Raylon planned to stay in Chansa for one additional day in order to mourn his friend. On that day, he made a list of goods and skills, Haja needed to prepare within the next 4 months and then bid the villagers farewell. He also communicated with them, that he planned on changing his traveling route after his next visit here. This meant that after his next visit, the villagers wouldn’t see him again for a long while. Some of them were saddened by the loss of his wares and tried to prepare their funds for some last-minute purchases. Meanwhile, Haja prepared for his upcoming journey.

His mother prepared a bag full of spare clothing and some other useful goodies while his father made a bunch of expeditions to prepare some healing herbs as an improvised first-aid-kit.

Once more, Haja took a look at his list of assignments, Raylon gave him. Currently he could only understand them with the help of his mother, since he wasn’t yet able to read and write properly.

___

To do list. You need to complete as much as possible from these 10 assignments to become my apprentice. Most of the assignments, I have given you, are too hard for someone of your age to complete. However, I want to see you try your best at solving as many of them as you can. Solving difficult problems is a part of being a merchant. Furthermore, every one of your assignments is going to be crucial parts of your future as a merchant, so It would do you good, to try your best at every one of them:

1) Learn how to read and write: You need to learn how to read Allakelim, the main language of Ayrilia in order to run errands and complete other important tasks as a merchant. At some point, you will need to learn a lot of languages, because my traveling route goes through a variety of counties other than Ayrilia.

2)Learn about Ayrilian etiquette: A good merchant knows how to show themselves in a positive light. In order to sell something to another person, you first need to build up a foundation of trust through your appearance. At some point, you will have to learn a lot of different kinds of etiquette and all sorts of appearances, once we are in a country other than Ayrilia.

3)Learn about the Ayrilian history: Ask as many people as possible, what they know about the Ayrilian history and compile a report within a book and show it to me. I will later on tell you, why I want you to do that.

4)Learn how to read a map from your father. I gave him a map of a place near your village, so learn from him how to handle a map.

5)Learn the basics of trading from the villagers around you.

6)I will give you a starting capital of 100 Yar, the Ayrilian currency of money. Let your father explain to you, what that is. I will question you, once I come back.

7)Try to trade your starting capital and make a profit, by buying and selling stuff from the other villagers. It doesn’t matter, how much of a profit or a loss you made, but you need to trade at least 10 times and make a logbook containing your trades.

8)Try to stay fit and prepare yourself for the long travels and hard sleeping spots. Learn how to sleep in the worst conditions.

9)Prepare a set of questions you want to know about the business of being a merchant and ask those questions, once I come back.

10)Learn: Learn as many different words and their meaning, as you can. Ask your surroundings about every single word you don’t understand. Down below, I wrote a short fairy tale, that has a lot of difficult tails in it, so try to understand the meaning of every single word that is used and try to use every word that I used at least twice within your everyday speech.

….

Humanitarian, the Sage of peace:

[...]

(Note: Entire Fairy tale will be a separate extra-chapter)

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The young boy was truly intimidated, when he first heard about the amount of work, he had to do but he was able to console himself with the fact that he didn’t need to fulfill every assignment in order to be recognized as Raylon’s apprentice. He was already allowed to address him as ‘master’ the next time, they met. At the same time he was burning with a certain passion, that he wanted to show his new master, that he was capable of surpassing his expectations. It was the pride and naivety of a young aspiring boy and, at the same time, it was the result, that Raylon had been aiming for, when writing this list. Truth be told, what Raylon had written down was the entire future plan of Haja’s apprenticeship or put in another way, Haja and him would spent the next few years of their life instilling and perfecting this knowledge into him. They were the goals, that Haja would only fully reach at the end of his apprenticeship with Raylon.

Nevertheless, he was curios, what this talented boy could achieve in this short of a time.

And he had any right to be curios:

The first thing that Haja did after mulling over things was go on an expedition with his father. The contents of the expedition was a batch of lush cacti. He extracted the fibers from the cluster cacti and used a lush-blue cactus’ innards in combination with the water from a lush-red cactus and blended the two of them together. It was a well known trick in order to get a blue dye that was tinged with purple. This dye was an excellent ink because, if kept under a closed lid, it would hold exceptionally long.

Next, he searched for white Lush-cactus-clusters. He used the innards of those cacti, which were typically a basic product for cementing work and build a large quadratic frame, into which he poured the blended innards of the cactus in combination with water. He did so with the help of his family and friends, who all supported him with all their help. .After a few days under the sun, the mixture dried up and the result was a rough type of paper, which due to the large area of the frame was very thin despite its surprising durability. He cut this piece of paper with the help of the tailors measuring and cutting tools into small pieces of paper and together with his mother, he ordered a batch of them together and bound them tightly with a rope he had braided out of the cactus-fiber and as a result, he got himself a notebook, into which he would write his trade history. Together with his father he decorated his cover in different colors with the letters ‘Haja’s Logbook’ on top of it. He had to repeat this process a total of three times, resulting in the creation of ‘Haja’s History book’ and lastly ‘Haja’s notebook’.

The idea of pouring the lime from the cactus into a frame and making paper out of it was fairly common knowledge here, even though it had relatively little importance on the villagers lives.

