He had wanted to try it out simply as a way to get around. In that respect, it was working. That’s all Vandal expected.
“It still burns a lot less MP than Flight, meaning it’s a useful trick to have. Ah, we’re close to the town. I’m taking us down.”
Eleonora seemed to have given up, dropping back a little with a sigh. Lefdia gave her a reassuring tap on the shoulder.
With that, Vandal and his retinue reached the town in a single night, a trip from the Seventh that normally took about three days. Of course, they had overtaken the priest of Divine Alda, Flot, even though he left the day before Vandal did.
At the same time, Kanata was taking his stolen wagon and heading north from his own position toward a different town, one on the other side of Heartner’s capital. When he checked his distance to Vandal using the Target Radar the next morning, he was surprised at just how much closer his prey had moved in a single night.
Skill level increased for Spirit Body!
The town of Niakki.
For more than 100 years, prior to the start of the reclamation project, this had been the southernmost city in the Duke Heartner domain. In the last century, it had shrunk down to an urban but still relatively small town of ten thousand. It was ruled by Viscount Niakki and also served as the capital of his territory.
In the market, a boy with silver hair and a rough cloth eyepatch was walking through the crowd. He scanned his surroundings, and then moved over to a stall that his eye settled on.
“An apple,” he said.
“One baum each,” the middle-aged woman running the stall replied.
The youth searched around in his coin purse. It took him a while to extract a silver coin, which he then handed over.
The woman looked at it intently for a moment, then gave a snort. “That’s a fake, for sure. A snot-nosed kid like you has no business with silver. I don’t care whether you’re a refugee or an orphan; get lost!” Even as she spoke, she tucked the silver “fake” away. She clearly had no plans to return it to the boy.
“Well? What are you looking at? Begone or I’ll call the guard on you!” Her shouting attracted attention from other stall owners and passersby, but none of them had sympathy in their eyes. Their eyes held only annoyance, disgust, and hatred.
The boy’s face showed no reaction to these looks. He simply left, fading back into the crowd.
“Huh! Little freak!” The woman was smiling, however. She had just made 50 baum.
She also didn’t notice that a single apple was missing from her stall.
Meanwhile, the boy—Vandal—was out of the way, eating his apple in an alleyway. He didn’t consider this stealing, as the woman had taken fifty times the payment for it.
“This town is twisted.” He wasn’t trying to look especially dirty, but he was wearing a cloth around his head to hide his identity as a dhampir. As a result, people seemed to think he was a refugee or orphan. Further adding to that impression was his long hair, which also hid his pointy ears. But even if the townspeople saw those, they would probably just think he was a half-elf orphan.
The bigger shock was just how despised the refugees were here. It seemed like the people of the town blamed all their daily strife on them. It was true that, since the Saulon refugees arrived, the economy had taken a hit, taxes had gone up, and overall safety had gone down. There was more competition for day labor jobs, creating conflict among the poor. Vandal wasn’t going to mindlessly defend the refugees. However, the economic and taxation issues were because the Olbaum Electorate Kingdom had been defeated in the Saulon Domain, losing that territory and putting the Heartner Domain on the frontlines. That meant an increase in military spending. That wasn’t the fault of the refugees but of the politicians who had lost the battles and of the Amidd Empire that had launched the attack. At least, that was the only logical assumption.
“Young people today are so quick to pick on the weak.”
“That fruit-selling bitch! I’ll curse her to death! Give me some MP!”
“We don’t have the leaders like we used to . . . why, it was only yesterday . . . hold on, no, ten years ago?”
“The password is ‘ale and moba bean stir fry.’ They’ll say they’re all out, but repeat the order again. Then you can meet with the Night Fangs.”
“Hehe, if you’re looking for a good time, try Flower Hued Legs to the west. They have the very best whores!”
“I see,” Vandal deflected. He had asked the nearby spirits to tell him about this town and the Heartner Domain, and now they wouldn’t shut up. As he listened to them ramble on, he considered the discrimination the refugees were facing. This was the kind of thing that would make human rights organizations and the media go crazy back on Earth. He wondered why this kind of thing occurred, even among people of the same nation. There had been similar issues on Origin and Earth . . .
“Oh, of course,” Vandal realized. “For the people from Heartner . . . they don’t consider those from Saulon as a part of same nation.”
