The journey to Lumisade was completely uneventful. I'm really starting to doubt everything I've read in books about lively adventures popping up in every trek and travel they go on.
Where's the action? The adventure? The gripping tales of thrill?
I've been tricked. I've been backstabbed. And I've been, quite possibly, bamboozled.
To be fair, it wasn't all bad. It was pretty fun going around every town and city we stopped by. Every place we went to were significantly bigger than Forostar by multiple margins. Helgi mentioned that the huge difference in population and size was because Forostar was one of the most frontier villages. Another reason was that, though wealthy disproportionate to their size, Lady Artanis carefully managed nearly everything about the village in terms of trade and immigration. Lady Artanis started shaping the village into the way it was today the moment she first took control of the village.
From what Helgi knew, Lady Artanis was sent to Forostar from the city of Lumisade, but he didn't know the reason why. When Lady Artanis first got to Forostar, it was still a bareboned back-water village filled with hardworking albeit poor people. A far cry from the current state of the village. This explained why all the villagers revered her in one way or another with just how much she's elevated the village's standard of living.
Honestly, I'm far past the point where I should also join in in revering her, yet I still couldn't quite fully get myself to buy into the idea. There was a natural innate resistance in me.
The identification papers she made for me and Vera especially came in handy. Apparently, the Empire as a whole has a strict identification system in order to keep track of the populace. It made sense if you consider the fact that any adult would be able to use mana, making them considerably stronger than average. The people who couldn't use mana also needed to be tracked because of their potential to become someone who can use mana.
A way of looking at it is that a person needs to have been born and stayed in the Northern World for at least 16 years in order to be able to use mana. That's a significant time investment and churns out a significant source of manpower and just plain power in general. It made complete sense for the empire to keep identification of every single person.
We could have been screwed had we entered a larger town right off the bat. We might've been able to explain it away with a "We lived in the wilderness all this time.", but that's a hard story to sell to officials.
Over the days, Vera also gradually got used to Helgi and managed to have a proper conversation with him. It helped that Helgi was as happy as his namesake and pleasant to be around. On the other hand, Vera was still completely reserved whenever we were out in public.
Though maybe that's just how she'll always be. It was just jarring to me whenever I see the difference in how she acts in public and in private, but it's not really a problem if she stays like this, isn't it? There's no need to force her to be comfortable in being in public at all. I just need to get used to it.
We went to see various sights, tasted different cuisine, and joined in in some fun activities. Towns and cities were all in preparation to greet the coming season — spring — so there was a sort of festive air creeping up in the atmosphere.
Though technology may have advanced some what, people wouldn't — or rather, couldn't — dare forget their ties to nature. It was a prevailing notion among people that the reason why the Northern World had mana had something to do with the nature present within it.
It was a common, albeit not proven, sentiment among everyone who lived in the Northern World that the people outside the Northern World didn't have mana because they disrespected nature and the world around them. This belief led to everyone in these parts of the world to greatly care for and cherish the world around them.
Of course, this appreciation of nature didn't mean that any sort of exploitation of the environment didn't happen. It just meant that whenever someone took from nature, they did it in a sustainable and regenerative manner in order to preserve the beauty and sanctity of nature. Forostar conducted logging, but they carefully bred the trees they cut, did it in rotations, and limited the production. This does have the effect of raising the prices of the lumber produced by Forostar — which is something I can highly see Lady Artanis intentionally doing. It could be argued that their high quality lumber was sold at a premium.
The carriage that Helgi owned was made by and made of lumber from Forostar. The design was sleek, the ride was smooth, the suspension was great, it was comfortable, and looked much better compared to the other carriages we saw in other towns. It really just hammered in the idea that Forostar was that much more well-off.
The budget Lady Artanis gave us was also more than enough for us to live comfortably in the capital according to what she said. She gave us a card imprinted with her mana for easy withdrawal of funds from an account she set aside for us. We wouldn't need to take on jobs or anything to earn money on the side and just focus on our studies in the Academy.
We were currently stuck in a line of caravans trying to enter Lumisade. The process while not excruciatingly complex, it still took some time with the inspection of goods and personnel due to the large amount of people trying to get in the city.
The city of Lumisade was definitely deserving of being known as the Capital of Snow Elves. It was located right in the middle of where the snow forests of Lumisade met the snow plains. If you sliced the city along the boundary, you'd cut the urban parts of the city in half. From what I've read in books, the reigning snow elves in the past used this place as the main stronghold and outpost against the other kingdoms back when they still warred for the central plains of Vier.
When the four kingdoms united to form one empire, the royal snow elves moved their homes from deep in the forests to Lumisade. Partly to have better access to Vier and to fully control the handling and management of the Lumisade Dungeon.
Dungeons were incredible things and was where Dungeon Divers went to strive or die. There were four dungeons in the Empire of Vier, but only three dungeons outside of it for a total of seven dungeons in the entire Northern World
Dungeons was a place chock-full of mana, filled with adversaries, beasts, and traps. A place where dreamers go to die when met with the harsh reality of dungeon diving — or so, according to what I've read. Countless stories have been written of unwitting characters filled with hope and delusions of grandeur all meeting their gruesome end as the monsters within the dungeon feasted on their flesh and entrails.
Their bony remains left as a reminder of the dangers that laid within. There was no convenient method of transport, no rest areas, no lucky break. Anything and everything could go wrong in a dungeon.
Yet, even though dungeons were fraught with danger, countless more tried to delve deep within in hopes for the riches that comes with it. Monsters typically have a crystal made of mana within them called "Manaliths".
It was a condensation of the mana within that animal and could be used as a source of mana; as a source of energy. With nearly every technology developed within the Northern World relying on manaliths as energy sources, it was the quickest way to richness — if you were strong enough.
This source of seemingly unlimited supply of energy was the primary reason why the Empire mandated everyone at the age of 16 to learn how to utilize their mana. It wasn't just for strength, it was for power. By commercializing dungeon diving and placing it under their jurisdiction, they could maintain a steady flow of manaliths.
As manaliths were a condensation of the mana within an individual, it also went without saying that manaliths also existed inside humans — not just monsters. This was also why the Empire made sure to identify every individual's mana signature which differed from person to person. The Empire managed to stymy the sale of human manaliths through this as the manaliths contained the mana signature of the individual. Of course, this also went for monsters. One could correctly identify from what monster a manalith belonged to by checking its mana signature.
It was akin to a hand print. You could easily differentiate a human's hand print from a cat's paw print. You can also then differentiate a human's hand from another human's hand from their fingerprints, creases of their hand, and such.
"Next!"