Free Web NovelChapter 23: His Father’s Son
"Never bargain with a Goblin, a Fae or an Imp"
These were the words that lingered on Julius’s mind as he walked through the market district. Mudgob had told it to him as he prepared to leave the Inn this morning to head to the workers guild.
It was a new day and the market district bustled with activities from traders and buyers alike. This was the first time he had passed here. freewēbnoveℓ.com
He walked through the various stalls, selling their wares. Some of them had strange creatures who shared the same red skin, horns and tails as Zara but were smaller, ugly and basically naked.
The system did not flash a pop up to identify their race but Julius surmised they were Imps from Mudgob’s description. One of them looked at him for a moment before hissing.
He hadn’t seen Zara since that day at the Inn, Mudgob had asked details about the Demon and how Julius knew her but he couldn’t give proper answers.
All he could tell was she had decided to stalk him. The thought of that made him unsteady and slightly paranoid. He occasionally looked around as he walked but he couldn’t see her.
As far as Julius knew, she was another mystery this alternate world had dropped that he had to slowly come to terms with.
The Worker’s guild was through the market district and was an old looking building smaller than the Adventurers guild building.
Yumiko had offered to come along but he wanted to get a feel of the place himself. The Nekari had helped him last night with his eye irritation and he didn’t want to have to rely on her.
Besides, the system could generate a rough map of places he’d walked through, a circular minimap with a dot in the middle, buildings he’d passed were marked and everything else was blank. The range was limited and the data was temporary.
It was a subset of some skill the system wouldn’t reveal until he reached a higher tier, and reaching a higher tier meant using the current tier skills he had, consistently.
There was no progress bar to track and the system reminded him of his foundation training once in a while.
The system was another mystery to Julius. A floating interface that gave him powers, could chat with him, store items (except his phone and living things).
He had kept both daggers including the one Daren had given him in the inventory. There was a note on the screen.
[Iris’s note: You still have Daren Athaerius’s blade.]
"I’ll return it eventually."
[You have been saying that for days.]
"Why do now what can be done later?" He replied.
[The words of a procrastinator]
Julius did not refute that. The last project he was working on before being summoned into this world was a job that he was given two months to complete but the pay was mid and the client had communication issues and so he held it off till the week he was supposed to turn it in.
That’s future me’s problem now.
He wondered how his brother and his aunt were doing for a moment.
Their aunt was the youngest sibling to his late father, Emmanuel McKnight.
Julius had recalled details of his father last night. They were the last thing on his mind before he slept.
Emmanuel McKnight was the kind of man people remembered.
Generous to strangers, warm in any room he walked into, the sort who pressed money into a beggar’s hand without making a show of it. Julius had watched it his whole childhood.
Once he had seen his father sit two hours outside a pharmacy with an old man he’d never met, because the man’s daughter hadn’t come and his father didn’t want him to be alone. He’d been late to dinner but he never mentioned it.
Julius had thought as a boy that his father was the best man alive.
He’d learned otherwise.
Behind the warmth, Emmanuel was a man who couldn’t be kept warm enough by one woman and didn’t try. Two wives, affairs he barely hid. And once he’d decided his own cheating was nothing to be ashamed of, the rest followed naturally; if he could cheat, so could his wives and numerous partners, and what was the harm? To Emmanuel it was simple freedom.
Along the line, he realized he enjoyed it. The other men, with his wives and partners. He’d dressed it up in various words and the women went along with it. Some because they loved him, others for his money, some for reasons of their own.
Julius could never understand his father’s thought process, the same one that eventually got him killed.
The wrong woman, a husband too powerful with a name that wasn’t uttered carelessly and his father finding the affair funny. The man had warned him but pride comes before a fall as they say.
The news report ruled it as a tragic accident. Two dead. His mother had been with him that night. She hadn’t deserved the company she died in.
Julius had been old enough to understand. The careful way the adults didn’t speak at the funeral. He understood how the world worked from movies he had seen and his wretched uncle who was a lawyer.
In the end, he couldn’t hate the man but he couldn’t exactly forgive him either. The sequence of events that happened to him after his father’s death partly shaped him into the man he was.
Julius didn’t have an issue with his polygamy but he always wondered if his father could have handled it differently.
He returned his thoughts to the inventory. He briefly recalled the system was taking this breeding peace quest on a different angle than he expected.
A perverted system it seems.
[I am following a directive]
Whose directive?
[I am unable to assist with that]
That settled that. If only Vincent were here to explain what the system was, he thought.
He shut his eyes and let it all pass. The workers guild was in view now. He pulled up the inventory.
Money was the most important thing currently but he also had to be careful, if he was the last human and other races existed, he didn’t know what their relationship with humans was like.
Zara had told him to say he was Veshari, he also didn’t know what that was either. An idea was slowly forming, one that was interrupted as he opened the door of the Guild building only to come face to face with a goblin being lifted up by a familiar dwarf woman.
Her fox tailed companion was close by watching the ordeal with a shocked expression.
That is, until she saw Julius.
"Fancy seeing you here stranger." The kitsu gave a sly smile with the words. freewebnøvel.coɱ
The neutral expression on Julius’s face didn’t fade.
"Likewise...Joan."
