"That was… something."
Stepping out of the inn, Theo stopped for a moment and looked up to the sky.
He had already wasted over an hour on initiating Tia into the world of magic, so a moment for contemplation wouldn't hurt, would it?
It was only now, after stepping out from the space he formerly shared with the girl, that he allowed himself to look back upon the sights that he recorded in his memory.
Not in a perverted, creepy manner of intentionally trying to sneak a peek whenever the cloth he crafted for her failed at its task, but in a more natural one, of occasionally catching a glance whenever the movement of said cloth attracted his eyes.
And now that he no longer needed to take the possibility of Tia watching out for every smallest reaction on his face, he allowed a small smile to creep up to his lips.
'She really does have a nice figure. And her chest?' Theo's smile grew a little wider, 'quite shapely.'
Theo shook his head, pulling his mind out of the gutter as he lowered his gaze down to the street.
Quite obviously, there was no way he would be able to spot the caravan forming or moving through the city's streets. That would take place at the very border of the town, likely outside of its walls, with the goods he bought brought over by smaller carts.
'In that case, I wouldn't be able to find them, even if I knew what to look out for,' he thought, only for the world to then prove him right as soon as he raised his eyes up the street.
Even in this part of the town, right next to the town's most expensive inn, Theo only needed a glance to spot several workers pushing carts around.
'Figures,' he thought as his eyes moved down to the paved street itself, 'they wouldn't be able to keep the streets as clean if they allowed horse-drawn carriages to enter here.'
It was such a small, simple detail. One that most nobles would never stoop to consider. A truth, that horses would shit as they moved.
And shit they would, quite a lot more than an amateur could expect.
It was a problem quite famous in the military, where every cavalry unit had to carry a considerable supply of undertails, simple bags to be attached to the horses' backs, so that the road they would take wouldn't turn into a river of excrements through which the infantry would have to traverse.
In terms of the city planning, however, such a useful yet cumbersome to use item couldn't be the solution. Not without causing all the merchants and workers to riot.
That forced the city planners to find different solutions.
Some decided to greatly over-engineer the city roads, so that the horse's excrements could be easily washed off to the gutters, actively removing the waste before it would have the chance to accumulate.
Other cities would have their districts designed in a way that would restrict the areas that one could access with a horse, keeping the wealthier areas clean while establishing the shit-stink as merely a part of living in the cheaper districts.
Visteria, however, appeared to implement a full and total ban on all the horses and logistic monsters in the city, forcing the merchants to move all their wares in and out of it with the use of simple, human labor and an entire fleet of wheelbarrow-carts.
This design choice, however, wasn't something that most of the naturally grown cities in the interior of the kingdom could implement, not without an extensive effort to plan the city with small, logistic alleys all over the place. Only with the help of those could most of the wheelbarrows be pushed out of the main streets and into those smaller alleys, creating a clear divide between the areas used by the customers and those used by the merchants.
'And that means, it would be rather easy to implement a logistic tram system in here,' Theo thought, always on the lookout for other opportunities to grow his strength.
Sure, as soon as the first batch of the artificially made spirit stones would enter his hand, he would get more money than he could effectively handle…
But relying on just this one money-making scheme was only good for the first month, maybe two of his operations.
'It won't be long before I will saturate the local market, causing the prices to drastically drop. And if I want to push that moment as far into the future as possible, it means limiting the amount of the spirit stones I will be selling…'
With his mind already switching over to planning mode, Theo got on the move.
Wheelbarrows, carts and horse manure aside, he had already wasted more time than he originally wanted to, decreasing the time he had for his next project before he would be forced to rush back to the sect.
And for that next project of his to even start, he still had a long way to go!
'Seeing how that girl somehow managed to spot me using magic, I guess using high-key methods like flight is too risky,' Theo thought as he strolled down the street, each of his steps slightly longer and faster than the one before.
By the time he reached the town's gate, Theo was pretty much jogging. Thankfully, as he was coming from within the city and as there were no signs of a pursuit of any kind or form, the guards allowed him to pass through the gate with just a curious glance.
Once outside, Theo sped up even more, soon reaching the limit of how fast a cultivator of his level could move. Or, in other words, he reached the point where he could finally put his magic to use.
'I can't run any faster than that,' he silently acknowledged, only for the mana within him to stir as several different glyphs started to silently form in the air around him.
Some of them were quite similar to the ones he used during his flight while others saw the light of this part of the world for the very first time since the beginning of history.
A glyph to part the winds, decreasing the resistance that actively slowed Theo down.
Another glyph to use the mana within the air to raise its momentum to match Theo's.
And then finally, the most complex of them all, a glyph that used leftover mana from the air to counteract a portion of the gravity.
The reason Theo couldn't run any faster than he was doing already was because with his rising speed, so did the resistance of the air.
By removing this part from the equation, Theo's speed didn't double or anything, but the cap of how fast he could run increased by a considerable margin.
With the momentum of the air forced to match his own, Theo didn't need to worry about lacking the air to breathe, while pushing the air around him to actively support his rush.
And finally, with the help of the decreased gravity, rather than swinging his legs as fast as he could to keep on raising his momentum, Theo soon switched to just leaping through the air, each of the steps he took turning into a several-meters-long jump.
'Good,' with the whistle of the wind in his ears soon growing so loud it became all that Theo could hear, his lips inevitably turned into a smirk. 'That might just be the most optimal way to move around without a mount!'