In the days that followed, Joel maintained a steady pace: each morning he traveled from the hidden refuge to the small town he had discovered, and each afternoon he returned with his mind brimming with new information. His goal was not only to explore Vivec, but to understand the region that had accidentally received this group of interplanetary travelers.

  The routine, however, was far from monotonous. Barely two days in, he realized something fundamental: they had crossed the portal in an exceptionally empty area, almost a blind spot between densely populated regions. Just an hour's walk west or north was enough to noticeably increase the population.

  Joel couldn't help but think how fortunate they had been: crossing the portal in one of the few unpopulated areas of the territory was almost a miracle. If the portal had opened just a few kilometers further west, they would have emerged practically in a field… or in some farmer's backyard.

  Taking advantage of every opportunity—a purchase, a greeting, or a quick negotiation—he forced himself to constantly practice the local language. Speaking, listening, repeating, making mistakes…and listening even more. His fluency improved rapidly, especially since the inhabitants seemed accustomed to dealing with travelers with uneven pronunciations. This allowed him to gather valuable information.

  The first piece of the puzzle was the settlement's name itself: Vivec.

  From there, everything began to take shape. Vivec belonged to the province of Nympsos, which in turn was part of a nation called Dirmistan. Occasional mentions of taxes, governors, and regional laws allowed him to piece together a basic picture of the political organization, but what caught his attention most was the city visible from the hill to the northwest: Kelion, the capital of Nympsos. According to some merchants, it was a city with at least twenty thousand inhabitants.

  Joel felt the urge several times to head there immediately; curiosity consumed him. However, he decided to hold back. His command of the language was still imperfect, and showing up in a large city without a solid identity would be asking for trouble. Especially considering that Kelion, as the provincial capital, should have greater security and stronger warriors—probably those capable of facing mages without difficulty. He wasn't looking to infiltrate or act as a spy: if he wanted to integrate, he had to do it properly, without unnecessary lies, without leaving any loose ends that could link him to the four empires.

  But it wasn't the cities or the geography that impressed Joel most, but an unexpected encounter in Vivec's own village.

  As he watched the flow of carts in the wholesale market, he saw him: an enormous man, with arms as thick as young tree trunks and covered in thick hair on his shoulders and forearms. His face had the shape and hardness of a bear, and his eyes—small, bright, and alert—reinforced that impression. Right next to him worked another man, equally imposing, but with completely different features: feline ears that twitched with every sound, a short, golden mane that framed his head, and fangs clearly visible when he spoke.

  Demihumans.

  He heard the word later, when he discreetly inquired about them. A race similar to humans in almost every way, but with marked animal characteristics: tails, ears, claws, keen senses, superhuman strength, among others. In Myrrial, there were hybrid beings and intelligent beasts, but nothing so “human” and yet so distant as this.

  What disconcerted Joel most wasn't their appearance, but the thick metal collars they both wore around their necks, gleaming like polished shackles in the midday sun.

  When he asked, he received quick, curt replies, as if it were a given: They were slaves.

  The news hit him harder than he expected, stirring a mixture of unease and curiosity. He didn't know to what extent slavery was legal, common, or accepted in this world…

  Joel quickly gathered more information about the presence of slaves in the region. A few days of discreet conversations, sometimes with bored merchants killing time between customers, other times with guards relaxing after hours in the sun, were enough for a stark reality to begin to take shape before him. In Gaea, slavery was neither a rarity nor a relic of the past: it was a widespread, normalized practice, deeply ingrained in the social structure of almost every nation.

  Few exceptions existed: small kingdoms or city-states that prohibited slavery for religious, political, or simply moral reasons. But even these places seemed to be in the minority, tolerated by their neighbors more out of economic convenience than respect for their principles. For the vast majority, slavery was… functional. A solution too efficient to abandon.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  According to what he was told, it all went back to the times when the continent's different races clashed in colossal wars for supremacy. Humans, elves, dwarves, demihumans, orcs: all had battled each other as if the continent could belong to only one. With each war came a mountain of prisoners, and with them, the inevitable question: what to do with so many captured enemies? Killing them would be a waste and would likely provoke unpredictable reactions from the opponents.

  The response, it seemed, quickly became the norm. The victors forced the defeated to build walls, roads, fortresses, canals, ports—everything necessary to expand their power. At some point, the practice ceased to be a temporary measure and transformed into the silent foundation that fueled the prosperity of many kingdoms. Civilizations grew, but so did their dependence on this “cheap labor.” And so an industry was born: a vast commercial network dedicated to capturing, buying, selling, and distributing slaves throughout Gaea.

  What was surprising, at least to Joel, was that not even the invasions of the four empires, which had devastated entire nations and fostered unity among the great powers, had managed to dismantle this system. Where empires imposed order, gaps remained for slave traders to exploit the ruins and internal conflicts.

