Jonathan stalked down the road away from the orphanage. Evidently, Mr. Geiller had not been kidding. Not only was he unwilling to form a contract with Jonathan, but he had been completely serious about leaving all the actual work to Jonathan while he holed up in the room across the hall from Abigail with the grimoire.

Which left Jonathan with a conundrum: who would be willing to make a contract with him? Sure, he could do magic for people, which theoretically made contracting with him appealing, but the simple fact was that he wasn't keen on increasing his magical expenditures, since they could possibly be killing him. Plus, since he had no money—nor any easy way to get money, currently—he needed his magic allotment for procuring supplies. It was a problem, and he wasn't sure just yet how he could approach it. He also wasn't sure how prevalent magic was. He seemed to recall Mr. Geiller implying that people had varying magical abilities, but on the other hand, he was summoned into the world by a nine-year-old and their next-door-neighbor was some sort of magical inventor. Simply based on the fiction from his old world, he expected "varying ability" to mean "most people can't do much, and a few can do a lot" but maybe it was more like literacy in his old world where people learned to use it every day, and a few people had extremely large vocabularies.

The one thing he knew he had going for him was the fact that his magic was a lot more flexible than what most people would have access to, since he recalled both Abigail and Mr. Geiller saying that he was capable of doing things that would require access to multiple realms normally. He just needed to find a way to leverage those abilities, which admittedly might be a little tricky given most of his practice was in conjuring sandwiches…

As Jonathan mused on his predicament and tried to come up with ideas for tempting people into forming a contract with him, he reached a portion of the road where it curved to the right around a hill. Up to this point, none of the few properties that lined the road appeared to be occupied. It was super strange that Mr. Geiller and the orphanage were the only two occupied homes in this area, and they were both down right near the effective end of the road. Though, come to that, he hadn't had a chance to follow it into the wood; it was possible that there were more people down that way.

He followed the road around the hill, and the world opened out beneath him.

On the other side of the hill, the road he'd been following from the orphanage merged with a road that was actually paved with large, somewhat irregular six-sided pavers. The paved road proceeded down a gentle slope to his left and terminated in a large town some distance away that was located next to a river. Jonathan wasn't great at estimating distance, but he thought the town was probably a few miles away. Alongside the road were a series of what appeared to be farms, interspersed with small wooden areas. Glancing to his right, the paved road curved around and was lost in the nearby hills.

Although there was no one particularly near Jonathan at the moment, he could see some foot and wagon traffic moving back and forth on the road further down in the valley.

Thank goodness Abigail had been awake enough before he left for him to summon food for both of them. This was going to be a long walk. Jonathan took a careful look at the hill and surrounding area where the road to the orphanage joined the paved road to make sure he wouldn't miss it on his way back. That would be incredibly embarrassing.

What felt like an hour or two later—Jonathan still didn't have any good way to tell time, but the sun wasn't quite overhead, so it was still late morning—Jonathan finally arrived at the edge of the town. The place was even bigger than he'd thought when he was looking down at it from the hills, a sprawling sea of houses and other buildings that appeared to have spread out from the river in a jumbled mess. The paved road ran straight into the center of town, and as the majority of the other roads that branched out from it were either unpaved or irregularly paved with bricks, Jonathan opted to follow it and see where he ended up.

That turned out to be a large square almost a half hour's travel after he first started passing residential houses. He was beginning to revise his estimation; this felt like a small city rather than a large town. Or at least small compared to his old world. He wasn't sure how it would rate in his new one.

The square appeared to be a major destination; there were multiple large buildings bordering it, stalls setup by merchants—or possibly farmers, judging by the mess of produce being sold out of the back of multiple wagons—and three more paved roads much like the one he had followed into town that led away from the square in other directions. At the very center of the square was what appeared to be a free-standing bell tower towering above the bustle.

