For the next three days, the cart traveled slowly toward Ectamel and the undead dead zone, at a deliberate pace. Between the uneven roads, we would stop to clear monsters and make the road safer for travelers. That gave me time, which was something I hadn’t realized I’d been craving.

  My ribs were starting to feel better. They no longer felt sharp enough to steal my breath if I laughed or shifted wrong. Even so, I chose to spend most of the travel time slipping away into the Sunless Reach, practicing my star mana whenever the road grew dull or my body protested too loudly. It was kind of a dick move on my part to leave my teammates stuck on a carriage while I lounged in a recliner bed, but oh well; I can teleport, and they don’t. Life isn’t always fair.

  The mountain didn’t care how many times I came back. The stars were always there to greet me.

  I focused more on control and retention than capacity, trying to shape star mana without immediately funneling it through my spear or letting it convert into normal mana. It responded more easily now, and I was able to keep it for a few minutes rather than the initial seconds, which was an improvement, but still not practical enough to be useful.

  I also tried, repeatedly, to enter my dream sanctuary on my own.

  That did not go well.

  Without Nina’s guidance, the attempt usually dissolved into half-formed dreams that made no sense at all: hallways that folded back into themselves and doors that opened into places I almost recognized. Once, I found myself standing in a version of my university apartment, but it was wrong on so many levels… mostly because it had the furniture of my old room in my mother’s house.

  Which, you know, was kind of upsetting, since Mother barely allowed me to express myself when decorating my room. I wasn’t allowed to even hang posters.

  Each attempt ended the same way, with confusion, disorientation, and the lingering sense that I was so close, yet so far.

  All in all, though, the journey was enjoyable.

  We passed through more villages, most of them small, quiet places where life revolved around the land rather than politics or power. Simple people, carving out livings that looked exhausting but honest. Their magic, such as it was, rarely felt dramatic. There were no glowing auras or thunderous miracles. Just small, practical abilities woven so tightly into daily life that they barely registered as magic at all.

  A farmer whose earth affinity let him feel when the soil needed turning.

  A woman whose fire spark was just strong enough to keep a hearth burning through rain.

  A child who could coax stubborn seeds to sprout a day early.

  Most villages converged around one or two affinities, passed down through family genetics and reinforced by environment. Outliers existed, of course, but they were rare, and usually the result of newcomers marrying in from neighboring settlements.

  Magic didn’t stand out. In the same way, no one freaked out about having a blender or a vacuum cleaner on Earth.

  One village sat directly on a lake, its houses built on stilts and floating platforms anchored to the shore. Sometimes they would have some sort of flooded basement. Fishing nets hung everywhere, drying in the sun like enormous spider webs.

  What surprised me wasn’t the architecture, but the people.

  Nearly half of them could breathe underwater. Not indefinitely, but long enough to dive, untangle nets, guide fish into enclosures, and repair submerged wooden structures.

  They became one with their environment, spending half their time naked in the water and wearing linen wraps when out of it.

  They didn’t just fish; they farmed fish, feeding them grain and scraps from nearby fields.

  It would have felt ridiculous if I hadn’t already learned that fish, like people, could be kindred: Given enough time, enough exposure, they adapted. Gills thickened. Digestion changed. Behavior shifted. The fish grew larger, calmer, and almost domestic.

  This village was called Waterdeep and also had a minor noble running it: Lord Nafa Lore, a descendant of the Lore clans, the premier water manipulators of the water-affinity bloodline, which made him distantly related to my friend Nada.

  But unlike the lord of Verraden, you couldn’t really distinguish him from the swimming locals, aside from his stronger aura and magic. He welcomed us warmly, guided us personally to the extermination mission site, and even helped with the monster, a swamp-like thing that was polluting the lake upstream.

  There was also another notable village that specialized in livestock.

  Specifically, they bred some sort of turkey–chicken hybrid that should not have existed by any sane biological standard. It was broad-breasted, fast-growing, and unbelievably tasty.

  Because of course it was.