  However, slavery in Gaea followed a peculiar, almost tribal, logic. Not every race accepted slaves from every other:

  Humans, proud of themselves, only allowed demihuman and elven slaves.

  The demihumans, fragmented into hundreds of clans, accepted humans, dwarves, and other demihumans as slaves.

  The elves, with their characteristic ancestral arrogance, preferred to enslave only humans.

  The dwarves, more pragmatic, favored strong slaves, such as orcs and certain types of resilient demihumans.

  For Joel, hearing all this was like lifting a veil that revealed the most primitive side of the world. It fascinated and disturbed him in equal measure. The conversations he had with some merchants, men who spoke of the subject with chilling nonchalance, allowed him to understand an even more twisted aspect: although there were no open wars between the great races, it was the empires and nations themselves that kept the slave-trading machine alive.

  “There’s always someone to sell,” a guard remarked to him as they drank a jug of watered-down wine at a market stall. And then he added, with the calm of someone discussing the year's harvest: “Criminals, debtors, vagrants, losers in internal disputes. Those in power always find any excuse to line their pockets and get rid of troublemakers.”

  A merchant confirmed something even more revealing: the demihumans, despite their natural strength and ferocity in defending themselves, were one of the races that supplied the most slaves to human territories. Their own fragmentation, tribal rivalries, and constant internal conflicts created inexhaustible resources for slavers.

  The mental image Joel had formed of the world began to expand with each new piece of information. Gaea wasn't just a world filled with powerful races and unknown magic; it was also a place marked by old wounds, uneasy pacts, and social structures held together by invisible chains.

  By the time a month had passed since his arrival in the new world, Joel already felt confident enough to hold a fluent conversation with practically any inhabitant of Vivec. He didn't master the language perfectly, not by a long shot, but he had reached a functional level, solid enough to get by without raising suspicion and understand most everyday conversations.

  During that month, in addition to practicing daily in the village, Joel had dedicated himself to writing a surprisingly comprehensive language manual: a thick notebook divided into thematic sections, filled with phonetic notes, simplified structures, lists of basic vocabulary, and example sentences. It was, in essence, a concentrated and practical version of the local pseudo-Greek, created with the clear objective that others in the refuge could learn it without too much difficulty. Joel placed special emphasis on the most frequent words, on polite formulas and on an elementary communication system, useful even for someone who could barely remember a few phrases.

  Alicia, to no one's surprise, immediately stood out. She had an almost innate ability to absorb new languages, having demonstrated this before when she learned English. In a matter of days, she surpassed the rest of the group and ended up being in charge of teaching, even though she herself was still learning. Under her guidance, they improvised something resembling a formal course within the shelter: group sessions, phonetic repetitions, and memory exercises. Even the children received their own lessons, designed to help them become familiar early on with the language of the world that now surrounded them.

  Several recordings that Joel made with a portable voice recorder were a great help. For weeks, he dedicated himself to recording greetings, brief conversations, and snippets of dialogue among the inhabitants of Vivec. He captured the voices of merchants, guards, the elderly, and children, all with distinct accents and rhythms. These recordings became the auditory foundation of the collective learning and, probably, a resource just as valuable as the manual.

  But while everyone was progressing step by step in their relationship with the new language, Joel knew there was something more urgent and inevitable: expanding the range of exploration.

  The small town could no longer offer him much new information. If he truly wanted to understand the social, economic, and military structure of Dirmistan, and by extension, the entire world, he needed to visit Kelion, the city that loomed in the distance like a silhouetted shadow on the horizon. A provincial capital with over twenty thousand inhabitants had to be brimming with crucial information, perhaps even a library.

  Moreover, there, in great numbers, were those individuals whom everyone in the region seemed to both fear and respect: the so-called "Mystic Warriors."

  Virtually every race on Gaea had its own name for them, according to its particular culture or history, but in Dirmistan, this designation predominated. They were not magicians like in the four worlds. Rather, they were a caste of exceptional fighters, masters of different weapons and martial disciplines, capable of physical feats that bordered on the supernatural. It was said that one in ten of the world's inhabitants had the latent potential to walk that path… a ridiculously high number compared to the proportion of magicians in the four worlds.

  Even so, unlocking such potential was another story. To ascend that ladder of power required two indispensable elements: innate talent and a competent mentor. In the absence of either, most remained stuck at the lower levels, unable to advance.

  The people of Vivec knew very little about it. They could vaguely describe the lower-level warriors: men and women with astonishing strength, capable of shattering planks with a single movement, dodging blows at almost superhuman speeds, or wielding heavy weapons with flawless skill. But about the higher levels, or the advanced techniques they practiced, most had no idea. Or they didn't want to talk about it, which also spoke volumes.

  This widespread ignorance only fueled Joel's curiosity. For the first time since arriving on Gaea, he felt an intense, almost childlike emotion: a mixture of anxiety and anticipation. It was the feeling of standing before completely unknown territory, yet brimming with possibilities.