At my flight travel speed it didn't take much longer than an hour before I saw what seemed to be a city. From what I could see, The walls surrounding it must have been over 20 meters tall an easily more than 5 meters thick. It was made from black-ish stone and guards were standing at the gatehouse. In the center of the city stood a caste of almost gargantuan size, indicating this was most likely the capital of a country.
I landed in front of the gate and approached the entrance. I expected an opportunity to put my understanding of their language to the test but to my surprise they didn't even try to stop me, instead they bowed slightly and let me pass.
However they eyed the metal cubes floating around me for a while after I had passed through. As I had just passed through the gatehouse, I noticed that the streets were rather clean compared to what I had expected from a medieval city. Clean not only of dirt but also of people. It was rather early in the morning as the sun had just started rising.
Not getting spotted by many was quite possibly a good thing, as I had no idea how the people would react to the floating metal around me. All who paid attention to them were rather curious about them in the past.
I looked around in the city, attempting to identify a place where information could be found. In short, I was looking for a library. It didn't take long before I reminded myself that in the dark ages, books were a luxury that only those of "noble" blood could afford.
This meant I would either have to make a noble invite me or break into the caste. Since the latter one seemed easier to achieve, I tried finding and entrance to what I could only presume to be the kings castle.
Before I would break into there however, I would politely ask to be let in at the gate which would also server as a good way to test the language. As I had finally found the gate to the castle, I found the guards taking a nap. I understood this as an invite and happily accepted it.
Passing through the gate I sent a pulse looking for the library. Once I had located it, I entered through a window and started collection information. I was only able to read them because I had acquired the language from the reptilians previously.
The first book was, of course, about magic, since I finally wanted to understand what that was about. Although Tozun had provided me with an explanation it was a very basic one. The book went into much more detail. There were multiple tiers of spells, 1-9 apparently. Whereas tier one was stated to be castable by anyone with a little practice and tier 9 described to be impossible to do.
Humans were apparently only able to cast up to tier 3, tier 5 if they were talented. It was also unclear why exactly that was the case but most reasoning was based around their incredibly low mana pool. The most a species seemed to be able to cast was tier 8 which made me wonder, why was there a tier 9 as well?
The book also went into detail on how affinity with elements worked. It seemed to be based around ones upbringing. The affinity to an element dictated how quickly you would master certain spells and to some extent, how powerful they would be when cast by you.
The mana pool was the appearance maximum mana to be stored in one's own body. This mana stuff was necessary to cast magic and once you mana was depleted, you would be unable to cast more magic, unless you knew how to use the mana of the world around you. Humans were stated to be better at using this ambient mana than most other races.
Now, that this magic stuff was out of the way, I picked up a book on economy, not to fully go through it but to get a simplified understanding of the currency used in the country and maybe other countries too.
So, this world used coins. Not really a surprise. but it was still nice to have confirmation. The coins were divided into 4 types. Copper -> silver -> gold -> platinum, in that order.
The conversion rate was 100 to 1 from the lower value coin to the higher value one. I personally found this a bit unsettling, as the actual value of those materials would warrant for completely different numbers but that's just primitives being primitive I figured.
I also tried to get my claws on a few historical books as well but information about the past seemed rather scarce. The few ones I did find however, mentioned occasions of magic higher than tier 9 being cast.
The other books o skimmed through, also revealed some useful information. For example, I was on a continent greatly populated by dragons and the previously one seemed to be largely populated by humans. Dragons themselves were something akin to nobles and the reptilians I met earlier were so called dragonborn.
No matter how much I think, "that name for a species sounds dumb" I don't think it would have been worth the effort to change it. Primitive civilizations come and go way too quickly for that to be worth it.
I thought about the social order in this country for a while longer. I concluded with: guess i'm noble now. I even had the money to back that up.
I am unsure why I remembered it at that moment but, that fresh fish for a silver was incredibly expensive. A normal bread shouldn't have cost more than maybe 1 copper coin, yet a single fresh fish was sold for 1 silver at the first city I was in? Must have been a scammer.
Lost in my thoughts I dropped a few gold cubes and surely I was heard, since I heard someone say "An intruder! Quickly inform king Ylreor".
I quickly lifted the cubes back up and left the library through the window, as always with a shockwave to accelerate. I might have accidentally wrecked the kings library there but kings are pretty much always rich and he surely could afford for renovate the place.