Sunday Pilots 2 - Golden Heart [2/2] – An Isekai [Sent into a fantasy world] Story (Patreon)

I don’t want a buffer on these ones and I already got the one for next Sunday done, so here is the second part of last Sunday’s pilot.

Rebirth was certainly an interesting experience, especially the first four years. There is just something to be said about being a toddler with memories you cannot yet make sense off. As to who my parents were this time around, I couldn’t tell you. I grew up in orphanage, thankfully not the poor kind.

It was only as I grew up that the memories of what and who I was began dawning on me in a structure that made sense. If there was one thing I hated about this whole rebirth business, it was going through childhood and puberty twice. Even with all the knowledge of already being through it once, the whole rampant hormones made it hard to not be moody.

Still, once I realized what and who I was, being a former denizen from another world, that made my life a bit weird. Especially since I suddenly spoke two tongue, the English from my homeland and the words of Shapen. Shapen being the tongue of humanity in this world. Yes, indeed all of known humanity spoke this language or at least an understandable dialect of it. The thing about this world was that humanity didn’t really know a lot of it.

The Shaped Known, that was the name of this corner of the world (or maybe it was the whole world, scholars weren’t sure on that one) and almost all of humanity inhibited the aptly called Safe Lands. Vast rivers stretched this land, with a mild and predictable climate, the winters were short and the harvest long. It was ideal farmland for both cattle and crops. What little strife there was between town, villages and cities rarely escalated into violence. If it did, it was quickly put down by the same forces that prevented most of it through brokered negotiations, being the Church of the Tranquil Age in the south or the nobility off the capital of the Safe Lands – Triritha.

Triritha, and that I could say from first hand experience, was a beautiful city full of high towers and wealthy, friendly people. Truly, the Safe Lands were as close as humanity could get to garden Eden.

Which was exactly why I got out of it as soon as I turned old enough to get a job, which was fourteen. I had not come to this strange land in order to end up in another secure, safe and extremely boring job. I refused, I had a whole new body, a new name and fourteen years to test and forge my resolve. That was quite needed as well.

I wasn’t just suddenly tossed into this world with nothing but my old body, only to suddenly become a better person than I was in old circumstances. Which was exactly what would have happened if I wouldn’t have gone through a complete rebirth cycle.

It was something that I realized when I was around ten years old in this world. If god had sent me to this world in the body I had before, I would probably have just fallen right into some other, secure routine. Oh, I would have marvelled at the magic of this world, the renaissance feeling and the opportunities of it all. I would have tried my hand at adventuring, without a doubt. Would I have stuck around? Doubtful.

No, it was the opportunity to readjust my entire life towards a calling that didn’t exist in my world of origin through the process of growing up again that gave me the opportunity to actually pursue this. The only head start I was given in this was the knowledge of an adult in a growing body. To be fair, that was quite the strong advantage to have.

The job I picked for myself had been that of a courier. It was a niche job, but a necessary one. There were normal postal services, but those only travelled in intervals between certain points and tended to be rather slow. There were a lot of people, particularly rich ones, that wanted their messages carried around immediately and, at best, directly to the target. Even in a secure world, humans loved their secrets. 

As to why I picked that job in particular, I wanted to explore the unknown, but by then my experience of my former life had manifested itself in something like wisdom and if there was one thing that adults had ahead of adolescents it was the knowledge that there was absolutely no value in tackling things far above your weight class. 

The trick was to try a little bit more than you could currently chew each time.

Diving straight into a desert with no skills to my name aside from bureaucracy and videogames sounded stupid. So, I took the courier job and travelled further and further distances each time. The soles of my young feet became used to the strain. The only real danger in the Safe Lands were wolves, who you really needed to try to encounter as the lush forests did enough for them to keep them out of the settlements. 

There was another valuable thing being a courier allowed me to do though: Gaining connections. In the courier guild I soon became known as the Unrelenting Boy, just the Unrelenting once I grew something that could charitably called a beard and people spied me visiting a…house for lady favours the first time. The former I shaved off, the latter I actually made a habit out of visiting sometimes. STD’s weren’t a concern thanks to the healing magic of the priesthood, albeit most of them didn’t approve catching you with any. I passed that cup so far.

The reason for my title was simply that I would barely rest between missions. As the job was well-compensated and travel took a long time due to a lack of horses, this world only had cows to slowly pull carts, most people worked in bursts. They would take a mission or several, depending on individual length, fulfil them and then spent times with friends and family until the money became tight.

