Chapter 565

The space the Goblin King had taken as his ‘throne room’ was littered with the cracked bones of beasts and the splintered remains of the poor merchants who had been the catalyst for Lance’s team’s quest.

After sparing them a thought, hoping they might find peace in their next life and forget such a gruesome death, he moved toward a pile of refuse in the far corner, his spiritual senses guiding him.

There, he unearthed a pair of earth-aligned monster cores, each the size of a plum. He tossed them into his iron ring and continued his sweep, though their presence here left his mind churning.

In nature, outside of dungeons, cores are usually grown only by the strongest monsters, and nothing beyond the Goblin King should have reached that threshold here.

The possibility that this whole situation was engineered crossed his mind, but he couldn’t quite grasp why anyone would go so far. When he looked into the ether, he didn’t sense any leftover mana that might have belonged to such a being.

That didn’t mean it wasn’t what had happened, but it lowered the probability.

His spatial awareness prickled, drawing his attention to a loose flagstone near the base of the makeshift throne.

Nick knelt and pried the stone up with a sliver of kinetic force. Beneath it lay a simple leather pouch, utterly unremarkable-looking, and even his spiritual senses struggled to pin it down, but to his newly awakened awareness, the leather practically shone.

He ran his fingertips over the material, trying to grasp the runic structure protecting it. The arrays were incredibly complex, tightly layered in a configuration only a true master could have managed. Unlike the protections cast on the average spatial pouch, these were not designed to repel physical force or elemental magic but to deflect sensory magics, powerful enough that even he had struggled to detect them.

Honestly, unless this unassuming little pouch contained something that could jeopardize the kingdom's stability, the protection was excessive.

Curious but ready to protect himself if the thing was booby-trapped beyond what he could sense, Nick pulled the drawstring open.

Inside sat a dozen dull, gray metal ingots. He pulled one out, testing its weight and resonance, but quickly realized it had no magical conductivity. The surface was smooth but lacked the exceptional density or structural resilience of star-metal or forged mythril. By all available metrics, it was just a mundane ingot.

Yet someone of the Prestige rank had invested a staggering amount of effort to keep it completely hidden from the world.

“Is a day going to come when I don’t wander into a new mystery?” He huffed, more amused than annoyed.

Once his examination was complete and he had confirmed his preliminary findings, he dropped the ingots into his iron ring, where they would be hidden among the countless materials he’d been gathering. Even if they somehow held a power he couldn’t sense—something he sincerely doubted—being surrounded by so many cores and monster parts would hide them from prying eyes, not to mention the defenses layered on the ring.

He kept the leather pouch out, tying it to his belt, because enclosing a spatial artifact within another was known to produce strange results. It wasn’t necessarily impossible, but he’d need to deepen his affinity before attempting anything like it.

Well, that, and the runic arrays woven into the fabric were a masterclass in spatial obfuscation, a perfect study guide for his ongoing progression.

Satisfied that the room held nothing else of value, Nick turned toward the vertical shaft. He glided upward, channeling an air current to lift him silently back to the paved corridor.

The battle was over by the time he arrived. Lance knelt on blood-slicked stone, his breath coming in ragged gasps. An ugly gash marred his left thigh, the rent in his armor exposing torn muscle, but Materia knelt beside him, working to keep him from bleeding out.

She pressed her hands to the wound and had already dealt with a more time-sensitive cut that could have left him blind, but the silver amulet at her throat had gone dull, and her mana reserves were dangerously low.

Jax stood a few paces away, trying and failing to wipe the hobgoblin lieutenant's dark blood from his daggers as his hands shook from the adrenaline crash.

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Lira leaned against a wall, coughing dryly. Her hands were red and blistered, and the marks left in the stone told him she’d put her [Fire Whip] to good use.

They eked out a victory, but the cost was not negligible, with a dozen potion vials scattered around them. Forced to use them in combat, they lacked the resources for a swift recovery, and a long march back to civilization with a wounded warrior invited further disaster.

Well, I didn’t want to interfere with their fight, but I don’t think this counts. They won, so giving them a small gift shouldn’t make me too memorable, right?

Nick drew four vials from his ring. The restorative draughts within glowed with a rich, ruby light, all born of high-grade alchemy capable of knitting flesh and restoring stamina in a moment. They were among Rhea’s best work and would have been worth at least a few gold each on the open market, not exactly something a random group of teenage adventurers could afford.

They weren’t Ogden’s personal stock, but those would have been overkill here.

Looking for a suitable target, he eventually fixed his intent on a rotting wooden crate resting near the corridor wall, a few feet from Jax, and invoked [Spatial Relocation]. He attuned his mana to the local reality’s natural flow, smoothing his intent into a seamless current so the team couldn’t sense anything.

The vials vanished from his grasp and materialized inside the crate without a sound.

It wasn’t long before Jax, ever restless, kicked the side of the crate to check for its contents. The wood gave way, and the rogue froze, locking onto the red vials resting among the splinters.

