Surrounded by the ocean on all sides, the Eliad continent, or Eliadia to the humans, was a massive piece of land surrounded on all sides by the massive ocean that housed a wide variety of landscapes and environments, from the most dry and hottest deserts to the long stretches of forests that occupied the south-west of the continent and the wide mountain range located up in the north.
The land itself, was home to three races, the elves, the dwarves and the humans, besides, of course, the massive variety of wildlife and other... "creatures".
Each race occupies a different piece of the continent, never truly coexisting with one another, the elves settled in the forest to the south-west while the dwarves made the mountains in the north-west their lair and the humans decided to erect their civilization in the east of the continent, occupying the long stretches of plains, dry land and mountain regions that existed there.
In the human region of the continent, that was divided into reigns, in a time long before Joseph's birth, a tall young man with short black hair and a well-kept mustache that complemented his handsome face was driving a carriage through the main dirt road that that led from the nation of Procent to the nation of Belnaris.
This road, normally bustling with life due to being the main route used by travelers and trading caravans to travel between the two nations, was now silent and if this young man cared to look around himself, he would quickly understand why. No one besides him was travelling the road.
But, of course, as was implied before, this young man simply didn't care about this factor, nor was he really disturbed by the deafening silence that settled in the road. Even if he noticed something, he would quickly understand that the reason for this happening was the fact that… It was the latter half of the night.
While most people would choose to set up camp in favor of continuing their journey in order to avoid the cold of the night and being ambushed in the middle of the dark by creatures and bandits, this man, Mike Smith, decided that he should press forward, during the night, towards Belnaris.
Why would he do that? Was he fearless? Was he a madman? Was he rushed on time? Well, not exactly….
He was pissed.
He was so furious, in fact, that he let his better judgement be affected, and made the brilliant decision of journeying with little to no breaks, to speed up the travel.
But why was Mike so pissed? Well, to answer that question we would have to go back to a few weeks before his journey, when Mike was living his best life, making a fortune in gambling houses.
Despite coming from a rather well-off merchant family, Mike was not really interested in following the family trade, no, his interest lay elsewhere – Gambling, and he was good to, being able to walk in a gambling house with fity gold coins and get out with five hundred gold coins most of the times, only showed how lucky of and individual he was.
Now, normally such a lucky person would be barred from entering any of the gambling houses in town, however, due to his identity, his trying of maintaining a decent win-lose ratio in order to walk out of his adventures with just a small margin of profit that would be considered by the house as a negligible loss to them when compared to their daily earnings and due to his luck in general, Mike was always allowed entry.
Life was good for Mike, he was happy, and he was slowly getting richer, however his father was not really pleased with his actions and attitude towards conducting business, he always believed that one day Mike would trip over himself and manage to squander the family fortune, and as such he decided that Mike needed rehabilitation, and what better way to rehabilitate someone than to send said person into a foreign nation with nothing but a carriage with a few products to sell valued in one hundred and sixty gold coins in the standard market and, at the same time, giving them a goal of making three hundred gold coins before coming back home.
That was how Mike ended up in this position, making the 7-day trip from his hometown to the closest town belonging to the Belnaris nation, Cliside.
Mike had always fought with his father over his of life, he had tried to convince him of his lifestyle with the gains that came from his gambles, and when that didn't work out, he, at least, tried to appease him by not quitting the family business altogether. But it was all for nought, his father wasn't having any of it, he wanted Mike to change his way of life one way or another, and Mike upon understanding this with his father's latest attempt at "rehabilitation", finally blew a fuse.
He was going to finish this assignment the fastest he could, return home, and secure a major deal that would finally help him get his father off his back.
--------Back to the present moment…------
Mike was still driving his carriage, his eyes sported dark circles below them and sometimes his eyelids would slowly start to drop, threatening to close themselves over his eyes depriving him off vision and bringing with it the inevitable sleepiness… trying to force him into a much-needed rest. But of course, in these moments, Mike would always choose the most reasonable course of action, in his head at least - He would slap himself awake.
This was now the third night in a row that Mike had chosen to stay awake. His mind… his body… were begging him for rest, but he wouldn't sleep until he reached his destination. He would only stop the carriage to let the horse rest a little, and even then, he wouldn't close his eyes, afraid of missing the time where his horse seemed sufficiently rested to continue the journey, just imagine the HOURS of travel he would have wasted if he had tried to rest in those moments…
He was also constantly trying to speed up the travel time by sweet-talking his horse…He believed it helped.
------------2 days later...------------
Mike was dragging himself through the streets of Cliside, cutting quite the sorry figure while walking around the city, but thankfully, he had reached his destination in the middle of the night, so no one was around to witness it.
He had decided to park his carriage on the side of a stable near the city entrance, and leave it there, along with the horse to be taken care of by the owner of said stable, while he looked for an inn to finally lay down.
He sighed, knowing he could finally rest and replenish his energy to then go look for a way to scam some people into buying his products at higher prices compared to their market value.
Mike had actually thought of skipping the process of trying to secure a good business deal altogether and instead trying to reach his goal by gambling with the locals in the city, however that idea was quickly killed in his infancy, when he remembered that the robe he was wearing, black with the symbol representative of his father's company embroidered in the back, was enchanted to record his actions, securing footage that would later be review by his father.
He sighed again and continued moving forward only to stumble upon a tavern still open for business. He stopped in front of it pondering if he should go inside to take a look and maybe get something to drink before continuing to look for an inn.
On one side he was dead tired, feeling like he could fall asleep while standing at any moment, but on the other side the strangeness of finding a tavern still open for business triggered his sense of curiosity.
After a momentary struggle, his curiosity won in the end, and so he entered only to find…