“That took ridiculously long!” Kane complained.
Three hours had passed since they went in for a transit registration, and they were finally out after an extensive registration process.
“True,” Rui huffed, massaging his head. The process had been as tedious and lengthy as the sheer amount of processing one went through when traveling internationally by flight back on Earth. He did not expect the immigration process would be so tedious in a relatively more primitive world where the concept or the equivalent of passports and visas did not even exist.
The international immigration policy of nations on the Panama Continent was more primitive and relied on basic government-issued identification proof, and was closer to how things worked in the nineteenth century of Earth.
“Yet they were so meticulous and rigorous,” Rui sighed. “It must be due to the astronomical influx of migrants since the discovery of the Shionel Dungeon. I highly doubt that their system has always been this sophisticated. They probably needed to step up the security in their processing for national security, they cannot allow such a large number of migrants to enter without any security measures. However, that is only more relieving to me.”
“Why so?” Kane turned to him.
“Their interrogation room and identity check-ups were conducted in a separate room walled with the same kind of energy-jamming esoteric substances that prevent espionage and spying,” Rui explained. “They have to, with the sheer concentration of Martial Squires in that facility. It’s the same thing that the Hajin branch of the Martial Union uses for important matters. That gives me an even greater assurance that our data will not be leaked.”
𝑜𝒱xt.𝚌𝐌
“Makes sense,” Kane nodded, before scanning his environment. “So we’re here huh? The Shionel Confederation.”
The two of them took a good first look at the port town of Kanour of the Shionel Confederation as they stepped out of the transit port facility.
The visage they captured could only be summed in a single word.
“Chaos…”
An ocean of people could be seen in the vicinity outside of the airport. A majority of them were people entering or exiting the nation, while the remaining people consisted of those who wanted to make money off of them.
“Sir! Do you need a rickshaw? Come this way!” One man suddenly appeared out of seemingly nowhere as he began bombarding them with offers and praising self-proclamations about his rickshaw services, among other things in the international dialect. If one closed their eyes and took the words at face value, one would think he was offering a five-star carriage journey.
“Sir!” Another man reached out to them. “Sir come this way! I’ll offer you a discount!”
“Nonono! Come this way, I know the best hotels in town!”
Soon several rickshaw men began quarreling for them.
“Enough,” Rui’s expression grew cold as he exposed a portion of his mental pressure on all of them.
Their expressions paled as they squirreled away.
“Tsk,” Rui tutted. “I normally dislike attracting attention, but it might be better to unveil my power to drive away scam artists who wish to exploit foreigners.
“Hehe,” Kane chuckled. “Where do you want to actually go though?”
“First, we ought to head to the Adventurer’s Guild and register as adventurers. We have already decided to not undertake the mission from the Adventurer Guild’s library, but at the very least, we need to register in order to be able to enter the Shionel Dungeon.” Rui reminded him.
“Sounds like a plan,” Kane nodded.
Rui had already memorized detailed maps of the Shionel Confederation and stored them in his Mind Palace, he did not want to handle cumbersome maps once he entered the nation. He quickly waded past the chaotic crowd, straightforwardly heading in the direction of the Adventurer Guild situated in the town of Kanour. Every town in the nation had a built Adventurer’s Guild that could accept new registrations, while also distributing missions.
One branch of a guild would be unable to handle the sheer amount of workload that would come with being the bureaucracy that was responsible for managing matters surrounding the Shionel Dungeon.
“It’s convenient that you’ve memorized the map,” Kane noted. “Now that I think of it, doesn’t that mean you know the entire layout of the entire country in your head right now?”
“That’s right,” Rui nodded.
“Doesn’t that also mean you could do the same thing for the entire continent?” Kane looked at Rui with amazement.
“It would be difficult, but possible, yes,” Rui nodded as they jogged through the more remote parts of the town.
He had no reason to go through the difficulty of doing such a thing, of course.
“Still,” Rui looked around as he absorbed the town of Kanour. “It’s even more busy than I’d heard. The migration must be causing such a spike in growth to the native markets and sectors of the Shionel Confederation that even relatively recent intelligence might quickly already be outdated.”
The town of Kanour was a bustling town of commerce and business with an intensity that far surpassed the town of Hajin. The town was divided into ten wards, nine of them centering the first and the largest ward. On the outskirts of the wards were countless flea markets comprised of smaller-scale individual retailers and merchants selling a limited variety of products of services, while the center of the wards was infested with showrooms, shops, factory outlets, and even malls. The infrastructure was even better than that of the town of Hajin and came one step closer to resembling modern first-world rich cities of Earth, Rui could even see that the proportion of sky-scrapers was significantly higher than that of the town of Hajin.
“Incredible,” Kane murmured.
“Yeah, I can see why this is one of the largest trade hubs in the easter section of the Panama Continent,” Rui nodded as took his novel new surroundings. “Life here must be quite interesting.”
Kane snorted. “Yeah, interesting is a mild way of putting it. I wouldn’t spend a day in this country if it weren’t for the dungeon.”