Loki gathered his belongings early in the morning, before anyone in the orphanage woke up. He didn’t own much: some simple clothes, a piece of dry bread wrapped in cloth, a small knife he found in the house’s kitchen, and a small pouch of coins he had collected from his meager savings over the past days. He didn’t feel the weight of farewell as he expected, perhaps because this body wasn’t originally his, and perhaps because a part of him was more eager to get out than any other feeling.
Before leaving the village for good, he stopped at the small market held every morning at its entrance, where some traveling merchants used to display their goods before continuing to other villages. He sat next to one of them, a man in his forties carrying a cart full of simple metal tools, and asked him cautiously about things that felt embarrassingly basic.
"Where exactly are we?" Loki asked. "I mean... the name of this region, what governs it?"
The merchant looked at him with slight surprise, as if the question was strange enough to deserve a second look, then shrugged as if he was used to young people’s ignorance about such matters. "We are on the outskirts of the Ragna Empire, boy. The strongest empire on this continent, without dispute."
"Strongest?" Loki repeated, trying to make his question seem normal, not ignorant. "Compared to whom?"
"Compared to everyone around it." The merchant answered while arranging his goods. "There are six other kingdoms on this continent, all smaller and weaker than Ragna, some allied and some pretending to be neutral. None of them dares to face it directly."
He paused a little, then added in a lower tone, as if moving to a topic he didn’t like to talk about loudly. "And there’s another region, no one mentions its name much. Even the Empire itself avoids approaching it."
Loki became immediately interested. "A forbidden zone?"
"Something like that." The merchant said, his eyes moving around as if making sure no one heard them even though the square was almost empty at this early hour. "I don’t know many details, and I don’t think anyone in this village does. Only that armies don’t enter it, merchants don’t pass by it, and even nobles who like to boast about their armies go silent when its name is mentioned."
Loki didn’t get a specific name or more details than that, but he felt this amount of information was enough for now. A powerful empire, six smaller kingdoms, and a region feared by everyone, even the strong. A simple picture, but the first real map he drew in his mind about the world he now lives in.
He thanked the merchant and walked away, thinking about how to use this information later, when he noticed an old man sitting on a nearby bench, watching him for a while without intervening. He wore simple clothes but unusually elegant for an ordinary villager, and an old sword tied at his waist in a leather scabbard with worn edges.
"I heard you asking about the world." The old man said suddenly, without lifting his head from the sword he was polishing with a piece of cloth. "That’s rare among young people here, most of them care only about food and stories."
Loki approached with cautious curiosity. "Do you know a lot?"
The old man smiled a small smile. "I know enough to live to this age while carrying a sword." He looked at Loki from head to toe with a quick assessment. "You carry a different breath. You’re not a mage, that’s clear, no trace of mana around you at all. But you’re also not an ordinary fighter yet."
Loki stopped, not sure how to respond to such a remark from a complete stranger. "What do you mean?"
"If you want to take the path of the sword." The man said, finally putting his sword aside, "you have to understand a basic thing. Physical strength alone won’t take you far. You have to make a real effort to release what is inside you, a latent energy in every true fighter, something deeper than muscles. Some call it aura, some call it by different names, but in the end it’s the same idea: energy that needs discipline to appear."
This talk wasn’t completely strange; he had heard a similar version from the Caretaker days ago when he talked about aura and fighter stages. But something in the old man’s way made Loki feel that this talk wasn’t just passing information, but advice directed specifically at him.
"Thank you." He said finally, bowing his head respectfully.
The man shook his head without adding anything else and returned to polishing his sword as if the conversation had ended on its own.
Loki moved away from the market, taking the road leading out of the village, his heart heavy with more thoughts than it had been an hour ago. He walked for a while, until the last houses of the village disappeared behind a small bend, then stopped at the side of the road and summoned the window in a calm voice.
"Status window."
It appeared in front of him as usual:
[Host Status: Loki]
Level: Beginner
Hit Points: 100/100
Strength: E
Endurance: E
Intelligence: D
Speed: D
Internal Energy: E
He stared at the fourth line for longer than usual this time. He remembered the old man’s words, the aura a fighter needs to free himself from his physical constraints. He also remembered the Caretaker’s talk about aura and the sword. Everything he had heard so far pointed in the same direction: the path of the sword depends on an aura built by training, while the path of magic depends on mana. Two completely separate things, with no relation to each other.
But the line in front of him didn’t say "aura." It didn’t say "mana" either. It said something else entirely: internal energy.
Loki sat on a nearby rock, trying to understand what he was seeing. Everything he had read in his previous life about this kind of classification was linked to martial arts novels completely different from this world, novels where practitioners circulate internal energy through energy lines in their bodies, having nothing to do with swords or auras or mana as people here understand them.
"This doesn’t make sense." He muttered to himself. "This is a world of swords and magic, not a world of internal martial arts. Why then..."
He stopped talking, and looked again at the cover with which he had thrown the novel in his previous life, trying to remember any small detail that might explain this contradiction. He didn’t remember anything useful, since he had thrown the novel before even reading it.
An idea slowly began to form in his head, an idea he wasn’t ready to fully accept yet. If everyone else in this world walked either the path of aura or the path of mana, and he alone possessed something completely different that appears to him only through a window no one else sees, that means what is inside him is not just a simple difference. It might be something this world has never seen at all.
He looked at his hands for a long moment, then closed the window and closed his eyes, trying to feel any trace of that mysterious energy from within. He felt nothing clear, no warmth, no pulse, nothing distinguishing it from any ordinary feeling of tiredness after a long day. But the absence of feeling it didn’t mean its absence, only that he didn’t know yet how to touch it.
He finally got up, dusting off his clothes. "Okay." He said to himself in a low voice. "If I’m really different, I won’t know that from sitting here staring at a silent window."
He looked at the road stretching ahead of him, dirt and long, leading to regions he had never seen before and knew nothing about except the name of an empire and six kingdoms and a region feared by everyone. He smiled a calm smile, different from his usual sarcastic smiles, closer to a silent decision he had just made.
"Let’s find out then." He said, and began to walk.