63 Living Arrangements

Galahad found the room was exactly how it was when he left the day before. He left all his extra gear and nonmagical sword tucked in the corner of the musty room, remaining untouched until he tossed his smaller bag still half filled with food on top.

Galahad's initial plan was to wait for his application at the Renting Office to be processed by spending two days in the dungeon and the third finding a place to live.

He did manage to find the cavern that let him stay through the Shift without risk, but because of the whole incident with Elldry, he left early.

Galahad only managed to eat about half his bag of food before returning, so he figured that he'll find a use for it in the morning.

After unloading the bag off his back, he walked over to the couches and accidentally kicked the metal canister still on the floor. It spun and rolled around as it sprinkled a few more metal shards onto the molding carpet. Galahad made a note in his little reminder system to clean that up in the morning. He figured it was a chance to make a good work impression for the dwarf if he saw it cleaned up before his new boss needed to scream about wanting it done.

The moment Galahad's body hit the least moldiest smelling couch in the room, he was asleep.

*****

Galahad was about as lucid as he could be when he fell asleep. This time there was no status windows or sad old memories to flashback and experience; He was just left in an empty darkness with nothing to interact with.

As he felt himself floating in nothing, he was startled by the silence suddenly being broken.

"Youuu've done well." Said a familiar and coarse voice. "I would have thhhhought that pathetic heart of gold you try carrying around would kill ussss both."

It took Galahad a second to recognize the voice from when he blacked out from the pain of being mauled a little while ago. Then he realized he already knew that voice from even further back in time.

This voice had screamed at him in the forest, commanding to do something. He couldn't remember much of that one, but the chilling feeling he got from the encounter was very fresh in his mind.

"Who or what exactly are you?" Galahad asked to the black abyss. After a brief moment of no response, he asked another question.

"Are you that pissed off little voice in the back of head? The one that makes me so easily willing to commit murder?" Galahad shouted.

"Hee hee hee." The voice just laughed in a clearly mocking tone. "You believe me to be ssssomething terrible while you ssleep; yet when awake, you consssider me a blessing to save your friendsss."

"Ar-are you the reason I am changing? Are you that black orb and the reason for me gaining this strange system?"

Galahad could only assume the voice was talking about the new class and all its perks when it mentioned blessing. Then he connected it to his previous theory that the orb did it too him, stringing all the unusual events to a singular source.

"Oh goodie!" Exclaimed the voice with a demented form of glee in its tone. "You're finally starting to figure it out. I don't mean to talk about to youuuu about why I exisst. I only came to tellll you I don't need to be ssso close to the surface of your mind jusssst yet. Itsss far too early for that."

"Too early for what?" He asked.

No response, and whatever part of his mind could sense the voice's presence, it was telling Galahad that the voice was now disappearing.

"What are are you playing at?" Galahad didn't like the way this thing in his brain was just hiding away in the recesses of his mind. He wanted as many answers as he could get before losing his chance to understand what was happening.

"Tsk tsk tsk, such a rush questionssss with too much time to play. I'll be seeeiiiinnnng yyoouuuuuuu." The voice began stretching into a quieting tone, eventually snuffing itself out to silence.

Galahad was left with no answers and a sequence of normal dreams with no reason or depth to them.

*****

Galahad woke up in the dark living room of Regin's workshop with no idea what time it was. The room had no windows and hardly any light shown through the cracks of the door.

He got up from the couch and rubbed his eyes to clear out the sleep before opening the door to be abruptly hit by the frigid temperature of the outside.

Galahad immediately slammed the door to retaliate against the cold. During the process, he saw the sun was about to rise over the horizon and a few clouds were forming to unleash the hell of winter.

He yawned and shook his messy styled hair out of his eyes. He was surprised to find it still wet from his shower and made him realize he hadn't gotten a haircut since a week before the dungeon event that took his friends.

He added a haircut on his reminder board and cleared the metal canister off from the list. The clean up only took a few minutes of pulling out the metal shards out of the carpet and tossing all of the scraps in a trash bin.

At that point, Galahad ran out of things to do in Regin's second floor of the workshop before venturing out into the cold. He was putting his boots and coat on to leave, but thought about one more thing.

'Does this weird key work on the doors downstairs?'

He proscastinated his leave by going downstairs to the basement and inspecting the door. He ran his fingers along the metal to discover it contained no mana to it, the same as new the door upstairs.

'How did Regin make the key fly into the hole when there's no magic? I'll have to ask him about it when we're both here.'

The key hole to the basement door at the same height of waist level, but was just a regular insert to a lock and his key did not fit the hole. He had no way of going inside.

Galahad put his ear to the door and heard nothing operating inside, only a soft hum of mana vibrating in the air.

Amidst the inspection of the door, he felt a scry message ping inside his head. The message notification popped up his side view; A Ms. Terra Zongyu was able to meet to him at noon that day to show him the available properties for rent if he wanted to start looking at locations early.

Galahad took that message as a moment of good fortune from the gods and happily accepted. Now he had tasks that day that didn't involve life threatening situations, murder, or lying to government officials.

'I'm just gonna go to a business appointment and get a haircut. It's hard to imagine that this was a normal thing I used to do.' He thought as jumped outside into the cold wind to find a barbershop.

