Sven hated sand. It was coarse and rough, and it got everywhere.

  He especially hated sand when sand possessed a semi-magical ability to find itself in his shoes, or stuck to his skin, as he was in the middle of experimenting with magic for the first time.

  Despite how annoying it was, however, he managed mostly to ignore the fine particulate as he felt that he was drawing closer and closer to being able to infuse the cornucopia with his mana.

  As, in truth, it wasn’t that much more difficult, theoretically speaking, than infusing his fingers or a leg with mana. He just had to will the mana to manifest outside rather than flow inside him.

  But, while theory and practice are identical in theory, in practice, they are distinct, and as Sven had never interacted with mana before a few hours ago, he was struggling to bridge the divide.

  Or, he was until, like a spectral warmth dancing between the fine hairs that lined his arms, he felt a strange ghostly feeling emanate from the point in space directly in front of him.

  Sven stared in awe at the faint golden spark that flickered and flowed before his very eyes.

  Entranced by the literal magic manifesting before him, it took Sven a few minutes before he made the leap to use his new control over mana to fill up his special horn.

  The moment he did, however, his awe only grew as the empty horn began to glow as a liquid the colour of pale moonlight began to slowly fill the ivory walls of the Cornucopia.

  Sven’s hands began to tremble as he slowly raised the mouth of the horn to his dry lips. Then, in a quick motion, he tilted the horn up and began gulping down liquid euphoria.

  The disgusting sound of slurping echoed in the horn and thus also in his ears as he desperately searched for more of the heavenly liquid with his tongue but to no avail.

  Letting out a great breathy “Ah”, Sven shivered as he recalled the taste fondly. It had overwhelmed him in an instant. Even if the euphoria only lasted a brief few seconds.

  However, the taste wasn’t the only heavenly reward he’d received for drinking from the horn, as an ethereal blue system prompt that then appeared revealed.

  —

  Level Up!

  Your Realm has increased to the [2nd Layer of the Apprentice]!

  —

  Sven still wasn’t sure exactly what the meaning of his realm increasing was, beside that it helped in some way to increase his overall mana, but that alone was enough for him to be happy.

  Especially as he now had an example of how his mana can be used to do incredible things.

  That thought made him glance down at the cornucopia in his hand, and though he had just tasted paradise in liquid form from it, he felt no impulse to try and fill up the horn cup again.

  Not only because he now felt perfectly satiated, but also because he had the sneaking suspicion it would not be wise to drink from it again. At least, not any time in the next 24 hours.

  Sven had no particular rational explanation behind this suspicion, but the idea of abusing the horn in his hand gave him the chills and his gut told him it would be more than a bad idea.

  So, to remove the source of his temptation from view, Sven willed the cornucopia back to where it had emerged from, and just like that, it disappeared from his hand.

  Sven then tried to shake his head clear of the strange mythical treasure and instead focused on a slightly more pressing matter. He smelt like bad news.

  It was largely as a result of the blood that soaked his clothes from the early injuries he’d suffered, but the litres of sweat that had built up as he had hiked, and the fecal matter of some unknown beast that he must have accidentally stepped in didn’t help things much.

  Sven thus desired nothing more than a good bath and fresh clothes. Two things that he needed to find a human settlement of some kind to acquire.

  Which led his focus naturally to the small metal thing he’d picked up earlier: the City scanner.

  The scanner looked a bit like one of those devices that police use to measure the speed of cars that were driving down the motorway before fixed cameras and AI could do all the work.

  Sven had always been one of the more technologically adept of his generation, but the gadget he held in his hand was quite literally foreign to him in every respect.

  There were no buttons or lit interfaces, just a small metal box atop a metal stick with a small glass window that gave no outward indication of it being on or even working.

  No matter how hard he pressed the glass with his fingers, nothing happened, which meant that its interface, if it even had one, wasn’t operating off of touchscreen.

  With all of his Earthly new tech tricks tried, tested, and failed, Sven tried infusing the new gadget with mana. Which, at last, caused a faint red light to in the glass window.

  The scanner seemed to process something for a second before a small red arrow appeared which told Sven to veer left of his current position.

  “How nifty,” Sven muttered in appreciation of the simplicity of the magical GPS, before he brushed off what sand had got on his clothes and bare skin, and then prepared to move off.

  But, before he did, he glanced at the small wooden box that lay in his right palm. Inside was a pill that would perhaps boost his realm further.

  Yet, out of an abundance of caution, and partly due to his nose’s vociferous demands for swift and decisive resolution of his smell problem, Sven did not eat the pill then and there.

  Instead, he just about managed to fit the box in his pocket, before he at last set off in the direction that the city scanner pointed him in the hopes of at last finding a place for him in this new world.