In this world, travel by road was still dangerous. Most people lived their entire lives in the villages or towns where they were born. Anyone coming from outside them were outsiders—foreigners, even.
Furthermore, the Olbaum Electorate Kingdom had originally formed from a bunch of small nations. Politicians only governed those in their own domain, and the people from other dukes’ domains were considered outsiders. It made sense that people from Heartner wouldn’t consider people from Saulon as compatriots.
The pioneer villages are going to have it hard in the future, Vandal thought, taking a second bite of his apple—and he didn’t like it much, either. It was, simply put, not a great apple. It tasted like an apple, but it definitely wouldn’t have made the shelves in a supermarket back on Earth. It wasn’t sweet, but rather sour, and it felt horrible to bite into. Kobol fruit was better than this, although that was more a reflection of how tasty kobol fruit were.
Vandal recalled the flavor of apples from Japan, on Earth. If he could take that flavor, created by long years of selective breeding and the hard work of farmers, and place it into the flesh of a kobol fruit . . . he could sell kobol fruit that tasted like apples for ten Amidd in the Empire, or ten baum here in Olbaum.
“Enough side quests,” Vandal declared. “I’m going to sneak into the magicians’ guild tonight and search for some older spirits. They keep cursed items there, from the sound of it. There should be some pretty aged spirits—perhaps vengeful ones—hanging around.”
He was talking to himself again. He needed to stop spending so long alone.
Vandal set out, still munching on the disappointing apple. Along the way, some thugs gave him some trouble. They had seen him pay with the silver coin. They didn’t know anything about Princess Lebia either, but their blood tasted a lot better than the apple.
The small Niakki branch of the magicians’ guild was home to a magical text feared for its powerful curse. It held all sorts of forbidden knowledge, granting power to those who read it but also warping their personalities into a totally different ones, crazed and cruel. Some suggested that, rather than forbidden knowledge, the book contained a sealed-away evil god, who crept into the brains of any who opened the tome.
That theory was actually about ninety percent correct.
“Hehe, another fool opens my pages!” The Devil God of Magical Texts, Bubuldoura, cackled with glee. He had been defeated long ago by the hero Gold Farmoun but escaped by turning himself into this book. There was something that he needed to regain his strength: readers.
When someone opened him and read from his pages, he could take over their mind, control them, and suck down their strength like a mosquito, slowly recovering his power.
“I’m about halfway there, at long last! Time to take over another pathetic fool and use them a stepping-stone to my complete revival!” His pages were flipped open. Bubuldoura wasn’t about to miss his chance, and he immediately leapt at the mind of the one holding him. “Yes! I’m going to seize control of you! Just like all the foolish prey I’ve controlled until now!” Bubuldoura’s spirit, like some horrible combination of an arthropod and a mollusk, slid toward the mind of his new reader. The reader would be unable to resist and bend instantly to Bubuldoura’s subjugation. That was the way it had always been, so he saw no reason for it to differ this time.
“Huh? What’s going on? I can’t reach him?!”
He reached, and reached some more, but he couldn’t arrive at the memories or personality he wanted to touch. Bubuldoura started to panic, stretching and clawing, but he barely felt the lightest touch on the tips of a few tendrils.
The thing he touched puzzled him, as well.
“What’s this, now? What’s going on? How can such a thing exist? Is this reader really someone from this world?”
Bubuldoura had infected the minds of hundreds, if not thousands of humans. He was, from one perspective, a specialist in the mind. But he had never encountered a human like this.
It couldn’t be. The mind had nothing where it was meant to be, and what was there instead shouldn’t exist in the first place. It was like a human body, but there was a small intestine shaped like a liver where the brain was supposed to be. It was that kind of impossible-to-understand mystery. Like the entire mind had been cobbled together from random pieces of trash.
Having reached this conclusion, Bubuldoura had a terrifying thought.
“I did hear that a divine being took the souls of the four heroes who were crushed by the Demon King and crammed them together into a single new soul. If that soul was then broken again, for some reason . . . ack?!” In the middle of that thought, Bubuldoura noticed a massive crack appearing above him.
A crack that was moving around.
“Eek, eek, eeeeeek!” The crack opened up a little more, and he saw a massive eye inside it. The mud-colored pupil reflected back the form of Bubuldoura.