*****

Terra Zongyu had been working the rental circuit for years now. She was approaching that point in everyone's life where they start contemplating the structure of her life too often for it too seem healthy, making the thinker feel worse every time. Her overly abundant thoughts of her direction in life made the idea of finding other jobs to try and learn to master was a scary yet enticing possibility.

One job that particularly stood out was the constant demand for adventurers in the dungeon. It was a way to stay active during a full workday and maintain a decent sum of money if you leveled up to a high ranking status. The problem she faced was that job was so far out of her element, she didn't how to even begin adapting to the dangers and threats adventurers always faced.

Multiple times, she sat down at her desk in the office with an application to apply for the Etherite Kingdom's guild contract and the Enlistment. Every time after reading through the terms about injuries and death, she'd throw the paper in the recycling bin.

Currently she was going through the same process for the second time that week.

'Come on, just sign it.' She said to herself with a pen inches away. 'That boy came here looking so scrawny and harmless. Yet, He had a decent savings put together at just twenty years old, you could probably fight monsters better than he could right now.'

After seeing Galahad come in just two days ago with his dirty bandaged arm and low level Identification; Terra was the closest she had ever been at signing up for the Enlistment. Just as her hand was beginning to cramp, the front station of the building sent a scry saying her noon appointment had arrived.

She sighed to herself and put the paper in one of her desk drawers. After taking a moment to composed herself, she walked to magic lift and took it down to the main lobby.

Terra exited into the main lobby of the office building, where a large waiting lobby stood with lots of natural light entering through the mostly windowed entrance.

The building itself was actually a shared office building between multiple businesses, the massive structure always seemed to intimidate any newcomers to Diagon, but for some reason her most recent client had experienced the opposite affect.

That scrawny new client had came into her office building just two days ago with a huge amount of quiet confidence that matched the size of his savings account. He looked over the liabilities and deposit info like it was hardly anything.

Terra didn't know if it came from his experiences from fighting in the dungeon or just some crazy part of a youthful mindset. She just wished she was able to do something so sudden and carefree like up and move to a new city to fight demons.

She passed the main desk and scanned over the lobby to find her client. Yet he wasn't there.

There was only a few random characters sitting and standing among the room. The thin and dirty boy she was supposed to meet was not among them. She walked back over to the male stationed to the front desk who sent her the scry.

Terra quietly told him that she didn't see the boy she was supposed to meet. At that comment, one of the characters looking out the windows of the building seemed to have coincidentally turned around and walked up to her from behind.

After getting a silent notion from the secretary's eye glances to look at the person now approaching. She turned around and it took a full five second before she realized who she was looking at.

Galahad had been gone for only a little under forty-eight hours, yet he looked like it had been going through weeks of intense physical training and a spa treatment since then.

The shower and haircut cleaned him up to look less homeless and more like someone tailored to work at a middle to upper class business. He no longer had the mass of messy black hair and instead a mid fade with the top hair arced back to stay out of his face.

But that was hardly the changes that made it difficult for Terra to identify him. It was the changes in his entire physical build.

His body has broadened a little and combining with the deeper tone set along his arms and shoulders. Galahad had no idea that jumping from level eleven to seventeen would create so a significant change to his physique. He looked almost like a new person.

It hardly seemed noticeable to Galahad until he looked at his reflection in the building windows just a second before, somewhat concerning him about how Terra might react to such sudden changes.

He got exactly what he fear when she couldn't speak upon looking at him. All Galahad could do to play off her response was act as casual as possible.

"Ahh, Miss Zongyu. It feels like its hardly been a day." Galahad smiled at her while she could only greet him with a face of barely stifled shock and awe.

*****

Galahad and Terra were in her office space looking at the map that took up nearly half the wall opposite to her desk. The large map was composed of the three districts that made up Diagon and roads drawn out with lots of careful details. The drawings even expanded out to show off the immense ring of stone wall formed around the city's district lines.

Terra felt very befuddled about the whole situation, especially when all the locations she predicted he'd like were immediately shot down. All the houses near other adventurers and their teams were meant to bring them together and form more promising teams, yet he didn't seem to have any desire in socializing with other adventurers. She had to scrap the rough draft of areas and start with what he was looking to find.

"I will probably spend a majority of my day gone for work, so I mainly just want a real quiet and tucked away place. It doesn't need to be huge, apartment buildings with decent security is all I am looking for." Galahad tried his best not to describe a shady hideaway where he could just dump all his extra gear and mana orbs in order not to be caught illegally dungeon diving.

As they discussed the kind of places Galahad was looking for, she started to realize how much less she understood about him and more she had simply assumed. The life of being an adventurer was surely popular and always needing more people fighting in dungeons, but Galahad didn't seem overenthusiastic about fighting alongside others or even being alongside anyone.

Galahad was interesting in the properties with few people and few interactions as possible. The talk of quiet and distant made her think about the one particular property she had been holding onto since the start of working in that office. She hated even just the thought of that place and its history, so she ignored it the best she could and kept acting as professional as possible.

Twenty minutes was all it took for Galahad to determine the locations he wanted to look at from Terra's new list of properties. It was five spots scattered about the residential district ring. Each location was confirmed on Terra's tablet and then popped up on the wall map as a glowing red dot projected on various roads.

Galahad watched all the little red dots twinkled against the magic map with a weird sensation in his heart.

'So one of these places will be my new home- no, it will be just a temporary space. I won't need to stay here long because once I get three impossible orbs, I will be out of here and returning.