Being that I once again didn’t put in the effort to gain anything I could call friends and with no family to speak of as an orphan, I had nothing in that direction to shackle me. It seemed like my nature was made for jobs like these, as I just didn’t feel that thing that bound me to a certain place. Rather, I felt the unknown call out to me, and I listened whenever I could. The longest I staid in a place was for six months to learn the basis of magic. My favourite spell was one to conjure tools, but more on that another time.

Basically, I turned myself into a jack of all trades. Magic, craftsmanship, outdoor survival, weapon and tool skills, I learned at least something of all of it. That had been my nickname in the old world, ironically enough, Jack, short for my last name Jackson. My first name was Timothy though, not Michael.

Now there were many things that could be said about Timothy Jackson, but not that it was an adventurer’s name. I remembered the name, because it was a binding to my old life that provided me with all of the valuable experiences to get this one on track. It was a memento, a rather strong one at that. 

For everything else, I went with the name given to me by the orphanage, Koith. My only gripes with that name was that it sounded a bit like the word ‘cough’, but beggars can’t be choosers. For a last name, I could have given the name of the orphanage, but I preferred to use the one I earned. When asked, I called myself Koith Unrelenting. That sometimes gave people with snappy humour an easy opportunity to ask how my lungs were doing or something to a similar effect.

It was a pretty basic fact of life that people were going to make fun of whatever name you had though, so I didn’t mind it. I had earned the name, I would keep it until I would get one I liked more.

I should come to a finish about me though. After spending four years as a basic courier, I then took some riskier jobs in the south, where the Safe Lands ended and the human settlers fought against the Hurdling Sands, a desert they attempted to push back using magic. It was a slow project, one that had already seen generations come and would see many more go. It showed how most of human society operated, in perpetuity. 

Eventually all of the desert would be liveable, that I didn’t doubt, but that was a task for normal people. It wasn’t honourless in the slightest and I won’t stand on soapbox and proclaim it was easy either, it just didn’t take a man of particular ambition. 

I may not have been outstanding in my talents, but I had decided that I wanted to etch my names into the annals of this worlds history through exploring the unknown. That had been my wish and god actually had hurled me into a world that was perfectly suited to fulfil it. 

The Shaped Known, that was the name of this world, for a simple reason. The most basic of all basic spells, one so easy that children as young as four could learn it, was the conjuration of a projection of this world.

The question whether this was actually the entire world or just a corner of it, I didn’t know the answer too. The ocean waters were inhabited by giant sea serpents that made long distance naval travel dangerous or downright impossible, depending on who you asked. The more they leaned towards dangerous, the shorter they lived, usually. Those serpents largely avoided the Safe Lands though, this are was like an untouchable cradle for humanity.

What I did know though, was that more than half of it was a mystery. Everything greyed out, no human had ever set foot into. To the west a massive mountain range blocked human from exploring the rest of the continent and a nest of a particularly old sea serpent prevented humans from taking the northern part around. Meanwhile, the southern path was blocked by the lack of suitable places to build a port, the Hurdling Sands made it impossible.

The Hurdling Sands had gained their names because they were exactly that, a giant hurdle. In the span of history, it had only been relatively recently that a route that allowed travel all the way south of it had been discovered. It was dangerous, even now. It would take a couple more decades until the desert would be pushed back enough to make it commercially viable.

Still, the first wave of explorers established the settlement of Fool’s Bridge where this continent connected to the southern one. They called this continent the Half-grey Craddle, while the southern one had the name written over it, the Explorer’s Frontier.

The Grasping Isles had been named for their appearance as a hand trying to pluck the eye of the Eastward View. I guess anyone could guess what the Eastward View had thus been named for.

Rivers, ruins of unknown civilizations, different landscapes, other races, there was no telling what was out there. Perhaps a few people knew, perhaps someone in Fool’s Bridge had gone further west than the map indicated, it took a different spell to share what one knew with the world. If there were such people, I had to wonder why they didn’t.

After all, if you were the first to discover something, you got to name it and there was no way to falsify that it had been you who named it. You got to change the map for all the world to see, literally updating the collective consciousness. The god that had thought of this had wisely exempted big objects from that rule, so nobody could rename the Unknown Nearbies into the Land of Dicks and Honey or something, but still. Massive glory was to be found out there, for everyone who could survive the journey.

I was driven to survive and find. Find rivers and ruins, landscapes and races, the unknown and the consistent. I would find it all and more important than just finding it, I would be the one to do so first. Would grasp for the centre of all that new knowledge out there and touch the golden heart that lay there.

That was my calling to be fulfilled in this new world and now I was ready to begin.