Chapter 150

The first thing they did upon disembarking the Silk Lady was to take a few minutes to just wander around and get a feel for the most prominent language. Neither of them had any first-hand knowledge of the eastern continent and only had System’s insistence than the locals spoke a language called Eledarn, and that Consortium Standard was the dominant trade language between the various clans that controlled the eastern continent.

Luke had the AP to buy both languages, but Zea could only afford one. They’d decided to see in Consortium Standard was widely used outside of the business and transportation sectors before committing the AP to picking it up, both because Zea didn’t want to level anymore, and because Luke needed about 500 AP to pick up the rest of his bloodline skills. Wasting a big chunk of languages that would only be useful for a week or two didn’t strike him as a smart move.

“I want a place to sleep that has an actual bed, and I want a bath,” Zea told Luke. “We’ve got fifty-two gold left, and I have no idea what the exchange rate is for local currency. So our priorities right now are figuring out the local dialect, getting some money, and locating some hospitality.”

[Detection] spent the next ten minutes going crazy while they walked. People on the eastern continent, at least the ones who lived in Naldrin, seems to be on average a lot shorter than literally every human he’d met prior to getting off the ship. Consequently, foreigners stood out since they were half a foot taller than just about anyone else. Zea was still the shortest person in a mile radius, but the difference was less pronounced since there were plenty of other people under the five-foot mark.

If that was the only difference, it might not have been a big deal, but the overwhelming majority of the locals also had silver-white hair. It was like the whole city had one hair stylist, and the guy was the biggest anime nerd ever. There was a word for that… Started with a ‘W.’

“Webabo… Weed… Web… something,” Luke muttered.

“What?” Zea asked.

“Huh? Oh, nothing, just trying to remember something from back home.”

“Mmhmm. Is it, you know, relevant to our situation?”

“Nah, not really. So, time to pick up a new language, you think?”

“Yeah. What’s your AP floating at right now?” Zea asked.

“Still 42. I figured I needed to bank it for bloodline skills so I didn’t spend any after my last level up.”

Left unsaid was that he’d been planning to upgrade [Leatherworking]to rank 4, but ended up giving the raw material to Zea instead. There didn’t seem to be much point in wasting the AP if he had nothing to work on. On the bright side, it was always nice to have a cushion in case he needed a new skill immediately.

“Take Consortium Standard as a language skill and we’ll see how far it gets us? If it’s working for you, I’ll pick it up too.”

“Sure,” Luke said. He navigated through his system interface to the skill store, found [Consortium Standard] under the languages section, and bought rank 1 for 5 AP. His brain skipped a beat as it got slammed with new knowledge, and suddenly he could understand most of what was being said around him.

“Oh yeah, that’s the dominant language here,” he told Zea. “Seems to have a lot of overlap with the local dialect, enough that if you were fully fluent in one, you could probably communicate with someone speaking the other as long as you’re patient.”

“Figured, but let’s get away from the docks where all the foreigners are and see if the ratio shifts once it’s just native Naldrinians talking to each other.”

They walked deeper into the city, deep enough that people with dark colored hair quickly shrunk to the minority and the street signs stopped being in two or three different languages. The streets weren’t exactly crowded, but they were comfortably full and everything was just a little bit too narrow to Luke’s mind. That combined with the architecture utilizing some sort of clay blocks instead of wooden planks for buildings, most of which were two or even three stories tall, gave the city a somewhat claustrophobic feel for Luke.

The farther away from the docks they got, the less [Consortium Standard] was able to translate for Luke. There were occasional open squares where he still heard it, and various ground-floor shops that had signs written in multiple languages. He could read parts of those, but most of the idle background chatter from everyday people not looking to sell anything was in another language. That didn’t mean the citizens of Naldrin couldn’t speak Standard just because they weren’t. There was an easy way to test that.

“Excuse me,” Luke said to a young woman minding a small fruit stand on the side of the street.

“Hello,” she said, giving him what he would have called a customer service smile. “Are you interested in some fruit?”

“No, well, yes, but…” Luke held up a silver coin. “I don’t have any of the local currency yet. Do you know where I can get my money changed over? And then perhaps an inn, one with a bath.”

“I can make change for you,” she said hesitantly, “But… maybe it is better to go to a money changer. That way you know you are not getting taken advantage of. There is one over in the commerce square that could help you. It’s a big, wide building with a blue tiled roof.”

“Oh! Yeah, I saw that. Over that way, right?” Luke asked, pointing behind him and to the left.

“Right. Over there.”

Luke thanked the woman and led Zea back towards the commerce square. He stopped once more to ask for directions, even though he knew where he was going, just to see if a random person who wasn’t trying to sell anything would also understand him.

