Cass’s second attempt wasn’t much better than the first, nor was his third, as apparent when the silver glow settled.

  [TIER 1 DELIVERY QUEST]

  Please grab the sealed letter from Desk A at the Quest Registry.

  Cute girl Chancey has it. Don’t make her upset.

  Bring the letter to Kara Tullis, usually but not always in the Guild Atrium.

  Don’t mess it up, she’ll know if you do.

  Thanks.

  Cassio Vale

  Liora Guildhall

  QuestWright in Training (I’m trying)

  The thud of his forehead hitting the desk was louder than Kara’s snort. He felt a hand roughly patting his back.

  “Think of it this way, you can only get better. Now, try again.”

  “Why? Wait…” He lifted his head, the vellum sticking to it and blocking his vision, “Would Chancey see the quest?”

  Kara laughed, “Of course, she’s a Registry Clerk.”

  Cass groaned, slamming his forehead back down on the desk. He’d underestimated the padding provided by the thick piece of stuck paper. “Ow.”

  “This isn’t very becoming of a Guild Official.”

  “That’s because I’m trying to become a Guild Official, don’t tell me you were Tier 2 Guild Trainer Kara Vullis on the first day.”

  She snorted, “Of course not, but we all have standards we must meet. Now, try again.”

  Pulling the “official” quest off his face, Cass grabbed another and really focused down. Pushing himself to encapsulate the system information as best as he could, he blinked once, then clicked the draft button.

  [SYSTEM ALERT]

  You have reached your maximum daily quest limit for the day.

  0/3 remaining

  Advance your reputation or gain new titles to increase your daily allotment.

  “You saw the alert?” Kara asked as he melted into the chair. “Good. While none of the three quests you created count towards your weekly quota, I’m certain we’ll complete them with time to spare. Now, we have a few minutes before your next class, so what questions do you have for me right now?”

  Cass looked over at her as air escaped from him in a gust, “How do I get titles?”

  Kara sat on the edge of the desk, leaning against the system map as she crossed her legs. “Good question. Usually, that would be answered by your System Mechanics instructor, but I don’t mind. Remember the paths you found the other day?” At Cass’s nod, she continued, “Each path unlock leads to new abilities you can gain, as well as titles that suddenly become available. The higher your level, the more paths you discover, the more abilities and titles you can gain. There are a few I know of that you can get au naturel, but for your Calling specifically, it’s related to your path first.”

  “And reputation? I saw it unlocked when I first accepted the Calling, and the quest we received this morning said I was eligible, but I don’t really know what it is.”

  Kara stared at her screen for a moment, then said, “I’ll be quick, since we’re almost out of time. Think of each Calling as its own, individual world, if you will. All of them are different, and each is somewhat customized for the individual. What are the first two paths you can gain?”

  Cass had to pull it up, “The Path of Inspection and the Path of Logistics.”

  Kara snapped her fingers, “See, and in my notes, it states that the most likely path that a new QuestWright would have access to is the Path of Structure. But each Calling is unique to the individual. Reputation comes down to trust. The trust you earn with both the System and the Questors. If experience gives you abilities, then Reputation gives you new quests, because you’re now trusted to handle them.” She looked distracted for a moment before Cass received an update, saying he had five minutes to get to Classroom F.

  Uncrossing her legs, she hopped off the desk and gave him a light smile. “You did excellent work for this block, QuestWright Vale. I’m sure tomorrow will go much better. Now, you have class with Diplomat Haim in just a few minutes, I suggest you get a move on.”

  Cass stood up and looked at the System Map, which disappeared the moment he disengaged from the Annex. Brushing off an imaginary crease in his robe as Kara turned to leave, he couldn’t help but reflect on what she’d called him.

  QuestWright Vale. The more he heard it, the less strange it sounded.

  He had three fake quests done, five experience to his name, had met a few people, and his reputation was likely in a dumpster somewhere downtown. But still, somehow, he was building something.

  Momentum, maybe?

  He shook off the thought. Right, I have Interpersonal Dynamics and Negotiation. Considering his walkabout in Liora, this class also seemed well-suited for a QuestWright, putting an extra pep in his step.

  Arriving at Classroom F, he found an already seated Orla near the back. The classroom was split in half with two large tables dominating the space. Moving around a few people and apologizing to one person whose heel got stepped on, Cass got in place before the instructor began.

  Orla looked at him with a raised brow. “Did you have a good lab?”

