Apinsig
patreon
Chapter 142 Homesteading in a fantasy world
🕑 Added 2023-01-10 20:06:08 +0000 UTCI was quickly moving past the county capital. Half of it was burned down making it look like an empty husk but I think there might still be a few people living there. I kind of wanted to check it out but luckily, I was able to run fast enough that soon that idea became mute. My biggest fear about this trip was my quite evident need to check out interesting things and that might get me in a lot of trouble.
To counteract that while I was running, I decided to focus on the fact that I had to go more than 1000 kilometres to reach my location. That was a ridiculously long distance especially because this was supposed to be a small Kingdom.
If I understood, correctly this Kingdom was occupying an area between 5% and 10% of this continent being on the Eastern shore and stretching for about 2000 kilometres and going inwards towards the centre for about 1300 kilometres. To its, North was absolutely nothing besides the high energy area where monsters ruled. The same was to its West but to the south, it was bordered by another Kingdom.
Originally those kingdoms were a part of the same rulership, but they broke apart a long time ago. It was also the reason why the capital was at the southern border and not that the centre like most other kingdoms in this world. Beneath that Kingdom were many more until you made it to the southern tip of the continent where a big empire stood.
With some rough calculating that would make this continent lengthwise about 11,000 kilometres which was ridiculous. That’s longer than Africa although it is about only 6000 kilometres wide. But it doesn't get too much narrower than that so overall I think it will come to a bit less than 60 million square kilometres which would make this about twice the size of Africa.
To the East where the beast races live, that continent is even bigger than this one but the one to the West where the elves live is smaller but not by too much. Then of course there are the two southern continents which if I understood correctly are even bigger than this one and by not a small margin. My brain started to hurt a bit. I do not know the correct calculations but the planet should be a lot bigger than the earth was.
So why does gravity feel normal? I have no idea. Perhaps there are less dense materials but from my experience, I would have to say that some rocks can weigh a lot more especially if they are energy enhanced. Perhaps the simple solution is that energy has something to do with it but what, I do not know. If some smart person hasn’t figured it out I never will.
One interesting fact about all the continents was that the centre was uninhabited by the civilized races. For some reason, the energy density grew as you got to the centre of the continent until you find strong monsters that make their homes in the high energy density areas. From my understanding, there are some towns there for high-level people who find it uncomfortable to live in lower-density energy areas.
While high-level people can survive in low-energy-dense areas it is certainly not pleasant for them. But that is also the reason why monsters aren’t ruling the continent. Some of them are so strong that going to a lower energy area will literally kill them but that's not a fact for every monster one notable exception are Dragons but there are many more and they are the pain for any civilization.
But those monsters have not been a real threat to the world for a long time and are always taken care of even if they have wiped a Kingdom or two off the map. There are enough powerful people that they can eventually take it down.
Another problem that has come up is that as I get stronger, I will need to travel to places that cater for stronger people. If I don’t my problem with my equipment will get even worse and eventually I will not find any opportunity to get stronger.
That is kind of hard to accept for me. I just want to stay in my corner of the world and do some farming but honestly, that’s just something I like to say to myself as I do like the excitement of fights and getting stronger.
I will need a way to travel the land fast and also gain access to the different transport networks. Apparently, there are numerous different quick travel systems and practically every Kingdom has multiple ones.
If you want to travel from one side of the world to another you would need to use many different ones. While mage portals are the most common ones, they are different as no Kingdom wants another Kingdom to have access to their portal system. There are of course weird ones but those are usually for a small area or old ones that don't see much use.
This made me think about Goose and if I could possibly use him as a flying mount when he gets big enough but I don’t know how fast he could fly. He might not be good for long distances but I’m quite certain he would be good for shorter distances.
My concentration was broken a bit because I needed to slow down so I could take a turn at a crossroads. I also needed to slow down because the roads here were quite bad and if I was going too fast, I was running into the problem that I might fall because my feet were sinking so much into the road. I could see a small cart that was being pulled by two horses, but it was going down a different road. That was the first sign of a life I’ve seen on the road.
It was kind of sad. I wanted to see this Kingdom when it was full of life or even better, I would have liked to see this world when it was full of life. There would have been so many wonderous things to see, and I might have not become what I currently am. I stopped that line of thinking as I know from experience that starting to think about what if’s is a bad idea.
Thinking about the wider world. While I was not really into the anime stuff, I still knew about cat girls. I would like to see one as they were real in this world. My second choice would have to be an elf as I always wanted to know if they truly possessed beauty beyond compare.
