“Your species' nation, the Terran Cooperative?”

  My AR was showing that he was confused, and so were the others—even the ones checking the gold and platinum had stopped going over the bars.

  “I will see if I can find out what this means.” Lola informed me through our connection. While I tried to remain as calm as possible.

  “So I’m assuming you don't have a valid reason. There are situations when we do not side on behalf of nations.”

  “One is when that nation employs mind control in any form other than propaganda—because you can't do anything against that. And the other encompassing reason is if you claim that you were a slave. Since you are in the slave-free area of the station, you can technically declare yourself a free individual, and you would then have no nation.”

  He then leaned in and started to whisper, “Technically, even if you’re in debt, you could claim that you're a slave. A stretch, but I can make it happen.”

  Now I was just confused, and while I guess I could go with his suggestion, I did not want those corporate assholes to claim that they were something they were not.

  “I didn’t find much, but species nations have a lot of power over their species in basically every civilized part of the galaxy. This would trouble us a lot,” Lola informed me.

  “I think that there’s been a misunderstanding. Humans definitely don’t have a species nation, as you called it. There is no way we could be so united. Even before we entered this galaxy, our planet had at no point been truly united.”

  “Even now, I know of another nation—the Terran Empire—that operates from our home system. And I know many nations that have left, that would definitely not be under the Terran Cooperative.”

  There was a moment of pause. Then he started to go through his clipboard-looking tablet.

  “If this is true, then I must apologize. From the records, it seems that the Terran Cooperative made contact with us approximately three years ago and submitted all the forms and provided proof of their claim.”

  It was always weird how, when time or measurement were involved, the universal translators’ voice kind of sounded a bit robotic, because it was converting it to my timescale. It should have no problem not being robotic-sounding.

  “We do have records of the Terran Empire, other smaller nations, some mercenary fleets, and many, many adventurers with the same species of human. They aren't operating here much—we rarely see your kind—but I’m also not seeing the connections we would see if they were all under one nation. Would you say your species is social?”

  “We're definitely social, but only up to a certain degree. If our viewpoints differ too much... well, we have had three world wars, so…”

  I could see his face cringe, and it kind of looked similar to ours when we did that.

  “Still, this will take time to figure out, and that doesn't mean that you have a valid reason to be here.”

  He was about to say something else, but we were all distracted by what started to happen behind me.

  This entire time, the drones were working on the ship, cutting the back ramp in a way that would allow us to lower it. But two of the drones seemed to start pushing each other to try to get to the same spot to cut it.

  “Hey, you two, stop it. Take turns, or one of you go to another spot.”

  They were kinda acting like siblings fighting over something, and I wasn’t sure if I liked it or loved it. Seems that they chose to share, as one of them started to cut from the bottom and the other from the top.

  When I turned around, however, the pleasant face I saw had disappeared.

  “Are those AI? I’m not seeing any control devices.”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  He didn’t need to say more, because I could see, if I didn’t give the correct answer, I would be in a lot of trouble.

  “They're all connected to me. I have gone through a mana rebirth and will be registering myself with the Adventurers’ Association.”

  There was no verbal communication, but the leader looked at another one of his party, who took out some sort of device and activated it, sending a pulse through everything.

  My hand was immediately on my revolver, but nothing seemed to have happened.

  “You should have just said that you wanted to become an adventurer. That would be a valid reason. And please relax—that would have shut down any electronics not connected to a Mage. We will still put the request through to investigate the claims of the Terran Cooperative and of them being a species-nation, but now we can get back to business.”

  “From the amount of gold and platinum you have supplied, they all seem to be extremely pure. I appreciate that. Based on the current price, I can now add do your temporary account: 972,000 mana credits, from which I will deduct 167,000 mana credits for the two-week stay.”

  “With this transaction completed, you can head to the registration office if you want to leave this arm of the station. I have also granted you access to the station’s basic web and the services available on this arm.”

  I didn’t even notice that all of them were wearing small backpacks, but the six people who had checked the bags now started to pull out the bars and began loading everyone’s backpacks, moving back and forth quite rapidly.

  “If you have any more questions, you have my contact information. But I must now go, as we have another arrival. A prosperous time for you, Mage Graves Remy, the captain of Forward Horizon Mark One.”

  “A prosperous time for you as well.”

  I watched him speed away. Well, this was certainly not what I expected.

  “Lola, do you have the connection?”

  “Yes. Before we can purchase even further access to the web, you need to go through the registration office. After that, you can enter the station proper, where you can register as an adventurer. I will display the route you need to take.”

