AN: Yo, your lazy author → :D present you chapter 29, enjoy!!

PR by Zenla, the royal proofreader

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I had around 8 months left before leaving for Tristam City and Lana Academy. The fee is 1 gold and 20 silver coins per year and per person. There is an additional 10 silver for a room in the dormitories, and they were shared rooms, boys separate from girls. 10 silver coins, that is also the average renting price of a cottage per year.

Once there, with the accurate knowledge of the prices, we would have the choice between living in the academy or renting an available cottage. Renting a cottage would mean daily travel between home and the academy, but also that I could stay with the girls at night. So we would need raise at least 2 gold coins to safely cover for our first year there. I believe we would have the time to raise money for the following year while studying there.

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10 days in the Frontier, hunting monsters with decent material, passively looking for a decent amount of ore. 5 days in the village, training our hand to hand combat skills, weapons skills and magic skills. Working on my alchemy, trying to remember details from the lessons in my previous life and trying to apply them to this world. Also reviewing what I knew about mathematics in my old world, algebric and geometric formulas, equations.

While I was working on alchemy and science, the girls were improving on their leather working and tailoring. I wanted us to be as self sufficient as possible in preparations for our long travels and dangerous explorations. I didn't forget about the instrument I bought, I would train with my viol in the evenings. Lastly, sending mana into Komodo's magic core while observing the weird mana. That is how we spent our time.

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During the later half of autumn, while we were exploring the Frontier near the foot of the mountain, something caught my attention, I noticed something unusual. As I was using my mana sense, I felt a lack of reaction around 8 meters underground. Meaning I didn't feel the mana of the ground below 8 meters, and on a wide zone.

It could only mean one thing, a cave. It could be an isolated one, or one part of a larger network, and who knew what kind of beasts, monsters or materials we could find there. Right now, we didn't have the right equipment for underground explorations, but a quick scouting would be enough. It was still early in the afternoon, so I started to slowly dig a slanted hole with earth magic. I was secured with a rope by Muriem and Komodo while Kerrina was keeping an eye on the surroundings.

While digging, I never felt the bottom of the cave. When I reached it, the little sunlight that came through told me that the cave had a high ceiling. The bottom was around 30 meters away. I fired several fireballs in differents directions to see more of the cave, and noticed a few tunnels at differents places, some small and the others wide enough to walk upright. The cave was slightly egg shaped, and there were a lot of stalactics and stalagmites. I didn't see nor feel any living things nearby.

I hoped I could find some crystals and ores down there, especially since it's a the foot of a mountain. We will have to explore it later, and I don't want the others adventurers to notice it and take what could have been mine. I remembered 2 movies where some people got trapped underground in caves, and in the 2 they had to deal with nasty inhabitants, I don't want to find myselfs in that situation without preparations. I closed the hole, then explored the surroundings in search of other caves, then we left for Argot. There was a lot of preparations to make before going in

Back in Argot, I decided to spend more time in the workplace of my father. If there are living beings there, they will probably have poor vision but good hearing and sense of smell. I already had a product to mask my scent, but the cave's interior wouldn't smell like plants and trees. I needed an overpowering scent of stones and rock. Also, loud noises or bright flash of light would work fine. All of that would have little use if they were to be sensitive to vibrations, but it wouldn't hurt to have them.

Alpinism, speleology, I didn't know anything about them, so I didn't know the proper equipment to use against them, and I didn't remember the details of the equipment shown in the movies. So I would have to improvise, we would need a lot of rope, and it could be troublesome to take Komodo with us. I had the girls make leather harnesses for us and I went to Old Johrgard to make the metallic parts. Even if the exploration of this cave would end up short, it probably wouldn't be the only one we would encounter, so our efforts wouldn't be for nothing.

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After 5 days of preparations, we left for the cave, without Komodo. I didn't forget to leave a note to our parents about the position of the cave, just in case. Once there, I created a perimeter around the soon to be entrance with small earth columns, scattered my smelly forest essence around, then dug the slanted tunnel again. After securing the rope that would allow us to go down and being ready to descend, I hid the entrance behind me with a bunch of plants I had prepared before hand.

I got down first since I had my mana sense to feel the surrounding, then I made a fire ball in my hand and waited for the girls to come down. We applied my new smelly earth essence on ourselves, and cautiously made our way toward one of the few tunnels available. I engraved a visible cross on the wall at the entrance to indicate it was visited, and I would do the same at the entrance of any other tunnels. Most of them ended up too small to continue, but one of them allowed passage, and headed deeper underground.

Exploring a cave can be hard on the nerves, especially when you're half expecting some monsters to be down there, and using as little light as possible, the air was stale and I didn't want to consume our oxygen with fire. And people tend to be anxious in the darkness. We had to crawl for a while. All this time I was using mana sense. We didn't talk, and I used fire magic only briefly from time to time, to avoid missing something my mana sense couldn't identify, but our eyes could. After advancing for a while the path got wider, and we were able walk again, but the path was still leading deeper underground.

We started to see a faint purple glow ahead, and sneakily got closer, and as we got closer I could feel a source of mana. We reached a large open space, with big body of water in the middle, and numerous openings in the walls and ceiling. The glow was coming from something deep in the water, and it was also the source of the mana I felt. It wasn't an incredible amount of mana, it was equal to that of someone with above average ability in magic. I got closer to the water and concentrated on my mana sense, looking for living beings, but there were no signs.

I was glad I wouldn't have to worry about an underwater creature attacking me, but I was still worried that water might contains dangerous products. I put the tip of my finger in for a few second and waited. Nothing noteworthy. I did it again, but this time I licked it, reviewing all the spells I knew against poison, but then again there was nothing. I looked at the girls, they were starring at me with worry in their eyes, I calmed them with a smile. So I took off everything I had on me except my underwear and dived in. The curiosity got the better of me, but I couldn't detect anything harmful either. At least I was sure to get something interesting.

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AN: What lies in the depth of this underground body of water? Something good? Something bad? Find out in the next episode of Dragon Ball Z :D