He was fortunate that it was summer, but the warm weather wasn’t enough to raise his body temperature while his clothes were still soaked. The mist around him made matters worse, blocking out the sun’s rays and sapping his body heat.
Kai let his consciousness slip away once more, leaving his body in the care of the rugged roots of the great tree. The hand holding the wound fell limp at his side, and fresh blood colored his clothes before dripping to the ground.
The boy’s lifeblood was slowly draining from his body.
Then, as if there’d been a gentle wind, there was swaying in the lonely bare branches of the great tree, whose countless roots appeared to embrace a huge rock.
The valley slept in silence, for it contained no living creatures, except for the boy.
**
Meanwhile, many of the human soldiers who’d scattered and fled from the forest had somehow gotten behind the defensive walls of Banya, and so the human forces narrowly avoided being wiped out.
They were able to repel an org attack from behind the walls as they took care of the wounded, and exhausted soldiers were able to take turns in getting some much-needed food and rest. They also found enough time to reorganize when the battle reached a lull.
A roll call confirmed that many lives had been lost, and even lords who’d grown used to the gruesome sights in the borderlands were left pale. With less soldiers to defend the region, their continued survival in the borderlands was immediately in doubt.
“How could we let this happen?”
Losses on such a scale were rare in recent years.
The reduction in their numbers was so great that it seemed likely that the nation’s border in the borderlands would need to be moved back.
“They played us for fools...”
Their great losses had occurred because they’d taken the fight to the forest where they were at a disadvantage, and also because they’d failed to locate the org camp that had reportedly been sighted.
The people of Banya had originally been viewed as victims, but they were the ones who’d been so impatient to rescue their women, and they were the ones who’d been so sure that the enemy camp had been seen in a particular location.
It was only natural that the villagers would fall under suspicion, and before long there were confessions of guilt, though many remained defiant: “We had no other choice!” The revelation caused an uproar in the human camp.
An urgent council of lords was convened, and the blame was placed squarely on Pinheroy Baruch, the baron who ruled Banya. The baron protested about his innocence: he had nothing to do with any of it; a handful of villagers had acted entirely without his knowledge. These excuses did nothing to quell the anger of lords who’d lost so many soldiers. In fact, it was more fuel to the fire.
“No one gives a damn what the circumstances were!”
“What did they promise you? That they’d release your women? And you believed it? To think, you were prepared to sacrifice countless people from our villages in exchange!”
“You’re nothing but a wretched traitor!”
“We were all taken in by your deception! But now those deceived will have their retribution!”
Realizing he was going to be executed before he could argue, Pinheroy unleashed the power of his guardian in an attempt to resist. But the lords that surrounded him were all guardian bearers themselves, and they had no trouble holding him down.
As the leader of the allied forces, it was Count Balta who delivered the guilty verdict, and those who were able left the building in haste.
When they returned, they had brought Baron Pinheroy’s eldest daughter with them. They threw the girl to the ground and forced her to prostrate herself by her father’s side before they announced to her that, “Lord Pinheroy is to be retired.”
His red-haired daughter was pale with disbelief as she looked at her father. Then she groveled before the other lords and begged them to spare his life.
His daughter’s pleading fell on deaf ears.
Under the laws of the country, it was not enough for someone recognized as a feudal lord to simply be given a title; it was a long-held tradition that they would be formally recognized as a lord the moment they received the blessings of a land god bound to their domain.
In this world, retirement meant that a transfer in the “right to a guardian’s protection” would need to take place, so it wasn’t possible to succeed a house on the basis of one’s name alone.
“We are not without compassion. We will allow House Baruch to continue in recognition of your father’s loyal friendship to us over many years. However, he is guilty of a heavy crime, and now his judgment must be delivered by your hand so that you might inherit his guardian.”
“I beg you! Have mercy! Please!”
“Judgment must be delivered by the hand of his successor.”
Count Balta’s guardian was the most powerful in the borderlands, but even he had allowed his kumadori to show clearly. The markings on his face were far more intricate than those of any of the other lords, and his ashen blue eyes glowed as if his immense power was burning behind them.
The moment someone became a host to a guardian, they were more than human; they were a guardian bearer with the authority to pass judgment on common people.
One of the lesser lords offered her a dagger.
“You must succeed him by your own hand.”
Under ordinary circumstances, the transfer of a guardian, and the title that came with it, happened when a lord’s life reached a natural end. Their guardian would be allowed to return to its gravesite, where enshrinement could be performed once more.
However, when the retirement of a still-living lord was to take place in this world, it was equivalent to a death sentence. As long as the bearer still lived, the guardian could not be transferred to a new host.
“It would seem you’re incapable.”
