Chapter 78: Adventurer Guild [1]

Rael turned his right hand over in the morning light and studied the place where the chain scar had been. The skin was smooth now, faintly pink, but the memory of the pain remained. Ordinary minor health potions had done nothing. Mira had needed to push her skill harder than she expected just to close it. Whatever mark Ekaksha’s loosened chain had left was not a normal burn, and that fact sat uncomfortably at the edge of his thoughts. He set it aside for later and opened the new class window instead.

[Healer (A-Rank)] (30 days remaining)

Description:

A powerful support class specializing in healing wounds, restoring vitality, and cleansing harmful effects. An A-Rank Healer can save lives even after severe injuries.

Skills:

[Greater Heal] (Novice) — Channels divine energy to rapidly heal severe wounds, restore damaged tissue and limbs, and recover a large amount of vitality.

[Purification] (Novice) — Removes poisons, curses, diseases, and other harmful effects from the target. The effectiveness depends on the strength of the affliction.

The value of the healer class was obvious. Rael fought by spending his body. He took hits to create openings, pushed skills until his mana ran thin, and walked out of every serious fight with new cuts and bruises. Until now recovery had meant potions, rest, or simply enduring. Greater Heal changed that equation. Even at Novice mastery it offered a way to restore himself between encounters instead of limping back to the walls every time he overreached. Purification was a quieter insurance policy against the kinds of lingering toxins and curses the deeper Wildlands were said to carry. He had wanted a healing option for weeks. Finding an A-Rank version on a waitress in a mid-tier city inn had never been part of the plan.

That thought circled back to Mira herself. Ashfall was large and prosperous by the standards of the outer territories, yet it was still far from the central human strongholds where high-rank specialists usually gathered. An A-Rank Healer could have commanded serious fees in any major capital. Instead she wore a shortened maid uniform, teased customers, and refused payment for the work she had done on his hand. She had sidestepped every question about her history with practiced ease. Rael did not push. He carried enough secrets of his own—the true nature of Analyze, the bloodline, the entity in his dreams, the sealed Intelligence—to recognize the same careful silence in someone else. Whatever reasons kept her in Ashfall were hers. He was simply grateful the chance encounter had given him the class.

He decided not to leave the walls today. The Fang Alpha and the pack had left him with cores, usable remains, and a clear need to turn them into coin or materials before he pushed farther out. Learning the city’s layout and rhythms mattered as much as another hunt. He left the inn and joined the streets as they woke.

Ashfall in the early hours felt different from the same streets at dusk. Mana-stone lamps still glowed in the narrower lanes, but their light was fading against the rising gold of the twin suns. Shutters opened in uneven sequence. A blacksmith in a thick leather apron rolled a cart of raw bars toward a forge already leaking heat into the alley; the ring of an early hammer started up before Rael had passed the next corner. Merchants unlocked heavy doors and kicked wooden wedges under them to hold them wide, calling quiet greetings to neighbors while they set out the first trays of goods. The smell of baking bread mixed with coal smoke and the faint metallic tang of the smithies.

Farther along the avenue he saw hunters moving in the opposite direction—toward the gates. Some walked alone, still buckling straps. Others moved in small knots, talking in low voices about routes and meeting points. They wanted the early hours outside the walls, when the most accessible hunting grounds had not yet been picked over by the day’s traffic. Rael watched them go and felt no urge to follow. His body still carried the previous day’s fatigue, and the cores in his storage ring would not sell themselves.

Near a wider plaza he passed a group of young people in matching dark-blue uniforms. They carried practice swords in plain scabbards and walked with the straight-backed discipline of students heading to morning drills. Sword-art schools. The sight pulled a familiar thread of thought loose.

There were two broad ways an awakener fought.

The first used mana inward. Fighters classes circulated power through muscle, bone, and tendon, hardening the body itself until fists, blades, or arrows struck with force far beyond ordinary flesh. Swordsmen, close-combat specialists, many archers, and most tanks belonged to this path. Their mana rarely left the skin except as reinforcement.

The second path sent mana outward. Mages classes shaped fire, ice, lightning, or other attributes into projectiles, barriers, and zones of control. Healers did the same with restorative energy. The body remained relatively ordinary; the power lived in what they released into the world.

Rael’s own situation sat awkwardly between the two. Infernomancer and Frostheart both expressed themselves as external skills—bolts, walls, armor of ice, fields of flame. Analyze did not care which style he used; it only cared that he understood what he copied. He had trained in the Blackthorn sword forms since childhood, yet those forms were built around dark-attribute reinforcement that traveled through the blade and the body together. Without that attribute the techniques felt incomplete, like trying to swing a tool whose weight had changed. He could still use the footwork and the angles. The full art remained closed to him for now. One day he might find a way to bridge the gap. Until then he needed either a different sword style that matched the power he actually carried, or enough raw skill to make the incomplete version lethal on its own. The problem was not urgent today, but it would not wait forever.

After more than half an hour of steady walking the Adventurer Guild rose ahead of him.

The building stood near the City Lord’s tower, large and practical rather than beautiful, with wide doors that stayed open from early morning until well after the twin suns set. Rael stepped inside and stopped just past the threshold.

The main hall was already crowded. Parties clustered around notice boards thick with handwritten and crystal-posted quests. Solo hunters waited in lines at the appraisal and sales counters. Mages in marked robes argued quietly over the price of rare materials. Mixed-blood beast-kin—wolf-kin, fox-kin, a few with heavier feline traits—moved through the crowd without drawing special attention. Relations between humans and beast-kin had been stable on Titan for generations; here in Aetherion the same practical tolerance seemed to hold. What struck Rael hardest was the pressure. Dozens of stronger auras overlapped in the enclosed space. A person with no combat experience might have found it hard to breathe. Even he, freshly leveled and carrying two combat classes, felt the weight of how many people in the room could kill him without particular effort. Most of them never glanced his way. He was simply another young awakener with a storage ring and something to sell.

The Adventurer Guild itself functioned like a public company open to anyone who could pay the modest registration fee. Once inside, an awakener could accept posted quests, sell monster materials and cores at the guild’s posted rates, or request basic appraisal. The system was impersonal and efficient. It existed so that solo hunters and small parties without noble backing still had a place to turn their kills into coin and information. Private guilds also existed—many of them founded and funded by noble houses—but those operated more like closed companies. They kept the best contracts, the most profitable hunting rights, and the cleaner political connections for their own members. To most noble-born awakeners the public Adventurer Guild was a necessary utility for commoners and outsiders, not a place they preferred to stand in for long.

Rael had no noble backing left to him and no private guild waiting to claim his kills. The public hall would do. He adjusted the fit of his storage ring, picked the shortest line that looked like it handled materials rather than quest registration, and waited his turn among the noise, the overlapping auras, and the low constant talk of prices, routes, and yesterday’s close calls. The city was still teaching him its shape. Today he would learn how it paid.

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Thank you for reading this far.

Rael’s path has only just begun. Your time and attention mean more than you know. Every Chapter exists because someone is still turning the page.

There is much left ahead: stronger foes, deeper secrets, and the long road toward the strength he is still chasing. From now on the story will start to follow new arcs no longer just hunting and shopping a real stories. I hope you will continue walking it with him.

Thank you again for being here.

See you in the next Chapter.