Everyone is looking their very finest when they arrive at the Inn for their party. The local adventurers cheer their arrival, congratulating the three on their advancements.

“That’s the whole guild now!” The singer of the band calls out between songs. “You might now know it from their reputation, but this is the entirety of the Darklight Host. Not only are they a top local Raiding Guild, but they do it all short handed!”

The cheers are mixed with hearty laughter, as everyone present knows of the large numbers of summons that their Guild deploys for combat, making their team grossly outnumber any standard party.

“So, little Druid, what path did you head down?” A big hunter asks Kone.

“I went down the Nature’s Allies path. I got a skill book called Rend for the bear form, but didn’t want to be a tank.” Kone smiles.

“Rend is a good one. I got it at level 55, made me a great melee fighter. I’m surprised you didn’t go full healing spec though. You’re just a little bit of a thing.”

“Druids start out in the woods, like pixies do. So I picked up bear form at the start and kind of enjoyed it. It would be a shame to abandon it once I got a skill book for combat, so I went down the path that would let me do both.”

“You hear that Gents? The Druid actually used their brain to pick their skill tree!” Someone calls from the back and a drunken cheer is raised.

“So tell us, how good is the skill book drop rate, running with an Iron Man titled Guild?” A young looking Elven woman from the local guard force asks Misha.

“About one for every twenty levels gained? Yeah, that’s about right. If your squad gains forty levels in the Raid, you can pretty much expect two books to drop. Whether they’re useful to your build or not is another question.” Misha laughs.

The surrounding adventurers get a wistful look. “It’s about one every fifty levels for the rest of us scrubs. If a whole party of five gets ten levels grinding in the dungeon, someone will likely get a skill.”

Misha downplayed their drop rate to avoid causing jealousy and anger. They’re actually getting books about twice that fast, one every ten combined levels, enough that their whole guild has gotten multiple highly ranked and useful skills by level 60, instead of hoping for one each, or buying the most basic of skill books from vendors for exorbitant prices.

That’s the route most take, save as much money as possible and buy skills, or grind enough for tuition and spend multiple years in an academy learning those same basic skills. But the gamer spirit is strong with most of the transfers, they’d rather grind and buy than spend years of their second life in school. They almost all did that in their first life, after all.

“Well, if it’s one every twenty, Young Dimnys here should have gained a book too. Or did the luck go to one of the others?” A red faced, red bearded Dwarven Smith asks. Cain recognizes this one, he was the guy whose smithy Dimnys was working behind when they met her.

“I got a book of Crushing Blow and one of Stone Skin since you saw me last, old man. It’s been over thirty levels after all.” She laughs and the man raises his tankard in salute before collapsing into his chair.

Cain sees an interesting thing spread out on a table, a group has a proper map. He walks over to discretely examine it, only to find it’s not fully detailed, just a map that has been drawn by a newer adventurer like them.

Place names are still simple, Transfer Village, Karmazin City, Elven woods with very few details filled in. Though most have the type of dungeon indicated. They’re adding the area around Sunnybrook now, and Cain heads over to help them out a bit.

“There’s a river, follows the bottom of the mountain range you’ve drawn there, and right about here there’s a village in a ruined city, with a dungeon that holds Dark Fae and spiders.” Cain says helpfully.

“Excellent, thank you. We found out something interesting from a higher level group. The whole rookie area is a valley within a massive mountain range. there’s only one way in and out that anyone knows of, and barely anyone who leaves comes back. That’s why nobody knows that the wider world looks like. The rumor is that whatever Divine Being causes the transfers protects us in here until level 100. If you reach it while in here, you’re transferred to the path through the mountains immediately.”

Now that’s interesting. Cain hadn’t met anyone who personally met a very high level player. Forget after they leave the zone, transfers rarely return to the lower level towns, so even getting news a few levels ahead of you is difficult. They have the Dark Dwarf Territory marked on the map, at the very west side, where the Elven forest and its mostly unknown contents mark the East.

Walking there on foot would take well over a month, maybe two weeks if you were in a carriage. They don’t have Graska, the Dark Dwarven city that can be accessed through the Demon Dungeon placed on the map though. They do have Peaceful River though, about three days walk north of Karmazin, or about the same northwest of Sunnybrook, near an area marked level 80 and left blank.

That’s the best map Cain has seen so far, so he asks permission to copy it out onto a piece of paper. Char comes over and adds her insights to the map, adding a place called Spirit Village into the eastern edge of the Elven Forest, and a place called Arrival Town, where the Elven transfers show up.

The places transfers arrive have a very lame theme going on, Cain thinks, the most basic of names, all to do with transfers, or the species that shows up there. But then, a lot of the little farming villages marked on the map aren’t even named by their occupants. Instead they’re just considered part of a Lord or Guild’s land.

But he doesn’t see anything resembling the level 100 area in the Demon Dungeon that should have a city in it, if the rumors recorded by the writer of the book he found are correct. They should be, everything else was as the book predicted it would be.

But that’s a problem for later.. Tonight he’s got a very drunk Guild to escort home.