Nick allowed a brief smile to touch his lips, then turned and flew into the shadows.

The mid-morning sun greeted him as he left the Marrow Caves, and he angled eastward, pushing his speed until the wind roared past his ears. His usual suite of spells formed around him without so much as a twitch of his fingers, allowing him to observe the sprawling landscape below without enduring the indignity of the weather.

The central province of Berea showed exactly what centuries of unchallenged authority and immense wealth could accomplish. Endless grids of farmland painted the valleys in shades of green and gold. Vast aqueducts of fitted stone carried water across wide gorges. Paved roads, wide enough to accommodate four merchant wagons abreast, cut straight, unbroken lines across the plains.

From his vantage point, the population increase was clear. Towns and villages dotted the countryside, clustering around major intersections and river bends. Every few hours, the sprawling footprint of a true city appeared on the horizon. They were ringed by high walls of enchanted stone, their central districts glowing with the light of wards and commerce.

Human magic was alive and well here. In a way, it struck him harder than even seeing Alluria.

That had been a lone light in the frontier's darkness, the natural place for all practitioners to gather. Here, magic was a fact of life, and people treated it and its bounty as perfectly normal.

This was the engine of the continent's strongest Kingdom, and its reach was great indeed. This was the resource pool the true players were drawing on to fuel their hidden plots.

It didn’t interest Nick much, beyond the consequences for his family, but he wasn’t foolish enough to think he could completely stay out of it during his stay in the capital.

It would be very nice if I were granted an audience with the King immediately upon my arrival and given leave as soon as it was over, but that’s not going to happen.

He was still early, after all, and he couldn’t expect the reigning monarch to bend to his whims, even if he were so inclined.

No, Nick was going to spend the next month skulking about, tapping into the contacts he’d been offered, trying to learn as much as possible about the capital, while working on his subtler magics, and hopefully growing stronger.

He flew through the afternoon, tracking several columns, both mercantile and martial, moving along the highways below. He flew through the dusk, watching the cities ignite with magical streetlamps, transforming the landscape into a sprawling constellation of civilization. He pushed through the night, turning the puzzle of the gray ingots over and over in his mind.

By the afternoon of the following day, after flying hundreds of miles, the King’s Highway widened into a colossal artery, and Nick spotted his destination ahead.

This was supposedly the final rest stop before the capital, though it defied the definition of a simple inn or waypoint. It was a sprawling, fortified complex built along the banks of a wide, slow-moving river. Dozens of three-story stone buildings, walled courtyards, and massive stable blocks clustered together, forming a temporary city dedicated to caring for travelers from all over the Kingdom and beyond.

It also served as a holding pen for thousands of foreign merchants, diplomats, and mercenaries awaiting clearance to enter Siderea, preventing the city’s gates from being clogged.

Nick angled his descent, dropping into a dense copse of weeping willows a mile downriver from the complex.

He touched down lightly on the soft loam and spent a few minutes making himself presentable, cleaning up with his quality-of-life spells and adjusting his coat's lapels, ensuring the golden swords of the Crowley sigil and his Mage Errant medal were visible only to someone with a keen eye. If he wanted to draw the attention of the capital's premier information broker, he needed to present a profile worth investigating.

Being too open would get him stopped by others trying to curry favor or spy on him, so he had to strike the right balance.

Once he was done, he walked the remaining mile and joined the throng of travelers streaming through the complex’s open gates.

The courtyard was a mess. Draft horses stamped their hooves as other animals, some more magical than others, walked among them. Armored knights bearing the heraldry of a dozen noble houses barked orders at their squires. Merchants in rich doublets haggled furiously with provisioners over food prices. People, both human and nonhuman, from every corner of the kingdom rushed about, attending to their duties and barely sparing him a glance as he passed.

Nick took his time savoring the atmosphere, but eventually slipped past a trio of arguing sellswords and entered the complex’s largest building—a sprawling tavern called the River’s Edge.

The interior was vast, its ceiling supported by thick pillars of enchanted oak he sensed would suppress any offensive spell below a certain level. Long wooden tables filled the floor, packed with patrons shouting over the din of clattering pewter and scraping chairs. Pretty serving maids navigated the narrow gaps, carrying trays loaded with roasted meats and sloshing tankards of dark ale.

Nick found an empty stool at the end of the wooden bar. He flagged down a passing barkeep and tossed a silver coin onto the counter.

“Whatever roasted bird you have on hand that’s not too gamey, watered ale, and bread," he ordered, receiving a few copper coins in change before the barkeep vanished into the back.

Half a silver for a meal? Damn, that’s expensive.

He didn’t have time to look around before the barkeep returned, slamming a pewter plate and a foaming tankard down in front of him. The fowl’s skin was blistered and crisp, the meat pulling easily from the bone, and Nick decided that while it cost more than he would have paid in Alluria, it was good enough to bother with.

As he ate, he turned his senses to his surroundings and began learning.