The village of Thornwall sat in a valley between two hills that had, at some point in geological history, clearly been trying to become mountains and then thought better of it. The result was a settlement nestled in a kind of geographical shrug — a place that existed primarily because someone had once built a tavern there, and other people had built houses nearby on the principle that proximity to alcohol was the foundation of civilisation.

  It was the kind of village where nothing happened slowly, deliberately, or with great commitment.

  At four minutes past the fifth bell — which was to say, roughly dawn, give or take the bell-ringer's hangover — Levin Kai opened his eyes in the cramped attic room above the Leaky Sovereign tavern and stared at the ceiling. The ceiling stared back. It had been doing this for six weeks now, and neither party had blinked, though the ceiling had developed two new water stains that gave it an expression of mild disappointment.

  Levin sat up, ran a hand through hair that was either white or faintly green depending on the light and the observer's sobriety, and swung his legs over the side of the cot. The cot groaned. It had been groaning since the day he'd arrived, and he suspected it would continue groaning long after he left, possibly out of habit.

  He dressed in the dark with the efficiency of someone who owned exactly one set of clothes and therefore faced no decisions in the morning. This was, he had discovered, one of the few genuine advantages of poverty. Rich people, he imagined, probably spent forty minutes each dawn agonising over which of their seventeen identical white shirts best expressed their personality. Levin simply put on the shirt. The shirt expressed nothing. They had an understanding.

  The stairs down to the tavern's common room were narrow, steep, and constructed from wood that had been old when the village was young. Each step produced a different note when trodden upon, so that descending them at speed sounded rather like a xylophone being played by someone falling down a staircase, which was essentially what it was.

  Levin descended quietly, hitting only the silent steps — third, fifth, seventh, ninth, and the long stride over the twelfth, which screamed like a cat in a theological debate regardless of how gently you touched it.

  The common room was empty. Tables sat in patient rows, still wearing the sticky rings of last night's ale like badges of service. A single candle guttered on the bar. The hearth held the grey memory of a fire that had given up sometime around midnight and now lay in cold, philosophical ash.

  Levin moved behind the bar, found the kettle, and began the most important ritual known to any sentient being in any world: the brewing of tea.

  He had opinions about tea. Specifically, he believed that tea was the thin, fragrant barrier between a person and the howling void of an unmanageable morning. The water had to be properly boiled — a rolling boil, the kind that meant business — and the leaves had to steep for precisely the duration it took to count to two hundred in one's head while thinking about something else entirely. Levin usually thought about clouds. Clouds asked very little of a person.

  While the kettle heated over the re-stoked hearth, he stepped out the back door to the well.

  The well was thirty paces from the tavern's rear entrance, and beside it sat two buckets. They were large buckets. They were, in fact, the kind of buckets that a reasonable person would fill halfway and make two trips with, or alternatively fill completely and then spend several minutes making a series of facial expressions that communicated the full spectrum of human regret before waddling back with both arms threatening to detach from their sockets.

  Levin filled both to the brim, hooked one on each arm, and walked back to the tavern at a pace that suggested he was carrying two empty mugs rather than approximately eighty pounds of well water. A faint blue flicker — so brief it might have been a trick of the pre-dawn light, or a very small and confused firefly — traced along his forearms and vanished.

  He set the buckets down by the kitchen basin without a splash, without a grunt, without any of the theatrical suffering that the task traditionally demanded. If anyone had been watching, they might have found this remarkable. But the only witness was a tabby cat sitting on the windowsill, and the cat had seen Levin do this every morning for six weeks and had long since filed the information under "irrelevant" alongside most other facts about human behaviour.

  The kettle whistled. Levin poured. The tea steeped. He counted clouds in his mind — cumulus, stratus, the big fluffy one that had looked like a disappointed horse yesterday — and at two hundred, he poured himself a cup.

  He took a sip.

  It was, he decided, acceptable. Which was the highest compliment he had ever paid to anything.

  He had settled into the nearest chair and was halfway through his second sip when the door behind the bar banged open and Marda appeared.

