Morning sunlight spilled through the billowing curtains, pooling across Leon's face.
Bright patches drifted over the floorboards as the fabric swayed. Outside, birds chattered in the dense canopy of the courtyard trees, their songs woven together with the droning of cicadas into a midsummer symphony.
Leon surfaced from sleep with his mind blank, staring unfocused at the wooden ceiling.
It took a few moments before awareness sharpened and thought returned.
He glanced at the clock on the wall. Nearly nine.
"This late already... yesterday must've taken more out of me than I thought," he murmured.
Kicking off the thin summer blanket, he swung out of bed, threw the window wide, and drew a long breath of morning air. A full-body stretch cracked half the joints in his back.
"Ahh..."
"God, that felt good. Sleep really is the ultimate luxury. Thank you, brain, for not pulling the insomnia card."
Through the lattice of branches and dappled shade, Babel rose pale against the distant skyline. He could almost feel the city's pulse thrumming beneath it.
"Right then, time to tend to my little darlings."
The sight of his thriving garden put a grin on his face. Still in a tank top and shorts, he grabbed the watering can and got to work, taking his sweet time about it.
Between pours, his eyes drifted to his injured left arm.
Where yesterday's pain had been a white-hot drill boring into bone, now there was barely a twinge.
"Damn... healed up this much overnight? Back home that'd be a hundred days minimum, and here it's already scabbed over. This world is something else."
He flexed the arm gently, testing the range of motion, and let out a low whistle.
"Hmm hmm hmm..."
The summer morning was crisp and comfortable. Leon watered his plants, humming tunelessly, fingers of awareness idly flipping the internal switch that called up his magic interface. Nothing wrong with admiring his own stat sheet now and then, savoring that private little thrill.
"Mm... hm?"
A flicker of confusion crossed his face.
First glance: same as always.
Second glance: still the same.
Third glance: something was off.
"What's different..."
He froze. The watering can tilted, pouring a steady stream onto the same spot without his noticing.
His gaze raked across the dense rows of data, scanning and re-scanning, checking every line.
Then his eyes swept past the Level field, and locked on.
It was flashing.
Level: Lv. 1+
He stared at the pulsing characters. Lv. 1+. Blinking over and over.
"...?"
"What the hell?"
"Since when does my level blink? Did I miss something?"
He spun around, strode to the stone bench in the courtyard, set the watering can on the table, and sat down to focus.
Tentatively, he pushed his consciousness toward the plus sign after the flashing text. A prompt materialized:
Level: Lv. 1. Great Feat requirement met. Level-up available. Confirm?
"..."
Leon said nothing. Just stared.
The silence said everything.
"I... can level up already? When did I complete a Great Feat? You're supposed to accomplish the impossible for that. Like fighting something way above your level..."
"Wait."
It hit him like a thunderbolt. A skill effect he'd been mentally filing away as background noise.
His gaze snapped downward to the skill list.
Proof of Traversal
Defies convention. Diverges from common sense.Excelia may be freely allocated, or combined with offerings for limit breaks.Excelia threshold required for level advancement drastically reduced.
His eyes bored into that third line. Excelia threshold required for level advancement drastically reduced. The words burned in his vision like staring into the sun.
A few seconds later, comprehension detonated.
Leon jolted to his feet so hard the bench scraped against stone. His expression split wide open with realization.
"So that's what 'drastically reduced Excelia threshold' actually means in practice."
"Ha..."
"Hahahahahaha!"
He pressed a hand to his forehead and laughed like a man unhinged, looking every bit the lunatic.
"That fight with the special variant... for someone at my level, that thing basically counted as an equal opponent, right? It sure as hell made me feel like I was about to die."
"So under Proof of Traversal's rules, a life-or-death battle gets counted as a qualifying Great Feat. That actually tracks."
Sure, it was technically a Lv. 1 mob. But a special variant Lv. 1 mob. Close enough to "evenly matched" when you were staring down the barrel of your own mortality.