But the most surprising thing—particularly after his previous week—was the sheer number of people. He'd had to move to the side of the road to avoid numerous wagons on his way into town, but once he entered the town—and particularly as he drew closer to the square—the number of pedestrians had drastically increased, and once he reached the square it was an honest-to-goodness crowd.

When he reached the square, Jonathan withdrew off the side of the road and simply observed the people for a while. Surprisingly, he wasn't able to distinguish any particular class differences. Given the agrarian surroundings, he had been expecting rough homespun on the farmers, fancier clothes on the townsfolk, and maybe a few extra-fancy nobles here and there, but contrary to his preconceived notions everyone was wearing clothing of more or less the same quality. A few of the farmers did tend to wear heavier duty clothing that looked to be made from canvas, but overall everyone was wearing clothes that appeared to be made out of cotton. The style of clothing was foreign—to Jonathan's untrained eye, it looked like a strange mash-up between medieval tunics and traditional Chinese garb, except made with more modern materials—but he largely couldn't spot any obvious different groups.

Well, except for the group of people wearing deep burgundy robes who were clustered on and around the steps leading up to one of the larger buildings partway around the square to his left. Jonathan couldn't be sure, but the giant pentagram relief on the front of the building's façade made him think they were probably the Quint religious order that Mr. Geiller had mentioned with such disdain. While he'd love to talk to them and get a better feel for what the word "demon" actually meant in this reality, that would have to wait for another day. Mr. Geiller's warnings about how they might treat him if he accidentally outed himself made him nervous. He'd want to have a better sense for what was normal behavior in this world before he attempted contact with the church.

He turned his attention to the crowd, wondering who he should talk to in order to start getting his bearings. On a whim, he enlivened his magic.

The square erupted in an intense display of smoke, in various colors. Jonathan reflexively stopped enlivening his magic in surprise, though he wasn't sure what he'd expected. Carefully, he eased back into it, this time focusing on the people on the outskirts of the square nearby and trying to parse the conflicting impressions he was perceiving.

Having practiced this with Abigail regularly over the past week, he was confident that what he was perceiving as "smoke" was actually some metaphysical byproduct of human desires. He wasn't sure what the colors signified, since Abigail's smoke was always a similar shade of red, but he was beginning to be able to identify the impressions that the smoke gave him. In fact…he started walking around the edges of the square to his right and soon located the source of a very familiar desire. Although the smoke around the man sitting on the steps of a nearby building was a sort of deep aquamarine, the feeling Jonathan was getting from it was unmistakable: the man desperately wanted a sandwich.

Jonathan examined the man more closely. Unlike the majority of the people in the square, his clothes were more ragged and unkempt. Although he wasn't begging, he also didn't appear to have anything to occupy his time; he was simply sitting and watching the people pass by. His attention was especially focused on a nearby stall, out of which a merchant was selling—Jonathan had guessed it—sandwiches.

This honestly seemed like a perfect setup, but Jonathan had one thing he had to test before he approached the man. He spent a few minutes watching the merchant to make sure that he didn't mess things up—the woman appeared to have a selection of ingredients packed away in her stall, and when a customer approached she would take their order and build the sandwich right there, then wrap it in some sort of brown paper. Maybe waxed paper or similar; Jonathan couldn't be sure at this distance.

He figured that was enough to go on. Moving so that he was off to the side and somewhat behind the ragged man but not too far away, Jonathan focused on his hands. Moments later, aquamarine smoke swirled into his chest, pain wracked his body, and he was holding a pair of sandwiches wrapped in brown paper that looked extremely similar to the merchant's.

Success! Thankfully, his sandwich-making abilities did not appear to be limited to Abigail, which was fantastic news for Jonathan, since he was personally getting quite hungry and not being restricted to performing magic when Abigail was around meant his options for trying to find more people to contract with were drastically better.

But before he could start looking for new people to contract with, he needed more information. Sandwiches in hand, Jonathan approached the ragged-looking man on the steps.