  Marda was the innkeeper of the Leaky Sovereign, a title she held with the grim tenacity of someone defending a hill that everyone else had already agreed to abandon. She was a broad woman in her fifties with arms like bread loaves and a face that had been weathered by decades of dealing with the public, which is to say it wore a permanent scowl.

  "You're up," she said.

  "I am," Levin agreed.

  "Tea's made?"

  "It is."

  "Water's fetched?"

  "Also true."

  Marda squinted at him with the deep suspicion of a woman who believed that anyone who completed chores without being asked was either planning something or fundamentally broken as a person. She had not yet determined which category Levin fell into, and this uncertainty was, in its own small way, the most exciting thing happening in her life.

  "Right," she said, and disappeared back through the door. She reappeared four seconds later holding a broom, which she thrust at him like a lance. "Floors."

  Levin took the broom. The broom was ancient, balding, and had a slight curve to its handle that meant sweeping with it required a constant, subtle correction to the left, as though the broom itself harboured a deep philosophical preference for the western wall and resented being directed elsewhere. Levin had developed a relationship with this broom over the past six weeks. It was adversarial, but respectful.

  He swept.

  The common room floor revealed its archaeology in layers: food items from last night, crumbs from the night before, a coin from sometime last week (which Levin placed on the bar), and a single sock of mysterious provenance that he chose to sweep under the large cabinet because some questions were better left unasked.

  Marda re-emerged with a ledger and slammed it on the bar. "Three guests last night," she announced. "Three. In a twenty-room inn. That's—" She performed some mental arithmetic, and her face suggested the numbers had personally offended her. "That's fifteen percent occupancy."

  "Eighty-five percent vacancy," Levin offered.

  Marda preferred her misery quantified from every possible angle.

  "Fifteen percent," she repeated, ignoring him. "Used to be we'd have traders through here every week. Caravans. Pilgrims heading to the Sunspire. Mercenaries looking for work." She slapped the ledger. "Now? Nothing. You know why?"

  Levin knew why. Marda had explained why every morning for six weeks, with the reliable consistency of a sermon and roughly the same emotional trajectory.

  "Levels," she said, as though the word itself tasted of ash and tax collectors. "Everything's levels now. Can't hire a stablehand unless he's Level 3 Equestrian. Can't get a barmaid without a Level 2 Hospitality certification. Last month, the Merchant Council declared that any trader operating below Level 5 Commerce needed to pay a supplementary licensing fee." She paused to let the injustice of this settle into the room like smoke. "A supplementary fee, Levin. On top of the regular fee. On top of the road tax, the gate tax, the stall tax, and the tax on taxes, which I'm fairly certain they invented just to see if anyone would notice."

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "People noticed," Levin said.

  "People left," Marda corrected. "Took their carts to Millhaven. Thirty miles north, no level requirements, half the taxes. And here I am, running a twenty-room inn with three guests, a cat, and a Level 1 dishwasher."

  She said "Level 1" the way most people said "plague carrier" — with a mixture of pity, alarm, and the faint hope that it might turn out to be someone else's problem.

  Levin took another sip of tea. "I also sweep," he said.

  "Oh, wonderful. A multi-talented Level 1. I'll alert the Guild."

  The front door of the tavern opened at that moment with the particular confidence of someone who believed that all doors existed primarily for their personal use. A man stepped in, and the room immediately became smaller, louder, and more expensive.

  He was a merchant — this was evident from the rings on his fingers (four, gold, ostentatious), the quality of his coat (fur-trimmed, massive, impractical, designed to communicate wealth to anyone within a fifty-foot radius), and the way he surveyed the common room with the expression of a man who had just been asked to sit in a puddle. Behind him trailed a porter carrying three bags and the haunted look of someone who had been carrying said bags for a very long time.

  "Ah," said the merchant. "This is the... establishment?"

  "The Leaky Sovereign," Marda said, with the dangerous calm of a woman who had been insulted by professionals and was not impressed by amateurs. "Rooms, meals, and ale. What'll it be?"