“Please have mercy... mercy...”
“Someone must offer her assistance.”
“Please, stop...”
Without a moment’s hesitation, one of the lesser lords swung his sword.
That lord, like the others, was host to a guardian, which entitled him to deliver judgment. The head of Baron Pinheroy of Banya fell to the floor.
In that same moment, his daughter began to scream.
“Now! Do it quickly! Before the divine spirit returns!”
“No... no...”
“I’ll show you how!”
Another impatient lord grabbed the girl’s arm, placed a dagger in her hand, and then forced her to thrust it into her father’s body. Then, as the girl was vomiting, he pulled her arm sharply and forced her hand inside her father’s body.
To complete the transfer of Baron Pinheroy’s guardian, his godstone would need to be removed while his guardian was still inside, and the marrow consumed by his successor. But the girl had fainted the moment that her hand had been thrust into her father’s still-warm body.
Count Balta regarded the limp body of the girl with disinterest as he gave his orders.
“The succession ritual has been unsuccessful. The divine spirit will soon depart. Someone must hurry to seal off the gravesite of House Baruch. We must defend the divine spirit from anyone who might be impudent enough to seize it.”
With the trial of Baron Pinheroy of Banya concluded, the council of lords had a number of decisions to make before they could disband.
The org forces stubbornly continued to surround the village. Their invasion was to be resisted, and the allied force was to leave the region as soon as the human territory was declared safe. A lord from a neighboring village would oversee the succession process in Banya, and Count Balta would serve as the heir’s custodian until she was of age.
Olha of Lag was merely his father’s delegate and he was the youngest member of the council, so the council ended without him having any particular say in anything. His gaze was stern as he looked at the girl who had been left to lie where she fainted.
“House Moloch’s heir has a hard heart.”
When Olha heard whispers from those watching him pass by, he showed no reaction.
During the night of the next day, the orgs threw something over the stone walls of the village before withdrawing.
The following morning, it became clear to the villagers that the orgs had fulfilled their part of the deal by returning the severed heads of the women. The people of the village expressed their hatred for the orgs and their callousness through cries of despair.
No more than a half toki later, the bloody battle between humans and orgs had begun again.
9
Am I... dead...?
A feeling of frustration had constantly been with him in recent days, but now what he felt was a sense of comfort, like the warmth of the sun.
A macaque had thrown him and left him severely injured. An org had pierced his side.
All his life he had carried the burden of weakness, but now he had been freed. This idea felt disconnected from his current reality, so Kai felt as though this feeling was merely a dream.
He was truly awakening now, and the fog was clearing from his dull mind.
He opened his eyes and was met by a soft light that shone down on him.
It’s morning...?
He heard the chirping of small birds and echoes of insect noises.
The sun’s rays found their way through gaps in the bare branches of the great tree that Kai had trusted himself to, and the light embraced him with its warmth.
At some point, the mist that shrouded the valley had cleared.
He still felt that he must be dreaming. In spite of his condition, when he sat up his body felt light and his muscles responsive, and there was no discomfort in his ribs that had once caused him pain each time he turned his neck.
Every inch of his body felt as though it was brimming with power, as if it waited impatiently for him to move.
His hand instinctively went to the wound at his side. He realized the pain was gone from even that area.
“It... doesn’t hurt?”
He was used to having scrapes stop hurting after a night of rest, so he thought the wound had just gone numb. As if breaking free from a brief feeling of indecision, he began to remove his clothes.
The great volume of blood absorbed by the fabric had hardened, and he had to peel his clothes away from his skin. He braced himself for the pain of a scab being removed, but he felt no pain. He examined the region where the wound should have been, but what he found was a patch of pink new flesh covering the wound. It was as if he’d had months to heal.
Although the pain was gone, the scar was proof he’d been wounded, so Kai accepted that this was reality and not just a dream.
Kai jumped to his feet.
The mist is gone...
He’d thought that this area was part of the marshland inhabited by the lagarto, but with the mist gone, he saw that it was something very different.
The warm rays of sunlight shone down into the valley unimpeded, and what he saw was like a forest of trees with branches that looked as if they were always bare.
The shadows that the trees cast on the ground and the contrast against the clear blue water of the lake looked simply beautiful to Kai.
Kai’s unbelievable recovery had naturally lifted his spirits.
He moved a short distance, climbing over one of the gigantic meandering roots, to a spot where he could take in the full sight of the great tree that had held him. For some reason he felt a sense of gratitude toward the tree for taking care of him.
There was a giant rock that looked as though it had been broken apart by the great tree as it had grown. It looked as though a young tree had once taken root in a crack in the rock, and had broken it apart as it grew into the great tree before him. Kai was in awe at the sight. He turned his attention to the rock that the tree was forcing apart, realizing that it too was an impressive size. As he examined its shape through the roots that surrounded it, he noticed it was unusually square.
