87th of Season of Water, 57th year of the 32nd imperial era

Newt returned to the remains of the overturned cart, the farmer finally reaching it in his own mad dash.

"I'm ruined!" The man pulled at his hair again, weeping, his broken gaze glued to his dead spikebacks and trampled cabbages.

At least you're alive? But Newt remained quiet, silently feeling sorry for the man's loss.

"How will I feed my wife and little ones?"

The words tugged at Newt's heart, and he considered giving the man several gold coins to purchase new beasts of burden and make up for the lost cabbages. When he was desperate, a stranger's helping hand would have been a blessing, an agent of fate sent by the heavens.

Except it would have been a curse. If someone else had taken me out of the mines after Father and Mother were sold, I would have been devastated and helpless, a mortal without resources surrounded by mages. Brave and the rest would have taken over, and I would have been a waste or a puppet at best.

"The eighth baby is on the way! Will Daisy lose the baby from shock when she—"

"Heaven's lightning, man! Here," Newt stuffed a fistful of gold coins into the farmer's face, then smacked them into his palms, filling the man's hands while the overflowing coins rained on the ground.

"Go, buy whatever you need, just stop. Get a hold of yourself! You're alive! Don't you understand how big of a difference it is for your family that you have not died to a random saurian attack?"

Newt almost slapped him, but even with a casual blow he would likely break a commoner's neck, if not smash his skull outright. Unaware of how close he was to death for the second time that day, the farmer went down on his knees.

"Thank you, Lord Mageknight, thank you." Instead of gathering the coins, he growled before Newt's feet. He tried to hug and kiss his shoes, but with a light burst of hot air, Newt jumped outside the farmer's reach, much like he did with Plowson.

"What are longclaws doing this far from Summersweald?" Newt turned away from the disquieting vision of his own weakness and asked the slowly gathering crowd.

A man cleared his throat behind Newt, and the youth looked at him. The man's chubby cheeks were ruddy, sweat beading on his forehead. Winded from running, he breathed in deeply before answering Newt's question.

"They have lived here since I was a boy, Lord Mageknight, but much deeper in the forest, rarely venturing out." The speaker had nicer clothes than the rest and, while intimidated by the mageknight, had enough confidence to speak up, marking him wealthy or possibly related to an awakened. "There's enough woodland to hide them, so we can't tell for sure whether these are signs of a larger movement. Spiketails and trihorns have trampled several fields. We sent a request to the guild and to Hailstown three days ago, but the messengers probably haven't reached them yet."

The man lowered his gaze, and Newt knew what the problem was. Hailstown cared little for commoners and several fields of grain or cabbage trampled a hundred miles away. As for the guild, they were over five hundred miles away, while the village was at the fringes of the empire, an irrelevant region, and they would not move for several carts of cabbages. Maybe not even for an occasional farmer devoured by the trespassing saurians. So long as manabeasts didn't appear, the guild would stay out of it. And if manabeasts did appear, the guild members sent to investigate would come too late to find signs of human life.

To make matters worse, the saurian outbreak was long overdue. If towns and cities received news of saurians rampaging through the countryside, they would tighten their defenses, and focus on gathering whatever supplies they could to weather a siege.

Newt would have thought the same had the suffering people been a week away. They would have been somebody else's problem. But he couldn't turn his back on them while they stood right before him. Not because of the pressure, but because they weren't numbers in rumors, but flesh and blood people. One of them apparently with eight children.

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"Could you show me where those other incidents happened?" he asked and the crowd's mood lifted, the people shining with hope.

"Certainly, Lord Mageknight," the wealthy man bowed thrice, becoming a lot more polite before he motioned Newt to follow.

Newt took a step when he looked at the cabbage transporter once more.

Eight children? You're not even thirty years old.

"Congratulations on your eighth child," Newt said, and the cabbage transporter looked at him with a stupid grin. "You should give your wife some breathing space. Maybe a separate bedroom."

The grin froze, but then the surrounding men approached the cabbage transporter.

"Daisy's pregnant again?"

"Congratulations!"

"Whose is it?" someone asked, eliciting a rowdy laugh.

Newt left the wellwishers and the confused father behind, following the sweaty, anxious guide.

"We have enough time to visit two farms before sundown," he explained, and Newt followed, considering the situation. He asked about the village and its people, as well as the history of saurian attacks.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. No great person was born or had a tomb in the irrelevant village of Wheatfield. No secret realms, nor extreme losses during previous saurian outbreaks. The place was practically in the Salamandra clan's backyard, just outside their domain. Only then did it dawn on Newt that they asked for help from two distant organizations without even alerting the one next door.

"Why didn't you ask for help from the Salamandras? A runner could have reached them in a day or two."

"They were a mighty force once, ages ago, but that clan has long since declined, Lord Mageknight," the innkeeper said, unaware of Newt's origin. "We still tell the legends of their ancestors defending us during times of peril to our children, but right now, they are weak. Even if they send their people, the saurians might kill them."

Newt wanted to argue, but couldn't. Even if they were still a part of the clan, and he sent Brave and the other five, some of them might have died to the five longclaws, and Stronggrow and Marrow needed to watch the clanhold. In the end, he simply nodded.

"You should at least notify them about what's happening. This is close to their territory, and they should know about potential threats. Even if they are weak, if the danger is great, they might help or shelter you where they can protect you. Better to lose your fields than your lives."

The strained smile made it obvious that Mound, the innkeeper, doubted Newt's words, but he still agreed.

"Yes, Lord Mageknight. Sorry, Lord Mageknight. I will have someone deliver the news tomorrow."

Great, now I feel like I'm strong-arming commoners.

"You don't have to. It's just common courtesy." Newt said, and the innkeeper repeated his assurances before their conversation died an awkward death.

They inspected the two farms, but there was little to see, other than trampled fields and several giant mounds of droppings left behind by multi-ton saurians lumbering around. Newt noticed that the field visited by spiketails was visibly less tormented than the one flattened by the much heavier trihorns, but that was about it.

The eyewitnesses claimed the animals were jittery and often stopped to observe their surroundings for predators. A worrying sign, but reasonable, considering the longclaw attack.

Newt and the innkeeper returned to the inn just as the sun was about to set. The innkeeper insisted on giving Newt free accommodations and a free meal, and for some reason, Newt found the polite gesture comical. He had just given a random farmer enough money to purchase farm animals and to make up for his losses. A potage and a night's rent were a drop in the bucket, but he still thanked his host and went to the room after finishing a bowl of warm stew.

Newt made himself comfortable on the bed and read his notes late into the night. Most of the fourth realm spells were evolutions of the ones he already knew, just as the evolutions from second to third realm.

For example, with a bit more mana and more intricate manipulations of heated air, Confuse Senses II became Confuse Senses III, releasing a loud boom along with the flash.

Salamandra's Regeneration had suffered a heavier modification. Instead of simply cauterizing wounds, it also helped burn foreign substances in the mage's body, while the fourth realm evolution burned both matter and foreign energies.

Salamandra's Breath allowed Newt to spew projectiles from his mouth, but the range was still pitiful, merely two feet away from his face, extending all the way to ten feet at the peak of the third realm, which while significant and much better would often injure the mage, along with their target.

Long hours of the night passed in reading, and two hours before dawn, Newt allowed himself to doze off. He planned to spend the day investigating the forest and believed a quick nap would help sharpen his mind.

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