Chapter 10: Chapter 10: Cities are like onions. Layered and smelly.

The trip home was far from a normal affair. The light of the moon shone down on me, and I tried to work out what had happened. One moment it was morning, the next it was night.

My father wasn’t surprised. He carried the cube close to his chest, next to me. He was relaxed despite the time. There was a sea of people lined up outside select stores in the streets. I stared up at them, wondering what secrets lay within. Red, blue, green, yellow. There was no uniformity to the color of the clothes that the people around me wore.

A pattern in the types of clothes worn by the city folk emerged as I looked more. Most women favoured long dresses, similar to what Letitia had worn.

The men that roamed the streets weren’t dressed in robes or masks, they draped capes over their shoulders to hold off the cold, and hats were in fashion in this world. All kinds of hats. Top hats, fedoras, really any kind of hat. Some had designs that mimicked animals, with faces designed so that they looked ferociously at the incoming crowds. That led me to another observation.

There were a lot of humans here.

Normally, that would be the situation, but I was in a fantasy world. This place should be teeming with other races of all kinds. What kind of magic using society didn’t have elves and dwarves manning every street and bar?

Oh no.

I hope I didn’t reincarnate into a xenophobic society.

I tried to peek through the entryways of the establishments. I wouldn’t get an opportunity to look inside the stores for a while. Most of them were crowded, but then a single door opened up as my father and I walked past it.

A wisp of fire escaped from the inside, and I caught a glimpse of the entertainment that the city provided. A bright red fox stood on a stage, its body on fire. It turned to the crowd and let out a strange cry. Above it the air shimmered with flames that shifted into shapes. A sword and shield appeared and then two people made out of fire came to wield them.

The door closed and I lost sight of them.

Damn. That only made me want to see more. If the system was only limited by our imaginations, then the citizens of this world would be unique in most of their abilities. It would at least be difficult to find two people with the same skills.

All the more reason for me to train more when I got home.

There was a noticeable change in the architecture as we got closer towards our house. The bricks wore out and the paint grew dimmer. There wasn’t a physical barrier, like a wall, but there didn’t have to be to notice the difference. The crowds thinned and soon we were alone except for a couple of people scurrying in the dark.

We still weren’t in the section that our house was built in. If the other area was the high-class district, this would be the middle-class section. I remembered Zodiac being on the other side of the city, a huge compound in and of itself.

The difference became even more noticeable as we got closer to our house. Brick was a rarity, and wood had taken over. A strong gust of wind passed by us and knocked down part of the roof of one of the houses. It was abandoned.

Interesting.

If the city was thriving then there shouldn’t be any reason to have empty houses. There should always be a steady stream of new people moving into a prosperous city. The empty houses didn’t bode well. I wondered what I’d need to do to move into a better home.

What dictated the hierarchy of this world?

I didn’t know if certain skills or talents were profitable in the city. I intended to find out. If I raised the level of my earth creation ability, then I should be able to build a house out of mana and rocks. I could make stone bricks and house my parents in a castle.

Then why hadn’t anyone else done that too? It was something to consider. I didn’t want to violate any city building laws.

Our house was in the very fringes of the city. The entire time I’ve been here I hadn’t seen any sort of wall separating us from the trees and plains that lay beyond.

The moon illuminated what laid beyond my house. Farmland. Lots and lots of farmland. My house marked the final area of civilization, and I could see the reason for the change. Originating from further away than I could see was a river. It crossed the farmland and then passed through the city itself.

My mother opened the door for us before we’d knocked, taking me in her arms and swinging me through the air happily.

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“Two days. Two days without my babies.” She gave my father a kiss. “Every time you go there it ends up like this.”

Two days?

I looked up at the sky and saw the moon through the cracks in my ceiling. It was almost scary how much time I had lost without even realising it.

“It was worth it.” My father put down the cube and it started to glow. That was strange. I don’t remember having anything magic activate it. “You know, our son might have an interest in becoming a scriber.”

My father had a huge smile on his face. He pulled up next to me and pinched my cheek. Then he looked at the glowing cube and lifted it up for me to see.

“Now you can see me at work, champ.” My dad fiddled with the cube. He went to my parent’s room and came out holding a thin sheet of paper.

The cube whirred to life as he approached it and the paper disappeared from his hand. This time I knew what to watch out for, inside the cube was the piece of paper. It was tiny.

The lasers shot out from within the inscriber and towards the paper. This time I kept an eye on the moon to check the time. It hadn’t moved.

My father removed the paper from the cube and brought it up to me. It had a strange symbol. Intricate and ethereal. The bottom half looked like an S and the top half split out into various directions. There was a small circle in the middle of the upper half that hadn’t been carved out. It looked kind of like an eye.

“Sun. Fire. Gold.” My father said the words slowly.

I grabbed the paper, studying it carefully. The symbols were a language. Of course. I should have thought of that sooner. There were some languages on earth that used symbols to convey various meanings. I never learnt any of them.

The paper stayed lifeless. No magic within it. I stared at it expectantly, there was no obvious way to power it. I didn’t even know what would happen if I did. I might even need a skill to activate the paper.

“He loves it.” My mother’s eyes were wide. “You should make more and post those on his wall. You’re so much better at symbols than…”

We both knew what his drawings looked like.

“I don’t want to overwhelm him.” My father reached for the piece of paper. “That’s what made my sister stop inscribing when she was young.”

I shook my head vigorously and held onto the paper when he tried to take it. There was no way he was getting this.

A rip resounded through the air as the paper tore. I stared at the broken symbol in disbelief, my eyes tearing up.

My dad held the other half. He looked down at the symbol and then back at me. Without missing a beat he went into the room and brought out more pieces of paper. Soon my hands were filled with different symbols. I didn’t know what any of them meant, but I would soon.

The biggest piece of paper held the word for ‘sun’. Each symbol had multiple meanings, and my father wrote them underneath each symbol. He didn’t know how much I could understand but after we had visited Zodiac he’d been taking me a lot more seriously.

It felt good

My parents chatted until the moon was at its highest point. Then I started to get sleepy, and my mother put me to bed. The puffer stared at the walls curiously, examining the new additions to the room. My father had placed the symbols all around me.

I counted one hundred and twenty-two in total. Some of them I had seen carved into the inscribers. Others were new to me.

A thought hit my mind. I had spent two days inside that store.

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