In many novels, a situation like this often appeared: the protagonist, born in a remote little town at the very edge of the world, fought their way through the local old, weak, sick, and disabled to reach a more prosperous region. Then, in that region's great cities, they encountered even more villains and short-sighted little punks, beating them to a pulp to obtain the resources needed to head for still greater cities and larger maps.
Ian had always believed that he fit the standards of this sort of novel plot perfectly.
First of all, he had emerged from Harrison Port, the very edge of not only the Empire but the entire world of Terra. Back then, Ian had thought Harrison Port's circumstances were Terra's norm, believing this world was merely a post-apocalyptic low-civilization world with Ascension arts and psionics.
But it was not until Nauman City that Ian discovered Terra's waters might run deeper than he had imagined... A city with so much armored equipment and large-scale alchemical machinery was enough to prove that the civilization behind it had at least achieved Origin Matter industrialization.
Yet that was not the right answer either—only upon arriving in the Imperial Capital did Ian finally understand that the entire world of Terra was steeped in mysteries. It was not a normal civilized world at all; far too much technology beyond its age lay hidden beneath all manner of primitive appearances.
A backwater like Harrison Port and the Imperial Capital already had completely different aesthetics. It could even be called outright deception.
—Could the gap between a frontier town and the capital really be this enormous?!
—Oh, it really could be this enormous. Never mind. Ian was simply making a mountain out of a molehill.
Unlike the Imperial Capital, World Tree Capital gave Ian