Strongest Family System

Robert noticed this without being troubled by it. It was simply the world being what it actually was rather than what proximity to home had made it appear to be.

The Osborn Clan's growing reputation, which had felt significant from inside Magical City's borders, was a local fact rather than a regional one.

Beyond a certain distance, the name meant nothing at all, and the recognition of that was not discouraging so much as clarifying. The world was genuinely larger than anything he had been able to see while standing in the middle of the thing he was building.

On the fifth day of travel, the group arrived at a city that made Magical City's scale feel modest by comparison.

It was called Riverstone City, named for the wide, slow river that ran through its center and had, according to a caravan driver who mentioned it in passing the day before they arrived, been the reason for the settlement's original founding centuries ago.

The river still ran there, broader now and crossed by several stone bridges, and the city had grown up around it in all directions until it occupied more territory than Magical City did buy a factor that became obvious immediately upon arrival.

The streets were wider and more crowded. The market districts were multiple, each one specializing in different categories of goods rather than mixing everything together the way Magical City's single main market did.

Cultivators were everywhere, not the modest numbers that passed through Magical City's lanes, but a genuine density of them, enough that their collective presence was simply a feature of the city's atmosphere rather than something that stood out individually.

The clan influence visible throughout the city was stronger and more established than anything the Osborn Clan had yet produced at home. Clan banners hung from buildings in several districts, marking territory and affiliation in a way that told Robert immediately that the political structure here operated on a different scale from what he was accustomed to managing.

The group rented rooms at a well-maintained inn near the river district and spent two days in the city, resting and replenishing.

Sai used both days productively, moving through the markets and common areas with the ease of someone who had been doing exactly this kind of work for years. He spoke with merchants from several different regions, cultivators passing through on their own journeys, and the inn's owner, who proved to be an excellent source of general regional knowledge.

Most of the conversations he found useful eventually circled back, in one way or another, to Forgotten Moon City.

Nobody he spoke with had visited the ruins recently. Nobody possessed direct knowledge of what was currently happening there.

But the rumors that circulated in Riverstone City were consistent with everything the Osborn network had gathered before departure. People entering the ruins and not returning. Lights visible at night in districts that should have been empty.

Treasure hunters, experienced enough to know the risks of dangerous ruins, choose to attempt it anyway and subsequently vanish without trace. The mystery was becoming more concrete with each conversation rather than less, the details sharpening even as the explanation behind them remained absent.

On the evening of the second day in Riverstone City, a system notification appeared quietly in Robert's vision.

Hidden Condition Completed: Leave Home Territory

Reward: 5,000 System Points

New Function Unlocked: Regional Influence Map

The function opened as a simple overlay across his field of vision when he activated it, showing a broad view of the surrounding region. Major cities appeared as marked points, scaled roughly to their size and significance.

Influential clans were indicated in their territories, named but without detailed information about their internal structure or strength. Important trade routes ran between the points like threads on a map, and the overall shape of the region became visible in a way that no paper map had quite managed to convey.

Robert studied it carefully.

The Osborn Clan's position appeared near the eastern edge of the display, small relative to the broader picture, surrounded by dozens of other powers at various scales. Riverstone City appeared nearby, visibly larger than the Magical City marker.

Further west, the map grew less detailed, the information becoming sparser as it approached territories where the function apparently had less basis to draw on. Near the western boundary of what the map showed with any confidence, in a location marked with a notation that distinguished it from ordinary city markers, sat a point labeled simply 'Forgotten Moon City—Ruins.'

He closed the function after several minutes.

The world the map displayed was considerably larger than the territory he had been navigating for the past year, and the Osborn Clan's position within it was considerably smaller than his daily experience of the clan's growing influence had made it feel. Both of those facts were simply accurate, and he received them as information rather than discouragement.

That night the group camped on open ground outside the city's southern edge, the river visible in the middle distance and the city's lanterns reflecting across its surface.

The atmosphere between the four of them was calm. Ronan talked more than the others, sharing thoughts about Riverstone City's size and what it suggested about the cities further west that they had not yet seen.

Eissa asked questions about Forgotten Moon City, not the practical questions about routes and distances, but the more open questions about what three hundred years of abandonment actually looked like when you were standing inside it and what kind of thing could cause a prosperous city to empty so completely that even its name became a rumor.

Sai reviewed the notes he had gathered over two days and made additions while the others talked, occasionally contributing a piece of information that shifted the direction of the conversation before returning to his work.

Robert sat slightly apart from the group, looking west.

Beyond the shadowy horizon, at the distant edge of a journey that was just getting started, a city that had remained quiet for three hundred years was finally stirring. At night, lights flickered through its ancient ruins. People ventured in, but they didn't come back out. Something that had been asleep for three centuries had suddenly chosen, for reasons still a mystery, to awaken.

The map function had confirmed the direction. The reports had confirmed the reality of what waited there.

What neither the map nor the reports could tell him was what he would actually find when he arrived.

That was what the journey was for.