Chapter 1
You found an Ordinary Loach (32).
TAILYN VLASHICH grinned happily as he dropped the flower into his bag. The god was merciful that day. It wasn’t so often he found more than five flowers, and that made thirty-two in the space of just the morning. Mistress Valanil was going to be happy to see him. And if he could come up with another eight loaches by the end of the day, he would have four silver coins coming his way—a fortune for a ten-year-old kid.
The boy gave himself another mental pat on the back for his courage and ingenuity. Heading up into the ruins had been the right move. While the adults generally kept their kids away from the ancients’ ruined city, Tailyn’s guardian couldn’t have cared less about him. The god’s laws made it illegal to send anyone with a mana bar to do physical labor, and the town elder wasn’t about to invest time and energy in someone leeching off society. Paying for the kid was enough of a burden.
For a long time, the boy just wandered the streets, unsure of what to do. His friends were all off working the fields, chopping wood, or mining stone, picking up at least one specialization in the process, but that wasn’t an option for Tailyn. Master Isor, his guardian and the village elder, announced that the treasury just didn’t have the thousand gold it would have taken to develop the sponging slacker. And while the god gave kids without mana a random work specialization when they turned six, Tailyn was going to have to wait until he turned twelve. Only then would he be permitted to stand before the god and find out what his life held.
It was only Mistress Valanil, the local herbalist, who took pity on the boy. She couldn’t teach him the herbalism skill, though what she could do was draw the flowers she needed and explain where they grew. And with that, the boy became an herbalist, albeit without the requisite skill, crawling around the fields as he compared every flower he found to Mistress Valanil’s sketches. It was quiet outside the city. The guards had long since destroyed all the monsters, leaving nothing there to threaten Tailyn. And the herbalist even paid him one silver coin for every ten flowers, which stunned and amazed him. Without his own expenses, as Isor begrudgingly paid for everything, the boy had managed to save up enough over two years of work to buy one divine gold. One day, he would have the courage to head over to the temple and make that happen.
Tailyn had decided to pick his way through the ancient ruins not far from the city that day. It was a forbidden area, which was why boys headed there to pick up their “valor stone” as soon as they turned six. That proved they were grown up and ready to work for the good of the town. And while the adults didn’t like it, a quick glance at their own stone sitting on a shelf reminded them to keep their mouth shut. Nobody had any intention of stopping a tradition that had already lasted more than a thousand years.
Even Tailyn had a valor stone. It was lying on a shelf in his room. Otherwise empty, the shelf made it painfully clear that he had no other evidence of his bravery—no weapons, no loot, nothing he’d mined or chopped himself. Even the flowers he picked for Mistress Valanil refused to find a home there. Until the boy unlocked herbalism, the plants wouldn’t be accepted.
Taking a deep breath, Tailyn headed onward, his path taking him higher and higher. His notes told him ordinary loaches grew in the sun, peeking out between rocks, with three bright-red petals each. Everything similar except for a different color was the dangerously poisonous shark flower. Mistress Valanil had instructed the boy not to touch them—doing so could result in the kind of enormous burn she’d earned herself when she was little. A shark flower had cut straight through her protection.
After finding his way to a high ridge that turned out to be free of flowers entirely, Tailyn decided to take a quick break. He pulled up his attributes. For whatever reason, staring at the semi-transparent window floating in front of him calmed him down.
Status table
General character information
Tailyn Vlashich
No class
Level
1
Age
10
Coins
0
Gold
0
Shield level
60
Mana level
60
Attack (physical)
14
Attack (magic)
16
Skills
None
The numbers in the table were low, lower, in fact, than any of the other children in the town above the age of six. But there was nothing Tailyn could do about that.
The most important entries in the table both clocked in at one: his level and his yearly tax. And while his level more or less made sense—it only increased when he did something extraordinary like enrolling in the magic academy or completing a mission from the god, should it deign to come down and offer one—things were more complicated when it came to the tax. Everyone paid a tax starting when they turned sixteen, be they a lowborn peasant or the emperor himself. May he enjoy many years of health. Crystals were extracted from the ancients’ deepest mines by the country’s most esteemed workers: miners. Being a miner meant prosperity. It meant everything. And since people with mana weren’t sent to the mines, Tailyn was worried his fate lay elsewhere. Crystals were all sent to the capital, where the emperor personally gave the god its due on behalf of his subjects.
Nobody knew what coins were. At least, none of the other boys had ever heard so much as a rumor. Gold, sure—that was what you could buy at the god’s temple for two hundred silver coins so you didn’t have to worry about anyone stealing your treasure.
The shield level was his personal protection. It formed around everyone as a gift from the god they received at birth, increasing by one with each passing year. From what people said, it also had something to do with your level, though there were too few people in the town who’d gotten past level one to tell. Mistress Valanil, who was all the way up at level twelve, had promised to tell Tailyn all about that when he turned twelve and got his class.
The mana level was something like the shield level. It also increased with each year, only Tailyn had no way to use it. Without special skills, mana was just as useless as the magic attack value that was tied to it. The boy really had no idea what it was about—Master Isor, the only adult with mana, categorically refused to answer any questions on the subject. Of course, there was one more “lucky” kid with mana, Master Isor’s son Dort. He was a year older than Tailyn and already had the designer skill. The town had obviously come up with the money for him. But no matter how hard he tried, Tailyn couldn’t make himself call Dort master. The kid was small, scrawny, a young version of Master Isor. Three years before, Dort had been torturing an innocent dog when someone gave him a walloping. Master Isor had lost it, assigning to him a couple adult blockheads looking to become city guards. The thirteen-year-olds had clear orders to protect his darling Dort from all enemies. Six months later, the whole thing had gone to Dort’s head, and the rest of the kids were under his sway. That went for Tailyn, too. Every week, he was supposed to pay one whole silver coin, otherwise his back was introduced to a club. And that was as dangerous as it was painful. With each year that went by, the guards grew stronger, and it was only a matter of time before they were going to be able to take out his personal shield, leaving him defenseless against the world. Getting the shield back would have been nigh on impossible… The only option would have been to head over to the temple and beg the god for pity—he certainly wasn’t going to find an elixir off in the middle of nowhere.