Tim's POV
The bowl was my best investment.
I'd found it in the refuse pile behind the orphanage kitchen cracked down one side, the bottom scorched black from some long-ago accident, useless for holding anything liquid. To the orphanage it was garbage. To me it was a prop, and props had value.
I carried it loose in one hand, held low, the way I'd observed real beggar children carry them. Not thrusting it forward aggressively, that drew irritation, sometimes violence from passersby who felt accosted. Just holding it, passively, visibley.
It worked better than I'd expected.
E-Rantel, I had come to understand over my months of careful observation, operated on a strict visual grammar. The clothes you wore, the way you walked, what you carried, these things communicated your place in the hierarchy instantly and completely. A beggar child with a cracked bowl read as furniture to most people. Not a threat, not an annoyance worth engaging with, not even quite a person in the way that mattered to busy adults with places to be. I became part of the street's background noise, as unremarkable as a gutter or a loose cobblestone.
This was enormously useful.
I extended my range steadily, week by week, memorising the city's layout the way I'd once memorised commute routes and office floor plans in my previous life. E-Rantel was not a small city, it had layers, a complexity that wasn't obvious from the orphanage's narrow corner of it. The lower ward where I lived was the most vermin-rich, naturally. Poor sanitation, crowded buildings, food stored carelessly. But the middle wards had their own infestations, hidden behind respectable facades, rats in the walls of merchant storehouses, cockroaches colonising the warm spaces behind bakery ovens, ant trails running beneath the floors of grain depots.
I hit them all, and hit them hard.
The work had developed its own rhythm by now. I rose before the other children, slipped out in the grey pre-dawn, and worked the alleys for two to three hours before returning in time for morning meal. Sometimes I went out again in the late afternoon, when the streets were busy enough that one more small figure moving purposefully attracted no attention. I had refined my methods considerably from the early days of a nail on a stick. I understood now which approaches were efficient and which wasted time and energy. Rats required patience and positioning, cornering them properly before striking, minimising the struggle. Cockroaches were pure volume work, best addressed at their nesting sites rather than chasing individuals. Ants were meditative, almost, a long slow accumulation that nevertheless added up.
The two copper coins had been unexpected and genuinely touching. An old woman near the market district, wide and aproned, carrying shopping in both arms, had looked down at me with an expression of uncomplicated sympathy and pressed the coins into my free hand before I could think of anything to say. She was gone before I recovered.
I held the coins for a long time afterward.
Two copper. By the standards of this city it was almost nothing, enough for a small loaf of bread, perhaps, or a handful of dried beans. But it was the first money I had ever held in this life, and it represented something beyond its face value. It represented the beginning of *resources.* Every journey started with a single step, every fortune started with a single coin, and I now had two.
I did not spend them. I wrapped them in a strip of cloth torn from the hem of my shirt and hid them in a gap in the mortar behind my sleeping mat. I went to sleep that night feeling, for the first time since my rebirth, something adjacent to optimism.
The harvest season arrived gradually, the way seasons do, first in the angle of the light, then in the smell of the air, then in the increasing traffic of carts through the city gates carrying grain from the surrounding farmland. The city took on a particular energy in harvest time, busy and slightly anxious, the way people get when something important and weather-dependent is almost resolved.
I was in an alley off the middle ward's grain storage district on the morning it happened, working through what had turned out to be a substantial rat colony behind a merchant's back wall. The rats here were larger than the lower ward variety, better fed, from proximity to stored grain, which made them slower and more complacent but also more experienced in avoiding threats. I had been working this particular colony for three days.
The fat one had been cautious. I'd spotted it before, always retreating before I could cut off its escape. But this morning it had miscalculated, gone left instead of right, and found itself in a dead end of broken crates and collapsed shelving. It turned and faced me with the cornered animal's particular furious despair.
I finished it cleanly.
And then the feeling came.
Different this time. Where the first level-up had been explosive, that rush of heat and sudden overwhelming power, this was gentler. A cool wave, almost pleasant, moving through me from crown to sole like a breeze through an open window on a warm day. There and gone in three seconds, leaving behind a subtle but definite sense of increased solidity. More of myself, somehow. More *present.*
I crouched there thinking about it carefully.
The diminishing intensity made complete sense when I considered the mathematics. The jump from level one to level two represented a doubling of everything, a one hundred percent increase in every statistic. Staggering, almost incomprehensible in physical terms. But the jump from level two to level three was an increase over an already-doubled base. The *absolute* gain might even be larger, but proportionally it was smaller, and the body registered proportion, not absolute numbers.
