Taking the Mafia to the Magic World

Several days have passed since Vicente and Layla fought the ogres.

In those days, they continued their journey west, encountering and even fighting some powerful beasts. But they hadn't encountered any other kind of monster since the short fight against the ogres.

They had stopped in a city in the Seidel Kingdom, but after leaving that place, they were very close to leaving that state for good.

After the next city where they stopped to rest, their next stop would be the Chutha Dynasty, in the far east of that great state in the west of the Seidel Kingdom.

...

Vicente and Layla were finishing collecting a valuable medicinal plant they had found on their way earlier.

Such chance encounters were quite common in Polaris Realm. The continent was huge, and mana was found irregularly in nature. In addition, just like on Earth, living beings could spread all kinds of plants as they traveled, leaving behind food scraps and so on.

Many of these remnants would simply decay into garbage. But a few would succeed in establishing themselves and evolving, sometimes producing things of value to many people.

Even without the help of intelligent beings, nature could produce valuable resources almost anywhere. Therefore, there was a tremendous amount of wild resources all over the continent, and finding some of them during long journeys wasn't such a challenge.

Gathering these resources wasn't difficult, and after doing what was necessary, Vicente stored the small plant he had just picked up in his spatial ring.

He mastered it easily, and with it in his hand, all he had to do was wait until he returned to Saltstar City for someone to use it to produce pills and potions for his family.

"Someone is approaching us." He turned from what he was doing to warn his companion.

"Enemies?" Layla was worried, for gathering any wild resource carried the risk of battling over it.

Wild items had no owners, and as long as they weren't stored, third parties could witness their existence, something that didn't happen with properly stored items.

Why would a particular individual fight a stranger for items they didn't know one had? It wasn't possible to know what was in a person's spatial ring, so it was almost impossible to know a person's wealth just by looking at them.

But wild items had to be captured and removed from their place of origin before they could be stored. In the time before it was stored, people might notice its existence and know at least one of the possessions of the person who harvested it.

That could lead to disputes, so people in Vicente and Layla's situation always had to be aware of their surroundings and be ready to fight!

Vicente's eyes narrowed as he looked at the group approaching him and Layla before he sighed, more relaxed. "I don't think so. They're just newly advanced Mages. They're probably out here hunting pentagrams."

"So what do we do?"

"Let's move without attracting attention," Vicente said as he jumped to a branch that was 8 meters above the ground.

Layla moved as well and began to move through the branches alongside Vicente.

As they did so, they soon spotted the group of six Low-level Mages that Vicente had noticed, walking while standing in some sort of formation, ready to fight if necessary.

But as these newly promoted Mages moved cautiously, weapons in hand and mana circulating through their Magic Gems, they spoke in low voices.

"Jace, is this rumor you heard really true?" One of the two women in the group asked a blond man walking ahead of them.

"What rumor? Are you talking about The Skull City?" The blond man, who appeared to be middle-aged, asked.

"Yes. About the opportunities that are supposedly available there. I heard from Mateo that a Paragons of New Hope member entered that place when he was a Low-level Mage. He left the area a year later with a High-level Mage's cultivation." The woman said, attracting the attention of two people a few meters above where they were walking.

'Oh?' Vicente looked in the direction of that group with interest.

The blond man nodded in agreement. "That's right, it's not just a rumor. After this breakthrough, this man received a grand prize when he returned to the Chutha Dynasty.

He was a low-ranking elder when he learned about The Skull City on the border of our kingdom and the Chutha Dynasty. Less than three months since his return to the Paragons of New Hope sect, he has become a mid-ranking elder with the right to enter one of the four known Magic Fountains in that state."

"That's incredible!" One of the other three men in the group commented. "Are you interested in venturing into The Skull City, Julia?"

The woman who had asked about it replied. "Why wouldn't I be? We're only subordinates of Marquis Todd and Smith. It took me 180 years to reach my current level, while it took Jace 110 years, even though he's the most talented of us.

If we rely on our talents and the resources of our leaders, we will never become Sovereigns. We'll die long before then."

The other woman in the group agreed. "If we're going to advance without special external resources, it would take us longer to become High-level Mages than we have to live.

Even Jace will need at least 1,000 years to become a Sovereign. But he has 300 years left..."

Ordinary magicians, without many resources to cultivate, without many artifacts, without the best medical treatments for recovery, and without special places to train or people to guide them, usually needed the sum of their years of effort for each advance.

If it took a person 100 years to become a Low-level Mage, it would take them 100 years to become a Mid-level Mage. If it took them 200 years to become a Mid-level Mage, it would take them another 200 years to become a High-level Mage. That would make such a person 400 years old when they became a High-level Mage, and they would not become an Earth Sovereign until they were 800 years old.

But the average life expectancy of a Mage was only 400 years!

Hence the women's concern.

It was crucial to cultivate quickly at the beginning of the magical journey. If one is slow at the beginning, it might be challenging to progress in the future, and one might die of old age before reaching their potential.

The longer a person waited to cultivate, the slower their progress would be.

However, this was true for cultivation without the use of any external equipment or resources, that is, just through regular meditation!

Jace said. "That's true. We will have to take a little risk if we want to break through the 3rd stage in the future. But for now, let's focus on getting good pentagrams for ourselves!"