These notebooks were going to be filled up considerably 4 months from now.

Since this process required a high amount of waiting, Haja started on his other assignments, which he didn’t need a pen and paper for. His rhythm of activity constitutes as follows:

In the morning, he would undergo a training routine, which Miss Breyla of the guard siblings created for him. It constituted of mostly stamina training with a side-focus on strength. He was mostly tasked with running laps around the village in different tempos and doing some training exercises for his back, abdomen, his arms and his legs. Because of the sandy and soft texture of the desert sand, the running exercise was very stamina consuming but at the same time the soft ground bore the advantage of decreasing the danger of overusing certain muscle compartments in his body. Even then, he could only do a few laps around the village before his stamina was on the verge of exhaustion. Thus, he only did very small amount of running since the goal was for his body to be physically fit on longer travels.

Contrary to expectations, riding a horse carriage for very long distances wasn’t always possible, since the carriage was primarily used to transport goods and not the merchant himself. Thus, there were long distances, that the merchant had to walk themselves, albeit slowly over the course of hours. Even though the carriage, that Raylon was using, was easily capable of transporting 2 people including the merchandise(it was drawn by three well-bred horses), once Haja started his own business as a traveling merchant, he was most likely not going to have that luxury.

After finishing his workout routine and washing up a little, Haja ate dinner with his parents and got a short break to relax a little.

From late morning until noon, Haja was educated in formal etiquette by his mother and Miss Lepaf, the keeper of the Ayrilian-peacocks. Seeing that the peacock was a product that was mostly sought after by nobles for their appearance and merchants for their value in noble circles, she had a lot of experience with the etiquette of the high-society. Haja’s mother on the other hand was able to support him through second-hand experience, since her parents had lived in Sharia, a major Ayrilian city and were thus taught the basics of etiquette. Apparently her mother Theresia grandmother, had a relatively high social standing due to her family.

The lessons typically took around 2 hours but were sometimes shortened a bit, when it seemed like Haja was to stressed out from his relatively tight schedule. The young boy used the rest of his day in a relatively free manner. From time to time he went to the tailors and learned from them the basics of fashion and appearance. He learned what colors to match, what accessories to wear and what haircuts to use when aiming for a certain reaction from his peers. They also taught him more about tailoring his own clothing and over time, Haja became surprisingly talented at that. Mr. Tailor even made a comment <<Had you wanted to become a tailor, I am sure you could have found a job wherever you went.>>

Other times, the aspiring merchant questioned the adults around the village about their knowledge in trading. It was one of his tasks to make at least 10 trades with the villagers and he needed to try and make them profitable.

During the evening, he would sit down with his parents and learn about reading and writing. He mostly learned from his mother, but she unfortunately wasn’t that fluent in both of those areas, since she never had much of a need for them. However, he was still able to learn a lot from her. Since Razeff, Haja’s father, was a herbalist, he had a decent understanding of jargon regarding herbology, so he was able to teach Haja a different application of reading and writing from a formal education. The practical learning that was focused on real plants and herbs was very helpful for the boys understanding and his progress was quite advanced.

After 2 months of learning the basics, the family began his historical education and imparted a lot of information regarding history, politics and geography onto him. Since their own educational level was quite low, the knowledge they gave him was very broad and less detailed than it could have been but it was more than enough considering that Haja only had roundabout two months left to learn about the vast history of Ayrilia.

Apart from his daily rhythm, Haja would once a week make an expedition to a place near the village together with his father and train on path-finding and navigation. They had been gifted with a map and a compass and he had to learn how to use them in combination with each other. Unexpectedly, navigation seemed to be a hidden strength from Haja, because his ability to discern directions and mark the landscape was excellent to the point, where he could have been a professional military scout. In record time he was able to master navigation and in the process developed a high affection for the craft.

Thus, even though his schedule was already decently full, Haja developed a hobby of cartography. He prepared a second, much larger notebook with the headline ‘Haja the explorer’(he wrote this title by himself. First he wanted to call this notebook ‘Haja’s exploration but it didn’t fit on the cover. Thus he settled for this) and filled one page of that with a map depicting a rough sketch of the vicinity of Chansa village. The pages of this notebook are foldable and one page from this one is equal in size to 8 pages from the others.

Haja completed the map during his time off and is was decently well detailed. In the process, his artistic skills also improved: Instead of marking all herbs with a roughly drawn flower, Haja learned how to draw differently shaped objects corresponding with the type of herb. After some teachings from a local villager, he improved his ability of depicting topographical changes in the landscape like hills and valleys by using different shades of Grey.

This was possible because Haja had switched from using ink as his main tool for drawing and now uses the dye from a cluster-cactus in the form of dried powder. He prepared a short stick by splitting one end of it into very small fibers. Then he  takes out a small amount of powder and places it on the desired location of the map. Afterwards he spreads and flattens the dye with his improvised brush and since the dye is inherently sticky, a small amount of it sticks to the area he wants it to stick to. By repeating this process, the area he focuses on becomes darker and darker. His kind of skill is surprisingly advanced and Haja was able to do it on accident.

Regardless of his talent, he continues to develop this hobby of his as a hobby while focusing on his preparations to make his journey. Time flies by quickly. The time of his departure will soon arrive.