The Runic Alchemist

Chapter 33: Seraphim Luminara

Getting into another terrible, butt-hurting wagon journey with common folks for 4 days straight, Damian finally reached his destination. The capital of Faerunia and the most prosperous city in the entire realm – 'Seraphim Luminara'. The gathering point of business & culture unlike any other.

"Now this is what you call a city...!!"

The wide streets and paved roads with hundreds for people going from here and there making noises and shouting, this was a city indeed. The buildings were just one or two stories tall but the artwork carved onto them was mind-blowingly beautiful and incredibly detailed. People were wearing better clothes than the country side, fashion and wealth was finally a thing for the public here.

Damian was walking through the streets of the incredible harbor city while admiring the artwork on the stone buildings and stone statues carved at every crossroads and feeling overwhelmed with excitement and wonder. But he couldn't do that all day so he got on his same routine of finding good inn with a bath that had a reasonable rate.

Finally finding one in the the more modest part of the city that was for common folk. Damian relaxed in his small room after getting refreshed. The entry in the city was free but he had to wait in line for two whole hours and that's what would happen every time he went outside the city walls unless he got into the paid line for faster access.

And not just that with 3 silvers a day in the inn and food and stuff he had to at least spend 5 silvers every day for a decent living condition.

Finding a job was kind of a necessity now.

He would also need a reserve of decent amount of money for booking a passage on a ship and travelling to another kingdom. That was for later though, Damian free of all his burdens had decided to live in this city for a while and get himself a bit more knowledgeable about the world which his sheltered upbringing could not provide him.

Since there was still some hours left before night, Damian changed his clothes to a clean ones and got out on the streets. For today he just travelled across the whole city and got familiar with the streets and famous locations and gatherings of various kinds of people.

Not surprising that the most noticeable bunch after bars and taverns with drunk fools were the followers of light giving big speeches in the busy streets. The god that they worshiped was the Sun god. Despite being a huge maritime kingdom, Faerunia was not a very religion heavy kingdom.

Some old fishermen and sailors believed in the old sea god but there were no churches or great statues of sea god unlike the sun god. Supposedly the royal line of Faerunia was blessed with the sea god's lineage, but just like everything else Damian and other people just knew it from the books.

Very rarely one would get to really experience what the powers of any significant individuals actually were, unless they revealed it themselves & no great house would ever reveal all it's trump cards. Specially the royalty who had the pressure to remain the strongest in the kingdom no matter what or the ambitious lords would challenge their right at the first sign of weakness.

The sun god followers were the most common religion believers and mostly the whole realm followed some part of it. There were some exceptions and differences but no other religion was as famous, of course except the followers of chaos.

It was the biggest rival and enemy of sun god since the whole kingdom of these evil believers existed and were constantly at each other's throats with followers of light according the books. The dark believers had their own kingdom but it was on an island, in history some great wars were waged against it with the help of all five kingdom's united forces.

However it was before the fifth kingdom called itself an empire and started an open war against it's border kingdoms. The last mention of their existence in history was two centuries ago, only some random people were caught now and then as spies or chaos god supporters and were executed by the sun god followers, but their legitimacy was very questionable.

Damian getting tired of all the walking, finally bought two skewers and sat on a stone bench in front of the biggest attraction of the city.

A giant statue of some ancient figure of a warrior lady who was standing while keeping her one leg on top of someone's head, who apparently did not have a body. The warrior lady with a scimitar on her waist and a beautiful harp that she was playing with her hands looked sad and solemn.

Damian knew about the statue from one of the books, apparently it was stated to be here way before the very first record of human history was inscribed in text.

No one knew who or what it was but it was one of the greatest work of art ever created. The words carved at the foot of the statue, which were translated after century of work from various historians was actually one of the most famous line in literature.

[In Memory of Those Who Chose The Sea.]

Many a famous historians talked about it but non had any solid idea what it exactly meant or how old exactly it was.

The sheer size made Damian question as to just how in the world was something like this made in such a backward era, or maybe the world was somehow reset through a great climate shift or something. The possibilities were endless. Some believed it to be a sea god but the royal line of Faerunia never acknowledge it as sea god. Not to mention the sea god in history was always depicted as male.

Finishing his tour of the city Damian walked back to his room in the inn and finally emptied his whole storage of the gold and silver coins. In total after everything that he had already spent he still had 176 gold coins and 90 silver coins.

If he wanted to live here for a while he would have to manage his expenditure and at least get a job that would pay him a gold every single day or 5 silver a day at least.

Damian had guessed from the amount he looted from the fake bandits that average people with their first job did not even have few silver coins on them, which makes his goal even harder to achieve but Damian was confident that with his modern knowledge and his unique understanding of magic and runes he would somehow make do.

Of course all that was secondary, his main purpose here was to gain as much knowledge as he could, find some people doing magic and copy awesome and useful spells and most importantly continue his own research in the field of runes and magic.

Laying down on bed in his room thinking this Damian did not realize when he fell asleep, but when he opened his eyes the morning light was flooding through the half open window. Getting refreshed and having breakfast in the inn's tavern Damian wandered the streets, looking for a job since there were no news papers or job agencies in this era yet.

For now he just went from shop to shop looking at the products sold there and the process of skilled craftsman making them. Damian could not sell his own runic scrolls since it only worked with his command. There was a skill for transferring the authority of your written spells to others but it was an advanced level [Scribe] skill that mostly runesmiths learned as a pre requisite for their job.

If Damian started learning it now, it would at least take few months to get it, not to mentioned it was not guaranteed that he would get it plus the [Scribe] skill required constant writing for days and tons of papers and ink.

The spell scrolls were actually sold and bought in these shops which ranged from basics to all kinds of intermediately spells. Of course they were all written in the same runic depiction as that runic book Damian had. No one was any different, this was the most common and one and only way to write and understand runes for the people.

Unlike Damian who used the true structure of the spells with a web of interconnected sections and formulas.

Damian had yet to figure out various runic symbols that he drew on daily bases as it appeared in the circular magic spells but he did not have big enough repertoire to categorize and understand the meaning of all runes. It was just a weird language with even weirder symbols for now to Damian.

All the runic shops he visited only hired people with [Scribe] related first job as an apprentice and for an experienced craftsman Runesmith job was required, Damian knew that's how it would be but still he tried with his somewhat rustic knowledge of the common runic language.

The process was even more awkward since Damian refused to show his status tool to anyone, it had both his real name and his 'Godless' blessings which would make him a prime target of the churches and religious zealots. Not to mention his prestigious job which was rare even among the prestigious job list.