By the time I was jumping from level sixty-five to sixty-six, if I ever reached such heights, the change would be like adding a single drop to a bucket. There, technically. Essentially imperceptible.
Which raised a practical problem.
At some point, probably sooner than I'd like, I would lose the ability to gauge my own growth from feel alone. The sensation would become too subtle to trust. I needed an external metric, something the world already provided. And the world did provide one, in the form of the danger level system that adventurers and soldiers and anyone who dealt with threats used to assess opponents.
I didn't fully understand how danger levels were measured yet, it seemed partly intuitive, a skilled fighter's read on an opponent's bearing and capability. But I could learn. There were adventurers in this city, guild staff, soldiers. People who read danger levels professionally. I could observe them, ask careful questions, build up a working understanding over time.
Future me's problem, I decided. Current me had more alleys to clear.
I straightened up, noted the sky, still early, two hours before I needed to be back, and went looking for the next colony.
Panasolei Gruze Day Rettenmaier's POV, Governor of E-Rantel
The records did not lie. That was both their greatest virtue and, on mornings like this one, their most inconvenient quality.
Panasolei sat in his study on the third floor of the administrative hall, the season's tallied reports spread across his desk in neat stacks, a cup of tea cooling forgotten at his elbow. He was a careful man by temperament and a meticulous one by training, twenty-two years in civic administration had made him deeply suspicious of numbers that didn't behave as expected. Numbers that were too bad meant negligence or corruption somewhere in the chain. Numbers that were too good meant the same, just dressed differently.
These numbers were too good.
The grain collection figure he'd read three times now, convinced each time that he'd misremembered the previous year's baseline. He hadn't. A thirty-two percent increase in effective grain yield from the city's surrounding farmland and internal storage district was not a weather event. Weather gave you perhaps eight to twelve percent variance in a good year. Thirty-two percent was structural. Something had *changed.*
He pulled the secondary records. Storage loss from pests likes rats, insects, the inevitable attrition that every granary accepted as the cost of doing business in a city this size. He found the figure and stared at it for a long moment.
Down. Dramatically, almost absurdly down. What had previously accounted for an estimated nine to eleven percent of stored grain loss annually had apparently collapsed to something the assessors had recorded, with evident uncertainty, as *negligible.*
He picked up the health records next, a habit born of long experience connecting disparate data points. The city physician's quarterly report. Gastrointestinal illness, the persistent misery of the lower ward, the seasonal stomach sicknesses that hospitalised dozens every winter and killed the weakest among them with depressing regularity. This year's figures were the lowest recorded in his tenure. Possibly the lowest in the hall's records going back thirty years.
He set the papers down and laced his fingers together on the desk.
Reduced grain loss. Reduced illness, Increase in Crops. All three moving together, all three pointing toward the same underlying cause like tributaries flowing into a river.
The logic was clean and simple. The mystery was the cause.
He had his staff pull what they could. There had been no organised effort, he would have known about it, There had been no unusual weather patterns that might have helped the crops. He'd sent a query to the adventurers' guild asking whether any contracts related to mass healing had been registered in the past year. The reply had come back negative.
Whatever had reduced E-Rantel's problems had done so without any official record, without any organised effort, without anyone apparently noticing it happen.
He drummed his fingers on the desk.
In his experience, things that happened without anyone noticing them were either very small but powerfull group or very large organization, Insignificant things slipped through unobserved because they didn't matter. Significant things sometimes slipped through because they were *designed* to.
He considered opening an inquiry. Then he considered the paperwork an inquiry would generate, the staff time it would consume, the fact that the outcome of the inquiry would at best confirm what he already suspected, someone is helping e-rantel for no clear reason, without adding any meaningful policy implication. The city was healthier and richer than it had been. There was no crime here to investigate, no negligence to address.
He picked up his tea, found it cold, and set it down again.
"Must have been a Good Year," he said to the empty room, with the slightly defeated tone of a man who knew the explanation was inadequate and was choosing it anyway.
He closed the records, filed them neatly, and moved on to the next item on his agenda.
Near the walls of the city he administered so carefully, in alleys he had never walked and would never walk, a five-year-old orphan with rock smashing some poor rat's skull.
Tim's stats(Tim can't see his own stats).
level 3
Vermin killer [2/10]