He looked at the blinking plus sign again. The grin spreading across his face could've bent steel.
The Great Feat box was checked. But he already knew the rest of the equation. No adventurer in their right mind leveled up with stats below D-rank — that was 500 and above. Anything less and you'd be crippling your foundation permanently. He'd known that since before he ever set foot in the Dungeon.
A glance at his Basic Abilities confirmed it. Not a single stat had cracked 500. Not even close.
Good. No temptation to rush it.
He dismissed the notification and shelved the whole idea. Way too early to worry about that.
The real problem staring him down was his stat potential ceiling.
Full circle. It all came back to Excelia and money.
"Oh, right. Almost forgot about yesterday's little bonus."
He ducked inside and retrieved the branch, turning it over in his hands.
"This has to be a Great Sacred Tree Branch. The way it channels and amplifies magical energy... no wonder it's one of the best materials for crafting staves."
His mind drifted back to the figure he'd crossed paths with in the Dungeon.
"That guy... if I had to bet, he's an Evilus grunt. They're already stockpiling these things? Then again, this stuff is restricted. Barely hits the open market. If you want to hoard a serious supply, you'd need to start early. Makes sense they'd be collecting now."
The pieces clicked together with the intelligence he'd gathered earlier, and understanding crystallized.
"The chaos in the Dungeon was a diversion? Cover for their real operation on the surface?"
He rubbed his chin, the shape of Evilus's scheme coming into sharper focus.
Then he measured it against his own situation. His expression flickered between calculation and temptation.
"If I could find Evilus's supply cache and clean them out..."
"With that kind of haul, I'd save ninety percent on staff-crafting materials. The leftover Great Sacred Tree Branches could solve my funding problem entirely. Hell... I might even be able to push every one of my stat caps to top-tier."
But a sober assessment cooled the fantasy fast.
"No. Even if I found the warehouse, I don't have the firepower to pull it off. The risk is way too high. Not my style."
"Actually... hold on."
His eyes lit up. A plan took shape, and if it worked, this could be the break that launched everything.
"No rush. There's plenty of time. Once the Familia and I have built up some real strength, then we move. Safer that way."
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, tamping down the restless energy coiling in his chest.
When he opened them again, the everyday calm had returned.
"Food first."
...
After throwing together a quick breakfast, Leon packed up his battle-damaged gear, changed into civilian clothes, locked the door, and headed out.
The narrow lane in front of his home hid itself among the trees, shaded and quiet, sunlight scattering in coins across the pale stone pavers.
Orario sat at the far western edge of the continent, close enough to the ocean to enjoy mild weather year-round. The midsummer breeze that brushed his face carried a comfortable warmth without the usual bite of heat.
He turned onto the main road with the ease of long habit, and the full spectacle of Orario crashed over him.
Broad avenues wide enough for four carriages abreast stretched ahead, flanked on both sides by shops packed shoulder to shoulder. At the center of it all, Babel towered against the sky, and the Labyrinth City radiated outward from it in every direction, flaunting its vitality with a kind of shameless grandeur.
Leon had walked this route more times than he could count, but the scene still stirred something in him. Compared to the steel-and-glass canyons of his old world, this ancient city where gods and mortals lived side by side spoke to him on a different level. Centuries of history had soaked into every stone, every weathered archway, every crooked alley.
He cut through the plaza at the base of Babel and angled northeast toward the Second District.
Orario spread in a rough circle with Babel at its hub, the main roads slicing the city into eight wedge-shaped sectors.
The Second District, wedged between the northeast and eastern avenues, was Orario's industrial heart. This was where Magic Stone products were born, where countless workshops and trading posts clustered in a maze of forges and smoke.
The district's most famous landmark was the headquarters of the Hephaestus Familia, the great commercial powerhouse renowned across the world for its smithing: the Warg Red House.
Radiating out from the Warg Red House, the Second District was dotted with smaller forges, each belonging to an individual smith under the Hephaestus Familia's banner. One of those smiths was exactly who Leon had come to see today.