  The merchant settled himself at the bar. Maneuvering to make sure his coat didn't touch anything. His porter collapsed into a chair near the door with the boneless gratitude of a sack of grain that had finally been set down.

  "Breakfast," the merchant declared. "And information. I'm heading south to Greymarch, and I need to hire protection for the mountain pass. Bandits, I'm told." He waved a ringed hand dismissively, as though bandits were a mild weather pattern. "I need a Level 10. Minimum. Swordsman, ranger, scout, knight, battlemage — I don't care about class, so long as they're Level 10 or above. I refuse to travel with anyone below that threshold. Last caravan I joined hired a Level 6 ranger, and do you know what happened?"

  He paused for dramatic effect.

  Marda stared at him with the patience of a glacier.

  "Wolves," the merchant said. "Wolves happened. The ranger panicked, fired two arrows into a tree — the same tree, mind you, both arrows — and then ran. Ran! A Level 6! I ask you." He shook his head with the profound disappointment of a man who had never personally faced a wolf and was therefore qualified to judge everyone who had. "No, it's Level 10 or nothing. That's my policy. Has been since the Millhaven incident."

  He did not elaborate on the Millhaven incident, which suggested it was either too traumatic to recount or too mundane to survive the retelling.

  "You won't find a Level 10 in Thornwall," Marda said flatly. "Highest we've got is Garren the blacksmith. Level 7 Artisan. He could probably shoe your horse aggressively, if that helps."

  "It does not help."

  "Didn't think so."

  The merchant turned on his stool and noticed Levin for the first time. Levin was leaning against the bar, holding his tea. He had his opinions on this conversation, mostly his usual. Aware of it, doing his best to ignore it, stay out of it, unbothered by it, and mildly hoping it would stop.

  "What about you? What's your level? Class?" the merchant asked.

  "Level 1," Levin said. "Mage."

  The merchant stared at him for a long moment. Then he laughed. It was the kind of laugh that contained no actual humour — a laugh deployed as a weapon, designed to make the target feel approximately two inches tall and vaguely apologetic for existing.

  "Level 1," the merchant repeated, turning back to Marda. "A Level 1 Mage. Wonderful. Can he do anything useful? Light a candle, perhaps? Warm my soup?"

  "He makes excellent tea," Marda said, which was the closest thing to a compliment she had ever directed at Levin, and she delivered it with the enthusiasm of someone reading a tax form.

  "Tea. Marvellous. I'll be sure to call on him when I'm besieged by bandits and desperately in need of a hot beverage," the merchant said.

  He laughed again at his own joke. His porter, near the door, did not laugh. The porter had the expression of a man who had heard every joke his employer had ever made, multiple times, and had developed a coping mechanism that involved staring at a fixed point on the wall and thinking about retirement.

  Levin took another sip of tea.

  The thing about being Level 1 was that people told you about it constantly, as though you might have forgotten. As though you had woken up that morning, checked your status, seen the number "1" glowing in the little blue box that hovered at the edge of your vision when you concentrated, and thought, Ah, yes, that seems fine, no concerns there. As though the number were a temporary condition, like a cold, that might clear up with rest and fluids.

  It did not clear up.

  Levin had killed — by his rough and somewhat conservative estimate — somewhere in the neighbourhood of four hundred creatures since arriving in this world six weeks ago. Wolves, goblins (whose personal hygiene was, parenthetically, even worse than their combat skills, which was saying something given that said skills consisted primarily of running at you while screaming and hoping for the best), slimes, a particularly aggressive badger that he still felt slightly guilty about, and one very confused bear that had wandered into the tavern's root cellar and refused to leave until Levin had explained the situation to it with a precisely calibrated Arcane Bolt.

  Four hundred kills. Four hundred small, invisible expansions of something inside him — a warmth, pressure, weight, and a sense of capacity growing like a lake fed by underground springs. His mana pool, if he concentrated on the blue status box, now read a number roughly five times what it had been on his first day.

