An inn

A few days later Richard had found himself out of the forrest and run into a city. Starving because of his lack of survival skills he had promptly entered an inn to eat. Sadly when it was time for payment the owner became livid yelling at him what use round pieces of gold with silly drawings on them was of any use to him and why someone who though looking a little dirty and worn out but wearing such luxurious clothing did not carry a single tael of silver.

Thankfully the owner had taken pity on him seeing as he appeared to be a lost child that had probably ran away from his rich family, and reluctantly accepted to wait for him to go an exchange the gold coins for taels.

Pretty sure of being ripped of Richard had traded his forty-three gold coins for their gold worth after the crooked merchant had weighted his coins. While the necklace of translation allowed him to understand and speak to others while wearing it, it granted him no help with written language and he was therefore stumped on what to do when he was handed a list of prices for different items, amongst which gold was included.

Returning to the inn he had paid of his debt but seeing as a tael of silver was worth two meals and a room to stay per day he had taken up the kind offer and decided to stay for at least a night seeing as he was still exhausted from the lack of food and comfortable sleep. He was really not used to sleeping outside against a tree, being unprotected and weak also led to him awakening several times each times because of either animal sounds or bugs bites.

Asking around he was saddened by the lack of anything even remotely close to a library anywhere outside of the largest of cities to which it would most likely take months to reach. Most books belonged to the wealthy families and they guarded their knowledge closely.

The only bright point was that in a few weeks a place called the thundercloud sect would come to hire workers. Apparently they had recently found a large amount of resources and decided to expand, according to some there were rumors that large battle had taken place for these resources and because of it a lot of workers had lost their lives. But no one knew for sure, what they did know was that a small group of immortals would come from this place to hire several hundreds of workers.

The happiest part was that they had also decided to test every child under the age of sixteen if they were eligible to become immortals, usually one would have to travel to the sec during their entrance test which would only happen every five years, other then that you either needed to have connections, great wealth or a lucky encounter were an immortal took your fancy.

The immortals sounded very similar to battle mages, they could perform very strange and mysterious things that sounded similar to magic, on top of that they also seemed to have great physical strength The owner had even sworn that he had seen one of the member from a big clan in the city tear of the arm of a man trying to rob him, and his guess was this family member was already on the path of an immortal.

To his surprise the city which seemed to hold almost a hundred thousand people seemed to have most of its citizens living unaware of how the world worked. Perhaps knowledge was power and in this world the one's in power was not willing to share. It wasn't much different from his previous world though to a certain degree everyone seemed a bit to in awe of the immortals at most they sounded to be somewhat similar to a second to third tier wizard or another profession at a similar power level.

Still it was the only clue he had at the moment to grow stronger and perhaps return to his own world one day.

He tried his best to gather as much information as possible about this test to become an immortal. The owner and everyone who was willing to talk to a child would either shake their heads or spout some unbelievable tale of how they had previously gone through impossible tests only to fail at the last step, they were in other words simply spouting rubbish.

Many had started to believe that he was a young rich kid who had run away from home to become an immortal much to the protest of his family. He was often chastised for not being filial to his parent while others would commend him for chasing his dreams.

Weeks past by and while trying to live frugally he was almost out of money only having three taels of silver left meaning he could only stay and eat at the inn for another three days after which he would either have to sell one of his items or try to make a living in someway. Thankfully the thundercloud sect had already arrived but they had been holed up in the city owners house and seemingly done nothing outside of spreading the word that they would start the enlistment test in two days and recruitment of workers from today until they had hired six hundred workers or a week had passed by.

Finally he could see what immortals was all about.