Now that I got a solid look at it, I realized the town wasn’t as medieval as I thought. It had sophisticated water cisterns and various semi-automated bits of machinery. There just wasn’t much metal in the architecture.

  As it turns out, metal was a massive part of our everyday lives, and without it we had very little recognizable architecture. I mean, sure, there was siding and plaster and stuff like that. Many of the apartments around my residence were built from such materials. But in a place like this, where you didn’t have an overabundance of luxury goods, you turned to the most available source of solid building materials. In this case, that material was wood and thatch.

  I wandered down the main road, watching the various professions at work. Every one was fascinating. Outside, I had never gotten to see anybody else at work. I just swiped different items across a scanner and clicked a button that told me how much was owed back in change.

  In one building with a rather nice awning, a blacksmith hammered down on what looked like a massive war axe carefully balanced on an anvil. A coal forge and pair of leather bellows stood to one side, and a barrel of water to the other.

  Over to the right of him, there was a woman in a pointy hat who made a show of setting everything from clothing to utilities to weapons and armor on a simple wooden table before opening a massive tome and chanting over them. The weapons would spin up into the air, glowing arcane symbols flying into them from all directions, then settle back down looking no different than before. That must have been the enchanter.

  And even further down the road was the oddest sight I had ever seen. It was a man sitting in a small booth. It was a rickety thing, held together by sheer grit and determination on the wood’s part. The man was dressed in a style clothing I was well accustomed to. I hadn’t ever worn it myself, but I had come close a some points in my life. It was the desperate man’s rags.

  The man noticed my examination and waved me over. Walking over to him was a chore, as a crowd of people chose that exact moment to walk right in front of my face. I was forced to go across the stream, which proved more difficult that I had thought.

  When I reached him, the man smiled, revealing a mouth with very little teeth left. “You’re new here.” He said. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. And an accurate one at that. I wasn’t certain how he knew that.

  “What gave it away?” I asked.

  He snorted. “You’re not using your inventory. You still have that silly looking backpack to carry all of you thing for you.”

  That was right. I had an inventory now. I had forgotten about that.

  When a person was finally acknowledged and integrated by the system, they received a number of benefits. Some of them were quality of life, like the inability to get sick anymore. Others were more important. The more important benefits were things like the ability to grow your stats—or even have stats to begin with—beyond strictly mortal means, and the ability to store an unlimited amount of items in some sort of alternate space called an inventory.

  Things in the inventory would never change states. That meant a candle would keep burning without melting the wax any further, a bomb in the middle of exploding would maintain its integrity until it was removed whereupon it would promptly detonate, and food would never spoil.

  It was convenient. But it was also necessary for various combat styles. You couldn’t very well brew a strong but short-lived poison while a yeti was charging you, after all. And the system liked variety, which meant this kind of build most certainly existed.

  I opened my interface and flipped to the inventory tab. Now, how was I supposed to get it in there?

  “Just will it inside, and it’ll be there.” The man said.

  The backpack vanished, appearing inside my interface in a list of entries. The inventory tab now read:

  Money

  Bronze: 0

  Equipment

  Set of Clothes

  Items

  Daily Food Rations x15

  Water Bottle(Full)

  Set of Clothes x2

  Backpack

  Fairly self-explanatory. Apart from the lack of silver and gold entries, that was. The system was probably just pointing out my extreme lack of wealth.

  You know what, I didn’t care. The utility of the system more than made up for that particular flaw. This was brilliant.

  “Thank you.” I said. This really was helpful. If the man hadn’t pointed this out to me, I would probably have ended up fighting my first monster with all the extra weight on my back.

  “You’re welcome, son. Do you have any coin you could spare for a poor man in need? I’ll give you something special I found in exchange.”

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  I shook my head sadly, emptying my pockets to reveal the air they held inside. “I wish I did. But unfortunately, I am as broke as you are. I could give you a change of clothes, though you probably wouldn’t fit in them. Maybe some food?”

  The other man raised his eyebrow. “Did you check your back pocket?”

  My back pocket? I never put anything in there. It was hard to access, as it was too tight to slip anything other than my thumb and forefinger into. Not to mention anything I put back there dug into my backside and made me severely uncomfortable. There was nothing…

  Hang on a minute. There was something in there.

  Reaching back, I pulled out a pair of bronze coins. How had those gotten in there? I could have sworn there was nothing there a couple minutes ago. Anyway, he could have them.

  I tossed the two of them at him. “I don’t know how you knew they were in there when I didn’t know myself, and I’m not sure I want to find out. But here you go, two bronze for your services. What’s this something special you wanted to show me?”

