The Sapling Under Management (1)
"Do I really have to bathe, or will washing my face be enough······?"
Thermia stepped out of Velesa's house—and immediately stopped, noticing a young human man loitering in front of it.
"Who are you, mister?"
There stood the prince, afflicted with a severe case of prince syndrome. He was probably in his twenties—far too young to be called mister, if you asked her.
"Do you live here?"
"What's it to you?"
The girl looked the suspicious stranger up and down. Expensive clothes, a face that had never done an honest day's work, hands without a single callus. Rich family, clearly.
The Crown Prince shifted awkwardly, then ventured a question.
"I hear this is the house of a woman called Velesa. Is that so?"
"Why? Need some clothes made?"
"I have already commissioned those. This is a private matter."
"A private matter?"
Thermia's expression turned peculiar. She gave the Crown Prince another once-over, and a sly little smirk crept onto her face.
"Don't tell me you've fallen for my sister?"
Well, obviously.
"Fallen for that violent woman? Absolutely not—!"
The Crown Prince flared up, then barely reined himself in. He exhaled slowly and forced the words out calmly.
"You needn't know anything. More importantly—is this the house of the woman Velesa or not?"
"My, you seem awfully curious about that."
The girl's grin turned openly mischievous now.
"You have fallen for her."
"Tch. As if I said otherwise—wait, no! I did not!"
Ignoring his protest entirely, Thermia crossed her arms and struck a rather insolent pose.
"Yep, this is my sister's house. And I'm very close with her—practically family, you could say. Not her real little sister, but close enough to count as one?"
The Crown Prince's face brightened.
"Splendid. Then will you fetch her for me? I have a private matter to discuss."
"Hm, let me think."
Thermia looked him up and down again, making no effort whatsoever to hide it.
"See, I'm not the sort of little sister who introduces her sister to men with arrogant mouths."
The door of the house slammed shut.
Muttering, honestly, where do these people come from, the girl headed around to the back gate.
The Crown Prince stood abandoned, his face frozen in disbelief.
"I... I am being treated with such contempt...?"
A cold wind blew past him.
Some time later.
Height: 3,840cm → 4,480cm (MAX)
Collection Rate: 240/day avg → 280/day avg
Yoo-hoo. I'm officially a 45-meter sapling now.
I'm pretty sure that makes me four times taller than the big trees around me. Though honestly, how big is that, exactly? Since I look down on everything nearby anyway, it's hard to gauge. Digging through my memories of my modern life—an apartment building's fifteenth floor was around 40 meters, wasn't it?
Wha—fifteen floors?!
I grew that big? I'm genuinely that tall?!
No wonder everyone dropped to their knees the moment I raised my divine presence even a little. It's not easy to stay standing when a tree the size of an apartment building starts talking to you.
I am, at this moment, a sapling taller than a fifteen-story apartment building. Forty-five meters had seemed reasonable on paper, but once I actually compared, the scale hit me all at once. If this weren't a remote forest, word of me would have spread far and wide by now.
As a result, when Thermia came to visit, she gave up trying to look up at me entirely and just had her conversation facing the trunk.
"Sister says she's got a real piece of work hanging around her."
The girl grumbled on.
"No, not a piece of work—what did she call him again? A leech? A leech, that's it. Apparently there's a human who thinks he's God's gift, but by sister's standards his personality is a total bust."
Wow, really?
My condolences, Crown Prince. You courted Velesa with all your might, but a no is a no, isn't it? To be fair, you set your sights on a rather steep mountain from the start. Confidence in your looks is all well and good, but this is an elf village. The random uncle walking down the street here is better-looking than you.
"She really does suffer so. I admire her craftsmanship to pieces, but living as a seamstress—just thinking about it sounds exhausting. You'd have to truly love the work itself to manage it."
Thermia pulled a face of pure disgust and mimed drawing a bow. The target: Pebble Girl, fast asleep on her bed of soil.
"If I weren't due in the city soon, I'd have put an arrow right in that leech's backside."
You have somewhere to go?
"The weather's cleared up, so I need to go trade all the flour we've been stockpiling without being able to eat any of it. They were picking escorts, so I volunteered—oh, right!"
Something seemed to occur to her, and the girl's cheeks flushed pink.
"At first some people were against me going! But then I did this—"
She mimed firing an arrow into the sky.
"I showed off my trick of loosing arrows and hitting the mark, and everyone just went bug-eyed and picked me on the spot! They chose elites for this city trip given how ugly the security situation's been, and I passed with flying colors!"
A palm thrust toward me in a jaunty point.
"All thanks to you, Lord Tree, for giving everyone such fine bows!"
The girl winked.
"Connections are power, after all!"
A fit of giggles followed.
Glad you're so pleased with yourself. But with the rebellion and all, there'll be plenty of bandits about. Won't it be dangerous?
"I'm tense as anything."
As if her palms had gone sweaty at the thought, Thermia rubbed them together needlessly.
"Still, we're trading the flour for seeds this time so we can build a raw-diet farm. I'm the one who pushed for the raw diet, so I can't exactly chicken out because it's dangerous."
With the weather warming, it seemed the village intended to get ahead of its food supply problems. And I couldn't argue—sustaining the raw diet through gathering and hunting alone was getting awfully tight.
The village itself had grown considerably too, swelling with the people the Lord's Castle kept sending over and elves who'd heard rumors and come seeking us out. We were approaching five hundred residents, which meant this winter would bring a serious food shortage.
Time to start lending a hand.
Then I'll ask Pebble Girl to handle the land clearing. Let's make the village farm a large-scale operation while we're at it.
