After dinner, Gregor tells the group to stay in the den. “I have a map, but it is currently in my library. As Jason learned earlier today, there is not much space in there at all. Just stick tight and I will bring it out here so I can show you what is up.”

It takes him a minute, but soon enough Gregor is back with a large sheet of vellum and spreads it out. As soon as the sheet is flat, the markings on the surface come to life and a shockingly accurate looking map is projected just above it.

Gregor smiles at the looks on everyone’s face, “You won’t find another map quite like this one anywhere in the entire realm. Not because of accuracy or anything mind you. This is a collaborative project with my husband. I enchanted it, and he is the one that filled in all the details with his travels. The areas right around our city are of course filled out in decent detail but the further out you go it becomes more obvious. Especially once you can start finding the blank spots on the map and it devolves into a mess of wandering lines.”

“Still, this will show what your group needs as he makes it a point to at least come within sight of all the nearby towns and villages. Even in places where he isn’t quite welcome. I really wish he would stop, but I think you would have more luck telling a cat to not knock over things. Peter goes wherever he wants to, irrespective of nations and kings. Anyway, can you describe a little bit more on what you three are looking for?”

Rosha shrugs, “Last time we split up because I was almost at the bottleneck and Jason was well behind that. My trip was basically all main roads to the nearest beginners dungeon. Along the way I picked up enough experience to hit the bottleneck and so it was just a matter of beating a boss. Still took a decent amount of time.”

Jason nods, “And on my end I skirted along the edge of the Wasteland and the rabbit plains from Shinefish to Wasteland’s Edge. At night I would camp in the plains to care for my plants and cultivate. During the day I would explore into the Wasteland itself. It was hit or miss. Nothing was too strong as far as monsters go but the environmental hazards were quite something else. That and I found two different potentially sapient species in the making. One more along than the other.”

“To break through I ended up fighting a loner goblin warboss, which was around level 20. Now I might not be able to level skip so hard against bosses, but regular monsters five or so levels higher than me shouldn’t be a problem. So a path that starts with me fighting level 20 monsters would be nice.”

Gregor nods, “And what do you guys want for a dungeon? I know that some people don’t care one way or another but that isn’t always the case. Wouldn’t want to send you to a spider dungeon if you had arachnophobia.”

The three look at each other, but no one speaks up. Courtney shrugs, “We don’t have any particular fears I guess. Besides that, I guess just don’t send us into some foul smelling pit. There are enough dungeons out there that we don’t need to go tromping through a sewer or some other decaying mess.”

Gregor laughs, “Fair enough. Luckily, that doesn’t narrow things down too much. While such dungeons do exist, they tend to be on the high end. More because low level dungeons like that get destroyed more often than not unless they provide some unique resources.”

He turns to the map and pokes a few spaces on the actual vellum. On the projected display, the map zooms out and red circles appear across it. Gregor pokes his finger into the display and draws a rough circle around the city, and all the red circles within the area fade out. “Okay, the circles are dungeons. I’ve nixed all the nearby places as a matter of fact. The question is, how long do you think it will take to finish leveling up?”

Jason leans back and thinks about it. “I want to work on my stats so that would take up some time. Oh, and Lily’s stats as well. Besides that, I want to wander around the wilderness a bit, anyway. I’ve got a really cool ability to improve the dirt in my portable planter, and I haven’t really had much of a chance to do much with it. What good is absorbing nature’s energy from the places I travel if I’m not travelling through all that many places.”

Courtney sighs, “On our end I have to admit this is going to take a while once it is just me and Rach... Rosha. Don’t listen to that idiot’s worry about taking too long. You and me both know the only reason our levels skyrocketed on the way over was because those swarms were out of our league big time. Without Jason’s help and Peter’s guidance, it would have taken us weeks to get here if we made it at all.”

“Most importantly, losing Jason means we lack a pure frontliner. Rosha can and has managed during our fights with the swarm cats. But with just me and her that would be asking for it. We need to fight enemies within a couple levels of our own. That and they need to be enemies that our strengths work against. No more swarms or undead. Some nice normal living targets that Rosha can sneak attack from a distance and I can cast illusions on. Though even with all that I expect, it will take a few months or more to hit the bottleneck, and the only reason why I expect it to go that fast is we are travellers. I know that a local in our position could take more than a year, even if they can manage constant adventuring.”

Akhier

Thank you for reading! Next two chapters are free on my Patreon ( 270 and 271 ), five chapters beyond that for only a dollar, and many more for five dollars (two chapters release a week at this tier).