  Images of failure after failure flashed through his mind, Kara’s laughter echoing across the space while he audibly groaned in the background. Out loud, he said, “Yep, it went great. How about you?”

  She looked away, eyes tracking the Instructor as they walked in, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Diplomat Abner Haim was a short, pudgy fellow with a perfectly smooth baby face that didn’t seem to match the gray at his temples. The entire class block was devoted to Haim’s breakdown of conversational styles, methods of de-escalation, and body language based on perceived power imbalances.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  While Cass was lost, Orla looked positively ecstatic. In a fair play of turnabout, he poked her in the ribs, “Hey, why are you so excited?”

  “Diplomat Haim rarely teaches at the Guild. This is a huge opportunity for me.”

  The class mercifully ended quickly, and everyone took a break for lunch. A dejected Pellin sitting alone brightened noticeably when he found Orla and Cass coming to his table.

  “Hey guys!”

  “Hey, nerd.” Orla greeted, dropping her tray with a thud.

  “Hey, Pell,” Cass said, sliding into the seat across from him. “You get that machine fixed?”

  “Nope,” Pell said, a big grin on his face, “But I racked up a ton of experience trying.”

  The sound of Orla’s fork striking the table in disgust was loud enough to turn heads. “Ugh, I hate your Calling.”

  Lunch passed quickly after that, more an inhaling of food than conversation. Cass stacked his tray and then went to his next class alone as Pellin and Orla did the same. Looking at the update again, he grew a little excited. Resources and Logistics with Myla Jen, Council Supply Coordinator.

  Unlike the previous classes, this one ran on interaction. Myla posed real-world scenarios, such as incomplete requisitions, mixed inventories, or failed delivery chains, then presented them to the class like puzzles. Everyone had to contribute, and Cass found himself fully sucked into the joy of problem solving.

  When it was over, he actually found that he’d miss it, as he and the people he’d met had struck a bond in the problems they’d worked to combat. Next up was the second Kara block of the day, although this one was twice as long as the previous. The update sent him to the Entrance Hall, where Kara stood talking to Jim, who was already standing outside his booth.

  She looked him over, “You ready? Today’s focus is fieldwork.”

  They passed by a smiling Jim and entered Liora proper, though this time, Cass was doing it officially for the first time as a Guild Administrator. They moved in and out of Downtown at Kara’s usual quick clip, winding up in northern Liora.

  When they slowed down, it was because a cart carrying a heavy load of raw ore was stalled in the middle of the street. Two horses leashed to the front lazily looked at them while one chewed on some hay sticking out of its mouth.

  “Welcome to the receiving district.” She gestured at what, to Cass, looked like pure chaos. People sprinted all over the area in barely-controlled patterns as they dodged moving carts, shouted orders, or occasionally dropped whatever it was they held. The street was littered with pieces of paper and small bits of raw materials.

  “The northern gate leads directly to most of Liora’s mines, fields, and anything else that takes up a lot of space. Just like central Liora formed around the Guild, northern Liora formed around processing materials.”

  She paused as Cass watched a shouting match erupt between two men. It only ended after a passing man in oversized armor stepped up, breaking them apart before continuing on his merry way. He never looked back.

  Chaos indeed.

  Kara took a deep breath of the tangy air, then smiled, “This is where I was raised. There’s nothing quite like the Depot.” She gestured again and strode toward a large building with words scrawled across the top.

  Tolliver’s Intake- Yard 3

  Cass followed Kara toward the large building, dodging a line of offloaded barrels that hadn’t made it past the threshold. The building itself was broad and low, built more for speed than elegance. Inside, the air thickened as dust and aerated sweat seemed to dive into the back of his throat.

  Moving past several men and women who stopped to speak to her, Kara led Cass deeper into the building until she found a large man wearing an apron at a desk. The moment he saw her, his face seemed to light up.

  “Kara Tullis, what brings you down here, girl?”

  She cleared her throat, inclining her head toward Cass. “Hey, Olek. I’m taking the Guild’s newest QuestWright here on a field exercise. I thought he should see Tolliver’s third-best yard in action.”

  “Third?” The big man huffed, “That’s slander, numbers don’t mean everything. A girl from the Depot should know that.” He looked at Cass with a nod. “What kind of exercise?”

  Kara answered for him, “I thought I’d take him over to Central Intake so he can get a sense of what the steps are for every resource that gets into Liora.”

