Chapter 18: On the road (1/2)

My worries that came to be when I first realized the true scale of the journey ahead sadly came true.

Sitting in the questionable comfort of the riding saddle of my cruiser, I watched how the terrain around us refused to change.

I rocked my hips to and fro with every other step of the horse, attuning the natural movement of my body to the rhythm of my mount.

It was a skill that was deeply ingrained into my flesh, making it feel as natural as walking.

Still, while my body was accustomed to riding a horse, my mind clearly wasn't.

Despite having three horses to swap on the go, I ended up instinctively pulling the group back.

As much as I wanted to just dash ahead to get as far away from the city as soon as possible, doing so would be counterproductive.

By tiring the horses early on, we would struggle to even reach the relay station to the south by the end of the day.

No, for long-distance travel like that, we ended up pushing our horses no further than a comfortable, slow trot.

'Still,' I thought, turning my head back and looking at the distant outline of the city. 'It feels like we are really slow, but the distance keeps on increasing.'

I was still scared of the nobles.

Since I entered this dive in a pretty unorthodox way, I didn't really know whether I could wake up from it as usual.

There was a chance that if I were to die before completing my objective, my consciousness would float in the quantum vacuum of information for as long as it would take the government to find a replacement that would actually complete the assignment.

And while it wouldn't be my first time in the information limbo of the raw world's data, I had no desire whatsoever to waste god-know how long in what amounted to practically a coma.

That's why I was rushing to leave the city so much.

And that's why I now had to endure one element of the journey that no adventure story I've consumed in the past could prepare me for.

The boredom.

In the books, animations, and games, it would be done with in an instant. A few words of narrative, wide pan of the camera, fast travel… Those tricks that every type of media exploited allowed my imagination to skip the true meat of what those adventures were all about.

Because for every fight with a powerful boss that I would get excited about, the characters often had to waste weeks if not months and years just traveling from place to place!

And as my experiences quickly proved, just traveling at a hurried pace like that wasn't all that easy either.

First came the sun.

Even though the current season of this world appeared to be similar to the earth's spring, the structure of how its temperature came to be also appeared to be different.

In a sense, I couldn't feel the natural warmth from the ground that would keep the air's temperature more constant.

No.

In this world, it was the sun that provided most of the heat, making the temperature difference between night and day quite significant. And as a result…

As a result, the thick, fur clothing that we borrowed at the stable quickly turned into heavy, wet luggage once the hot rays of the sun started to fry us dry.

Loosening the thick outerwear was only a short-term solution.

As time went by, the sun rose higher and higher in the sky. And as weird as it felt, it appeared to get closer with every passing hour.

'But… how?'

On a plane, I could easily imagine such a set of stellar bodies.

But no matter how much I thought about it, the only setting where what I could see with my own eyes made any physical sense, the sun…

The sun would have to be orbiting the planet!

'It doesn't make sense,' I thought, slowly trying to figure out this mystery to ward off the extreme boredom of long-distance travel.

Other than slowly figuring out this world, I could only use the spare moments when we would come to a quick stop to change the horses and move on again.

'If this planet was the heavier of the two, then it would have much greater gravity than anything any biological form could handle,' I slowly gathered what I could say for sure. 'That means, this sun…'

For some reason, the rays of the local star's light were far warmer than what I could remember my home sun to be. The sun itself also looked… much bigger.

'A red dwarf or something?' I thought, trying to rationalize what I could see with the knowledge of astronomical laws of the real world.

The star was far bigger than the sun… or was simply closer. Still.

For the local star to suddenly get much closer, it had to be the one orbiting the planet, not the other way around.

And there was no way a planet could be heavier than any kind of a damn star!

'So if the planet is not heavier, then is that sun…' I gulped my saliva down, 'lighter than the planet?'

I didn't feel any excessive downward pull. And even if I was accustomed to it and thus unable to feel it through my host's body… The vegetation all around showed no signs of excessive gravity burden.

The trees rose as high as I expected them. My body felt exactly like my real one, except for its much greater vitality and agility.

'Well, I've already seen magic in this world,' I thought before breathing a heavy sigh. 'So why do I expect everything to be like on earth?'

This wasn't just a different planet somewhere out in the universe.

This was a whole brand new world, a universe on its own. And it has its own rules that dictated everything.

Rules that had no business being the same as the ones I was accustomed to.

In the end, despite how rushed it was and how overflowing with boredom I continued to be throughout, the journey moved a lot faster than I expected.

Maybe it was because I finally found some time to actively sort my thoughts out, but before I could even realize it, we were taking the obligatory rest during the two hottest hours of the day, when the temperature grew to uncomfortable levels.

And above all, we had to let our horses rest after rushing them for nearly eight hours straight!

Yet, even after our mounts had some time to graze, snack on the oats we carried and get a short nap in the shake, the journey somehow appeared to pass faster and faster with each passing minute.

And by the time we reached the relay station of the Imperial Express, I grew so accustomed to how absolutely nothing was happening… I kind of regretted that we'd finally arrived at our first destination!

I leaned over the sweaty neck of my hard-working horse. It was breathing heavily after pushing the limits of its endurance near the limit throughout the day. And now, with the goal finally in sight, this smart creature could finally calm its breath and slow its pace.

"We split the watch the same way as before," I ordered the moment I jumped down my horse before grabbing the shared reins of all three of them and guiding them towards a sizeable ranch.

It was located shy of a kilometer north of the grand interchange, a monument of the civilization long gone that was the cornerstone of the recent expansion of the imperial subjects into what was now a Halian league.

'Just twenty kilometers away from the border, huh?' I thought, recalling the few details the map from my memories could provide. My head then moved, my eyes turning in the opposite direction to where the sun was setting.

Just twenty kilometers away from the relative safety of lands that no longer answered directly to the emperor. Once past this line, the nobles that potentially chased after us would find their ability to act… to be far more restricted than in their homeland!

'And there is a chance they will chase us down south instead,' I thought, taking a deep breath as I moved my eyes away from the horizon before moving them over to the biggest building on the ranch.

Just like back when we visited our first stable, the open doors to the barn quickly became the only source of light in the area, inviting us in with its warm rays.

"We change the horses and sleep through the dark hours. Each watch extends to three hours," I modified my orders a bit.

Tomorrow, we could rush out first thing in the morning, so there was no need to utilize the stealth of the darkest hours of the night.

We couldn't ride our horses through the darkness so there was no point going to sleep that late.

"For now, though, let's go and have some dinner!" I called out before passing the reins of my horses to a stable boy that appeared out of nowhere. Then, with all my luggage and possessions now in the safe custody of the imperial express, I made my way towards the light. "It's hard to talk when we were rushing like that, so let's take this opportunity to talk a bit," I added before falling into the sweet embrace of the barn's light.