While searching the forest, he’d been on the lookout for good wood, but unfortunately nothing he found looked like it would make good timber. The trees at the bottom of the valley were your typical broad-leafs.
Looks like I’ll never find good timber with all these broad-leafs around.
Based on his past life memories, he’d had to accept that the unusual plant life here at the bottom of the valley would make it hard to find materials.
Kai still didn’t understand all the complicated reasoning behind it, but the trees that grew in this area of the borderlands were generally needle-leaf trees because the winters here were harsh. And yet the base of the valley was like another world that had its own climate for some reason.
But Kai wasn’t pessimistic about collecting trees for timber. He could find much more suitable trees growing outside of the valley.
The trees in the vast forests of the borderlands included large balen cedars that grew everywhere and were a good source of timber, and it was common for humans to cut down these trees for the sake of building houses in their settlements.
I could just go up top and cut a tree down so it falls into the lake.
Kai looked up at the cloudless starry sky and saw the Milky Way. In this world those stars were known as Ispi Rio, meaning river of souls. He could judge how long he had until morning from the angle of these stars in the western sky.
Knowing that there was no time like the present, Kai made his way up the cliff to look for good trees on the bank where he’d almost been killed by the org. At first, he figured that it would take the least effort to drop the tree into the valley if it was already close to the cliff, but some piece of knowledge within him warned, “That’ll make the valley walls crumble.” Instead, he looked for trees further from the valley’s edge.
It felt strange to think that the roots of a tree could grip the soil to prevent a cliff from collapsing.
At the top of the bank he found a thicket of trees surrounded by dense undergrowth that looked untouched. He only had to look at the area for a few moments before he found several beautiful balen cedars.
“All right. You can be the first.”
He didn’t want to choose a tree that was too broad. Not just because it would take too long to cut through; it felt wrong somehow to cut down elder trees unceremoniously.
Kai didn’t have any tools of course. He had brought his knife, but that obviously wasn’t going to be useful for cutting down a tree.
Let’s see if there’s a way to do it with magic.
He carefully considered what approach to take.
He had a lot more spiritual energy now that he’d gained a guardian, so he didn’t have to be so careful about how he used his magic. He searched through the knowledge that came to mind from his past life memories.
The idea of using water or air to cut through an object came to him, but he would have to try those ideas out to find out whether they could work.
His first idea was that he might create cutting power using wind, and the word that came to his mind was “kamaitachi.” His first attempt at creating some sort of magic “wind cutter” failed because it was too difficult to mentally picture a whirlwind. The idea of pushing the air to create wind was easier to work with, but it used up a surprising amount of spiritual energy just to create a slight breeze.
He considered applying pressure by creating a forceful flow of water in some sort of magic “water cutter,” but the whole idea of a massive amount of water appearing from nowhere was absurd.
Kai considered fire magic his specialty, but his initial attempt to cut through a branch with his “heat cutter” set the branch on fire. After briefly panicking, he put the fire out and gave up on the idea of using fire completely.
Kai thought about it for a while and concluded that fire magic didn’t work according to basic laws of physics. Based on that, he theorized that magic was the power to take pure concepts and turn them into reality, making conceptual weapons a possibility.
What he imagined next was a sword. But the sword he imagined was a magic sword that embodied the very concept of “cutting.”
To cut through the tree... if I had an invisible blade that could slip between the “molecules.”
Plants and animals were aggregated organic matter. And organic matter was nothing more than a substance formed by collections of molecules.
Those molecules were mostly joined together by electrostatic bonds between positive and negative charges.
In a bond caused by what’s known as a Van der Waals interaction, an attraction between a positive and negative charge would cause the molecules to stick together, and if like charges were brought into contact, this would cause a repulsion interaction that moved the charges apart.
Kai was just a boy who’d had no education during his life in the village, so he obviously didn’t have enough fundamental knowledge to fully understand this kind of high-level science, but some part of his brain was wired up to accept seemingly ridiculous ideas.
Whatever these bonds are, I’ll split them apart when I cut!
The blade edge in this concept would easily penetrate the molecular-scale crystals within the wood, and would use force to break apart the powerful electrostatic bonds that held them together.
The object he applied this magic to was the edge of his hand. He decided on a time limit of three seconds for using this “invisible sword” after trying out several cutting motions. Kai had become comfortable with the concept of seconds by this point.
He imagined a blade capable of cutting through molecular bonds.
He held up his arm and applied the mental image to it.
He quickly swung his arm down while the effect was still active.
Immediately after swinging his arm, he closed the floodgate to stop the flow of magic.
He performed these actions as part of a smooth series of motions.
Kai put his strength as a guardian bearer behind his hand movement and didn’t worry for a moment about injuring his hand if his magic failed. As soon as he could feel the heat that came with using magic around his hand, he swung his hand downward and chopped.
