Map of the known world

  Political map of Ytreses

  Map of the Free States

  The following map shows the specific location where Joel established the refuge in Dirmistan. I divided it in two to differentiate the provincial boundaries from the map of main roads.

  Ignore the following, copy of the previous chapter

  The first action Joel took at dawn was as practical as it was inevitable: he needed money. Even before leaving the inn, he already had a clear plan. During the night, he had calmly reviewed the jewelry he had prepared beforehand, and the day before, he had identified every pawnshop, goldsmith's workshop, and merchant willing to buy precious metals. Everything was calculated.

  To avoid arousing suspicion, he acted with restraint. He didn't sell large quantities in one place, but rather traveled the length and breadth of the city, selling small portions of his merchandise in each shop. He never earned more than ten gold coins per establishment.

  Everyone said that a single gold coin was roughly equivalent to an average person's annual salary and could be exchanged for twelve silver coins or twelve hundred copper coins. Too abrupt an influx of wealth would have been enough to attract unwanted attention, awkward questions, or worse.

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  Even so, by nightfall, the result was conclusive. Joel had over a hundred gold coins in his pockets. A considerable fortune for any average citizen, obtained without visible effort and without raising any alarms. The merchants, upon learning that Evander Glezos—the name he presented to the world—was engaged in the itinerant trade of metals and valuable goods, were quick to offer him advice with self-serving familiarity. Almost all of them agreed on the same thing: if he traveled with such valuable merchandise, he should hire protection.

  Recommendations for mercenary companies poured in one after another, each presented as more reliable, stronger, or more “honorable” than the last. In the minds of these men, Joel was simply another merchant who bought cheap gold in distant lands to sell it at a high price in Dirmistan, where the demand never seemed to be satiated.

  In a way, they weren't wrong. Joel obtained the gold at a negligible cost: none at all. That silent irony stayed with him as he began to delve deeper into the world of mercenaries. He soon discovered that it wasn't something so simple, but rather a colossal industry, deeply rooted in the political and economic structure of Gaea.

  Like the adventurers' guilds in Myrrial, mercenary companies existed in almost every nation, but their true rise had come after the so-called demonic invasions, the name this world used to remember the incursion of the four empires.

  Since then, the great powers had learned a painful lesson. No nation dared to initiate open wars for supremacy anymore. Regular armies still existed, strong and well-organized, but their mobilization had become a last resort. The fear of provoking a new demon invasion by leaving cities unprotected—however improbable that might now be—served as the perfect excuse to avoid large-scale conflicts. In this vacuum, the need for intermediaries arose: an elegant and convenient way to shift violence away from official channels.

  Thus, mercenary companies became the privatization of war. Some were small, tied to a single nation or city; others, veritable international behemoths capable of tipping the course of conflicts between entire kingdoms. In modern Gaea, it was common to find mercenaries in almost any armed dispute, and there were many cases where both sides were composed exclusively of these companies.