lefi Forolova—the Adventurer who’d been teaching him stuff about the System most recently—have hair that looked like literal golden fire. But that day was not today. This day, he shopped.

  Edwin continued his foray through the crowds, looking for a few more materials that 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 a short-handled 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. Edwin was content, though. The quality of the tools he’d gotten was 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, no doubt thanks to his Packing Skill. Magic for the win!

  Granted, the unfortunate side of magic meant that Edwin had to stay vigilant against essentially 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, the 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, built atop 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 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 regular flooding and particularly rich soil? Sure, the sorts of things you could make with talsanenris berries were pretty overtly supernatural, but in a fantasy world that sort of thing might end up happening in all sorts of ways. Still, Edwin did have experiences with train-size predators, given the Stonehide Bear he’d encountered way back when he’d first landed on Joriah, though that didn’t absolutely require a magical forest.

  A road traveled 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” simply because they didn’t know 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.