The sun was rising in the city of Abastra as Elliot yawned heavily. His black hair was a mess, as were his clothes - black trousers, a clean white shirt, and a grey vest. It wasn't much, but as a clerk in the general store, he had to at least dress up decently for appearance's sake, though if his boss saw the state he was in, Elliot was sure he would get an earful.

Well, it's not like anyone will appear any time soon. He thought, looking through the front of the store and sneaking a glance at the street. What was usually a dirt road was now a stinky pool of mud thanks to the rain of the previous night. There were still a few droplets of water running down the wooden walls of the buildings across the street. Elliot shrugged as he took a seat behind the counter, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes, preparing to take a nap.

Cling!

The sudden chime of a bell woke him up, and Elliot almost fell down the chair. Hastily slamming his hands on the counter to recover balance, his eyes snapped open. The door had been swung open, and the cheap bell attached to it had rung, announcing a visitor.

"Cough, how might I help-" Elliot started to hurriedly comb his hair with his fingers as he put a very polite smile, but he stopped mid-greeting when he saw who walked into the store.

A boy not over sixteen was staring at him from the other side of the counter, wearing boots covered in mud and tattered clothes covered in dust. Elliot screamed internally when he saw the state the floor was in, and his gaze went from polite to enraged in the blink of an eye. He glared at the boy, taking a good look at his icy blue eyes, but what really caught his attention was his shaved head. It wasn't uncommon for kids to shave their heads in the city of Abastra, especially during the louse season, but something about the boy felt a bit off.

Elliot couldn't quite put his finger on it, but the blank expression on the boy's face made him seem absent, and a boy showing up alone at his store at this time of the day was very suspicious.

"How may I help you?" Elliot asked, forcing a smile on his face.

"Is this the general store?" The boy asked, giving a small, polite smile as well.

"Yes, it is. First time here?" Elliot widened his smile, probing the boy carefully.

Silence was all that answered him, however.

"What are you looking for exactly?" Elliot cocked his head. "We have some travel supplies in the back, as well as some grains. Over at that wall, as you can see, we have some clothes. On the other side, we have some everyday tools, and over there..."

"I want to see a map," the boy interrupted Elliot, not even glancing at the wares te store had for sale.

"We have those too. What kind of map would you like to see?" Elliot's lips twitched.

"Well, you see, I was on my way to the Western Continent with my young master and a few other servants, but I ended up getting separated from them and now my only hope is meeting them at our destination," the boy's downcast expression looked genuine enough for Elliot, but he still felt somewhat suspicious.

"Well, if that's the case then I can show you this map over here..." Elliot got down on his knees and started scrounging around the wooden drawers at the back of the counter, going over rolls of parchment until he found what he wanted.

"This over here is a map of the Central Continent's mainland," Elliot explained as he unfurled a parchment map on the counter. Depicted on it was a very uneven landmass, its shape vaguely resembled a circle, although very distorted and jagged.

"We are here, in the city of Abastra, Olen Kingdom." Elliot pointed to a small dot a bit above what looked like a grey stain near the center of the map that was covered with a few drawings of trees. "Where exactly in the Western Continent you want to go?"

"The mining city of Altera," the boy answered in a heartbeat.

"I see, so your master wanted to try his luck getting into the Roaring Mountain Sect?" Elliot raised a brow. The boy's answer was unexpected

"He will have a hard time, they are very hostile to outsiders, and even locals have almost no chance of entering the Outer Sect."

"There aren't many other choices, are there? The Abyss Sect couldn't enter my young master's eyes at all," the boy answered with a straight face.

"Well, that's understandable, the Abyss Sect's reputation has been declining for a while. Not that I feel sorry for them, they always looked down on us. The Rising Sun Sect is much better if you want my opinion."

"Well, if I ever catch up to him I'll be sure to pass on your words," the boy's tone showed a hint of annoyance.

"I forgot, sorry," Elliot gave the boy a small bow but was grumbling internally. "The answer to your question depends on how much money you have, or elemental crystals. The normal way would be to go to the western coast of the mainland, hop on a boat and go to the Western Continent, resupplying constantly at each city in the way. Now, how you would go about that depends entirely on your money: you could walk, buy a horse, rent a carriage from each city to the next and so on. That method would take from one month, ship travel included, to four months."

"That's not fast enough," the boy's brows furrowed.

"Well, you can always return to where you came from and wait for your young master there. Just point it on the map and we can figure out a route, I am sure it would be faster that way."

"That would be quite hard, I doubt I would be well-received. I would probably take a few beatings if I showed up alone," the boy shot Elliot a sharp glance.

"Yes, of course, I am sorry for not taking your circumstances into account," Elliot apologized.

"You mentioned there was a way using elemental crystals... are you talking about the Rift Cities?" the boy's expression eased somewhat as he returned to the matter at hand.

"Yes. From here to Altera..." Elliot studied the map on the counter carefully. "You would need to go through two rifts. You could go from here to the northeast, to the city of Ergen. The rift there would take you straight to Ilba. From Ilba you could travel to Ortten, and the rift there would take you to Amid in the Western Continent, which is not far from Altera."

Elliot's fingers run through the map, going from Abastra to the northeast, pointing to a dot marked red. Then, his finger went all the way to the southern edge of the map, to another red dot, Ilba, before moving a bit east, to a green dot representing Ortten.
"This map, can I take a better look?" the boy asked, looking a bit dazed.

