Our ship faced no more serious obstacles after the sea serpent. We visited a number of islands to trade with along the way until we finally made it to the powerful coastal nation of Mintar. I had spent about a month on board. It had been a pretty dense month, and while I had come to love the ship and its crew, it was still time to say goodbye. I would board a new ship and head farther west, while Suin would fill his stores with more merchandise to bring back to the Ancient Gold Empire.
Suin agreed to help me make arrangements for the next leg of my voyage. Mintar was a bit of an economic powerhouse, so there were a fair number of ships heading from here to the center of the continent. He was recognized by the merchants here, so securing passage was well within his power.
Though he had said it would take a few days, I was quite grateful for his help. It would normally take a much longer layover to get transferred to another ship. I suppose my current journey had already stretched into a length of decades, so waiting a few days for a ship wasn’t all that different from waiting a few months, but anything that got me home faster was something I was grateful for.
So, I ended up spending a few days in Mintar. It felt like too much time to sit around doing nothing, but not enough time to actually engage in something. The most I could do was go sightseeing around the port. The port here was quite large, so it would probably keep me entertained for a few days at the very least.
Unlike the people of the Great Grasslands who worshipped the natural world or the people of the Ancient Gold Empire who worshipped the dragon’s guardian spirits and mystics, the people of Mintar worshipped gods of the wind and sea. Their places of worship were called temples rather than churches, but their social function seemed more or less the same as the church in the center of the continent. In short, it served by grounding faith for life from birth until death, handled basic education, and sought out children with talent in the Divine Arts.
In that light, the Child of Fire I had met in the Great Grasslands might have been in a bit of a dangerous position back then. His supernatural power, a pyrokinesis the people here would have recognized as a type of Divine Art, was quite powerful. If he had continued to run amok, the temple here might have put together a task force to deal with him. No matter how you approached the issue, a person who didn’t believe in any god but possessed such powerful Divine Arts and used them to attack and plunder would be an affront to the temple here.
As organizations involved with finding and training children who possessed a talent for the Divine Arts, churches and temples possessed extensive knowledge of them. With Juyal making no efforts to keep his abilities a secret, a member of the temple would easily discern the nature of his pyrokinesis. No matter how powerful his abilities were, once their origin became known, it would be possible to take countermeasures against them. If more than one Divine Arts user were to confront him, especially any who were particularly effective against pyrokinesis, Juyal would stand no chance. Considering his talent for the Divine Arts, they might not have killed him immediately...but I doubted he’d ever be granted any freedom.
Of course, that would have been the case for Juyal back when he wielded his power recklessly. As he was now, even someone with a plan to defeat his pyrokinesis wouldn’t have an easy time taking him down. He had been quite devoted to learning swordsmanship, so at least as far as it came to dealing with his powers, there was no need to worry about him.
Besides, I suspected he had already brought an end to the Dahlian raids of the southern kingdoms. Walking through the streets of Mintar’s port city, I found woolen sheets for sale that must have been acquired by trading with the nomads of the grasslands. The sight brought back all sorts of memories.
It felt odd to be getting pangs of nostalgia when I had only been gone from the grasslands for about a decade. My nostalgia led me to inquiring further about the grasslands, where I learned there were apparently big changes happening. A street merchant wouldn’t know all that much, of course, but it appeared one of the large tribes was absorbing other tribes and gathering considerable power.
It sounded like a storm was brewing in the east, centered around the nomads there. Though the news left me a little uneasy, I knew Juyal, Zelen, and even Shuro had grown up into wonderful adults, so I was confident they’d make it through. If the children of wind and fire joined hands, they could weather any storm. Or perhaps it would be better to say that they’d start a storm all of their own.
That said, the emergence of a powerful new faction on the grasslands also carried the threat of both the southern kingdoms and the Ancient Gold Empire making a move against them, so I still felt a little worried.
Seeing miscellaneous goods lined up both from the Great Grasslands and the Ancient Gold Empire beside each other was interesting as well. There were also plenty of goods from other coastal and island kingdoms. Just looking at the goods for sale across the city made it feel like the decades I had spent in the East had barely scratched the surface of what lay here.
Besides Mintar, there were also other large coastal kingdoms like Skrolm, and I hadn’t so much as stepped foot in Red Mountain Province in the empire. Suin had plenty of colorful language to describe Skrolm, but I imagined that was mostly because they were an economic rival. I wouldn’t know the true nature of the place until I saw it for myself. Red Mountain Province apparently had a population of serpentfolk, as well as a kingdom of dwarves. There had also been plenty of tribes living on the Great Grasslands I’d never encountered.
Speaking of which, there were also the halflings and the fairies on the grasslands. I hadn’t had much chance to encounter halflings yet, and while I had previously held no interest in the fairies, I had come to learn that fairy society wasn’t as monolithic as it first seemed. There might have been some kind of change happening among them as well.
There were plenty of things I rushed past, numerous places I didn’t visit...it felt like I was wasting opportunities, but I’d have plenty of chances to visit them again in the future. For an ordinary human, my journey around the eastern region of the continent would have been the odyssey of a lifetime. But for a high elf like me, things were different. Out of the thousand years allotted to me, the few decades I had spent here were only a drop in the bucket.