The market street on the first floor was always quite bustling throughout the day, but the peak was for about an hour after the end of the workday. As it was, people were starting to show up in large numbers and the crowd would soon make it rather hard to stay attentive to someone, but never to the point of being hard to move into.

It was the perfect moment and Liliei walked out of the small alley she was hiding in. She slipped into the crowd, walking intently toward one of the food stall selling skewers. She was rather small and could move very easily, and despite her clothes being more tattered than the average, she didn’t draw any attention. There were two people waiting to buy something at the stand, and she timed her approach to get in range just as the vendor, a thin Human with a large smile plastered on his face, turned to the second.

The moment she was in his blind spot, she made her move, her hands moving fast and precisely, getting hold of two of the product and immediately diving back into the crowd. She was rather pleased when she didn’t hear the man react, as it was always difficult to stay unnoticed, but didn’t stop moving.

She started to eat the skewers as she moved toward her next target. She had to be fast and get as much as she could while there was enough people to prevent attention from getting on her. Her next target was another food stall, and she was able to get a small delicacy without getting seen by the Dwarf vendor. She ate the small cake while looking going back to her small alley – there was too many people at the moment for her next goal.

She waited in silence for the number of people to decrease to a point where she could properly follow someone and began looking for a mark. She didn’t have to wait for long as she soon saw a man wearing clothes a notch higher than the others and moving faster. It was perfect, he would be too distracted to pay attention, and being a Human, he’d be slower to react. She started moving immediately, setting her trajectory to cross his and the moment she was beside him, her hands sprung into action. In a swift motion, she cut the string of his purse with a small knife she kept in her sleeve and took her loot without modifying her speed.

She had noted that keeping her general movements uniform tended to keep her from being seen, but it didn’t seem to work this time, as the man immediately turned, his face filled with anger.

– “Give that back you thief!”

Immediately Liliei started running, She had the advantage in the crowd due to her size, but she had to get out of there as fast as she could. Fortunately people weren’t reacting very fast, and she got out of the crowd at max speed before people understood what happened. As she got into an alley she looked behind and saw that the man was following her.

– “Get back here you little pest!”

She ignored him and just continued running. Now that she was out of the crowd, she needed to lose him fast, since he would start catching on her. She had looked around before and knew the perfect place to lose him. She dashed left into a smaller alley, and profited to take a look behind her. He was still far enough, her plan should work. Only a few meters further was an intersection and she took to the right. She immediately found what she wanted.

There were two large crates that had been there since the morning and she dived between them. The moment she was hidden, she willed her Main Ability to come in effect. She felt a small amount of mana getting drained, as it made her harder to notice and detracted attention from her. It wouldn’t work if she was already the center of attention, but if someone was to lose sight of her long enough and she had somewhere to hide…

The man went forward past her small hideout and after a few seconds, she got out and ran in the opposite direction. The layout of this floor of the city was well suited to loose someone due to the rather disorganized fashion in which it had been built. It wasn’t quite as terrible as the lower floor, the slums where she lived, but it could still get confusing real fast. The upper floors were way worse on this point, being all orderly and neat, without anywhere to hide, so she never went there. Plus her clothes weren’t exactly in tatters, but while on this floor they still didn’t get her much attention, on the higher floors, nothing was less sure.

Her next destination was her “house” on the lowest floor and to get there there was two main possibilities: she could either go to the transport pads, near the center of the city, or get to one of the six columns on the border. The transport pads were faster, near instantaneous really, but there were so many people... and the view was much better on the columns.

It didn’t take long to get there and the view was quite stunning. She was only on the first floor, but it still was high enough that she could see very far on the huge plains that extended from there onward. She could see as well two of the Great Dungeons, the Sveisst Forest and the Rarkrit Canyon that went outward until the border of the continent.

There were two other Great Dungeons one was on the opposite side from where she stood, a Huge volcano chain, and the last laid just underneath the city, who benefited a lot from it.

