Elvana is jacking me off while caressing my hair. She gives me a kiss. God I feel wonderful. So calm and relaxed. Then I cum. But blood comes out instead of semen. Blood keeps coming out and it covers Elvana’s entire naked body. My mom comes into my room. She screams into my face. Father is laying in pieces in the corner of the room. Mehmed is preparing to hang himself in the other corner of the room. Afrim is in front of me and is deathly pale and the slash on his neck I healed is back and gangrenous. He grabs my face. He yells: Wake up Arben!

I wake up in cold sweat. Holy shit. I am so hot and sweaty. The room is dark but I feel the two Riding Lizards laying against me to steal my warmth. 

“Oh qyche, how long was I asleep for? Meh, doesn’t matter...” 

I start a fire in my hands with my magic. I get up and go to the entrance I sealed off. I look at the hole I left for ventilation. It’s night outside. I have to move again.

I wake the two Riding Lizards up.

 “I should name you guys. Mhmmm… Let’s see, you are Tailless, and you are Speedy.” 

They seem to respond well to the names. I guess they must feel happy after feasting on the goblins. 

I grab their collars and have them follow me outside. At the entrance I destroy the Earth Wall I made and now we are out.

“North Star, check. Mountains to my right side, check. Let’s move.” 

I mount Tailless and start the journey again.

In hindside, I actually had a lot of dumb luck during the escape. It was really lucky that I hadn’t run into any dangerous monsters during the night, or gotten caught by the Great Army of Doom. Also, there was that thing where I sensed mortal danger which saved my life.

I started thinking about my magic. Weirdly, ever since killing those goblins, I felt more ‘energy’ inside me. It’s hard to explain. Ever since I was a kid I could kind of feel ‘energy’ inside me, which I guess is my mana. And I could create waves of goosebumps with it. 

Also, out of everyone in the village, I was the most talented at magic, though I tried to hide it as much as possible because magic was seen as weak.

But I think this energy I could feel after killing the goblins was different from just raw mana or energy.

 It only came after some new experience. Or in this case killing those goblins. 

“If mana can be converted to real life spells, then can this energy be converted to something real as well?”

 I thought over this while traveling. I also started thinking what I would do when reaching the Llap. I had only a vague plan of finding some dungeon, and getting stronger. 

I wanted to find a library as well to get smarter. Though everyone in the village was mostly illiterate, I had managed to teach myself Shqip from this old book I stole from a wandering healer.

It was then my hunger hit me. I hadn’t eaten in, what, two days now? For now I filled my stomach with water that I made with magic. 

“Can’t believe Mehmet said magic was useless, what an idiot.”

 I started wondering what he was doing now, if he was dead yet. Then I remembered Elvana. I assumed she was just dead at this point in time. I just had to leave everything behind. There was nothing left. That was my mindset.

As the hours passed, I noticed that my night vision had gotten much better. It felt like my eyes had improved at night. I didn’t feel like my eyes had grown accustomed to the night time, it felt more like the ‘skill’ [Nightvision] had grown because of training. 

This led me to think more about the dynamics of magic and skills. Somewhere I had heard that each person had a level and a bunch of skills and attributes, and that these could be trained, though that measuring these things cost a lot of euros, more than someone from a poor village could afford.

 I also started wishing I had gotten an education on this stuff. But where I came from they didn’t care about explanations and reading and writing. It was all about “Trahdizion”. Nobody cared about being analytical. I didn’t even know how many years I had been alive because after the age of 8 everyone stopped counting your age and you were considered an adult. There wasn’t even a dedicated calendar system back in my village.

More hours passed, and the night sky was starting to get lighter. It will be daytime soon. 

“I’ll keep moving until the sun comes out. But I gotta look for some food and shelter again. Though I think Tailless and Speedy are full from the goblins so that’s good.”

Ahead, to my left, I spotted a big lone boar. 

It was about two times bigger than me, and had huge fangs. It was scratching itself against a tree. 

If it charged me and Tailless and Speedy, we would probably get really injured. If I had Tailless and Speedy go up against the boar themselves, then maybe they would win, but get hurt while fighting. So I couldn’t just go charging in like with the goblins.

About 50 meters away I told them to stay. 

Then I got as close as I could to the boar without it spotting me, and climbed up a tree. 

