Art thou an adventurer? Art thou one who shies not from adventure into the abyss, one who would risk your life to make the unknown known? If so, go and conquer all the dungeons of the world, for the dungeons are a door. And that...
These were the opening lines from Art Thou One Who Adventures, the fantasy epic that Sol and his childhood friends—those who would eventually form Black Tiger—had loved reading when they were young. It was what had inspired them to become adventurers in the first place. Even now, it remained a great influence on Sol’s dream of making the unknown known and conquering the dungeons of the world.
Naturally, Reen and Julia remembered the tale, along with how annoying it had been whenever the topic came up and Sol got all talkative about it. The fact that Reen could now look back on that version of Sol and think, How cute! proved how far gone she was, whereas Julia’s “How peaceful things were back then” and subsequent sigh placed her right up there next to Frederica in terms of being world-weary.
Truth be told, the two of them had never actually read the story. The book belonged to Sol, and they didn’t care enough to ask to borrow it. They were just going along with what the boys were all excited about. What they were drawn to were the roles that Sol described so passionately when they played make-believe adventurers: tank for Reen, healer for Julia, melee fighter for Mark, and mage for Alan.
Mark and Alan, however, had definitely gotten fully immersed in the book. In the same vein as Sol’s goal, Mark had been inspired to aim for becoming a champion of the king’s army and Alan an archmage leading a famous clan. And yet, strangely, Sol did not actually remember the story. He no longer had the leather-bound volume that had once been his most prized possession either. The very existence of that story was missing from his mind, leaving only the yearning it had lit within him. Naturally, he, as well as Reen and Julia, had yet to realize it. No one yet knew what it meant—or what would happen when he and the book were reunited.