She just stood there looking for a minute before continuing right toward a large rectangle standing on the border of the platform that represented the first floor and the moment she went through, she found herself inside a large metallic tube with stairs going up and down. The Whole city had been created long ago by one of the most powerful mage that had walked the continent, and it was full of wonders. Each floor was a huge platform, and they were one over the others, yet you could see the sky from any point in the city, each floor invisible from the ones below. In the same way, the huge columns going along the border of the city were completely invisible from inside, allowing one to see outside the city without being bothered.

There were quite a few other tricks, like the city was enchanted to pretty much repair and clean itself over time, and give access to water at every floor, and everything was fueled by the mana of the Dungeon that lay underneath. The only defect was the lowest floor where she was going. Some thirty turns before, during the Mana Wave that hit the continent, a huge flood of monsters had come out of the dungeon and, after the Adventurers finally beat them, they had wrecked the whole floor, and the enchantments had been overwhelmed and destroyed. As such, the place was now the slums of the city, half the houses destroyed or uninhabitable. She looked upward as she went out of the column and saw the huge floor above her head, blocking the sun and making the floor into a perpetual twilight.

The house she was living in was situated near the center and it took her about ten minutes to get there. The place had been in the epicenter during the Mana Wave, and most of the building had been reduced to rumble, but a few had been built since. Admittedly, they weren’t much more than shacks, but they did their jobs. Liliei herself was living in one of the surviving bits of a house. The thing was always giving the impression that it would come crashing on her head the next instant, but yet it still stood there, and she felt strangely secure in there.

She went through the hole where a door had once stood and looked around. The whole first floor was a littered with the wreckage of the second floor that had crashed on it. She went under the hole where the stairs for the third floor had been and made a running jump to catch a protrusion from the wall, then without losing her momentum, propelled herself higher and caught hold of the rest of a small part of the floor. From there she used the hole from a destroyed window to climb and catch a metal bar that had been put in the wall and pushed herself to get to the hole.

Contrary to the rest of the house, the third and final floor was in rather good shape. Most of the furniture had still been wrecked, but there was a small bed in the middle of the room, and a little dresser next to it. There were a few doors leading to the other rooms, but she hardly ever went in them.

She had lived in this place ever since she could remember, with the one that had raised her, Teria. The woman had been caught by the guard ten month earlier and since then Liliei made do as she could. She had been getting better at not getting seen, and stealing enough to get by, but it still had been rough, even if getting her Ability two months ago had helped her quite a lot in her activities.

Speaking of which… she still hadn’t looked at what her loot for the day was. She took the small pouch and opened it, hoping for some money but was soon disappointed. There was money, but most of it was copper coins with a few silver.

Oh well, better than nothing, at this pace she my be able to buy something interesting in a few hundred turns. As she was taking out the coins, she suddenly found a small ring and perked up a bit: that was a lot more interesting. It looked rather plain, but it wasn’t much of an indication.

She then did the first thing to do when you encountered some items you didn’t know:

”Appraisal”, she recited loudly

Immediately the information appearing in her mind.

[Silver Ring

A plain silver ring with a lingering trace of mana]

”Well, that’s it I guess.”

Even if Appraisal wasn’t sure source – it could give some basic information but nothing more – it didn’t seem that this ring was anything special. Well it was still quite nice, and she put the thing on her finger. She was bringing her hand up to look at it when the ring suddenly lit up with a faint blue light and she felt all her rather meager mana pool getting sucked dry by it.

She immediately tried to take it off, but her fingers just went through it and a sudden wave of exhaustion hit her. She felt herself falling, unable to move while a sudden pain went through her body. The pain everywhere was harsh but it was a hundred time worse in her fingers and her toes. She struggled, trying to see what was happening, and when she finally caught sight of her hand, a wave of despair hit her like never before. Her fingers were slowly disappearing, fading into nothingness, and the pain was going up her arms and legs.

She tried to scream but even that was impossible, exhaustion and pain completely blocking any action. She could only watch herself slowly disappear, unable to do anything, until the pain got too high and everything turned black.