  As if responding to this desire, a new prompt appeared in front of Sven that made him sure of the path he was walking, and thus made him hasten his pace.

  —

  Quest Gained!

  Quest Name: Narses Or Nothing

  Rank: [Profound]

  Objectives: [Find the Oasis City of Narses (0/1)

  Reward: ???

  —

  Winona let out an exhausted sigh as she casually shoved her ragged and worn work gloves into the large communal basket before trying her best to brush off the dirt from her outer disciple robe.

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  Her frustration at the fact that the dirt would not do as she wanted was only compounded when a colleague she always tried her best to avoid came skipping into the room with a goofy smile.

  “Wyn!” The woman called out as she gracefully removed her gloves before adding them to the big hand-weaved wooden basket as well. Her pair stood out in the pile for their relative cleanliness.

  Winona had no idea why the woman insisted on calling her Wyn, but ever since the woman made her big announcement the other day, Winona no longer tried correcting her.

  “Yes, Ashley?” She then replied with as neutral a voice as she could muster, all the while secretly in her head imagining herself already on the walk back to her room.

  The other woman smiled brightly as she gushed, “The senior disciples say that a patch of decade-old ginseng root will be maturing soon. They wanted to know if we were interested in helping the sect to harvest it all.”

  Winona internally sighed before she replied, diplomatically, “Ashley, I think they were more asking if you wanted to help them out. I’ve not heard anything about this ginseng root patch.”

  The other woman’s face turned confused as she responded, “No. I’m pretty sure they invited all of us. At least, that is what I heard from Jeremy.”

  And, just like that, Winona had no interest in continuing this conversation.

  “Well, if there is a real second helper slot available, I’d be happy to help with the harvesting of the patch. Anyway, I have to go now. Got some meditation to do.” She said, turning toward the exit.

  Before she could take another step, however, a strong hand gripped her shoulder, and the face of a pouting Ashley met her as she accepted her fate and turned back around.

  “Come on, Wyn!” The woman intoned, “All you do these days is meditate. Why not come out with me to the city and we can have fun visiting all of the cool merchant stands? It’ll be fun!”

  Winona looked into the other girl’s eyes as she replied, a little bit of her frustration in her voice, “I am on the cusp of being kicked out of the sect, Ashley, all I can afford to do is meditate.”

  “I get that, Wyn, I do.” The other woman retorted, not all that convincingly, before countering, “But that is no reason not to have fun now and again.”

  Winona had been about to reaffirm that she really couldn’t afford to be messing around when she was only weeks away from being tossed out onto the streets, but she didn’t make it that far.

  As, before she could even make her reply, the other woman added, enthusiastically, “Oh, and, you and I both know that getting too worked up over a breakthrough makes any bottleneck worse!”

  Winona stared at the woman who had, even if Winona could only begrudgingly admit it to herself, not made a bad point, and judging by her interlocutor’s face, she knew she had won.

  If the woman had remained silent for a minute longer, Winona could’ve seen herself reluctantly, in the spirit of clearing her mind of all mental blockages, agreeing to her co-worker's request.

  But, then, the woman tried to seal the deal by offering something Winona would never want, so as a result Winona instead grimaced internally as the woman added in a sugary voice.

  “Plus, if you come out and have fun with me, I’ll ask Jeremy if one of his friends can help you take the all-important step into the Apprentice realm.”

  In response, Winona shook her shoulders free of the woman’s grip and doubled down on the fact that she was busy, then briskly walked over to the wooden door, and ascended the staircase.

  All the while ignoring the calls of “Wyn!” from behind her.

  As she reached the top of the staircase and emerged into the sect’s spiritual herb processing area, she did as she always did and quietly walked past the rows of disciples sitting on long benches.

  Then, without making a sound, she pushed open one of the side doors and emerged out onto one of the sect’s many sandstone courtyards and took the quickest path she knew back to her room.

  Her mind roiled with thoughts as the warm summer sun beat down on her.

  But, only once she was firmly within the privacy of her room, did she allow herself to properly engage in introspection as she freed her blond hair from its veil with a sigh, before laying down.

  If the world was fair, Ashley really wouldn’t get on her nerves as much as she did. If fairness even existed in this world, they’d be best friends by now. They were two of the small group of female outer disciples, both of them interested in one day becoming an alchemist, and both were, at a young age, considered rather talented when it came to cultivation.

  Yet, somehow, Winona found herself unable to stand talking to the woman, and that bothered her as she knew full well that it wasn’t her precisely that she disliked. It was the people around her. Or, to be more specific, the men that she surrounded herself with.

  But, just thinking about those lust-filled bastards threatened to give her heart demons, so she tried to clear her mind of the whole subject by searching her litany of thoughts for other things.

  Before long, her mind had returned to a far more familiar dwelling place - despair.

