Little Tyrant Doesn't Want to Meet with a Bad End[1-200]

Chapter 146: An Occasional Adorableness

While Roel was still in university in his previous life, the stress of failing his end-of-semester examinations would usually prompt him to become a regular at the library, where he found himself becoming yet another victim of the vicious 'library dates'.

The three killer moves of library dates—hand holding, back leaning, and secret whispers—these had once left the single Roel in utter despair, crumbling weakly to the floor in defeat.

Yet, who could have known that he would one day become one of these people too?

Feeling the soft and tender sensation in his grasp, Roel couldn't help but lament that the working world sure was tough. In order to ensure that they didn't miss any information that could possibly lead to a vision, the two of them had been holding their hands while reading all this while.

Unfortunately, there hadn't been much progress so far.

After several attempts at physical contact failed, Roel and Charlotte turned their attention elsewhere and decided to investigate the letter and its message instead.

The content of the letter was fairly short. No matter how they looked at it, there were only two leads they could use for their investigation.

First and foremost was the location mentioned in the letter, Twohorn Port.

Roel personally wasn't too familiar with the place. In fact, the only thing he knew about it was that it wasn't located within the Ascart Fiefdom. It was not as if he hadn't tried looking up the records to see if he could find anything about 'Twohorn Port', but there were no maps in the manor that mentioned anything about it.

Initially, Roel thought that the maps were simply incomplete.

He was no longer in a world where maps were accurate and commonplace; in this world, maps were strategic intelligence that had a consequential impact in war, making them highly valued. On top of that, there were no advanced technologies in this world to get overhead imagery of terrain, and no tools to help draw out the map. Everything had to be done manually.

Cartography was an occupation that was highly demanding in terms of skill. They had to head down to the region being mapped themselves and survey the area, conducting measurements and making estimates, before detailing the information down on a piece of paper.

On top of how tiring and tough the job was, it was highly dangerous too. Exploring treacherous regions was difficult enough by itself, but they were often made unwelcome on top of that. There were no fief lords who would be willing to have their own territory exposed to others. If someone were to be caught secretly creating a map of a fief, that person would be arrested and grilled.

The line of thought was that if someone was trying to draw a map of your fiefdom, someone was probably coveting your land.

Even legitimate cartographers, authorized by the royal family, faced difficulties trying to carry out their work in other fiefs. The fief lords would usually resort to all kinds of tactics to sabotage their work.

Even if they didn't, just the danger of the wilds was a struggle to deal with. Here in Sia, old mountains weren't just filled with wild beasts. There were mutated beasts lingering in the depths of forests and mountains which even high transcendents would struggle to cope with. If a cartographer were to encounter one of those, it would spell certain doom.

That's why it was often said that the greatest accomplishment of a cartographer was to complete a single map in their lifetime.

In any case, all of these reasons made it highly difficult to acquire maps in Sia, and this was only the very first step of the problem. There was a greater challenge awaiting after acquiring a map—verifying its authenticity.