"Really?!"
Thermia hopped up and down with delight.
Tell the village chief. If they plan around my help from the start, it'll be easier to scale it up.
"I'll pass it to Teacher, not the chief! He's the one leading the farm plans this time anyway!"
Huh?
Teacher. The elf who had once demanded I explain exactly what I was, then gone on to push village-wide literacy programs. Thermia didn't much like him—called him arrogant—but having learned her letters under him, she'd come to grudgingly respect the man.
What a passionate person he was, apparently. Passionate enough to demand answers from a sacred tree the moment he arrived, and to launch a literacy campaign on the spot just to raise reading comprehension in the village. And now he was personally spearheading a farm project to sustain the raw diet.
Though why someone that impressive came here of all places, I had no idea.
Come to think of it, the Crown Prince and his escort had once started to bring him up out of nowhere in connection with Teacher, only to cut themselves off and end the conversation entirely. Were the two connected somehow? No one of the Crown Prince's stature would come wandering into this lawless period for nothing. Perhaps Teacher had scouted the village first and invited him.
And if word got out that either was linked to outsiders, even attending village meetings would become a delicate matter. So for now, were they simply pretending not to know each other?
While chatting with Thermia, I checked on where the Crown Prince was.
He sat on a tree stump with the soul thoroughly drained out of him. He'd even dismissed his escort—apparently wanting to be alone.
"Nothing goes right for me."
A palm brushed against his cheek. There, unmistakably, was the mark of another slap from Velesa.
Whoa. She hit him again, just now?
My condolences.
The Crown Prince murmured to himself.
"Truly, nothing goes right for me."
To think he could not even win over a woman of a forest village. He had cast aside his studies and his training, poured half a lifetime into the pursuit of women—and couldn't even manage that properly.
Perhaps it was only natural that his father, having reached his final conclusion—that bringing his family along on the advance to the capital would hardly slow their march—had still left him behind. His closest escort had said His Highness merely wished his son to take a great shock and be changed by it. But changed how? It was already too late.
Just then, a bubbling sound rose beside him.
Water?
He turned his head to find a tiny girl made of water sitting on a blade of grass. Her expression was blank, and she was sighing, deep and heavy. With each sigh her liquid body bubbled and boiled, then cooled again.
What is this thing?
The Crown Prince's gaze was captured by a being he had never once seen even within the royal palace. Before curiosity could form, emotion spilled straight out of his mouth.
"Do you have troubles of your own, too?"
The Water Drop Girl glanced sideways at him. A sigh escaped, and her small head nodded wearily.
"What troubles you, then?"
She moved her hands.
Sky gathered, earth gathered, and together they formed a mass of water. The water split and split again, taking shape, weaving a story. A picture-book tale in water unfurled before him.
A water drop, born from a sprout and touched by mystery, makes a friend and gains a little sister—a joyful story.
And then...
A friend, the tree, who merely sits beside her while every important, weighty thing is spoken of only with the sister. A story of being slowly eclipsed by a sibling too brilliant to compete with.
"So your sister is the problem?"
The Water Drop Girl hesitated—as if she'd rather not call her sister a problem.
"Somehow, I think I understand how you feel."
The Crown Prince looked up at the sky.
"Then let me tell you my story."
There had been a younger brother once. A fragile, delicate thing.
"I love my studies. Nothing pleases me more than teaching my brother what he does not know. I love my training. Nothing pleases me more than teaching him what he cannot do."
But even that, too, would pass.
From the moment the second son was born, the concubine had walked on eggshells—until at last greed blinded her. Poison entered the eldest son's meal, and the line of succession toppled with him.
That day, his father drew his sword and let it taste blood.
The younger brother, splattered with his mother's blood, was locked in a far-off room with no servant to attend him.
When the Crown Prince recovered, he had asked his father: Why do you imprison my brother, who committed no crime? Why deny him food and bar his door? Why forbid him physician and priest alike?
Why? Why?
Are you making him die?
"I wanted my father to regret it."
I wanted him to know his choice of heir was wrong—that even if his ambition succeeded, it would turn to foam in my hands.
"But······."
His expression twisted, bitter.
"Ever since I learned that he secretly reads through the family registry, tracing out and erasing the boy's name on each anniversary of his death—I can no longer know whether I did the right thing at all."
A gesture pointed far beyond them—away from the fief, toward the capital of the kingdom.
"My uncle and my father were surely close once. So how did it come to this? Did my brother truly have to die? I can no longer tell."
Grudge and hatred, resentment and grief.
He had sunk into a tangle of them, impossible to tell apart. All that remained was a body and mind drifting onward with the years.
"We have traveled too far, he and I. Too far to reach out to one another any longer."
His voice was hazy, but level.
"It is already too late. Too late, all the way to the end."
Suddenly, the Water Drop Girl drew near.
A stream of water shaped itself into the small carcass of a bird. Two little hands held it out to him, careful and gentle.
The Crown Prince didn't take it—only looked, and tilted his head.
"I don't follow. What does this mean?"
The Water Drop Girl looked at him with concern, then tugged at his arm.
He rose to his feet, and the girl flew ahead to lead the way. She walked as though lulling the winding forest path itself, carrying him past thickets he would never have entered on his own.
And beyond, at the forest's far edge, the branches and leaves of an immense tree came into view.
His mage had called it a sacred tree. The Crown Prince had asked why the name was so grand, but he'd never received an answer.
Now, though, he thought he might finally understand it for himself.
Hello, traveler.
The sky spoke.
Time is abundant here, and nothing is ever too late—not to the very end. If you carry a burden, you are welcome to set it down and tell me.