They told me Valorheim was expensive. What they meant was: fifty gold coins would last me about three weeks in the capital if I ate once a day and slept in a hallway.
So I took a cart to Millhaven.
It cost two silver, took four hours, and the driver talked the entire time about his son-in-law, who was apparently a disappointment. I nodded at appropriate intervals and thought about my situation.
Minor Enhancement. Scroll duration extension. Elixir improvement.
What does that actually mean in practice? I didn't know yet. I'd tried it once, in the inn room the night before — picked up a cheap Light scroll I'd bought for three copper, pressed my hand to it, pushed mana in the way you push mana into anything, and felt something happen. Something small. The scroll felt different afterward. Denser, maybe.
I'd activated it. It lasted about thirty percent longer than the merchant said it should.
Thirty percent, I'd thought. That's not nothing.
It wasn't enough to be impressive. But it was real, and it was measurable, and that was more than the court wizard's dismissal had implied.
Millhaven was smaller than the capital, louder than it had any right to be, and smelled like a river. The Adventurers' Guild branch was easy to find — it was the building with the most people going in and out and the loudest argument happening near the door.
I registered. Paid the fee (five silver, which hurt). Pressed my hand to their assessment stone.
The guild clerk — a tired woman in her forties who had clearly seen everything — looked at my status readout, looked at me, and said, "Minor Enhancement."
"Yes."
"Scroll extension."
"Yes."
"G-rank starting assignment. Herb gathering, vermin extermination, delivery runs." She slid a board across the counter with available jobs listed on it. "Welcome to the guild."
Vermin extermination, I thought. I was almost a hero. I was in the room. The circle grabbed me too. And now I'm going to kill rats.
"Great," I said. "Perfect. Very exciting career trajectory."
She didn't react. She'd definitely heard it all before.
The rat job was in a warehouse on the south end of town. Twenty copper on completion. The job listing said "minor infestation," which turned out to mean seventeen rats, two of which were the size of a medium dog and had, for reasons the universe had apparently decided I needed to experience, slightly glowing eyes.
Those are magic rats, I thought, standing in the doorway with a stick I'd found outside. Someone gave rats magic. Someone in this world looked at rats and thought: you know what these need? Enhancement. Let's enhance the rats.
I went in anyway because twenty copper was twenty copper.
The regular rats scattered when I moved through. The two big ones didn't.
Here's what I learned about fighting in a fantasy world: it's nothing like how it looks in fiction. There's no elegance. There's no choreography. There's just two glowing-eyed rats charging at your ankles while you swing a stick and make sounds that you will never repeat to another human being.
I hit one with the stick. It bounced off a crate and came back angrier.
Use the scroll, I thought, grabbing one from my belt — a cheap Shock scroll, two uses, bought this morning specifically for this. I pushed mana into it. Let the enhancement run first, a quick pass, the way I'd been practicing. Felt it settle.
Activated it.
The arc of electricity was small, the kind of thing a proper mage would sneeze at. But it hit both rats at once and they went stiff and then very still.
I stood there breathing hard, stick in hand, two dead magic rats at my feet.
The scroll had three uses after the enhancement, I noted. Started with two. I've been practicing and the rate is improving.
I collected my twenty copper and went back to the guild smelling like a warehouse.
Over the next two weeks I did six more jobs. Herb gathering twice (boring, peaceful, I'd take it). A delivery run to a farm outside town (fine, except the farmer's dog hated me specifically). Three more vermin jobs.
In between, I practiced the enhancement.
I bought cheap scrolls — the grey-market stuff that burned out fast — and ran enhancement passes on them until I understood what I was doing. The mana flow had a texture to it, almost. The scroll's internal structure would resist at first and then settle, like pressing a crease out of paper. Too fast and nothing happened. Too slow and I wasted MP. There was a rhythm to it.
By the end of the second week, I could push a two-use scroll to four. Consistently. Without wasting mana.
It stacks, I'd realized on day nine, which had been a good moment. I can run multiple passes on the same scroll. There's no cap.
I'd sat with that for a while.
Every other enhancement skill in the world had a cap. You couldn't double-enhance a sword — the skill wouldn't take a second pass. It was a known limitation. The court wizard had explained it to the class during the stat briefing, back in the throne room.
Minor Enhancement, being too weak to matter, had apparently never needed a cap.
You idiots, I thought, not for the first time, thinking about the court wizard. You looked at this and called it trash without asking why it didn't have a limiter.
I bought a better dagger with my earnings. Enhanced the edge. Felt it sharpen under my hands into something cleaner than the metal deserved to be.
I was, by every official measure, F-rank. A G-rank adventurer with a minor utility skill.
I was also, as of yesterday, the person who had quietly tripled the effective yield of every scroll in his possession.
Fifty gold, I thought, looking at the dagger. They gave me fifty gold and thought that was the end of it.
I put the dagger away and went to get dinner.