Leylines

Chapter 43: Leylines

During this time, whenever Gao De went out to sell medicine, he would take the opportunity to wander around Hogan City.

First, he needed to familiarize himself with Hogan City. At the same time, it was a way to relax and experience the flavor of this "other world."

Second, he wanted to understand the local customs, prices, and other such matters, deepening his understanding of this world.

It was precisely because of this habit that he discovered quite a few people in the city recently who were clearly not native residents of Hogan City.

That put Gao De on guard.

For no apparent reason, he had a feeling that a storm was brewing.

Besides that, there was an unexpected gain that even Gao De himself had not anticipated.

In this world, books were rare and expensive commodities.

Only in some of the larger cities were there bookshops specifically dedicated to selling books.

In small cities, one could forget about it. Only nobles, scholars, and wealthy merchants had privately collected books in their homes.

This was the result of the class that held power in this world monopolizing knowledge.

After learning this, Gao De had already given up hope of buying any books in Hogan City.

Yet while strolling about, he unexpectedly found a small workshop selling books in the commoners' district.

The workshop's owner was called Dairich. He had once been a Monk at a monastery in Bremen City.

Most monasteries had their own libraries for Monks to study doctrine.

At the same time, they would copy and sell their collected books to scholars in need and even wealthy patrons.

When Dairich had been at the monastery, he had been responsible for copying and producing books.

Later, the monastery could no longer sustain its operations due to high maintenance costs and exhausted sources of funding, and had no choice but to close down.

The Monks were then each dismissed and sent home.

When the monastery shut down, the Monks divided up everything inside. They took away whatever they could carry.

Dairich was already quite old and could not snatch any particularly valuable things. He could only pack up some of the monastery's collected books and return to Hogan City, where he had been born.

He was old, and his stamina could no longer keep up. He could not do physical labor, and although he could read, few people were willing to hire him because of his age.

But people had to eat.

After giving it some thought, the old Monk rented a small room in the commoners' district and opened a little workshop.

There, he produced and copied books, selling them directly to customers in a struggling effort to support himself in his old age.

The books sold by this old Monk were not particularly valuable, consisting mainly of religious texts.

They included guides to religious rites, manuals of church doctrine, books on church history, and church literature, including hymns.

There were also a small number of heroic epics depicting heroes and historical events, along with a scattered handful of chronicles, travel journals, and books on geography and culture.

There was not a single book on knowledge or practical manuals.

Of course, even if there had been, Gao De could not have afforded them.

Here, any book involving knowledge could cost an arm and a leg.

Those traditionally regarded as "miscellaneous books" were much cheaper.

But that cheapness was only relative.

Although the selection and quantity of books were both limited, they happened to include what Gao De needed.

He bought all the travel journals and books on geography and culture—four books in total—and they cost him two gold coins.

The price was simply jaw-dropping—in his previous life, it had not been uncommon to get a whole jin of books for fifty yuan through a group-buying "slash the price" deal.

Though Gao De's heart ached, he obediently paid up. When in Rome, do as the Romans did.

The moment he returned to the herb garden with the four books he had bought at great expense, Gao De eagerly picked up a copy of Bremen Gazetteer and began learning about this world.

Speaking of which, he had to thank Mage Seda.

If Mage Seda had not brought him back to the herb garden and taken him in as an apprentice, how could Gao De, once a beggar, have learned to read?

After flipping through only a few pages, Gao De's face showed extreme surprise.

"This is completely different from what I imagined?"

The entire Bremen Region lay in the west of the Sien Duchy, and its vastness far exceeded Gao De's expectations.

The overall character of this world was far too similar to medieval Europe, and Hogan City truly was not large. Its productive capacity, in his eyes, was extremely low.

This had led Gao De to subconsciously regard the Sien Duchy as a small country of several tens of thousands of square kilometers, at most a hundred thousand square kilometers.

The fact that Bremen City, the great city best known to the people of Hogan City, was actually less than two hundred kilometers away from Hogan City seemed to further confirm his guess.

But in truth, the Bremen Region alone was already larger than the entire Sien Duchy he had imagined.

The entire Bremen Region stretched more than four hundred kilometers from east to west and as much as eight hundred kilometers from north to south, with a total area of over three hundred thousand square kilometers!

That was already about the size of Guangdong plus Fujian.

Furthermore, there were nine great rivers within the Bremen Region.

Seven prominent mountain ranges.

Forests, swamps, and lakes were scattered across it like stars in the sky.

And this was only one western region of the Sien Duchy.

One could imagine just how vast the Sien Duchy itself must be.

"With such an enormous territory, can it really be governed at this world's technological level? Wouldn't it be like a whip too long to reach its tip?"

The question instinctively surfaced in Gao De's mind, and he muttered, "This isn't scientific!"

The next moment, he laughed sheepishly, realizing that he had once again been subconsciously viewing the issue through a fixed mindset.

Although this world's technological level was low, equivalent to medieval Europe, it possessed supernatural powers such as magic.

Wasn't the reason supernatural power was called supernatural precisely because it defied science?

Shaking his head, Gao De turned the page and continued reading.

Despite covering such a vast area, the Bremen Region was actually extremely desolate.

Centered on Bremen City, eight small cities including Hogan City formed a roughly circular developed area of nearly ten thousand square kilometers.

The remaining three hundred thousand square kilometers were all undeveloped wilderness, filled with savage beasts and dangerous Leyline Creatures.

Further down, Gao De finally learned a little information about Leyline Creatures.

Although he often heard the term Leyline Creature and frequently spoke of them himself, Gao De actually did not know much about them.

Now that he had finally encountered information about Leyline Creatures, he immediately regarded it as a priceless treasure.

"After the convergence of planes, leylines appeared with increasing frequency, their numbers growing by the day. Leyline Creatures emerged in great numbers, yet no new leyline has appeared in the Bremen Region for two hundred years. Geros XII once praised Bremen as a land blessed by fortune."

That was all the text had to say about Leyline Creatures, after which it turned back to other geographical introductions.

Yet this single brief sentence already contained more than enough information.

"The convergence of planes... does that mean this world has more than one plane? Or do planes here differ from the planes I understand?"

The phrase "leylines appeared with increasing frequency, Leyline Creatures emerged in great numbers" was easy enough to understand. Leyline Creatures came from leylines, while leylines were continuously forming in an endless stream, their numbers constantly increasing.

The number of Leyline Creatures should naturally increase as well.

Sure enough, a world with supernatural power was bound to be immensely complex and strange, containing countless secrets.

And the statement that "no new leyline has appeared in the Bremen Region for two hundred years" truly made Gao De feel slightly relieved.

Gao De had already witnessed the terror of Leyline Creatures once in the herb garden.

There was no need to think about it. The appearance of a leyline was a natural disaster for humanity.

Once a natural disaster struck, there were far too many uncontrollable factors. How could he, a weak first-rank Mage Apprentice, avoid being affected?

Gao De did not want his current peaceful life to be disrupted.

He was still young, his strength was insufficient, yet his potential was limitless.

For now, he should quietly "develop" and wait until he had grown much stronger.