Dawn on this world held none of the gentle gradient of Earthly mornings. It was a brutal shift. The sky snapped from inky violet to blinding steel-grey in a matter of minutes, tearing apart the mist that shrouded the forest. Adrian stretched. A symphony of cracking joints accompanied the movement. His body was stiff, numbed by the nocturnal dampness. He was alive, but his mind was already elsewhere, fixated on the data streaming across his field of vision.
[MORNING DIAGNOSTIC] [CURRENT ENERGY RESERVE: 0.001 (STAGNATION)] [ESTIMATED NATURAL PROGRESSION: 0.001 / DAY]
He descended from his tree with mechanical efficiency. He wrapped the roughly cleaned rabbit skin around his midriff like a belt. It smelled of musk and dried blood, but it cut the wind. In his pocket, he clutched the night's trophy: the animal's twisted horn. According to yesterday’s scan, that was where the maximum concentration of raw energy resided. A resource he couldn't yet exploit in its current state.
He pushed east..., guided by wisps of grey smoke. Where there is smoke, there is combustion. Where there is controlled combustion, there might be tools.
Two hours later, the forest opened onto a sunken valley. The village sprawled below—a scar of stone and mud amidst the vibrant greenery. There was nothing majestic about it. No crystal towers, no gilded roofs. Just squat hovels with steep slate roofs clustered around a muddy central square. A palisade of stripped logs ringed the settlement.
Adrian stopped at the tree line. He observed.
"Analysis," he murmured. "Etheric density sampling."
The interface overlaid frames onto the distant silhouettes.
[SUBJECT A: HUMAN] [GRADE 1.6]
[SUBJECT B: HUMAN] [GRADE 1.5]
Adrian grimaced. The average guard in this backwater hole had a natural "battery" two thousand times more charged than his. The armed guard was a full tank. Adrian was empty. What a pity. An engine without fuel.
He inhaled deeply to hide his apprehension behind a nonchalant mask and began the descent toward the main gate.
Two men in boiled leather armor guarded the entrance. They were chatting and laughing, but their gazes hardened instantly upon seeing Adrian approach. He must have presented a pitiful sight: a tall, athletic man, but clad in synthetic rags—partially burned—and barefoot like a vagabond.
One of the guards, the Grade 1.6, stepped forward. From his belt, he produced a small smoked-glass prism and aimed it at Adrian. The guard squinted, tapped the glass, then looked at Adrian with a mixture of disgust and stupor.
The guard barked a series of guttural sounds. Unintelligible, though vaguely resembling Old English; a complex syntax Adrian didn't recognize. Panic rose, not at the steel, but at the lack of comprehension.
[NOTIFICATION: LINGUISTIC MAPPING PROTOCOL ACTIVATED.] [ANALYSIS IN PROGRESS... SYNTAX PARTIALLY IDENTIFIED. STRUCTURE CLOSE TO PROTO-EUROPEAN ROOTS. DECODING PROBABILITY: 22%.]
[THE GUARD APPEARS TO MISTAKE YOU FOR A “GRADELESS”. I ALSO CAUGHT THE WORD “SYSTEM”.]
Gradeless? System? Level 0, perhaps... Doubtless the social label attached to pariahs who, like him, hadn't yet awakened their potential in the eyes of the “System.” To Adrian, it was simply zero energy density. To them, it was an insult.
Adrian remained silent, hands raised. Answering in English or French would have been tactical suicide. He watched the guard's lips, letting IRIS record every intonation, every frequency variation.
The guard seemed torn between beating him or shooing him away. But something was off. A Gradeless should be hugging the walls, trembling. This man was looking him straight in the eye.
[INITIALIZING AUTOMATIC TRANSLATION (INCOMPLETE): 32%]
“Get... inside,” he understood from the guard's grunt, who waved him through with evident contempt. “But if I see you” —translation missing— ... “I cut” ... “Coldvale” ...
Adrian passed without a word. He had crossed the threshold. His magical invisibility was working, and IRIS had saved him from the first stumbling block—the language barrier. They saw him as harmless trash. That was his best asset.
Coldvale didn't welcome him with songs, but with a crash of chaotic noise. For Adrian, the tumult of the market was acoustic aggression. He walked head down, his senses picking up every vibration without yet being able to extract meaning. The merchants' shouted outbursts were just chaotic frequencies to him, a unstructured hubbub.
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Suddenly, a cold discharge ran through his temporal cortex.
[NEURAL INTERFACE ACTIVATED: LANGUAGE MODULE CALIBRATING.]
[ANALYSIS: RECEIVED SOUNDS MATCH A DERIVATION OF OLD SAXON AND VULGAR LATIN (74% CORRELATION).]
[ACTION: REAL-TIME SYNTAX RECONSTRUCTION.]
The effect was vertiginous. In Adrian's mind, the noise transmuted. It wasn't a voice translating in his ear, but an instant understanding forcing itself upon him, as if he had always known these words.
"Drei Kupf for one!" yelled a fishmonger. “Three coppers a piece,” Adrian understood without even thinking about it.
He stopped in front of a board containing announcements... from the “Guild”? The glyphs carved into the wood, initially simple scrawls, animated under his gaze. IRIS projected an Augmented Reality layer directly onto his retina, replacing the unknown symbols with familiar terms: WANTED, REWARD, ETHERIC THREAT.