  Genetics in this world was about as flexible as physics, and with the right mix of affinities, persistence, and selective breeding, you could convince almost anything to mate with almost anything else. The catch was that the resulting hybrid was often, but not always, sterile.

  Which meant the village maintained full populations of turkey hens and roosters solely to keep producing the hybrids.

  It was an insult to nature, but delicious all the same.

  I ate seconds, and we bought some to pad our protein supply, especially for Shingo, who was starting to show remarkably fast growth once we improved his diet and exercise routine. His soul power had risen from a meager five SB to eight, almost doubling in the span of a week. Ja’a predicted that he would plateau around fourteen SB and would need to go through an evolution to grow stronger, but even then, it would have been a marked improvement, especially since, with the right equipment and soulbook, he could probably overcome many of the shortcomings that came from not having a particularly strong soul.

  Watching these places pass by left me oddly contemplative. This world’s natural order might seem broken, but it was the norm for most of the things that lived in it. It wasn’t savage or cruel by default. It was just… different. Magic hadn’t replaced labor or struggle; it barely changed their shape of them.

  People still worked, still aged, and still worried about the weather, harvests, children, and neighbors. Power existed, yes, but most people lived far below its ceiling, content with what they had and cautious about reaching for what they didn’t.

  Our next stop was the new slime-farming village.

  It was one of the last stops before reaching Ectamel, and it looked the part. The place had been built with a purely utilitarian sense of priority, its people not yet having had the time or luxury to make it comfortable.

  The log palisade surrounding the settlement was still pale and raw, the wood barely weathered. Tool marks were visible where axes and saws had worked steadily and carefully. The wooden houses inside looked fresh in the same way, beams still sharp-edged, roofs unwarped, and not yet sagging under years of snow or rain. It had that frontier look to it, like a place that hadn’t yet proven whether it would survive long enough to grow old.

  We were greeted at the gate by the founder himself.

  “Are you Commander Kitchi Agame’s little brother?” asked a jovial, brown-skinned man in his forties, his voice carrying easily. “Welcome to the Impact Zone.”

  “Ensign Loumpa, a pleasure to meet you,” Raik replied, climbing down from the cart. “I am indeed Raik Agame.”

  Loumpa was tall and broad-shouldered, the kind of muscular, battle-hardened man you would expect from a former teammate of my spear teacher, Knight Edmund. His smile was easy, and his eyes were sharp, assessing without being hostile.

  His left leg, however, ended below the knee.

  He walked with a wooden peg prosthetic, the crude, club-like kind I’d only ever seen in pirate movies and children’s stories. It was carved roughly, reinforced with iron bands, and strapped directly to his thigh with thick leather. Every step sent a jolt through his body that he hid well… but not well enough.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Just looking at it made my own leg ache in sympathy.

  For a world this advanced in paper production, agriculture, and magical soulcraft, the medical gap stood out painfully. They could alloy metals with magical cores, manipulate soul growth, and genetically engineer entirely new species of fowl, yet prosthetics still looked like medieval torture devices.

  Even a student on Earth with access to basic materials could probably make something better than this. A padded socket. A jointed brace. Something to distribute pressure instead of driving it straight into the bone.

  At the very least, they could have lined it with cotton.

  Admittedly, my own knowledge was limited. I doubted I could revolutionize prosthetics the way I had vaccines. Still, the disparity gnawed at me. Progress in this world didn’t spread evenly. It clustered around profit, power, and tradition, while everything else was left to rot.

  Loumpa noticed my gaze and chuckled. “Don’t worry,” he said lightly. “I’ve had worse.”

  Vena casually passed a small healing wave his way. It wouldn’t cure the injury definitively, but it eased some of the aches caused by the poor prosthetic. Loumpa smiled gratefully, rolling his shoulders as the tension faded.

  The village itself was shaped like a donut, a wide ring of buildings and work yards surrounding its center.

  A meteorite impact crater.