With barely any resistance, his hand sunk to about the center of the tree trunk. In fact, the straight edge of his hand had sunk into the tree like it was a lump of dirt.
Ugh...?
The gloopy sensation he felt was unpleasant, and he quickly pulled his hand away. An indentation the shape of his hand was left behind in the cedar tree, and although it had stood under its own strength until now, it wasn’t long before the tree began falling in the direction of the cut. There was a great cracking sound as it collapsed under its own weight.
Kai had intended to choose one of the younger trees, but it was still one of the larger trees in the forest, and the sound of it falling was not an everyday sound.
It caused the branches in trees around it to break as it fell, and the ground shook when it landed.
Sleeping birds woke up and squawked as they took to the air, and then after a short delay there was the sound of howling from the residents of the forest. It was unusual for such a disturbance of the peace to happen so late at night.
Now that Kai had gotten the hang of it, he cut down another two and then another three trees, which he threw down into the valley, without any concern about the noise he was making. But then his work was brought to a standstill.
“Buhshururu!”
Before he knew it, he’d been surrounded by demi-humans. Kai’s excellent night vision made it possible for him to identify them.
They’re lagarto...!
The residents of the forest’s marshland were an amphibious species with long tails, sharp teeth, and a hide that was tough like stone.
The marshland in which the lagarto lived was spread out fairly broadly around the valley, and Kai had to be careful to avoid straying into their territory. He had been careful up to now when traveling to and from the valley, but he’d been so absorbed in felling trees that he’d been slow to realize
that he was being a neighborhood nuisance.
The unique sounds coming from the long faces of the creatures were probably a conversation between them, but Kai understood none of it.
What he did understand was that they weren’t very happy.
The area where Kai was cutting down trees wasn’t in the marshland, of course. Which meant it was the lagarto who had left the water to approach him after hearing the noise.
“Sorry. Was I annoying you?”
“Gurururu...”
They were both intelligent species, so they could communicate to some extent as long as they paid careful attention to each other’s behavior.
Kai was clearly a human, but the lagarto didn’t seem concerned about that, and they didn’t appear to be looking for a fight.
One of the larger members of the group slowly made its way to the front, and then switched from crawling on all fours to standing on its hind legs. In terms of body size, orgs looked bigger, but the lagarto had much more powerful looking muscles. The sight of the tough hide that could protect them against any ordinary weapon would have caused an ordinary human to wet themselves in fear.
This was clearly a lagarto guardian bearer.
The spikes on its back looked sharper than the spikes of the others, and its teeth also looked bigger. Most importantly, the skin around its neck was colored like the striped pattern on a red snake, and Kai quickly recognized that this was what humans would call a kumadori.
“I do not know you, but can see, you powerful warrior. You look like human.”
“I didn’t mean any harm. I’ll try to keep it down.”
“You often seen in this place.”
“Yeah, I’m going to live in the valley.”
“You say... the valley?”
Hearing this, the lagarto suddenly lost their calm and made agitated-sounding noises to each other. Kai guessed they were saying things like, “He lives in the valley?” and “But that can’t be right.”
“Fearsome god live in the valley,” the lagarto guardian bearer said. “All who go near be killed.”
Something didn’t seem quite right, and Kai didn’t trust them. He started by asking a question he already knew the answer to.
“A god? There’s a god in the valley?”
“Indeed.”
“Well, I didn’t see him, and I’ve walked around the whole thing.”
“You walk in valley?!”
The lagarto were becoming increasingly agitated.
Kai couldn’t understand why, but the lagarto guardian bearer stretched its body upward in shock, as if this was some sort of great revelation. It blinked with shutter-like eyelids and then muttered a few broken words.
“Cannot be... ***** has died?”
A shudder ran through the red lagarto’s body.
14
The lagarto showed no hostility towards Kai despite the fact that he was obviously a human. In the past, when human soldiers had strayed into their territory, the lagarto had killed them without warning, so the current situation was surprising to Kai.
He looked into the strange yellow reptilian eyes of the lagarto, and he became curious about the world that they saw through their vertical narrow pupils.
“You say you are next master of valley?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The lagarto turned to leave as if it had learned all it wanted to know, so Kai had to move quickly to stop it.
When they’d seen Kai acting as though the valley belonged to him, they had decided that some creature with the hard to understand name of “*****” had died. The lagarto knew something that might explain why Kai had suddenly become fixated on the valley.
Even though their two species had been engaged in a bloody battle with each other not long before, Kai was calm and fearless as he looked at the lagarto guardian bearer.
The lagarto seemed unwilling to stop, so to prevent it from escaping he quickly moved in front to block its way. Kai could feel something like killing intent from the lagarto now.
“What?”
“Who is *****?”
The name was difficult to pronounce, but when he pronounced it right, it had a clear effect on the lagarto, and they understood his question.
