I have found that it is easier to estimate weather patterns closer to the wealds where few if any powerful mageknights reside. While their spars, ascensions, and training don’t happen quite often enough to be called regular occurrences they throw the weather into chaos at least once or twice a year in the core regions of the empire.

  — Excerpt from Around the Empire in Two Years

  Day 253, 4:26 PM

  It’s been well over a moon since I started randomly helping out people in Thunderbluff. While I can’t say random acts of kindness filled the void in me, it certainly helped me feel better and escape the clutches of existential dread.

  Dandelion slowly became a synonym for helping people for an affordable price or fair reward. A portion of my work could be described as mercantile. I helped connect those who had needs with those who had the knowledge or resources they sought. The right potion often came from my private stock, but alchemical necessities were far from the only thing I offered.

  While doing everything perfectly had its own advantages, I had made a self-imposed rule - no period of ten days will happen more than thrice. The first loop I spent doing alchemy the whole time, visiting the rumor-house and major merchants right before redoing. In the second loop, I solved problems and watched out for any unwanted consequences, while I invested my time during the third loop into actually making human contact and not just solving others’ problems.

  While my hobby paid a bit, I also made some money on the side. It was a pittance made through the alchemy I practiced, barely two third-realm crystals, all of it put together. True, I could have earned thrice as much by looping over and over to achieve perfect results with less botched potions, but even that amount remained insignificant.

  If an average awakened earned their resources at the rate I was earning, they would need over forty years just to earn enough manarium to reach the fourth realm. And I was earning great money compared to my peers. Add sculpting and drawing mana in meditation on top of that and mastering their abilities through practice. I didn’t see anyone reaching the fourth realm in less than a hundred years without signing over their freedom to someone rich enough to fund them.

  Funny enough, what earned me the most manarium was getting stuff like information at the rumor-house and library access whenever I needed it and then just ignoring it in the next loop.

  Thoughts of the inanities of life drifted through my mind as I waved and greeted people whom I had helped since coming to this world, when I suddenly saw a very familiar youth in tattered clothes standing lost in the middle of the street.

  “Newstar, is that you?” I asked with genuine confusion. I had just left the alchemists’ guild, heading for the rumor-house when I saw him in the street. The boy had reached the third realm, and yet he looked like a beggar straight from the slums’ infirmary.

  “What happened?” I asked with genuine concern. Seeing the godlike champion brought so low made for a strange sight.

  “Sir Dandelion,” he whimpered, tears welling in the corners of his eyes as he recognized me. “Am I glad to see you! It was horrible. Some villains caused trouble for me at the gate, then the corrupt guards took everything I had and threw me into the dungeon for ten days. And the dungeon was horrible, they…”

  Newstar told me about his difficult first encounter with government corruption. The despair and disbelief in his eyes would’ve been funny if the young man wasn’t so miserable. His world-shattering loss was - less than a second realm manarium crystal, not even ten pieces of the first realm crystal and some tattered clothes. It was a loss a third realm awakened could bounce back from in a day doing just about any job demanding such a high realm. And yet, there he was, crying over an hour’s wage if not less.

  “Come with me, Newstar. I’ve got a room at the adventurers’ guild; we can talk about your troubles over some crescents and tea. While you need to experience some trials, what happened here was pointless.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Something Redo and your good friend Dandelion should fix.

  Along the way, Newt poured his heart out. He told me everything he had done after we had parted ways. He had used my potions to help two of his clansmen reach the third realm, and when he departed for Thunderbluff, he encountered some manabeasts fighting and profited a bit from it, snagging some cores and his distant cousin even awakened using one of them.

  As we entered the adventurer’s guild, I sensed the wrongness before making the second step inside. A woman wearing the light-blue uniform of the Everfrost Order impaled me with her gaze. I recognized her face immediately. There was a flash of recognition in her eyes as well, and the temperature in the room dropped so much that the other patrons shivered.

  “Are you Dandelion, once called Blackfist the Brigand, the former townlord of Hailstown?” The Everfrost order’s fairy stared at me, her mood not much different from what it was when she rampaged through the imperial city’s streets when she came searching for her granddaughter’s killer.

  I sensed a surprising amount of hostility from her, but that was utter nonsense. It had to be. She wouldn’t dare kill me in an imperial city in front of so many witnesses. Still, even with Redo available, I needed a moment to collect myself.

  “Greetings, I am Dandelion.” I cleared my throat. “May I have the pleasure of knowing who is asking about me?”

  She said nothing. Her eyes were sharper than anything I had ever seen in all my lives, her glare cutting me piece by piece until she finally spoke.

  “I am Iceflow Frostgrave. Three moons ago, three rogues assaulted my granddaughter in the streets, and you fended them off all by yourself.”

  The aura she exerted was terrifying. The guildmaster was looking at her from behind the counter, but he was as powerless as a child before her. The only defense he had against the force of nature personified was his status. That and the fact that the guild’s exalts wouldn’t tolerate anyone openly humiliating them by killing one of their managers.

  I waited for her to continue, but Lady Frostgrave remained silent.

  Is she waiting for me to speak? Maybe I should say something? Being passive in conversations—

  “Did you cooperate with the attackers to get some benefits out of me?” She said finally, and I guess the question was reasonable.

  “No, Lady Mageknight.” I answered without hesitation.

  “Did you pay them, or hire someone else to hire helpers?”

  “No, Lady Mageknight.”

  “Lie to me,” she commanded.

  The question stumped me, but then I realized what she was getting at. She thought that maybe she couldn’t see through my lies. I was good, but not that good. From what I understood based on the books I had read, mageknights at sixth realm and above could use mana to track neural activity in those of lower realm, effectively knowing when you were making up an answer.

  I cleared my throat. “The guildmaster behind the counter over there is extremely charming, the most beautiful example of womanhood I have ever seen.”

  “Oi!” the man shouted without a hint of fear.

  I thought the joke would break the ice, but I should’ve known better when speaking with a person surnamed Frostgrave. There wasn’t even a hint of amusement in her eyes. Fortunately, that removed a lot of other potential jokes in our future interactions, and I had a feeling the one with Lady Frostgrave would need major rehearsing.

  “Are you Dandelion Blackfist?” she asked with finality in her voice, like she had already reached her decision, and I only needed to confirm it.

  The air grew more murderous, and she had asked the question in a yes or no format that has no true answer. Without already having an answer and with both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ being lies, I had to come up with something on the spot.

  “That’s what everyone else calls me. I suffered an amn—” Before I could finish the sentence, the atmosphere took a turn for the worse.

  I immediately assigned all my stats into mental attributes, and the world slowed down. Shards of ice materialized as Lady Frostgrave prepared for attack, and I realized I had screwed up. Luckily, I had died so many times, so I remained quite rational with death glaring at me. I scanned my surroundings. Newstar was the only one within range of Vengeful, and I didn’t want him potentially remembering the loop.

  “You lied.” Lady Frostgrave said at a normal speed, and I kicked Newt away from me, straight out of the building.

  His ribs snapped, but he was a tough third-realm mageknight. Fractured ribs shouldn’t pose much danger to his life. Unfortunately, I had no time to consider his well-being.

  A swarm of icicles stabbed towards me. I raised a shield of fire, water flowing beneath it, but a Valiant’s mana was too solid, her power much greater than mine. She riddled me with holes, but didn’t kill me.

  “I’m taking you to the heresy hunters; they will sort out what sort of abomination you are.”

  In response, I conjured a ball of ice inside my chest and blew myself up.