  It was easily a hundred meters across, and the settlement had grown around it. From the outside, it looked half hollow and half sheer, its surface veined with faintly glowing lines of earth mana. At its heart stood the cause of it all: a meteor a few meters tall, embedded deep into the center.

  That meteor was the source of the mana anomaly.

  Earth mana pooled around it in unnatural concentrations, saturating the soil, the air, even the metal scraps piled nearby. The effect was immediate and obvious. Metal monsters, slimes in this case, repopulated rapidly in the area, their growth accelerated far beyond natural rates.

  Thus, the slime farm.

  The inner barricade was built entirely from wood and rope, with no metal in sight, not even nails. Loumpa led us around it, explaining the operation with clear pride.

  “Growth cycles are stable,” he said. “As long as we keep feeding them scrap, they reproduce fast enough to sustain harvesting without collapsing the population.”

  I leaned over the railing and watched.

  Small gray blobs bounced and slid across the ground below, soft bodies wobbling as they moved. Some gnawed on discarded rusted blades and broken tools, metal dissolving slowly into their forms. Others collided, merged briefly, then split again. Occasionally, one would consume another entirely, swelling before settling back down.

  It was strange, watching monsters treated like livestock.

  Stranger still was how well it worked.

  “Where do you get all that metal?” Calr asked, surprised at the sheer abundance of scraps. As he spoke, we watched a worker empty a handcart over the barricade, half-swords sliding down the crater floor and nearly reaching the center.

  “From Ectamel,” Loumpa replied with a smile. “Most of the skeleton fodder that exits the dead zone carries some kind of metal weapon. We aren’t sure if they spawn with it or if there are intelligent undead supplying them, but either way, it makes for an easy source of scrap. Mostly iron, but that works well for us, since it’s cheap.”

  Even a territory larger than Alaska, endlessly spewing undead, could still be profitable with a little ingenuity, I supposed.

  Loumpa insisted that we eat lunch with him and his wife.

  Lunch, rather than dinner, was the more important meal in Hano and its surrounding regions, so the invitation carried more political weight. Raik accepted on all our behalf without hesitation, and we left the inner wall behind to head toward Loumpa’s home.

  The village was still actively growing. As we walked, we passed half-finished workshops in various stages of construction. One in particular caught my attention.

  The smith in charge looked old, late fifties maybe, and worked with the relaxed confidence of someone who had shaped metal his entire life. Around him were two younger workers who shared enough resemblance to be unmistakably his children.

  I slowed slightly, curiosity getting the better of me.

  “Where did you find skilled crafters so quickly?” I asked.

  “There’s no shortage of apprentices ready to become journeymen in Hano,” Loumpa nodded. “We already gained three smiths and two tanners just this week.”

  His gaze landed on the family at the forge. “As for them, they came to us from Verraden. Apparently, they were treated like peasants, locked into contracts with no chance of renegotiation for years. They reached their breaking point.”

  Raik sighed softly. “This could cause problems for you. House Verra still operates like old-school Bloodline nobility.”

  “Tough luck, then,” Loumpa said bluntly. “This is the Contested Realm, not the Elemental Bloodline Realm. People are free here, not serfs.”

  Loumpa’s house stood near the outer ring of the settlement, solidly built but unadorned, like everything else here. His wife was already outside when we arrived, tending a simple grill set over a shallow pit.

  She was a muscular woman in her early thirties, broad-shouldered and solid in the same way Loumpa was. She was at least a head taller than he, which made her second only to Shingo in height.

  “I met her while we were on missions in the Kindred Realm,” Loumpa said as we began grilling meat and vegetables for lunch.

  “I was at a turning point in my life,” his wife added calmly. “I had reached my limit in strength, and I had to choose. Either find a husband, or seek out a life-or-death battle that would push me beyond my limit.”

  Evolution… the only way to grow stronger for kindred and bloodline people.

  “She’s at twenty SB,” Ja’a whispered in my ear, having finally learned not to comment on people’s souls out loud. “Slightly stronger than Raik. Loumpa is around thirty.”

