Nihilea
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Chapter 41: Journey to the West
🕑 Added 2024-11-06 08:43:23 +0000 UTCChapter 41: Journey to the West
Up until this point in time, I’d never ridden in a horse drawn carriage before. As a whole, the concept was nearly extinct back in England, only occasionally brought out for certain ceremonial roles (see the aforementioned coronation), as part of a historical reenactment at a fair or while filming a show, or by traditional religious movements which forbade the use of motor vehicles. Now, having three days of experience as a passenger under my belt (quite literally), I can say that it’s not much fun. It was a far bumpier ride than the average car, bringing back memories of a mountainside holiday where my tour bus was tottering from side to side, making me wonder if we were about to take a plunge off a cliff every time we turned a corner. There were no windows, as we travelled with the tarp overhead strictly sealed, which combined with the floor lamp led to a significant amount of heat being produced.
I’d already stored my gambeson away, but even in only the thin shirt and pants I’d brought from the orphanage, a thin sheen of sweat lined my brow. Not quite enough for me to strip further, as the discomfort, whilst present, was still less than what I’d have felt going topless in front of a man at least two decades my senior, so I simply had to bear with it. I’d brought Pumpkin back out, and he seemed to enjoy the heat a lot more than me, despite having a coat of fur to make it worse. That brought to mind half-forgotten articles on Wikipedia, which claimed that they thrived in hot, dry climates due to their distant ancestry as desert dwellers. Separately, that same article explained that they were worshipped in ancient Egypt, which I wasn’t sure was true, but would go a long way to explain the average cat’s attitude.
In any event, I had nothing to do except pet the cat, since the carriage had little in the way of entertainment, though thankfully it wasn’t short on food and drink, at least. The caravan was travelling at a punishing pace, one that demanded eight solid hours of travel, a short break, and then the same again repeating, until the sky grew too dark to safely navigate. Only then would we make camp, taking turns to sleep for four hours each, while the other kept watch, until light returned, and we started all over again. Frankly, I wasn’t sure how the horse managed to keep up such a gruelling pace, and Harvey didn’t answer when I asked, merely grinning at me, so I could only assume some kind of enhancement was at work, either chemical or magical. This demanded that I keep to only light refreshments, which might have been the point, but I didn’t ask: some questions, I knew from experience, were best left unanswered.
Harvey, on the other hand, spent most of the trip slumped in his chair, a faraway look in his eyes. Initially I’d thought he was struggling with flashbacks or similar, until I saw his pupils moving methodically and realised he was working the System. But it was only when he started humming under his breath that I finally worked out what was going on: somehow, he’d managed to acquire a music player as part of the System, and was doing the Frontier equivalent of plugging in his headphones and ignoring the outside world. Needless to say, I was very jealous when that realisation came. I'd kept quiet up until now, but eventually, my curiosity and desire for stimulation won out.
“How’d you manage to get music on your System?”
I finally asked, when my patience gave, ten minutes and three tunes later.
“Finally figured it out, have you?” Harvey asked, undeniably smug in the face of my boredom induced irritation. “It’s part of the Bard interface, one which anyone who takes the Class gets access to, in order to make use of the empowering Songs. If you subsequently switch to another Class? Well, you lose access to that magic, but the music player still remains, and makes for a good way to pass the time. Say, if we meet a Bard on our travels, you can get it for yourself; it doesn’t take much to learn the very basics to access the Class, then drop it immediately after.”
“Tempting,” I admitted, already missing my considerable Spotify playlist from before. “Would that overwrite my existing Class, though? I’d rather not train up from Level 1 again.”
I’d changed my public Class to match my true level during the two nights off, explaining it to the others as having gained an advancement from my membership in the Dead Hand. Mainly, I’d done this to soothe my OCD, since it really didn’t like mismatched levels, but it also came in handy for excuses like these.
“Not as long as you return to Merchant within sixty seconds,” Harvey reassured me. “The System always allows a grace period between reclassing, to avoid people being screwed by an accidental selection. Not that it always helps, you’d be hard-pressed to meet an adventurer who hasn’t reclassed while drunk, or knows somehow who did. Usually, those stories end on a light note; unless they were in the middle of fighting monsters, but in such cases, being drunk alone would be a death sentence anyway, so you couldn’t even necessarily blame the reclass.”
“I'll try my best never to reclass while three bottles in,” I replied drily, getting a chuckle out of Harvey before he returned to his music.
Truly, this was why I’d elected to travel with the caravan: I could’ve set out alone and braved the wilds, yes, but there were benefits to going with a veteran of the trade, someone who knew the little quirks of the System that nobody ever bothered to write in a manual. I wasn’t planning to stay with them forever, but this made a good starting point, until I made some contacts of my own, and was ready to launch my financial empire. I’d put a lot of thought into what I wanted to do, both in the context of my own ambitions and the wider world, whilst also factoring in the restrictive Covenants of my Class.
No loans, so I had to build my base from scratch, and nothing legitimate, so none of the safe markets regulated by the powers that be. Within this framework, there were still plenty of ways to become obscenely wealthy, all it required was for me to identify a unique selling point, a niche nobody had ever realised existed, and for me, that was weapons. There were plenty of them, of course, I’d visited a shop full of weapons, but none carried the unique perspective of my time in modern society. More importantly, these weapons were all used to supply humans, to fight each other and the monsters up North. But nobody supplied the monsters, who all fought with their innate abilities, and wasn’t that just a shame? An entire half of an endless conflict, looking for an edge only I would be willing to provide.
Of course, I had to tread carefully here: being labelled the enemy of humanity would lead to death at best, and I planned to live to a ripe old age again. I had a few ideas on how to accomplish that, as well, but as my mind began to wander, a distant horn sounded, pulling me from my reverie.
“That’s the outrider’s alarm,” Harvey informed me, rising to his feet with his previous mirth gone. “Arm yourself, we might have trouble brewing.