  “Thank you. And keep an eye on those troublemakers—there’s a lot of work we need to do. Also, see if we have access to at least some parts that we could order to start fixing everything.”

  “Already done. There are standardised basic pieces of armour plating we can order. They come in almost 4 by 4 metre squares, although there are different sizes—although on average those are more expensive. Purchasing one will cost 23k mana credits”

  “More expensive than I thought. But order two of them. If I’m not back before they arrive, start analysing them using the drones to do my work.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  My AR was displaying the route I needed to take, so I just followed that.

  The room was quite spacious, even if it was the tiniest berth they had. It was a bit over 105 metres in length, 55 metres in width, and 35 metres in height—just a bit above the tiny size classifications for ships. My ship looked small compared to the size of the room.

  The doors opened automatically, and when I stepped outside, they locked behind me, and only I could get access to it. Not even the officials could barge in without a warrant.

  The laws in this station were weird, but Lola was constantly feeding me interesting things she found, and I was also reading some of it using my AR to display a text document.

  The hallway was quite spartan, but that's not to say that there wasn’t anything here. On the other side of the hallway, which was 20 metres across, were similar doors to the one I came out of.

  Looking to either side, it seemed to go on endlessly, with doors at constant distances from one another. In the middle, I would say, was something like a road, and at the edge of it, there were actually benches every so often.

  I needed to walk to a certain one that was a bit more fancy and actually had to press the button for the passenger transport to stop at this stop.

  Now this was something I truly didn’t expect—needing to wait for public transport in a space station. Honestly thought those times were behind me.

  This did allow me to browse a little bit more of the web and to find out that there were actually comfort places in the 42nd arm where I currently was. Turns out that not everyone wants to go into the station proper, so there were shop areas especially close to the entrance of the station proper. These were just restaurants, bars, and stuff like that.

  I was a bit curious about how food was handled, but turns out you needed some sort of AR glasses or better so you could get access to the data on the food and drink you were about to consume to see if it was deadly or not to you.

  There was a nice disclaimer at the bottom of that explanation that the station is not responsible if you consume something poisonous to you or even breathe something in that is deadly to you.

  The wait was about 12 minutes. I saw what looked to be like a small train, obviously using magnetic levitation to move as fast as it did. The train started to slow down near me, and the doors opened automatically. The good thing was that I didn’t have to pay for this, this was a service the station offered.

  As I stepped on, I saw that there were about ten others on board. Some of them looked quite rough, while others looked dignified. There was complete silence on board, so I decided not to interrupt that. It also seems that this train ride was going to take about 30 minutes to get me to the registration office at the start of this arm.

  “I have finished all the registration stuff you need to complete. You can go over it, but it’s pretty basic stuff. You will need to get a few vaccine shots. This would help your nano machines to fight against the more common diseases, although they should be able to handle them without that. I’m also working on an extended list of things that you can consume, because you can consume more than the average human.”

  “Thanks. This will make things go by faster, I suspect.”

  “Yes, a lot faster, but they might still ask you questions, so be prepared.”

  “I always try to be.”

  What I had classified before as a hallway I would no longer call it that, because near the station proper, the area opened up a lot, and I would say that the hallway turned into a proper village at some point—perhaps even a small town. It was hard to tell because there were many buildings blocking my view.

  There were now a lot more people here, and they came in all different sizes and shapes. I’m pretty sure some humans could never be here without looking disgusted.

  What was truly weird was that there were so many humanoids. Of course, they were quite different in some regards to humans, but damn, this form seemed to be able to make it into space more than any other.

  Some looked kinda dressed like me. Some looked more medieval-looking, with swords on their backs or large axes in their hands—some even had shields. Others were like the mercenaries I remembered from back home, wearing high-tech armors, but none of them were wearing any assault rifles or anything that looked similar to that. But they obviously had smaller gun-type weapons.

  Then there were the people who didn’t have any weapons. A lot of them had protectors around them that did—but not all of them. If you disregard that they were different species from humans, they looked like regular civilians just going about their business.

  Some obviously were doing better than others, from what they were wearing, so there was obviously wealth inequality.

  It was a strange mix of medieval, normal, and cyberpunk. And while it all looked weird to me right now, I think I would get used to this quite fast.

  It was one of my superpowers to adapt quickly and I needed to put that power to work to the best of my ability, because I was certain this was a truly dangerous place, even while it didn’t look like it.