This is a guaranteed chapter for wendsday (here atleast). This chapter is mainly on the world and how magic is used to protect kingdoms. This is also a relatively short one.

Enough rambling.

Enjoy

Chapter 19: The usage of magic

Nalser and Curo were a days worth of travel away from Nulan's Capital. The Nulan Capital was called Rem'bar. Nalser planned to stop by the capital, cash in the monster cores, shop for a few necessities and then start traveling again.

The reason Nalser decided to stop by Rem'bar was , that it was on the road. The Yin Compass lead him past the city and he thought, why not stop by there. He could hear some news about what was going on in the world and maybe even hear, what those Heroes who were left behind were doing. He started to get bugged by it. He hadn't heard a scratch of information about them, as if they are just holing up in the royal castle or are prehaps dead already.

From the forest to where he was staying now, had taken him two weeks of travel, although they were mostly, moving a few hours, and training the rest. This world was extremely strange to Nalser, The border fortresses were made in spots, that were easy to travel through and the surrounding terrain was either mountains or such. Quite often there were tense forests surrounding them, in those forests lurked Magical beasts no one wanted to provoke. Passing straight through a forest, it was akin to a suicide. Also Nalser just waltzed through Nadin's border fortress, he didn't want to deal with another big fight. If it was known that he came again, all hell would have broken loose, so he just used phantom steps to bypass the guards and the fortress.

Now Nalser understood, why the caravans adventurer's had astonished faces on when they saw him. He had also learned from Thomas that all the kingdoms had scrying spells and protective spells overlapping with their kingdoms border line, making it impossible to sneak in aside from either under a fortress or by using an extremely expensive presence hiding formations. The formations cost a fortune, even wealthy merchants wouldn't use one unless extremely necessary. The reason was, for it to work, you had to know what spells, the other kingdom was using. You also needed a very high leveled expert ot make the formation. All in all, making one was difficult, obtaining one was even more difficult. It was a product that had market but no supply.

The more Nalser thought about all this information and analyzed it to make it more clear for himself, the more he was astonished about how broken of a thing magic was. If someone sneaked into your kingdom, you would know it immediately. There were other methods, to pass by the spells undetected but these methods were even rarer than the formations. Only certain families with roots spanning across millenniums had a chance of having one of these methods.

This world was actually 60% magical beast territories and 40% of non magical beast ones. Clearing an area of magical beasts was an extremely difficult task. Usually these areas were ruled by at least a rank 8 or 9 magical beast. Killing one was extremely hard. one rank 8 magical beast was equivalent to a 2 Black Star adventurer. Every time some kingdom tried to clear an area, they had heavy reprecussions. Even if they could kill the ruler beast, they still had to clear out all the lower ranking ones as well. All in all, clearing an area would take a lot of time, resources and casualties so kingdoms didn't actually expand much, they kept building where they could and clearing paths where they could.

There were also some eccentric powerhouses that like to build a home in the middle of such areas to get peace and quiet. Angering these eccentrics was even a bigger calamity than angering a lvl 8 or 9 magical beast. Nalser had made a mental chart, where he started putting magical beast plus and non magical beast plus. The end result was, that he had determined, if magical beasts were actually interested in taking over the world, they actually had about 70-80% chance of doing so. Now Nalser understood why there was a saying, if they magical beasts had ambitions, nothing could stop them. All the races had to actually tip toe around them and pick up and fight for their scraps. All the regular folk had no chance of even fighting against a lvl 1 magical beast, so in an expansion ,they were zero to no use.

Nalser also understood, why he had to bust through a fortress instead of circling around it even if it took more time. Had they gone through the forests or mountains with a caravan of 700 people, most like 90% would have died before they could even make across the border. Nalser was only a day away from the capital but he was in no rush. He kept trying to comprehend the world he was now living in better but most things made no sense to him, no matter how hard he tried to comprehend it.

He actually had a lot of ideas on how they could reclaim land from the magical beasts or how to improve living conditions overall. But he didn't want to do it because if he did, that would mean that he is setteling in, in a kingdom. If he did that, he would most likely end up with a lot of things, that he would rather not want to do. He wanted to travel and see the world, live his life to the fullest and how he wants it. The idea of setteling down and becoming someone, who might even rise to a noble, wasn't his cup of tea.

One conclusion, he did reach though. The variety of magic inside this world was enormous. There were different spells for every occasion and these spells could not be underestimated. With that he closed his eyes and fell asleep on a tree branch.