Clara's life was perfectly fine before Serena, a sweet-faced QiuTV employee with blue eyes and shoulder-length black hair, came offering an exciting adventure for fifty thousand reed. The kind of adventure most teenagers her age dreamed of. Serena bragged about a luxurious, state-of-the-art train called Adventrix.
Just looking at the glittering black-and-gray outfit Serena was wearing was enough to convince Clara that her stories were true. But Serena's shrill voice, like that of a traveling pot salesman, made Clara want to stay as far away from her as possible.
Clara really was just a village girl. Forget going on adventures—the village market was the farthest place she'd ever visited. Usually, she only went there to trade vegetables and fruit from the harvest for a bag of money or staple foods.
At the market, she often watched people swarm the middlemen or the butcher famous for how quickly he could cut meat. Clara always felt that she was the one with the plainest appearance, with reddish hair tied in a ponytail by a worn purple ribbon, a dark blue knee-length skirt that had obviously been washed thousands of times, and worn-out brown-strapped sandals. Her small, pretty face did absolutely nothing to improve her appearance. Proof of that was how nobody even glanced at her when she arrived—the merchants here were so busy they didn't have time to offer their wares. The customers were the ones chasing after them!
Teenagers her age usually either worked or enrolled at Nalx Academy, the village's only magic academy. But Clara was one of the many people who hadn't been blessed with magical talent. On the one hand, she was grateful. On the other, she also felt envious. She was grateful because more than a few wizards had caused major trouble by using their powers for evil and ended up on Damon Island, the wizard prison. She was envious because there wasn't much to brag about when all you did was plant tomatoes, chili peppers, and strawberries, harvest them, then sell them at the market—Clara was in charge of tending the family's five-hundred-square-meter garden. Fris, her sickly mother, could do nothing but lie weakly in bed, and wherever she went, someone had to carry her—that was Made's job, her older brother's. Fris's legs had been paralyzed for a year, ever since she fell in the forest while gathering firewood. Clara's father, Bob, was a brickmaker.
This was the third time that week Serena had come demanding an answer. Maybe she thought Clara's answer might change if she came back again.
"Well, Clair?" Her voice was much more polite now. But it reminded Clara of the people from the Academy who barged into public schools looking for students willing to enroll in their higher academy, since they also offered a Gray Mage track—which Clara preferred to call Fake Mage. According to their advertising, there were several types of magic that nonmagical people could learn, using special magic wands, of course, that cost as much as a viola. Those minor spells included summoning rain, making objects disappear, and performing small-scale transmutations—changing one inanimate object into another.
"No," Clara said firmly, no longer able to keep an annoyed expression on her face around Serena. The city girl's determination now made her feel sorry for her. How much money would Serena even get if she managed to recruit Clara for Adventrix—the super-luxurious train where the adventure would take place?
Judging by the facilities Serena kept going on about, the fifty thousand reed each passenger had to pay up front—even just one meal on that train could cost that much—came with a catch: in exchange, each contestant had to be ready to face whatever challenges were handed out during the journey, ready to be documented and broadcast across the entire country.