I would use a long range spell against it. I started thinking which I should use. A water spell wouldn’t do much damage. I could use fire, and I wouldn’t have to worry about starting a forest fire because everything was still damp from the rains. But I also felt that a Fireball wouldn’t have the brute force I needed to kill the boar. 

An Earth Ball would be great, but again, I felt it wouldn’t have the pure brute force I needed. 

But then I got an idea: With one arm stretched away aiming at the boar, I started creating an Earth Ball. But I would try something new. 

First I focused on making the Earth Ball as hard as possible, and that worked. It started shifting from a brown colour to a more dark-brown colour. 

Then I tried something new again: I managed to change the shape from a round ball to an arrow tip. And as a finishing touch, I also managed to make it spin around, imitating the effect the feather would have on the arrow.

Making this earth arrow took a lot of concentration and mana because I had never tried to do it before. And I was also tired from climbing the tree and the long traveling. 

I had never practised my aim, I just used to shoot magic spells at the lake randomly. But I tried to aim at the boar’s torso. I concentrated on putting as much speed behind the shot as possible. And then I released.

I couldn’t even see the shot because it was going so fast. I just saw the boar’s torso getting a huge hole blown in it and the aftershock from the shot. It looked scary and painful.

The boar was dead. 

I climbed down the tree. 

I got closer to it. No way I could eat all this alone, it was twice my size. I whistled and Tailless and Speedy ran over. 

I used my machete to cut the boar in half. I gave them the front half because I didn’t want to look at its face. Then I used fire magic to grill the lower half. I was so hungry that I just ate immediately.

Of course I couldn’t eat everything, only a part of one of the hindlegs. I decided to grill the rest of the body more, then cover it with Earth Magic to preserve it and save it for later. I decided to tie it to Speedy’s saddle, and ride Tailless.

We kept going for a few more hours. Now the sun was coming up and I had to find shelter. It was then that I saw it: Far off in the distance, up ahead to my right, I could see that the huge mountains had stopped. It meant I was only a few hours away from the border.

I found a small cave and shut me and the lizards in with Earth Magic and left a small hole for ventilation as I did last night.

This is what I knew about the border from what I had heard: The kingdoms in Llap and Drenica paid mercenaries to patrol the borders and stop any people from crossing. 

If you wanted to get away from Dukagjina, you had to travel by road into Drenica and pay a huge toll fee. 

And if you wanted to get into Llap you had to go from Drenica, and if you weren’t a Drenican citizen, again pay a huge toll fee. 

The point of this system was to of course keep Dukagjina poor and from becoming powerful. 

Sometimes the Drenica kingdoms and the Llap kingdoms would go to war, but they would always, even in war times, keep up this policy of suppressing Dukagjina. 

I later learned that Drenica used to be a part of Llap, but that the Kingdom of Drenica grew so prosperous from having the biggest dungeon in Dardania, “Burgu i Zeze”, and from focusing on getting the entire market share of the slave trade in Dukagjina. 

In a series of small wars between the Kingdom of Drenica (a confederation of cities in the Drenica Region) and the Kingdoms of Llap (that is, the Kingdom of Prishtina and its vassal states in the Llap region), Drenica managed to secure the rights to be its own region, and the exclusive rights to have all immigration from Dukagjina flow into Drenica. And also the exclusive rights of slave-catching from Dukagjina. Of course some mercenaries in Llap still illegally caught slaves from Dukagjina.

I decided the best course of action would be traveling at night. 

I just hoped I’d make it across the Llap border without getting spotted. 

I took off my clothes and made a small light with my magic. I had huge rashes from wearing wet clothes. My feet looked really ugly. I tried to see if I could heal all my skin. 

And surprisingly, I could. 

It turns out it was actually easier for me to heal myself, because I could visualize the wounds even better since I also had the pain and the ability to feel my own body from two sources. 

To heal myself, I just touched my wounds and visualized energy or mana flowing to the places I touched with my hands, and the wounds healed. Pretty amazing. Though it did take a lot of concentration and mana.

 This also spurred me to look at Tailless’s tail again. That small pink blob thing had grown a little more. The pinkness reminded me of when Tailless was a baby, and he baby pink when he hatched from his egg. 

As I was thinking this, I yawned. All the healing and traveling, and fighting that boar had made me exhausted.

 I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

Tomorrow I will meet the mother of my first child.