Then the realization took Kai’s breath away.
“This is... a grave...”
This square rock towering above Kai was broken now, but he could tell that it had originally been a perfect square with sides about two yules long. The surface that faced toward the lake had clearly been engraved with some inscription. Kai had seen another “grave” just like this one.
He thought of the gravesite of the land god worshiped by House Moloch of Lag. The gravesite of The Great Lagdara, the land god of the village, was hidden underground below the castle, and Kai had seen it for himself during monthly cleaning sessions.
Is this one just like that one...?
To express his gratitude, Kai decided to remove the countless withered vines that had creeped over the inscription. The inscription must have been left this way for years... or for hundreds of years. The roots were stuck tight, and even after pulling away vines, withered old roots were left stuck in the grooves of the inscription.
Kai felt well enough to try burning away the remains of the vines with a gentle flame. He had no way to remove the vines in the high places beyond his reach, so he decided it was worth trying to burn them away.
The fire magic he was capable of producing wasn’t good for much else, after all. Or at least, that’s what he thought.
“Fire...”
His use of fire magic was limited to ten seconds.
He tried to burn away the vines near his hand, thinking that he would focus on small areas at a time, similarly to when he’d been recovering from his broken bones. He supposed that if he could burn the rough twisted roots into smaller pieces, the remains could be cleanly wiped away from the inscription.
Burn the decay from the inscription...
For now, his mental image included just the roots at eye level.
But what happened next shocked Kai. Just like before, the flame burning at his fingertip seemed to have crossed over into reality from a mysterious other realm, but this time it was instant. And the flame was exactly as Kai had pictured it, as if the very mental image itself had come into existence.
But what followed far exceeded his mental image.
The instant the flame emitted from his fingertip spread to the dry vines in the inscription, the flame suddenly covered the whole thing as if the inscription itself was glowing red. Within a few breaths, the vines had been completely burned away with ease.
“Haa... wha?”
Kai had imagined burning away a specific portion of the dry vines on the inscription, but the intensity of the blaze had turned the vines in that spot to ash in an instant, and the excess energy looking for someplace to go had surpassed his expectations by automatically moving on to accomplish his original wish: “Burn the decay from the inscription.”
Unfortunately, the excessive power of his fire magic had left the inscription covered in soot.
Kai gazed up at the result in amazement, and then he looked to the finger that the flame had come from. He couldn’t understand what had happened.
He tried using his fire magic once more.
Fire...
In the blink of an eye, there was a flame at his fingertip.
It wasn’t like a flame produced by fire magic; it was simply the exact flame he’d imagined. To prove it beyond doubt, he tried producing the flame as a fireball floating above his palm, and it appeared just so.
In his surprise, he let the fireball continue to burn for a full minute. Only then did he start to feel that his spiritual energy
was just beginning to run down, and he hastily closed the floodgate to cut off the supply and stop his magic.
In fact, he still felt that he had spiritual energy to spare.
The day before, he’d been able to use his magic for a maximum of ten seconds, but now that time had increased six-fold, and the amount of energy he’d needed to create a constant fireball was obviously a lot greater, so it had probably burned up spiritual energy at almost ten times the rate.
At first, Kai tried to understand this in terms of his own self-development.
He had, after all, consumed an entire org’s godstone all by himself before passing out. He’d expected to level up considerably as a result.
But somewhere inside himself he knew that things didn’t add up, and alarm bells were ringing.
Based on his experience, the development caused by sharing the godstone of a macaque between five people would explain about ten percent of his recent development at the very most. In fact, that was probably an overestimate, and it was unlikely to account for more than a few percent.
Even though he’d received all the benefits for himself, it wasn’t enough to explain much more than ten percent of his recent development. If orgs made stronger soldiers than macaques, he could revise his estimate up somewhat, but even that wasn’t enough to explain the discrepancy.
Could I have... gained a guardian?
The ancient ruined gravesite...
Based on its appearance, it was highly likely that the structure was the gravesite of a land god that had watched over Kai that night while he was on the brink of death. The feeling of being watched over by some formless being left him in awe.
This old gravesite had been abandoned for a long time, and it was possible that he’d somehow picked up a guardian from it. Given the dangerous terrain and the remoteness of the area, it seemed possible.
Kai went to check his appearance by looking at the reflection of his face in the shining blue lake that filled half of the valley.
He looked unchanged; it was the same vacant-looking face he was used to seeing, but he felt there was something else he needed to check to put his mind at rest.
Teogonia: Volume 1 (Premium) Page 6