  The two coins vanished before even touching the man. “Thank you, son,” he said, then clenched his fist hard. He opened it to reveal a small blue pebble. Tossing that to me, he continued, “I found this on the ground a while back. I can’t identify it, so I’m quite sure you can’t either. It may be useful in your travels, it may not. Who knows?”

  Looking down at the stone I had caught, I examined it. It was slightly opalescent, allowing a trickle of light to shine through.

  “Use your identify on it.” The man suggested.

  I did.

  ???

  Well that was useless. My identify didn’t even know what to do with it. That was odd. Identify was supposed to work on just about everything. Even Paragon level items should be identifiable, though it would probably kill me with the mental stress alone.

  Slipping the unidentifiable stone into my inventory, I nodded thanks to the man, then turned to go. I stopped. “I never got your name,” I said, turning back to him.

  But the man was gone, cart and all.

  Well that was perhaps the oddest interaction I had ever had, and I had had some weird ones in my day. Eighty year-old lady with dementia wanting to buy accessories for her baby daughter kind of weird. But I had somewhere to be, though, so I didn’t waste time thinking about it. My destination was right ahead.

  The Sanctuary was not at all what I was expecting it to be. Instead of a sprawling woodland park with pockets of monsters wandering it, the place was more like a kennel with a fighting pit attached.

  There were dozens of monsters lined up in cages against the wall, with what I thought were breeding pens in the back that housed hundreds more. The monsters raised a cacophony of howls, growls, and hisses as they clawed and bit at the bars, eager to make a meal from the intestines of any passersby.

  A sign was posted up front.

  Welcome to the Sanctuary. We pride ourselves on offering only the best selection of level one mobs for new dungeoneers to fight. Everything from babbling willow stumps to hot-bellied rattlers.

  Disclaimer. This is a charity organization. Feel free to donate to our cause if you have the finances to do so. Donations from new users not accepted.

  Warning. This service is for new users only. No person can fight more than one monster. Should you try to do so, you will be removed from this establishment and reported to the local authorities.

  There were two names on the sign-up sheet. I picked a pen from the small jar attached to the board and scratched my name in third.

  As soon as I did so, the gate beside me clicked and swung open, revealing a small path that led towards the fighting pit. There was a row of seats there. Wooden, of course. I had yet to see a single visible scrap of metal that wasn’t used for weapons or armor. But that was the culture here, I guess.

  I made my way hesitantly down the path and picked a seat. It was rough and unpolished, but it was more comfortable than sitting on the hard packed earth would have been. Or standing, for that matter. At least they didn’t have splinters like my door back home. That would have sucked.

  In the arena, a man was facing off against some kind of cat-tailed donkey with an extra long nose and razor sharp teeth. He had several long scratches down his arms and a slight tear in his shirt.

  What was he doing, punching that thing to death? Madness.

  But no, I saw the glint of something steel in his right hand. Maybe a dagger. I couldn’t quite make it out with the sun where it was in the sky.

  Then the donkey charged, and I saw what the man had been doing. He was bleeding the donkey with jagged gashes across its belly and flank. And it was working too. The donkey thing stumbled once as it started forward and the man took full advantage, bringing his chosen instrument of death up in a diagonal slash that took the monster in the throat as it recovered its balance.

  It collapsed to the floor, twitching, as blood spilled from its slit jugular. I shivered. That was gruesome, but I didn’t feel pity for the mob at all. Death would have been its fate either way.

  The girl who was up next chose a bow and summarily executed her abomination in one clean shot to the chest. Nice.

  And then it was my turn.

  I walked up to the gate and stepped inside the bloody arena. The floor was made of sand, which was both a boon and a problem. It was good because that meant the blood didn’t make things too slick to fight on. The problem was that the sand made maneuvering harder. Not that I had any technique in the first place. Far from it.

  There was a small rack of weapons to the side. I selected the sword, then immediately put it back. I couldn’t wield that thing. If I did, my death would be more likely to come from me falling on it than anything the mob tried.

  Shifting my attention to the spear next to it, I shook my head. To unwieldy. While I thought it might be nice to learn someday, if my class leaned that way, I wasn’t stupid enough to think I could swing the thing effectively now.

  The bow was equally unappealing. I was a terrible shot, even with crumpled pieces of paper. My old group of friends used to play games of dodgeball at the park when I was young. Even then I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.

  I picked up the shield. It was a standard round buckler, and it felt better. Not quite right, though. But it was the best option of the lot. Maybe I could use the sword and shield.

  Dismissing the thought out of hand, I picked up the dagger as well. It was still slightly bloody from the earlier man’s brawl with that horrid donkey thing, but it would be better than the sword, and far better than my bare fists.

  Raising my right hand with the dagger in it to signal the cage operator that I was ready, I stepped back and braced the shield with my arm and shoulder and waited as the door to the cage prepared for me slowly trundled open.