It's... disconcerting, IRIS, he thought. But how am I going to answer them?
[ANSWER: VOCAL MOTOR COORDINATION. I CAN SEND MICRO-IMPULSES TO YOUR LARYNX AND TONGUE TO MIMIC LOCAL PHONEMES. YOU MERELY ARTICULATE THE THOUGHT; I WILL HANDLE THE PHYSICAL MODULATION.]
Adrian stepped aside into a dark alley to test this technological intrusion. He tried to pronounce a simple word. He felt his oral muscles contract autonomously—a sensation like being a biological puppet, rather unpleasant.
“Kupf... Silber...”
His voice rang out with artificial precision, devoid of local nuance. While he could understand perfectly thanks to the neural link, his "pronunciation" remained that of a man whose muscles lacked the memory of these sounds. His accent was hard, almost metallic, but theoretically intelligible to a native.
[NOTE: YOUR ACCENT WILL BE PERCEIVED AS 'FOREIGN' OR 'BOREAL'. TACTICAL ADVANTAGE: THIS JUSTIFIES YOUR IGNORANCE OF LOCAL CUSTOMS.]
Reassured by this logic, he resumed walking. He passed a shop whose sign depicted a glass vial. The word APOTHECARY appeared highlighted in his field of vision.
Thanks to IRIS, the language wall had fallen quickly. He was no longer a deaf-mute stranger; he was an infiltrator equipped with a universal decoder. He pushed the door open. The bell's chime signaled his first real interaction. All he had to do was let IRIS pilot his vocal cords to turn his scientific theories into cold, hard cash.
The interior was dim, saturated with smells: anise, sulfur, dried herbs. Behind the counter, a woman in her fifties, grey hair pulled back in a strict bun, was crushing something in a mortar.
[HUMAN] [GRADE: 1.8]
“UNKNOWN not charity UNKNOWN,” she said, glancing at him without really looking up.
Adrian approached. He placed the hare's horn on the worn wood.
“Not charity,” he articulated with difficulty, his tongue tripping over the stress patterns. “Trade.”
The apothecary shot him a strange look, but she must have understood.
“Funny UNKNOWN accent, friend.”
She examined the horn with a crystal loupe.
“A UNKNOWN of a Horned Hare...” she added. “The cut is clean. UNKNOWN. The energy UNKNOWN fresh.”
“Yes,” he replied soberly.
She looked at him with new curiosity. She opened a till and pulled out a few dull coins.
“Ten coppers. UNKNOWN good price for you. Enough to UNKNOWN pay for a hot meal and a UNKNOWN at the 'Dog UNKNOWN' inn.”
Adrian took the coins. They were cold, heavy. Ten coppers. It was his fortune. But he didn't plan on spending them to sleep. Not right away.
“Tell... me,” he asked while stowing the money. “Which mixture... sold most?”
The woman raised an eyebrow, surprised he was still talking to her. She jerked her chin toward a row of flasks filled with a greenish, cloudy liquid lined up on the main shelf.
“The UNKNOWN Minor Potion. It's the staple. Puts a man back UNKNOWN after a bad encounter or a night too short.”
“Interesting,” Adrian lied. “And... composition?”
She snorted contemptuously.
“It's not a secret UNKNOWN. Everyone knows it. Blessed spring water, crushed Sylva roots, and a prayer to the UNKNOWN. You let it macerate three days under the moon. If it's green, it's good. If it's brown, it UNKNOWN.”
“'Blessed' water?” Adrian repeated with difficulty.
He stared at the greenish vials lined up on the shelf. The liquid was turbid. A brownish sediment stagnated at the bottom. Unstable colloidal suspension, he noted. Visible oxidation.
They used water. Cold water. It was an aberration. The active alkaloids in these roots were likely hydrophobic. By using water instead of an organic solvent like alcohol, they were wasting 90% of the active principle. This wasn't medicine; it was soup.
He masked his contempt. He needed these incompetents.
“The roots,” he asked.
“Fifteen coppers the UNKNOWN.”
“Where find?”
She burst out laughing.
“You? In the forest? You'll get yourself UNKNOWN by a grey wolf before finding the first stem. Sylva Roots only UNKNOWN in areas UNKNOWN in Ether, to the north. That's hunting ground for the UNKNOWN.”
She leaned over the counter, a smirk on her lips.
“If you want to play adventurer to earn your UNKNOWN, go see the Guild, down the street. They always have UNKNOWN chores for the desperate. But a piece of advice: know your place.”
Adrian took a step back. He had his plan. He couldn't "craft" yet. First, he had to survive the local economy. He needed money for equipment, and authorization to harvest ingredients without getting killed by guards or monsters.
“Anyway, name's Klara.”
“Thanks... for advice, Klara. Adrian.”
She nodded slightly.
He stepped out into the muddy street. The wind had picked up, biting cold. He looked north, toward the massive log building dominating the village, adorned with a crest depicting a sword and shield. The Guild.
Strictly speaking, he wasn't a warrior. He was, above all, a scientist. But in this world, to fund science, apparently one had to start by getting one's hands dirty.
“Grade 0,” he murmured, walking toward the Guild.
For now. He would do their dirty work. He would gather their herbs. And with their ignorance, he would create something to revolutionize their world. First for himself.
Question: Do you prefer the classic "Instant Translation" magic, or this painful "Malware" version? Let me know! ??
