Chapter 317 (1/2)

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio  Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

It was a long journey from the Pyroxene Town to the Void Mask Land.

It took about fifteen days for an ordinary businessman to travel it by carriage—five days from the Pyroxene Town to the Gold-panning Town, five days from the Gold-panning Town to the Dragon-Roar Town, and another five days to the Void Mask Land.

It was common to spend five days travelling from town to town, but why was that? Because more than five days of travel would make communication difficult while less than five days of travel would cause overlapping development between towns and thus potential conflicts in the future.

Therefore, apart from the towns that were already built in bustling districts, other towns that had been reclaimed in uncultivated lands like the Pyroxene Town, Gold-panning Town, and Dragon-roar Town had been designed with a distance of five days of travel between each other to maintain the proper connection.

Here, the distance of one day of travel wasn’t measured by walking, as nobody was able to take a journey to uncultivated lands by walking except for experienced adventurers. A one-day walk there would make one too exhausted to protect themself from magic beasts.

One day of travel actually meant carriage travel.

Before he was there, Sui Xiong didn’t know how far a carriage in his world could travel in a day, but it probably wasn’t as far as the ones in this world, because horses in this world were much stronger than the ones in his world. They could pull a cart and walk steadily for a whole day and even run a bit in the middle from time to time. Though Sui Xiong had never ridden a horse before, he had read quite a few historical stories about travelling in which the cavalries were good at hard fighting on battlefields and short-distance maneuvering, while they weren’t as good as infantry in long-distance maneuvering, for the horses were weaker than humans.

In the early morning, the carriage set off carrying spectators from the Pyroxene Town. A few adventurers served as the porters, as well as the bodyguards, of this fleet of carriages.

In case they confronted vicious magic beasts, Mr. Jose would be the one on the fleet to handle it, though they were not going through secluded lands, and there were businessmen passing by sometimes. Most powerful magic beasts were smart enough to avoid such an area, so it was already adequate to have experienced adventurers as guards.

And this time was no exception. All was good for the entirety of the journey, and no trouble happened at all. The fleet arrived at a small village near dusk, where their camping site was reserved.

On a field trip, camping wasn’t recommended unless one had to. If possible, it would be better stay in a village or at least near one, because magic beasts usually didn’t attack villages, but tended to attack campers.

Of course, this was some advice for ordinary people or average adventurers. For experienced ones who often explored wastelands, camping was a common practice, and they were even used to fighting magic beasts during the night. Magic beasts were something usual for them. On the contrary, if there were no magic beasts coming at all, they would be rather concerned, wondering if they had accidentally entered the territory of a super powerful monster such as the Archean Dragon.

Reif and his companions spent the whole day in the carriage, wasting no time, since the Mayor of the Felix Town had arranged an introduction to the Void Mask Land for them about all the countries and areas in the mainland, along with some writing classes.

They wrote with a soft brush pen on a roll of light gray cloth, easy stationery that had been released recently in Geerteng City, which was known as the “Home of Stationery.” They dipped the soft brush pen in water and wrote on the gray cloth to leave black handwriting on it. After they finished writing, the cloth would be hung outside the carriage to dry so that the handwriting would disappear to enable the reuse of the cloth.

According to their adventurer teacher, this had been invented by Baron Geerteng—now Viscount Geerteng—Ms. Olian. She believed that the meaning of knowledge and education was to make education accessible to more people so that they wouldn’t be deprived of the opportunity to learn due to poverty. This supporter of the God of Knowledge had once promised to spend her whole life promoting education across the mainland to benefit this country.

She had been doing as she promised.

In recent years, lots of cheap stationery had been invented in Geerteng, including this ink writing cloth. It was, reasonably, much more expensive than normal cloth. A roll of this cloth and a pen together cost a silver coin, but it was, after all, no more than a silver coin, fairly affordable for many poor kids in order to learn to write.

In fact, the ink writing cloth benefited them more by making painting accessible to everyone. It could not only used for writing but also painting. One might have needed a teacher to learn how to write, but not necessarily to learn to paint.

Therefore, skillful young painters were seen everywhere. Many kids liked painting at their leisure, and most of them thus discovered their talent in the arts. As they carried on making efforts, they made progress.

Among them was the young adventurer who had taught Reif and the other fellows to write. He had been a soldier before and had a chance to have his own ink writing cloth. Though he wanted to learn to write and followed the writings on bulletins, he soon found he had a greater talent in painting, especially recreating the magic beasts and monsters he had seen before. He could always capture the features of these beasts and painted in a vivid and clear way.

With this talent, he had earned quite some money by painting commonly seen magic beasts for a few villages for the purpose of introducing them. He decided not to be a soldier anymore. As the popular saying on the earth went—”the world is so big, I want to have a look.”

Travelling around the mainland, he soon found himself in the Void Mask Land. There, he took a literacy class and became a literate, educated person.