「Don't mention it. Anyone up for a trip to the Imperial City?!」
We have disbanded our Party and went our separate ways when the girl tried to assemble a new group of people who were up to take the trip she was offering. As for the Guild building in Quratar, it was bigger than the one in Veil, but definitely smaller than the one in the Imperial City. Veil had only one reception counter, Imperial City had many more of them, and the one here is Quratar has three in total. Hmm, from what Roxanne was telling me about this place, I thought its Adventurers Guild was going to be a bit bigger.
「A trip to the Imperial City! Anyone?」
The female eld Adventurer repeated her message, but once she saw that pretty much no one was coming along for the ride she simply clicked her tongue and then returned through the portal back to the Imperial City. Well, that's life for you I guess. You cannot always have a cake and eat a cake, or in this case always have people who would be willing to Fast Travel to wherever it is you're going.
But that is none of my concerns. All that I care about for now is that my goal has been achieved. Now that I have personally been to both the Imperial City and Quratar's Adventurer's Guild, I should be able to teleport to both of those locations on my own by using Warp, so I think I will do just that. And when I emerged from the portal back at Veil's Adventurer's Guild building…
「Welcome back, master.」
… Roxanne was still there, patiently waiting for me, greeting me with those warm words. My God, she has no idea how happy I am to see her!
「Yeah, I'm ba… whoooa!!!」
When I tried to walk towards her after returning her greeting, I suddenly felt very weak in the legs and tripped, almost falling on top of her, but Roxanne caught me before that could happen.
「Are you okay, master?」
Huh, that's strange. Did I use too much MP for that Warp from Quratar to Veil? But I don't feel the wave of negative emotions washing all over me, so it must have not go down to the critically low values just yet. But from now on I should keep it in mind that apparently the further I travel with Warp, the more MP will be consumed. When I go from Veil to the Labyrinth near it I don't feel anything, but that might be precisely because those two places are so close to one another, but a trip to Veil from Quratar must have teken a good chunk out of my MP bar, which kinda sucks, because I was convinced that no matter how far I would go with Warp all teleportations would require the same amount of MP, but apparently that is not the case, and the farther you want to go, the more of your MP is going to be consumed. And since the side effects of using too much of your MP include depression and being overwhelmed by negativity, such a result should be avoided at all costs, meaning that I should either avoid making too many Warp trips in a row without restoring MP or travel through short distances only. Anyway, the biggest surprise this time around was the fact that I didn't feel depressed at all but that instead my legs got all tangled up.
「It's okay, I'm fine. More importantly, would you like to go to Quratar?」
「Yes, please, let me accompany you this time.」
After selling all of the items we have obtained in the Labyrinth, we walked out of the Adventurer's Guild's building and headed to the empty alley behind it where we have once again formed our Party, and I also checked the time by looking at the position of the sun in the sky, which was quite high. Could it be that it was about noon? Well in that case we should still have enough time to do all the shopping I might need, so after waiting for a bit to allow my MP to be restored we made our first trip to Quratar together. When we arrived at the Quratar Adventurer's Guild, we immediately left it, since we had no business to take care of there specifically.
The streets of Quratar didn't look that much different from what we had in Veil, with one major exception: this town has its stores perpetually opened, and how many of them there were! Just the buildings across the street from the Adventurer's Guild had a dozen of them on their ground and first floors, which caught me off guard since I was expecting it all to have a more rural feeling to it, since this was my first time seeing the normal shops since I first came to this world. Most of them looked pretty similar to the ones you would see in the Japanese shopping districts of any major city, meaning that there was nothing particularly special about them from the outside, but maybe that was the compromise they had to go to if they wanted to have so many of them? Anyway, since these stores are perpetually opened, it probably means that from the business perspective Quratar must be more prosperous than Veil is. Then again, their Adventurer's Guild is smaller than the one in the Imperial City, so how prosperous is it in regards to adventuring business?
「Now I see what you meant, Roxanne. This city really seems to have everything an aspiring Adventurer might need and then some. When you mentioned the size of their Adventurer's Guild, is this what you had in mind?」
「Yes, although to be precise, it's not the Adventurer's Guild that is the most representative here. Since Quratar is a town with a Labyrinth nearby there are a lot of Explorers here, so as a result the Explorers Guild is substantially bigger than the Adventurers Guild.」
Roxanne explained. Thinking about it that way, it really makes sense. If the Labyrinth in Quratar is one of the bigger ones, then the services of Explorers, who specialize in, well, exploring Labyrinths and mapping them out would really be in higher demand than those of the Adventurers, who are much more oriented towards slaying monsters, which would also explain why their Guild in here is relatively modest in size.
「Is that so? Have you ever visited the Labyrinth here, or did you hear that from someone who was there?」
「Yes! When I was here before I visited the Labyrinth outside of the city once, and many more people seem to be doing exactly the same thing.」
「Really? Then maybe we should do the same? If we do, then I'm counting on you to guide me.」
「Leave it to me then! Please, it's this way!」
Roxanne pointed with her finger and began walking without hesitation.
「you know which way the north is, Roxanne?」
「I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand. Could you repeat that, master?」
「Nah, it's fine, don't worry about it, I was just talking to myself. I'm surprised that you remember which way to go after not being here for so long. Ah, could it be that you're following the Labyrinth's smell? Also, aren't we going to go outside of the city to reach the Labyrinth?」
「No, there' no need for that, because this city has been built around the Labyrinth in its entirety. The Labyrinth is in the town's center, and all of the roads extend from there in a radial pattern.」
Wow, really? Initially I found it pretty hard to believe, but the further into the city we went, the buildings were gradually getting more and more sparse on the right side of the road, meaning that this was probably the direction of the town's outskirts, whereas on the left side of the road they continued like normally all the way to the heart of the town, where we were apparently heading right now.
We continued to walk down the road towards the town's center. I looked at the sun to confirm its position in the sky and with it the time, and noticed that it was a little lower than it was back in Veil, but since I have no idea how far are those two cities located from one another, it became impossible to determine whether their longitudes and latitudes were exactly the same or different, causing differences in the length of the day of the amount of time one hour was perceived here, if such differences were even present in this world to begin with.
The stores we were passing by consisted mainly of fishmongers, butchers, bakeries and hardware stores. When we went passed them, we arrived at what looked like a rotary.