A New Star Chapter 28

A few months had passed under the count's tutelage, and I had gone down into town to drop off some pills and goods for Pietr, the man practically falling to the ground in relief when I made the delivery. His buyers were clamoring at his door for product and, as he had pointed out before, there wasn't anybody else in the town who could provide the kinds of goods I could. There was an old herbwoman on a street dedicated to medicine and a few shops, there being a doctors' clinic with several physicians and healers there as well as a shop that sold some medicines and medical equipment. There wasn't anybody else in the surrounding area that had any interest or great skill with alchemy, so it was basically a given that I would be the only source of pills, whether it was affinity boosting pills or pills meant to aid the body or any of the other kinds I could make, I was the single point of supply within scores of miles.  

Despite my early sarcastic assumptions in the matter, the count maintained a light hand in our training all the way through my seventh birthday, only teaching me from time-to-time in the mornings and mainly discussing history and theory in the afternoons. We were always done by no later than four o'clock, with the count often disappearing somewhere to his own devices after that. He also didn't bother showing up on the final day of the week, taking that day every week as his one day off. After my seventh birthday, however, he did move towards some more active training in the mornings, but this was merely some sparring.  

Whether it was an opponent that he arranged or the count himself, he would have us spend somewhere between one and two hours in the morning sparring. That meant that I could forgo much of the rest of my physical conditioning as, at this point, I wasn't really gaining much from doing something like running laps or even solo sword drills. I was only going to improve, whether that was my body affinity or my weapon skills, though battle and through medicines. That only applied to my body, of course, as I hadn't read anything about medicines that could improve weapon proficiency and would very much not trust something like that if I did hear about it.  

After a few months into my seventh year on this world, we changed the routine again. My parents were a bit worried about it, as the new routine involved expeditions into the Untamed Wilds, though they had a lot of faith in the count. He was, after all, even stronger than my parents, and not by a small margin, meaning he was very likely the strongest being currently in our territory. They still didn't understand exactly how strong I was, either, despite having seen my first duel with the count, which was another reason they were worried for these simple, single day explorations. It meant a lot of wandering around the first mountain that was nearest the estate, and a bit of venturing north and south of that to the next two mountains in the chain. The range stretched just about the entirety of the northern border, and that didn't just include our border, but the borders of the empires to the east and west as well. There was a gap to the far east where the mountains essentially ended, sloping down into a small plain that was an area of great force concentration for the empire. To the west, the mountains continued almost all the way to the massive sea that bordered the western part of the Settled Lands, ending in a series of steep valleys that were even more defensible than the mountains themselves.  

The range was fairly broad as well, stretching fifty or sixty miles wide at its narrowest and broadening to over two hundred miles at its widest. The border of our kingdom was a bit uneven because of the mountains, including spaces where the border guard had pushed into the mountains to try to continue the reclamation efforts, but that was a very slow and tedious process. The mountains proved a rather effective barrier in both directions, slowing the flow of beasts and monsters south, but making it very difficult to push north. I had some idea that the rise in technology might ease some of the problems, but muscle and grit would still be required in spades, and I doubted there was enough of that to make any significant progress over the next few decades.  

The excursions grew in length over the year, until winter settled in and slowed us down. We still went out, as the count insisted learning survival in harsh conditions was necessary, but retreated after the first weak in some embarrassment, as I had demonstrated a greater knowledge of winter campaigning than even he possessed. We continued short excursions into the spring, taking advantage of the cycle of seasons to harvest all manner of resources that were unavailable at other times. Winter was particularly good for me, as the season saw many herbs and flowers that grew only in the cold and under the influence of frozen mana, though they grew but one or two at a time. Still, with but a handful of such rare and precious herbs I could craft pills and elixirs of exceptional quality and benefits. The first small bottle of which, when Pietr saw them, practically had him drooling with gold coins flashing in his eyes.  

And speaking of Pietr, the situation in town hadn't gotten any better for him. He was holding on, and I had started monitoring it more closely, which led to some espionage lessons by the count. I confess, I knew the strategies, when to send in spies, when to order an assassination, how to bring key assets over from the other side, but the hands-on work had eluded me in my last life. I was a soldier and battlefield commander, a fleet commander and strategic mind, but many aspects of the subtler arts I had left to those with the time and proclivity for them. The count's lessons were interesting and informative, though there was little challenge in them. I could slip into the Dark Paths, walking through them with ease and without much of a time restrictions. Few these days even knew of such an ability, let alone ways to counter it or prevent such a skilled individual from spying on them.  

Such practice produced some result, in that I managed to get plenty of blackmail on the mayor of the town. It was just as Pietr had said; the man was as rotten as a month-old, bloated corpse, and wouldn't blink at almost any depravity, given two conditions. One, he never liked to dirty his hands with any dark business himself, always working through proxies or having Robert's gang do what he wanted for him. Two, as long as he got a cut, he didn't care about the details and would look the other way, even to the most heinous of crimes. The count wanted to simply kill the man flat out, which I was not fully against, but I didn't feel the time was ripe. Despite the evidence we had, I felt there was more to plumb, especially as Robert ran a lot of his business out of the surrounding area, from small farmsteads and little villages, making him a bit harder to track. I wanted more evidence of his many crimes, beyond the bit of smuggling and larceny he competed with Pietr to control.  