The lagarto guardian bearer went from standing on its two hindlegs to resting on four legs like a lizard, and it swung its long tail to clear any undergrowth that might get in its way. Kai didn’t know it then, but this was something the lagarto did to make themselves comfortable when they wanted to rest in the same spot for a long time. The guardian bearer shook its head at the other members of its tribe, so they left and went back to their beds.
Kai and the lagarto guardian bearer were left face-to-face with each other.
Without either needing to ask, they naturally knew to exchange names.
“My name’s Kai.”
“Mngoleh.
“That’s a little hard to say. Can I call you Goleh?”
“...”
Humans always regarded demi-humans as their enemy, and for a human to communicate with another species like this was more unusual than Kai would have guessed.
As long as Kai was the occupant of the valley and Goleh lived in the nearby marshlands, the two would be neighbors. As a show of friendship, Kai took out one of the maca that were hidden in his pocket and offered it to the lagarto. He then took out another and took a bite from it.
Goleh quickly realized that Kai was trying to show him that they weren’t poisoned, and it threw the red maca back into its throat with a single peck with its big mouth. It gulped the fruit down without needing to chew.
“Who is *****?” Kai asked for a second time.
Goleh blinked its shutter-like eyelids as if the question needed some thought.
“For long time, we live in fear of *****,” Goleh began calmly.
The pronunciation was difficult to understand, but Kai quickly got used to it and listened carefully to what Goleh had to say. He guessed that the lagarto were more comfortable when resting on four legs, so he followed Goleh’s example by sitting down in the grass and crossing his legs.
Now the nature of “*****” was revealed to him.
“Well, he sounds like a real monster to me.”
“He was survivor of the old ones who lived in the forest. Very proud warrior who give fierce punishment to ones who abandon faith.”
Lagarto lived long lives, but even they didn’t know how long the valley had been ruled by the survivor of the old ones known as *****.
Goleh was head of the lagarto’s Unega tribe, and even he didn’t know the original name of the “old ones.” Goleh claimed to have lived in the marshlands for over 200 years.
It wasn’t just the lagarto; the orgs and the few remaining koror also refused to go near the valley in fear of *****. Goleh claimed that no one had seen ***** for many years, but the lagarto still feared him so much that they wouldn’t even approach the valley.
The orgs were also unaware that the occupant of the valley was missing. The being known as ***** had used fear as a means of keeping intruders away, and the valley had become something of a sacred place that no one dared enter.
Through his connection with the land god of the valley, Kai knew it was true that ***** had died. A land god’s blessings could only ever be given to one person. As a guardian bearer, Kai knew this instinctively, and it was beyond all doubt.
Had ***** died in the valley, or in some foreign land? For some reason, Kai felt sure that ***** had died isolated and alone.
“None knew ***** was dead. It is by chance that you receive god of land as your guardian. That is all.”
The lagarto’s reasoning was calm and straightforward.
It was Kai’s first time talking to a demi-human, and he was surprised to learn that they could speak so rationally.
But surprised as he was, he had no trouble accepting that this was just how the world was. The humans of this world weren’t vain enough to think that man was the lo
rd of all creation.
When they were done talking, Goleh thanked Kai for the maca and then slowly turned to leave.
Kai had learned that lagarto also enjoyed maca. He decided that next time he visited, he’d bring many more as gifts.
Although Kai didn’t realize it, the lagarto had now formally accepted him as the occupant of the valley. As long as everyone kept to their own territory, the lagarto were an incredibly peaceful species.
In the end, he’d been given the go-ahead to cut down trees and carry them away. The trees had no value to the lagarto, so he was told to take as many as he pleased. But Kai had lost enthusiasm for tonight, so he decided that he should also return to his own territory.
After descending into the valley, he gathered up the trees that he’d dropped down, cleanly stripped them of their branches, and lined them up on the lakeshore. Between now and his next visit, he’d have to think carefully about how he’d cut them into timber.
“Am I really good enough for you, my god?” Kai asked, after finishing his prayers.
He’d made it a habit to put his hands together in prayer in front of the land god’s gravestone before returning to the village.
He’d merely been lucky. If *****’s previous guardian bearer had still been alive, he’d have been slaughtered the moment he set foot in the valley. The thought of everything being pure luck gave him a lot to consider.
But Kai wasn’t the sort of person to dwell on things that had already happened for too long. He didn’t doubt that he’d just been lucky, so he decided he should set his mind to thinking about the peaceful life he could enjoy here in the valley.
The sky was beginning to glow with a dull light that softly illuminated the gravestone. His time spent enjoying the valley had come to an end. Kai climbed to his feet and hurried back to Lag, and back to his everyday life.
As he ran like the wind through the natural landscape of the borderlands, all of Kai’s lingering doubts were quickly and easily forgotten.
**
After agilely crossing over the defensive walls of the village, Kai would normally have sneaked back to his bed in the barracks, but today he was feeling thirsty, so he decided to make a detour to one of the castle’s deep wells.
Teogonia: Volume 1 (Premium) Page 9