I would also like to see an orc but if I understood it correctly, they are another fallen race although they did have a few people that were able to achieve classes and every half-orc was able to get classes, so their society was not as bad off as the goblins.
I had to do a small detour when I reached the duchies capital. It was occupied by a force that controlled the nearby lands. I had to slow down and sneak past a road post which was manned by two guys that had a small shack to stay in.
It was quite easy to get past, but I was quite glad to see some fields that were being cultivated a bit deeper in. I did have to ignore the chains that I saw on the farmers. Slavery was something that physically hurt me to see.
It was a good thing that everything around me blurred when I got back up to my travelling speed otherwise, I might start to think that freeing them might be a good idea. While I was certain it was a good idea it was certainly not right now and possibly not even in the near future. But I was also certain that eventually whoever ruled this place will attack our community and he better believe that it will be the last time he will rule anything.
Sometimes I was able to use better roads and I could go faster. I didn’t have any way to figure out how fast I was going but I think I might have been pushing over 100 kilometres an hour. I had to make a few detours as there were bandit blocks on the road but that was a rare occurrence. It was kind of weird as sometimes everything almost looked normal when I got to some city state's territory but sometimes, I went hours without seeing anyone living.
Undead were quite a regular sight and I did have to kill one that was particularly fast but that was all it had, speed. In the end, it was quite easily crushed. I was about halfway to my location when something happened that I was not able to avoid. I could have avoided it, but I simply couldn’t. A group of bandits were attacking a caravan and I would have bypassed them but I heard children’s screaming and that was something that I wasn’t willing to let happen.
There were about 40 of them all of them were either bronze or silver and while the caravan guards seemed to have an upper hand in the strength department there were only 10 of them. The rest were simple people and with the 12 big carts, there were quite a lot of civilians here. Some were trying to help but it was obvious they didn't have any combat training. I went to the left side of the road where the bandits were starting to overwhelm the defenders.
I could just imagine how the defenders saw me as one moment I just appeared behind one of the bandits and with my fist alone I hit her so hard that she died right there. Pulling out my sword I was able to kill four more before they started to realize that something was wrong. Even when they did realize they couldn't do anything. It wasn't even a fight as my sword easily cut them into pieces.
At the start, my appearance and killing of the bandits rallied the caravan members but soon they stopped fighting when they saw how easily I handled everything. Having finished off all the bandits here I moved to the other side and did the same.
I could see the fear in their eyes, so I didn’t want to worry them more. “I recommend you guys bring more fighters next time.” And just as I finished saying that I started to run again and quickly disappeared hopefully giving them some feeling of safety.
I certainly know how this felt. This so reminded me back in the war when the enemy deployed its first superhumans. While they were just wearing improved armour and were pumped full of drugs, they were still able to do superhuman things for a limited time and taking them down was quite hard. Fortunately, that lasted only until we got the directionally EMPs that made their armour useless. We were able to push the lines forward quite a lot when that weapon was made available for us.
I had run nearly 18 hours when I had to take my first break. I needed to walk a bit so I could recover my energy. While I could keep going as my tank was still half full, I didn’t know when I would need to fight so keeping healthy reserves was a must.
Currently, it was night time but soon it will be morning again. For me, the night just meant the colours were less noticeable otherwise everything was still the same. Well, I guess I couldn’t see as far but the curvature of the world made seeing past a certain distance impossible.
I had to dodge a few more city-states and one of the areas was like I imagined the kingdom used to be. It was one of the biggest duchies capitals in the Kingdom and so I could understand why there might be a lot of people here and whoever was ruling here was doing a decent job of it. That meant that I had to go through the forest to not be stopped or seen. Sometimes that meant I was able to skip ahead sometimes it meant I had to take a longer route.
Once I had to backtrack as I had taken a wrong turn but the place, I was going was quite close now. When I was getting closer I stopped running and just walked using my movement ability. While I was moving a lot slower like this there was also a lot more people on the road and it seems that this location was quite popular. When I came over one of the hills I finally saw the camp that I needed to reach.
The only semi-permanent structures were the watch towers that were built around the hundreds of tents. These tents were the big once that an army commander would be proud to have as his centre of command. There even seemed to be a market square. The watchtowers were manned and around the camps were constant patrols that were moving. But the most important fact almost everyone I could see was a true gold rank like myself.
Comments
Iron Knight
HECK YES!! SO MUCH HYPE Alright I might have gone overboard but that was a great chapter!