"If your hands are clean I see no problem," Elliot passed the parchment map to the boy, that started to carefully study it with his blue eyes. From the boy's expression, Elliot could see he wasn't very willing to use the Rift Cities and was probably trying to desperately find out a new route.

"Using those rifts... how much would it cost?" the boy asked slowly as if he was fighting with the idea.

"Those are usually very costly, probably about two to four elemental crystals of any kind if I am not wrong. It's not like people like me could use this stuff, those are for cultivators or wealthy nobles." Elliot shrugged.

"I see..." the boy looked dispirited. "You know any way I could get elemental crystals?"

"Beg a cultivator or a noble," Elliot was blunt. "Personally I would choose a noble. Cultivators have use for that stuff, so they would just kick you away. Nobles would step on you, call you all kinds of offenses, and whatever they wanted to do to feel good about themselves, but if they were in a good mood you might just have a shot after enduring all that. Not that I need to explain this to you, I am sure you know all of this already, working for a young master trying to become a cultivator and all..." Elliot gave a meaningful glance, and the boy turned quiet.

"Thank you for your time," the boy quickly excused himself and promptly left the store.

"Hmm, Altera was it?" Elliot followed the boy with his eyes, trying to remember the details of their conversation. Something told him that wouldn't be the last he heard of the boy.

---

Amon walked hurried steps through the muddy main street of the city of Abastra. The general store was already a few blocks behind him. The sun was slowly rising higher in the sky as the morning finally turned bright, and more people started walking around the streets, carrying on their daily lives. His impression of the city was not great. It looked like the junctions back at the Abyss Sect, but there were far fewer trees, and no building as extravagant as the ones on it. The city lacked the flair cultivators like to put in places they owned, it's simplicity was almost overwhelming. It was a bit smaller than Hell's Keeper City, but the people that lived in Abastra looked not much different from those of the Outer Ring. The atmosphere, in general, was much more mundane, and the scenery was not pleasant at all. Not that it mattered, anyway.

They can go on about their daily lives and forget I was here in the first place, that would be for the best. Amon wasn't sure if that clerk had bitten the bait, but he hoped he had covered his tracks well enough.

As he approached the end of the main street, the wooden walls of the city entered his sigh. A small gate was built into the eastern side of the wall. A couple of guards stood on the sides of the gate, wearing iron helmets, chainmail, and holding spears. Blue cloaks covered their backs, held in place by golden insignias. It was a very different dressing style than what he was used to, but he naturally avoided staring too much.
He walked to a side street, avoiding the gate and the guards as he reached the wall. It stood a full three meters high, a bit less than double his height, but not a problem for him at all. He spread his divine sense to make sure there was no one around him and took a quick glance to his sides before bending his knees and jumping up with all his might.

The wall in front of him turned into a blur before completely disappearing as his body shot up, and he managed to take a look at the expansive farmland that surrounded the city, reaching almost all the way to the far south, were he could make out the shadow of the trees of the Broken Forest.
He landed heavily on the other side of the wall, and his feet promptly sunk deep into the muddy ground, all the way to his knees. Groaning, Amon kicked the mud away, freeing himself before turning east and starting what he knew was going to be a long walk.

"Can you change my eyes to brown now?" He suddenly asked, as if talking to the air in front of him.

"... Yes," a melodious voice answered bitterly.

Amon felt his visions distorting for a moment as the light bent in strange ways in front of his eyes, and he was sure Lya was doing her job. As she had called it long ago when disguising the interspatial ring, it was but a lighting trick. What mattered was what people saw, not what it truly was. That being said, Amon had decided to avoid trusting Lya with too much, which was why he shaved his hair instead of asking her to mask it. If push comes to shove, he would rather play the part of a blind boy and walk around with his eyes closed and a shaved head than trust her fully with his disguise.

"Are you going to the Western Continent?" Lya asked sheepishly, as if she was afraid her voice might make him snap.

Amon didn't bother answering her. She could always wait and see where they would go. He had taken a good look at the map he was shown, and he had figured out that dots with the same color were always in pairs, which was an indicator of which cities were connected by a spatial rift. While he fed on the idea that he was going to the Western Continent, and even let the clerk come up with the Roaring Mountain Sect's name on his own, his actual plan was going to the other end of the world, where he planned to make do with the highest elemental affinity he had, no matter how insignificant it actually was.

As he slowly moved away from Abastra, a few streaks in the sky caught his eye.

Spirit Vessels? He turned tense, as he was sure the Abyss Sect wouldn't have been able to catch up to him that fast. He squinted his eyes, trying to take a better look, and he managed to faintly make out a few gigantic silhouettes hanging below the vessels, much like the time when Jake Meyer had carried away the dire wolf back to Sky Reach's Village. The vessels slowly approached Abastra, disappearing from view as they landed somewhere in the city.

They are hunters? His tension gave way to confusion, as he was sure there were no cultivators in the Olen Kingdom and that the Abyss Sect used for itself everything they hunted in the Broken Forest.

He narrowed his eyes but decided to ignore his curiosity for the moment. He first had to get as far away from the Abyss Sect as possible, only then would he worry about irrelevant matters such as that. Be those hunters smugglers from the Abyss Sect or rival cultivators, if it hurt the Abyss Sect he wouldn't get in their way.