As surprising as it was, this was the environment the Agents of the Four Seasons in Kyokoku had to live in. Even the ones protecting him had to use fake names because of just how dangerous the insurgents were in this country.
What stood out the most was the phrase discarded his identity.
Going by the official explanation, it sounded like he’d had no other choice, but it was hard to imagine the Agent wanting to use a fake name anyway. Especially considering how young he was. He’d been forced to erase all records of himself.
That’s cruel.
Rindo felt awful for Kashu’s Agent of Autumn.
Kikka then gave them a short recap of each country’s history and of Kyokoku’s Seasons Tower.
Nadeshiko sat still, not knowing how to act.
“Nadeshiko,” said Rindo, “did you understand everything he said about Kyokoku?”
Nadeshiko looked at him awkwardly. “Not really…”
“It’s okay. He was going fast and skipped a lot; only the grown-ups would understand that. I apologize for my father. Would you like me to explain it to you?”
Nadeshiko nodded twice.
They could ignore what Kikka was saying right now.
The other interpreters were speaking at the same time, too, so it wouldn’t look strange for them to talk.
Even so, Rindo kept his voice low. “Basically, Kyokoku has no Towns. There are similar communities, but it’s not like in our country, where they’ve been hidden since ancient times and everyone lives there quietly.”
“Mmm… I lived in an apartment in Teishu, too.”
“Your parents work for the Agency, so they moved from Tsukushi to a connected facility so they could be supervised. The Agency was built by our clans.”
“Oh, right… But aren’t there people without supervision in Yamato, too?”
“There might be, but they should be very few in number. People who are unsupervised can’t be protected. While descendants of the gods incarnate live very confined lives, they are very well guarded. A person could obtain permission to go outside once they’d grown up so long as they had the proper ID, but that’s with the understanding that they’re still being supervised… It’s similar to how some of the commonfolk end up if they aren’t in the family register.”
“Family register…?”
“Some people aren’t registered under the administration of Yamato’s government, for one reason or another… The first problem those people run into is finding employment. Private businesses always check where you were born, who your parents are, where you live, how you live, et cetera, before hiring you. In such cases, they can’t prove anything—they can’t even get an ID. They also can’t ask the government for help when they have a problem.”
“That’s terrible…”
“Everyone who isn’t under supervision gets treated as an outsider, even if they really aren’t. If someone gets banished from the Town, they say it’s the same as dying in the wilderness. Some people leave of their own accord, but they ultimately get tracked down and sent back, or they even come back on their own. Living a good life outside is hard. Even if you can manage it while you’re young, it gets harder as you age…”
Nadeshiko looked very disheartened. It was painful for a child to imagine having no one to help her.
She must have had it rough, too.
Rindo was thinking about Guard of Spring Sakura Himedaka.
After the incident in spring, he’d heard about how she left the Town by herself to look for Hinagiku. She hadn’t been in the family register for a time.
That was an ordeal, even though she was still young.
Sakura had still been a child back then, yet she left and didn’t come back.
Her loyalty in leaving the Town’s protection to look for her lady was impressive, but it had also brought her much hardship.
It was easy to understand why Winter had gone to such lengths to protect not only Hinagiku but Sakura as well.
It was hard to leave Sakura to her own devices when she cared nothing for her own self.
“…Yamato does a better job than other countries in maintaining the clans of the Four Seasons. It might be simply because we’re an archipelago in the middle of the ocean. It’s a very closed-off country, so it’s easy to handle.”
“But it’s hard for Kyokoku because it’s big?”
“That, too…but there are other reasons. Many different races live in Kyokoku. It’s heavily influenced by other countries, and throughout its history, there were many fights between ethnic groups, regions, religions, and even with other countries. Wars, I should say. There were many turning points in history that made the descendants scatter and impossible to track.”
“War and fighting…”
“Yes, terrible things. Yamato has had its fair share of war, but nothing compared to Kyokoku. You often hear about young children being taken away from their parents to wage war somewhere. So even descendants of the Agents of the Four Seasons eventually blend into the rest of the populace, until one day they are suddenly chosen to be gods incarnate. There are cases of people outside the supervision of the Towns becoming gods incarnate in Yamato, but it is much more frequent in Kyokoku.”
“…”
Nadeshiko tried to process the information—the lives of the gods incarnate in the country of Kyokoku, the environment that made Liam abandon his old life to become the Agent of Autumn, and the weight of this responsibility.
After a while, she said, “It’s a bit hard, but I understand now… A lot of things happened, and many people had to leave their mothers and fathers as a result.”
Rindo nodded at Nadeshiko.
“And they lived among the commonfolk, so their personal history is out there in the common world, rather than protected as a descendant of the gods. That’s why they use fake names, so they can hide those records.”
“Exactly. Otherwise, the people they used to be close with would be targeted by the insurgents. Or even the city they’re from. They use the fake names all the time, even with their escorts… That’s how cautious they are about the risk of insurgents finding them out.”
Nadeshiko frowned. Rindo was strongly reminded of how deep Kyokoku’s problems were.
I’m sure names have leaked before during conflicts, and people have been tracked down.
Protecting the Agents was even harder than he thought.
It also made him realize that they ought to rethink the situation they were currently in.
Now, what will they try to do?
Rindo looked at Liam, then at Jude.
The two of them had been sharing short bursts of conversation as well. Liam looked grumpy the whole time, too.
Maybe they didn’t wish for this meeting, either?
He had assumed that the Agents agreed, given how much Kyokoku’s Seasons Tower had insisted, but thinking about it more clearly, he didn’t find it strange that Kyokoku’s Agent would also be against this. They, too, were only cogs in the machine. The boy’s refusal to speak could be taken as indicative of his opinion. If anything happened here, the Kyokoku Agent would be responsible. He most likely had been forced, just like Yamato, and only received their guests reluctantly.