  Five times.

  The spells that had once left him winded now felt like breathing. The Arcane Bolt that had started as a faintly luminous sneeze was now a crack of blue-white force that could punch through oak at thirty paces.

  And yet: Level 1.

  The number sat there in its little box, serene and immovable, like the cat near the well. It did not change. It did not flicker. It did not offer explanations or apologies. It simply was.

  Levin had, in the early days, found this maddening. He had killed things methodically, with the grim determination of a man trying to fill a bathtub with a teaspoon, waiting for the number to change. It had not changed. He had killed a goblin chieftain — Level 8, according to the faint tag that appeared above its head like a name badge at a particularly violent conference — and felt his mana surge, felt new pathways of power open like doors in a corridor he hadn't known existed, and then checked his level.

  One.

  He had stopped checking after that. The number was, he had decided, someone else's problem. Possibly the universe's. The universe, in his experience, was not especially good at solving its own problems, but he saw no reason to do its job for it.

  "More tea?" he asked Marda.

  Marda looked at him, looked at the merchant (who was now loudly explaining to his porter why Level 10 was the minimum acceptable standard for any professional service, including but not limited to carpentry, dentistry, artistry, smithing, and chimney sweeping), and looked back at Levin.

  "Make it strong," she said.

  Levin made it strong. He poured two cups, set one before Marda, and returned to his position against the bar. Outside, the sun had finally committed to rising, casting long amber light through the tavern's grimy windows and illuminating the dust motes that drifted through the air like tiny, purposeless pilgrims.

  The merchant was still talking. He had moved on from levels to the general decline of professional standards across the southern provinces, a subject he appeared to have strong feelings about and no intention of abbreviating. His porter had closed his eyes. Whether he was sleeping or simply conserving energy for the next leg of the journey was unclear, and frankly, from the porter's perspective, the distinction had ceased to matter.

  Levin picked up a dish towel and began polishing the glasses behind the bar. He polished them with the same quiet, unhurried competence with which he did everything — the same hands that had, two nights ago, vaporised a pack of shadow wolves on the ridge road with a Chain Lightning spell that had turned the darkness into a stuttering, blue-white noon for three full seconds.

  The glasses gleamed.

  He set each one on the shelf with a soft clink.

  Somewhere in his body, in the place where the warmth pooled and the pressure built and the invisible reservoir of power grew one percentage point at a time, something hummed. It was a quiet hum, barely perceptible, like a tuning fork struck in another room. It had been getting louder lately. He chose, for the moment, to ignore it, in the same way one ignores a smoke alarm that has been going off intermittently for a week — with a mixture of denial, optimism, and the vague hope that the problem would resolve itself before becoming genuinely catastrophic.

  He finished the glasses.

  He wiped down the bar.

  He refilled Marda's tea without being asked, which earned him a look of such conflicted gratitude that it nearly qualified as a facial expression.

  The merchant paid for his breakfast, declared Thornwall "charmingly rustic" in a tone that meant the opposite, and departed with his porter in tow, heading north to find his Level 10 escort.

  The door closed behind him.

  The room finally exhaled.

  "Level 10," Marda muttered, shaking her head. "For the mountain pass. My grandmother crossed that pass with a walking stick and a bad attitude, and she was Level nothing, because levels hadn't been invented yet, and she did just fine."

  "Times change," Levin said.

  "Times get stupider," Marda corrected.

  Levin considered this. He took a final sip of tea, found the cup empty, and set it down with the careful finality of a man who had completed the only task that truly mattered to him that morning.

  Outside, Thornwall was waking up. Shutters opened. A dog barked. Someone dropped something heavy and swore about it. The bell-ringer, having apparently recovered from last night, struck the sixth bell with the enthusiasm of a man who had just remembered he had a job and was trying to make up for lost time.

  It was, by every measurable standard, an entirely ordinary morning.

  Levin picked up the broom again. The broom pulled left. He corrected. They continued their slow, adversarial waltz across the common room floor, and the day — such as it was — began.