  She had been only 14 years old when she’d reached the peak of the [Novice] realm, and yet, even though she was about to turn 18, she hadn’t made any progress in her cultivation.

  And, if she was being honest, at this point she couldn’t see herself ever breaking through. After all, she had tried everything, but nothing had so far seemed to do anything for her.

  She’d spent the last few months spending almost every second that she wasn’t forced to work to meet the weekly contribution point quota cultivating in an attempt to brute force it.

  Yet, still, her realm wouldn’t budge. It was as though she were swallowed by quicksand, and now it was just waiting for her last pockets of air/hope to be depleted to deliver the final blow.

  Making it all worse, she knew exactly when that aforementioned final blow would land. The day of her 18th birthday. And the person who’d be delivering that blow would be the Sect Master.

  She would be removed from the sect registry, her belongings confiscated, and she’d be forced to either make a system oath of secrecy and leave, or else become the property of the sect.

  Neither fate appealed to Winona, with the latter making her skin crawl. But, unless she managed to break through, she’d have to choose one of them. As the sect didn’t tolerate “talentless” people.

  The waning fire of determination in her chest flared briefly as she forced herself to sit up.

  Then, for the millionth time in the last 4 years, she crossed her legs, closed her eyes, and began to meditate. Hoping, with all the hope she had left, that today would be the day that she’d do it.

  That today would be the day when she’d finally break through and at last be able to stand strong once again. That today wouldn’t be like all of the other days prior.

  But, for the millionth time in the last 4 years, when exhaustion finally dragged her out of her focus and she collapsed unconscious, she was still nowhere close to breaking through.

  Time passed like a breeze as Sven walked with a single-minded focus across a vast empty plain of sand, over the shifting dunes, while the cool desert night dulled his nerves. The only time that he had stopped walking was to observe the rising of the sun over the horizon.

  Yet, more surprising than the rosy beauty of an Empyrean Sunrise, was the fact that despite having spent almost 19 hours straight walking, neither his old bones or muscles were aching one bit.

  Nor, in fact, did he feel particularly tired despite his last sleep being over a day ago.

  With no other explanation in view for this new supernatural stamina of his, Sven once again could only thank his lucky star that he had endured that trial and increased his realm so much.

  As, while nothing had attacked him yet, he had glimpsed quite a few terrifying creatures off in the distance that would have made any attempt to sleep out the night a potentially fatal error.

  Sven did his best not to think about the hideous monstrosities he had glimpsed and was helped in this task by the sudden blinking of the scanner he held in his left hand as he crested a dune.

  A smile soon grew on his face as he looked out ahead of him, and through the distortions that the heat from the sun created, he spotted grand walls of sandstone that surrounded a vast cityscape.

  A humongous urban metropolis sat around and beside a large body of crystal clear water that glimmered gold under the intense light of day.

  More importantly, however, when he glanced at the towering city gates ahead of him, he saw that the line to get in was remarkably short and yet full of a variety of different-looking people.

  There were men in light robes, women wearing simple dresses and head coverings, and people in all sorts of other outfits that made Sven comfortable trekking down the dune to join the line.

  Even if his modern clothes were definitely unlike anything anyone else was wearing, his journey down the mountain had done much to muddy and ruin them to the point of unrecognizability.

  Which would, hopefully, make him stand out less compared to some of the other people in line.

  And, so it did. For a while at his approach, he received a few glances, but no one truly paid him attention once he joined the line and began to queue patiently like everyone else.

  He stood in line, mostly in silence, for the next ten minutes as the people in front of him, including a group of merchants travelling by horse-drawn wagon, were processed by the armoured guards.

  Then, he stepped forward and one of the guards, a muscled man with remarkable light brown skin and a rich dark moustache, spared him a glance before ordering, “Name and purpose for entry.”

  “My name is Sven Mikhailov. And I wish to enter the city to bathe, acquire new clothes, and in time build a new life for myself.” Sven replied honestly, not seeing any reason to lie to the official.

  The guard looked at him sceptically for a moment, before shrugging his shoulder and saying in an unexcited voice, “If you wish to stay in the city for longer than a month, you’ll need to join one of the professional guilds as, let me tell you, the last thing this city needs is more wretched beggars.”

  Sven nodded in understanding, ignoring the man’s callous remark, and the man then handed him a copper medal of sorts, explaining, “This is your entry visa. It’s valid for a month and month only.”

  The man then turned gruff as he added, “Got it?”

  “Yes sir,” Sven replied affirmatively, though he had no idea how a medieval society could ever keep track of hundreds of city entrants, but, judging by the man’s look, they very much could.

  With his threat levied, the guard then gestured at him to go through the gate, and so he did. Sven earned his very first up close and personal look at the Oasis city of Narses.