“Okay, I think we can safely assume that most people here are bilingual. It would be better to speak both languages, especially if we were going to stay for a long time, but Standard should be good enough for our purposes,” Luke said.

“Hopefully System was right about it having spread to other… what did he call them? Provinces?”

“I think so, yeah.”

Zea purchased the skill as well and took over the bargaining and haggling, which was just fine by Luke. It wasn’t that he had anything against a bath and a bed to sleep in, but if it had just been Luke, he’d have had System point him in the direction of the God Machine and started walking. It wasn’t like he had a car anyway, so roads were optional. If the eastern continent was anything like the western, something would try to kill him within an hour or two of getting away from civilization, he’d kill it, and then he’d eat his fill of badly cooked meat before moving on.

Thank God his high stamina protected him from getting food poisoning.

Luke just kind of trailed along, only vaguely interested in watching Zea work. She exchanged half their gold for the local currency, some sort of oval thing with a groove carved down the middle and a hole in one end. A bunch of them were strung together into something like a necklace, which now that Luke knew to look for them, he saw people wearing everywhere.

Zea promptly cut the string and dumped the coins into her own pouch. After that, they did a quick lap around the square to restock some of their supplies and found an inn on the south side of the city near the shore that had been built so that the entire first floor was a bathhouse. Luke had to admit after that she’d been completely right. It was worth the time and effort to get cleaned up before he put on his new set of enchanted clothing.

After renting a room and depositing their road supplies, Zea dragged him back onto the streets. “Where are we going?” Luke asked as he allowed himself to be tugged down the stairs and past the doorway leading back into the bathhouse.

“We’re on a whole new continent. There’s a culture here we know nothing about, and for probably the first time in months, nobody wants to kill us. We’re going to eat new foods and listen to new music and visit new places. Then we’re going to get a good night’s sleep before it’s back to endless walking tomorrow.”

Well, he certainly couldn’t argue with that.

* * *

“I have no idea what I’m eating,” Luke said.

“Me neither. It’s… It’s not very good.”

They’d ordered some kind of meat and vegetable dish that came with its own sauce to dip the chunks into, but the sauce was extremely bitter and, in Luke’s opinion at least, the food tasted better without it. There was also the matter of the eating utensil they’d been provided with, which looked something like a cross between a knife and a paddle.

It took a few tries to get it right, but a glance around the restaurant showed that it was designed to be used while holding the plate at an angle to scoop a chunk of food up after it had been sliced off the main portion. What exactly the eastern continent had against a simple fork, Luke couldn’t tell.

It was tempting to just eat with his fingers, but Luke restrained himself. As far as he was concerned, this was a date and it was long overdue. He wasn’t going to ruin it with poor manners.

“Want to go somewhere else?” Zea asked.

“Sure,” Luke said. They’d paid for the food in advance, so there was no bill to settle. They simply abandoned their table as they’d seen several other people do and exited through the front door. It was early evening now, and the streets were lit with lanterns using some sort of scented oil that made everything smell vaguely floral.

“Looks like there’s some kind of show going on over there,” he said, pointing towards a square a few hundred feet away. There was a crowd of people there, all facing towards a raised platform with ten people standing on it. Each of them was wearing a matching uniform, though some were more highly decorated than others. Nine of the men were in their forties, and the last one was perhaps in his mid-twenties.

Luke and Zea wandered into the square and slid across the back of the ground to an out of the way section where they wouldn’t be blocking anybody’s view. Luke was one of the tallest people there, and Zea was so short that it was easier for her to just jump up on top of a large crate and sit there. “What kind of a show do you think it is?” she asked.

“No idea, but it looks like it’s about to start.”

Across the square, a new man was just climbing up a few steps onto the platform. He turned to address the crowd, but unfortunately, he wasn’t speaking Consortium Standard. “Damn,” Luke said. “I’m getting maybe half of this. I don’t think it’s a show though, more like a ceremony, maybe.”

The man who was speaking paced back and forth in front of the other ten. He thanked them, on that part Luke was sure. The words were the exact same between the languages, but what exactly he was thanking them for, Luke couldn’t tell.

It was about then that Luke noticed how quiet everything had gotten. The city was full of energy and noise as people went about their lives, and that was still present in the background. But here, in this one square, nobody in the crowd said a word. They just listened, silent, and waited for the man up on the stage to finish giving his speech.

The middle-aged man on the far left and the young man on the right stepped forward out of the line and met in the middle. The younger man said something, Luke thought he was thanking the other man, and they clasped hands.

Then the younger one’s free hand blurred and a knife sliced through his counterpart’s throat.