Gaius tossed and turned, but it seemed that sleep wasn’t claiming him this night. He’d returned to Sundown Residence after registering at the Adventurers’ Guild, entirely intent on sleeping, but it would seem that his body wasn’t going to listen to his words. After failing to fall asleep for an hour or so, the boy decided to cultivate instead.

Big mistake.

His chest was still sore by the time he stopped. Gaius had fulfilled the criteria to become a Knight under the General Formula days before he’d tried to assassinate the Last Star, but that didn’t mean that his journey from there on would be pain-free. Channelling energy through that unused passage that linked his heart to the network of energy inside him had induced a constant biting chill within his body. It wasn’t just unpleasant anymore — it was a spike of cold that stabbed through his entire chest that vanished only when he stopped.

Wiping off a bead of cold sweat, the boy rolled off his soft bed. It was a pity he wasn’t able to sleep, despite his mental fatigue, since the bed was apparently stuffed with clouds. Fluffy ones.

Pulling on a shirt, Gaius left the house. With a gentle burst of power, Gaius leapt onto the roof, and balanced himself on something that looked like a lightning rod.

Lightning rod, eh? He looked at the object he was standing on, and frowned for a moment. The Cardinal Champions had probably inspired this item, although whether the masses of Orb understood why it worked or not was another question altogether. Or maybe, it was a Summoned who lived in the Eastern Territories instead, given that it was the first time he’d seen such an object in this world. Lightning was a rather rare sight in Orb, after all.

From his vantage point, he looked down at the city. The streets, illuminated by moonlight, was still rather packed with pedestrians despite the lateness of the hour. Their shadows danced as they crossed from street to street, and Gaius smiled to himself. The scenery before him warped and twisted, and the boy sank into the abyss of memory once again.

A familiar scent entered his nose as his vision cleared. It was a cross between metal and gunpowder, a smell that wasn’t too unpleasant to his nose. A puff of smoke was drifting out of the barrel, and as Gaius watched through the eyes of his old self, Memory-Gaius peered through the scope and confirmed that his mark had fallen onto the ground. At such a distance, there was nothing else to confirm his target’s death, but that wasn’t his problem.

Memory-Gaius, still in a prone position, disassembled his sniper slowly, placing each and every component into an innocuous looking schoolbag. After checking that he’d left nothing behind, he got up and slung the bag over his shoulder.

The memory ended.

It was a memory from when around he was in his mid-twenties, Gaius estimated, as the scenery returned to that of Orb. His hands weren’t as wrinkled and as callused then, and the him in the memory was clearly more enthused about doing jobs than he was in his later years. The boy could clearly recall the surge of bloodlust as the him in the memory relived the moment of the kill, relishing every moment leading up to the trigger’s pull.

His mouth twisted as the semi-foreign emotion entered his mind. And yet, the him when he was younger had probably went through something in the following years, to make him pick up orphaned and abandoned children to educate them.

Gaius adjusted his breathing, and then took to the skies. The airspace above Seireiden was actually more crowded than the cities he’d seen in the South, and by the looks of it, there were some guards loitering near the pagodas too.

Floating billboards? Advertisements targeted at Knights and beyond? Gaius closed his mouth after a few seconds, and then flew towards one of them. He hadn’t noticed them earlier, as there was a gaggle of Knights crowding around these boards, but someone had flew off a few seconds ago to reveal the odd sight to the boy.

Slipping on the Auspices of Concealment, Gaius put on a burst of speed, and arrived at the first billboard he saw thirty seconds later. An animated dragon, breathing flame and flapping its wings, roared at the boy as he peered at the words written on it.

“Looking for prospective dragon-slayers…” Gaius muttered. “Rank A and above adventurers only, approach the Tekkadan pagoda for more details.”

His words drew the attention of the small crowd of five people, most of them doing a double-take after seeing his small stature.

“Wow, a kid Knight.”

“Maybe he’s a Lord, Shino. Who says kids can’t be Lords?”

“And I’m a Demigod, then.” A man floated over to Gaius. “Few ever come back from that job, kid.”

Gaius turned to look at the person named Shino. The first thing he saw was a shiny katana — the man was twice the height of Gaius, which meant that the boy was looking at his waist. Craning his neck, Gaius took in a head of red and purple hair…and a concerned face.

Seeing a stranger concerned for him was a rather novel experience, and Gaius smiled. “I know. Thank you for your warning, however.”

Shino nudged his companion, a man with an ostentatious cape of gold and white. “He’s more polite than you. For shame.”

He turned back to Gaius. “The jobs here are colour-coded. Green is for Knights, yellow for Lords and red for Paragons. Well, no one’s actually going to put up a job for a rank S adventurer, however.”

Rank S…Paragon, eh? I wonder if rank SS refers to Demigods…Gaius stowed that thought away, and then nodded his thanks towards Shino. As he headed towards the green billboards, which were drawing a slightly larger crowd, the boy couldn’t help but feel a chill run down his back. If their words were correct, then the five who were looking at that advertisement were all Lords. At least they weren’t all that common, but…

It was a warning that the capital wasn’t as simple as it looked like. Or yet another one, anyway. The possibility that the capital of any state had a few Lords hanging around for no reason wasn’t implausible either. Maybe it was that case all along, but Gaius never got a chance to see the Southern capital, after all.

Not after he destroyed it, along with its untold history that spanned millennia.