As my eighth birthday neared, I began to go out into the Untamed Wilds solo. The count approved of such things, feeling there was no need, given both my strength and skills, to baby me too much. I often went out for a couple days at a time, camping in the Wilds, and it was during this time that I began to set the basics of several plans into motion. Firstly, I was using the time to establish small fallback bases and holdouts, things that I could use if I were in a bad situation to hide and recover. All of them were cleverly concealed, a half dozen within a day of the estate, and then another half dozen several days deeper into the mountains. I could move at quite an appreciable speed, especially if I stuck to the Dark Paths, so two or three days out from the estate was quite a distance, including two holdouts that were beyond the far edge of the mountain. 

I also spent a lot of that time exploring, keeping moving constantly and investigating everything even semi-close to the estate. Expeditions into the Untamed Wilds were still rare, and even the small number of solo adventurers and groups that worked in the mountains and just beyond them barely scratched the surface just of what was over the border. The range had been explored a moderate amount within a couple dozen miles of the estate, but even that area turned up new things that nobody in the guards or on the estate knew anything about. Beyond that, the area was practically unknown, with nobody having any idea of anything deeper into the mountains or further beyond. One of the things to keep in mind was that there were so few people that ventured beyond just a couple miles into the mountains, and the changes to the Untamed Wilds were so constant and rapid, that it was hard for anybody to have any accurate information about what was out there. 

One of the few exceptions to this was maternal grandfather, who spent an awful lot of time in the Untamed Wilds, and not just the mountains. He would venture well beyond the range, deep into the massive forest that was on the other side of the mountains and posed a serious risk to anybody weaker than O- or P-rank. Even being S-rank, grandfather had to be careful at the far edge of the forest, as there were things that made the far edge of the wood their home that could give even him a tough time.  

That was still relatively close, as well, as the forest stretched two or three hundred miles to the north before ending in another small mountain range. To the east was an area of pocked craters that were even more dangerous than that range, and to the west there was an area of big, rolling hills that had a very strange air about them. My grandfather told me to be extremely careful of going even into the forest, but especially into the hills to the northwest, as there was an old myth that the place was made from the bones of a set of giant wyverns and that their magic still swirled therein. It was both dangerous in itself and led to strange beasts and monsters springing up that were difficult to fight, ones with strange affinities and magics that needed special measures to counter.  

The mountains were more than enough for me for now, and during my explorations I had discovered a number of very interesting things. Strange wonders could be found everywhere in the Untamed Wilds, though they very often went hand-in-hand with strange and powerful dangers. One such thing I had found was an old, old laboratory of some kind of mage. The traces I found in the outer chambers, embedded deep in the side of a tall mountain, dated the place back at least six hundred years, but I suspected it was much older.  

The whole thing was protected by a magical security system that took me weeks, going out to the lab for a couple days before returning to the estate so as not to worry anyone, before I could break through it. Once I did, however, I was delighted to find the master key, taking complete control of the network, and it was something that would very likely give even an H-rank person quite a bit of trouble, given that they were unfamiliar with such complex security systems. It would take even someone of I- or J-rank a bit of time to brute force their way through, and it would also still pose them some danger. Considering my efforts to establish safe fallbacks in the mountains, the place was quite a find, and the notes inside, a set of complete enchanting notes as well as a long dissertation on fire magic, were a great secondary find.  

The enchanting notes I hung onto for now, not that I really intended to use them personally, but they would be quite a valuable thing on the market. Books were still quite expensive, even though people could use magic to copy them, and many people guarded their ideals jealously. Yes, there were places like the academies and several magic towers that were places of research and learning, but they were exclusive places, requiring high entry fees and high membership fees, and even then many of them had exclusivity contracts or contracts that prevented discussion of important materials with anyone not part of the tower, institute, or firm. A set of old, complex research notes would be extremely valuable just based on their novelty alone, not even mentioning if they contained some innovative or lost approach to an affinity or profession.  

Such things were one of the greatest discoveries many people made in the Untamed Wilds, which also pointed to clear evidence of continent-wide civilization at some point in the past. Many people pulled out similar notes, though the handful that had happened in the last couple years that I knew about were just a few fragments, a half-dozen ripped pages, and even those went for many gold coins. A complete set of notes would be worth an immense amount, enough that I was thinking in terms of promissory notes or such as payment, and that would just be the fire affinity notes. If the enchanting notes were novel, they could be worth a literal fortune, as a complete set of notes might go for somewhere in the tens of thousands of golds.  

I kept them tucked away as a bit of a rainy-day insurance, after reading through them both, of course. I had a very good memory, further improved, it seemed, from my affinities and high-tier body, and I could practically memorize everything in the couple hundred pages in the first reading. The fire notes were somewhat useful for me, and I pushed my fire affinity to G-grade with them, finally, as they gave enough insights for me to easily make the leap in a day, meaning I had already been close. The enchanting notes I memorized just so that I could reproduce them on demand, as the notes weren't encoded, nor did they have some meta key or something that required all the pages or the original writing. Even were the papers destroyed, I could reproduce them exactly, meaning I could also make and sell copies, if I felt that were a more profitable route.  

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