After leaving the dance room, Rudeus headed straight for Philip's office.
He knocked on the heavy mahogany door and, after receiving permission, pushed it open.
Philip, one of the Asura Kingdom's top politicians, was buried in mountains of territorial documents and letters from all sides.
When he saw that it was Rudeus, his slightly weary face immediately relaxed.
He set down his quill and gave him a gentle yet inscrutable, foxlike smile.
"Oh, Rudeus. What can I do for you?"
"Lord Philip, I'd like to leave the city for the next three days."
Rudeus bowed slightly and got straight to the point.
"Leave the city?" Philip's narrow eyes narrowed further as he regarded him with a hint of surprise.
"Yes. Eris's birthday is in a few days."
"As her tutor, I'd like to personally prepare a sufficiently special birthday gift for her."
Rudeus met his gaze openly and smiled, his tone utterly assured:
"Please rest assured, I'll be back before the birthday banquet begins."
Philip stared at me for a few seconds. Then the lines of his face softened completely, and approval and relief flashed in his eyes.
Rudeus cared so much about Eris that he was even willing to go to such lengths for her gift. The old fox was clearly more than happy to see it.
"If it's for Eris, then naturally, I have no reason to object."
"Go on, Rudeus. Stay safe. I look forward to the 'surprise' you bring back."
With permission granted, Rudeus felt a weight lift from his shoulders.
He strolled out of the heavily guarded Boreas mansion.
Humming a tune, he wound his way through the streets until he reached a secluded alley where absolutely no guards or passersby would come through.
He looked around, the corners of his mouth curling up slightly.
A powerful surge of magic raced through the meridians in his body and across his skin.
In an instant, his body refracted all light and turned completely transparent, blending perfectly into the air moving around him.
Next, he pressed his right index and middle fingers together in a sword gesture and pointed gently into the empty air.
With a crisp, piercing sword cry, a flying sword radiating a chilling gleam materialized in midair.
This was metal magic.
It was an extension of earth magic.
He leaped lightly onto the blade, becoming an invisible streak of light imperceptible to the naked eye.
Riding the sword, he soared into the sky, tearing straight through the thick clouds and rising into the heavens.
He usually had to play the mature, steady prodigy. It was rare for him to have leisure time like this, when he could let himself go completely without anyone bothering him.
Standing on his flying sword, he drifted aimlessly through the high-speed currents ten thousand meters above the ground, looking down at the towns as tiny as ants and the rolling mountains beneath him.
Still, wandering was one thing.
The main purpose of this trip was to see whether he could try his luck in those rarely visited, untouched wildernesses.
Perhaps he could find a "wild secret realm" that no one had discovered or set foot in yet.
Reality proved that he had somewhat overestimated his luck, however.
He spent an entire day drifting through the air on this outing.
Only when dusk fell once more and blazing clouds rolled across the horizon like fire and blood,
did Rudeus's vast mental perception net, spread over a radius of several kilometers, finally detect an extremely well-hidden fluctuation of magic with an unusual frequency in an unknown mountain range on Asura's border.
"Found it!"
His eyes lit up, and he immediately angled the sword downward.
Like a silent meteor, he plunged headfirst into the entrance to the secret realm, hidden in a fissure in an enormous valley.
The moment he entered the secret realm, darkness fell around him, and the air was filled with an ancient, decaying, damp odor.
Rudeus didn't let his guard down for a moment, keeping his perception magic at its utmost throughout.
In an instant, everything within several hundred meters-even a crawling insect or a tumbling pebble-formed a clear 3D panoramic image in his mind.
Before long, however, he was rather disappointed.
The monsters here were far too weak. According to his perception, among the several groups of demonic beasts he encountered along the way, there was basically not a single one that even reached C-rank.
For him as he was now, dealing with them didn't even require swinging a sword. A casual application of telekinetic distortion could burst all their heads.
With the overwhelming advantage of his perception magic and "full-map hack," he didn't even pause once.
As casually as if he were taking a stroll, he slaughtered gods that stood in his way and demolished everything by force.
In less than an hour, he cleared the realm without taking a scratch and forced his way into the lord's hall at its deepest point.
"Boom!!"
As the last elite monster guarding the way-a massive but equally fragile creature-fell unwillingly to the ground and crumbled to pieces, the defensive crystal at the center of the stone hall instantly shattered.
He strode forward and picked up the clearance "reward" from the stone platform-
a magic crystal about the size of a fist, radiating pure, deep-blue energy.
He held the crystal in his palm, injected magic into it, and weighed it in his hand. Then he pulled a regretful grimace.
Looking around, he saw that aside from the magic crystal, which was of fairly decent quality, the place was empty.
There wasn't even a trace of a legendary ancient holy relic or a piece of rare equipment.
"Tsk, this place is seriously poor. It doesn't even have one decent piece of rare equipment."
Rudeus sighed regretfully and shook his head, tossing the crystal into his system inventory before turning and striding away.
When he stepped out of the secret realm and a cool breeze from the nighttime valley brushed against him, he looked up at the vast starry sky and gave a self-deprecating smile.
He had been clinging to a little hope that he might get lucky and "freeload" a top-tier gift in the wild that would amaze Eris.
Now it seemed his freeloading plan had completely fallen through.
Still, it was no great loss.
"After all... I'm the one who really has a cheat."
He conjured another flying sword and leaped onto it. As he sped homeward on the sword, he deftly summoned the long-unseen System Shop in the depths of his mind.
A pale blue virtual panel unfolded before his eyes in an instant.
He looked at the string of figures in his account balance, which had become extremely substantial after accumulating for so long.
He already had 2,105,362 Emotion Points, and the last trace of anxiety in his heart vanished.
For some reason, lately he had been seeing long strings of increases in his Emotion Point records.
Each increase was generally small but frequent. It seemed that someone had spread news about him, causing a large influx of inexplicable Emotion Points.
But it didn't matter. The more of this stuff, the better; where it came from wasn't important at all.
Since the drops in the wild weren't any good, he could just spend some points when the time came and exchange them for a high-grade piece of top-quality equipment from the System Shop to give Eris.
Anything from the system was bound to be top quality. Whether in power or appearance, it would definitely suit that tsundere young lady's tastes perfectly.
An image involuntarily surfaced in his mind: Eris's cute expression when she received the gift in a few days, loving it to death inside but still letting out an awkward huff.
Rudeus couldn't help chuckling aloud.
The flying sword beneath his feet sped up a little more, becoming a streak of light that tore through the night sky.
Like a meteor chasing the moon, he sped toward the Boreas mansion.