  “A QuestWright needs to know all that?”

  “He may not see it now, but it will help him out a lot as he gets some levels. You mind?”

  “Nah, not at all, girl. You got free run of the place, have at it.”

  “Thanks, Olek. Give my best to Joanne.”

  “That I will, Kara.” The big man walked off, already yelling at someone as Kara began striding away while speaking in a low voice, “He’s a good man. My first job was at Tolliver number three, moving crates with that big monster as my supervisor.” She laughed as they passed through several smaller corridors, exiting into one large, open-air sorting bay. “You’d be surprised by how heavy those damn things can get, especially for an Uncalled.”

  Kara paused at the edge of the slightly more organized chaos, watching as a pair of workers maneuvered a crate from a flat-edged cart to a marked zone on the floor. Every spot in the bay was marked similarly, with more carts and workers moving around the area in a steady flow of busyness.

  She turned to Cass, already slipping back into her instructor voice, “Alright,” she cracked her knuckles, and looked around. “We’ve got an hour before we need to head back for your last class of the day. Go. Talk to people, learn about their jobs, and try to get a sense of how everything works.”

  Cass nodded, then moved down a set of steps and began to mingle. The air wasn’t quite as bad as it was in Olek’s area. It smelled of dry grain and sun-warmed rope. The occasional sound of cursing still happened, but the sounds of dragged, wooden crates and the occasional dropped tools offset it.

  Seeing a woman with a clipboard, he approached her first. She didn’t look up as she said, “Can I help you with something?”

  Remembering his interpersonal class with Diplomat Haim, he replied, “Hey, I’m Cass. Olek said I can ask around.” He paused, looking at the dozens of crates behind her, “I’m just trying to understand how the intake works.”

  She looked up with a raised eyebrow, then handed him the clipboard.“You want to understand how intake works? Fine. That’s the icon for stone. We just received ten crates' worth from the Western Quarry. It’s s’posed to be granite, but someone filed it under mixed material.”

  Cass looked at the notes. “Why would they do that?”

  “Who knows?” She shrugged, “Maybe they just wanted to fulfill a daily.”

  “A daily?”

  She looked at him as if he were dumb, “A quest.”

  It took him a second to realize she meant a low-tier System Quest, like Gary’s used to be with hauling flour. Cass spoke with the woman, who he learned was an Intake supervisor, then spent more time talking with several workers in the area.

  After he did so with those assigned to Stone, he followed the same procedure with the workers from Iron ore, then Wheat, and ran out of time halfway through speaking with the people at Textiles. Kara gathered him up, then they said a friendly goodbye to Olek and began the long walk to the Guild.

  “So, what’d you learn?” Kara asked as they left the chaos of the Depot behind them.

  “The System Map doesn’t show all of that,” Cass said, reflecting on what he’d learned. “It’s a lot more complicated than I expected. I saw crates getting delayed because the labels were wrong, or they didn’t match the count in the delivery sheets. Nothing really flows unless every step happens the right way, but even then, that’s wrong. Things aren’t linear; they’re layered, and there’s about eight steps before it heads out to the buyers.”

  “Good, and that’s a taste of things. We’re going to do this a few times with all of the Cardinal districts. North for receiving, south for Companies, which I believe you have some experience with.”

  Cass snorted, “Some.”

  “West for production,” Kara continued, “Crafting, refining, the basic conversion of raw goods. A big spot for a QuestWright with the Logistics path, perhaps?”

  He didn’t answer as they waited for a school line of kids to move past them, their stressed teacher trying to keep them together.

  “And the East?”

  Kara gave a smile, “The East is distribution. Where it all leaves after everything is complete. Public trade, Auctions, Liora Councilworks. Finished goods, basically.” The Guildhall came into sight as she spoke, its brown walls once seeming closed off to him, but now, slowly starting to feel like home.

  “By the time we’re done, you’ll see the whole of Liora. Every moving cog. Not just how it’s supposed to work, but the reality of the people who make it work. That’s what makes a good QuestWright. The ability to see deeper.”

  Kara didn’t say anything else as they passed through the Entrance Hall, just gave him a nod and headed towards the Atrium.

  Cass made his way toward his final class of the day, his feet dragging just a little slower.

  He’d barely written a real quest, hadn’t completed anything of value, and yet… for the first time, it felt like he understood something the System hadn’t told him.

  Not everything needed a silver glow to matter.