  “Her tribe follows a martial path,” Loumpa explained, flipping a skewer. “They forbid reproduction until you reach your soul’s limit, so you don’t produce weaker children.”

  “So did you decide to marry him once you met?” Kan asked.

  “No,” the woman said flatly. Then she grinned. “He interfered in the life-or-death fight I was having with a dragon. Now he owes me five children.”

  “You would have died if I hadn’t been there,” Loumpa argued, sounding like this was not the first time they’d had this conversation.

  “Probably,” she shrugged. “It’s not that I regret you saving me. That doesn’t change the fact that I still haven’t collected on our debt.”

  “Soon,” Loumpa said, giving her a heated look.

  “Oh my,” Ja’a said, fanning herself dramatically. “Lunch and a romance show. You truly are an incredible host.”

  Loumpa turned bright red, clearly having forgotten that he had guests.

  His wife just laughed.

  We left the village after lunch, clearing one more monster on the road to Ectamel.

  This time, it was a metal golem, born from a nearby ore vein saturated with abundant earth mana. Its body had assembled itself crudely, plates of raw iron ore and stone fused together without refinement. It was powerful enough to threaten caravans, but not truly dangerous to a trained team.

  Ja’a gauged it at a glance with her soul-seer ability.

  “Around ten SB.”

  Weakish.

  We decided to hold position and let Kan handle it alone, spreading out to watch for reinforcements while she stepped forward with her chain weapon hanging loose at her sides.

  Kan barely used any mana during the fight.

  The morning-star head of her chain lashed out again and again, striking the same spot repeatedly. She never overcommitted, always stepping back just as the golem swung, letting its own weight work against it.

  Metal rang against metal.

  Slowly, methodically, she carved away its outer shell. Each strike dented, cracked, then peeled layers apart, exposing the darker, denser structure beneath. Earth mana leaked from the wounds like a brownish mist.

  Once the inner heart was visible, a shinier metal ore at the center, Kan didn’t hesitate.

  She spun the chain once, adding momentum with a small turn of her body, and struck cleanly.

  The core shattered into pieces with a single blow, the golem collapsing in on itself as if its strings had been cut.

  Silence returned to the road, followed by clapping from Ja’a and me. Raik gave her a wink.

  At the center of the wreckage lay the golem’s heart: a chunk of gleaming ore with a monster core embedded inside it, pulsing faintly with residual mana.

  Kan knelt, carved the monster core out with practiced efficiency, and handed it to Raik.

  Then, without ceremony, she snapped off a small piece of the shiny ore and popped it into her mouth like a piece of butterscotch candy.

  She slowly ground it between her molars.

  I stared. “Is that… safe?”

  Kan shrugged. “My father ate adamantine for his last evolution. I should be fine with this much iron, even if it’s rich in earth mana.”

  “Maybe that’s why you have an earth and fire affinity,” I said slowly, thinking out loud. “The perfect combination for metal mana.”

  Raik tilted his head. “Maybe eating metal is part of your path.”

  Kan frowned. “It wasn’t for my siblings.”

  “You’re the only one born after your father’s last evolution,” Raik theorized. “After he became known as the Adamantine Warrior.”

  Kan went quiet for a moment.

  “Even if we pooled all our resources,” she finally said, “I doubt we could afford more than a few grams of adamantine.”

  Raik bent down and picked up the remaining fragments of the iron-rich golem heart, weighing them in his hand.

  “Maybe not,” he said. “But we can start with something cheaper.”

  “I can follow your soul’s progress and see if it helps or not,” Ja’a offered.

  That night at the camp, I spent hours trying to design a prosthetic leg using a single encyclopedia article.

  Let’s just say I failed miserably.

  Maybe Nina would have better luck.

  Or maybe Lady Petal Satori.

  Either way, tomorrow we would make it to Ectamel and the Undead Deadzone.

  telling than showing, but I felt that fully depicting each village in its own chapter, and introducing new characters who aren’t relevant to the main plot, would get boring very quickly.