An Unexpected Stage
Before the circus began, the tent was already buzzing.
Seats knocked together from wooden planks were packed with villagers. The place hadn't seemed big enough to fill them, yet there were clearly more people here than I'd expected. Even so, Evelyn and I had managed to claim spots nearly in the front row.
"Whew..."
If we hadn't already been waiting nearby, we would have been shoved all the way to the back. The crowd had surged in the moment the trumpets sounded, and I'd nearly lost the necklace in the crush.
I slipped a hand inside my robe and fished out the necklace set with its blue stone.
Yeah. No matter how many times I looked at it, this was Yurkon ore. I'd only ever seen the stuff as an icon, but even accounting for that, it was identical. There wasn't room to think it was anything else.
So why was it changing hands for pocket change like thirty silver?
After Haste Enchant was added to the game, the price of Yurkon ore never dropped. Not once. It was the ore you absolutely needed to grant that absurd stat affecting a character's speed across the board—skill cooldown, attack speed, cast speed, movement speed, all of it—so demand had no reason to fall. Listings vanished from the auction house the instant they appeared, and an ordinary player had to pay thirty percent over the average market price, sometimes nearly double, just to get their hands on one.
And then someone found this blue-gem necklace. If you built enough favor with a certain workshop, you could buy it, and breaking it down yielded a small amount of Yurkon ore fragments. Nobody had imagined that a junk piece with something like +5 Agility would shoot up like that. The people who knew ahead of time and cornered the necklaces made a fortune. Everyone else scrambled to grind workshop favor, and the value of favor-related consumables exploded—but that's another story.
It was the kind of event that had nearly wrecked the in-game economy overnight, so every step of it was still sharp in my memory.
Which meant this world was still before Haste Enchant had been invented.
Who was the alchemist who developed it, in the lore? If I knew that, I could get my hands on some serious money.
Sure, I'd been cynical about the whole idea, telling myself there was nothing worth doing even if I did make money. That only meant I couldn't find a reason to scrape coins together through the hassle of petty market flipping. It did not mean I was so indifferent to money that I'd ignore an easy path to a fortune. This was the feeling of going back fifteen years and buying Bitcoin.
I don't mean to insult anyone out there cultivating the Way, but if you offered to send them fifteen years into the past on the condition that they buy Bitcoin, even a monk sworn to own nothing would take that deal.
And if what you had wasn't some middling pile of cash but vast wealth, then even a world this short on things to do couldn't possibly be boring. The world would start bending to what I wanted. How could that not be fun?
From that angle... should I start stockpiling Yurkon ore now?
No. That idea carried risk. Nothing guaranteed this world's future would follow the update. What if I bought a mountain of the stuff and the enchantment was never invented? Then I'd just be some young man with an embarrassing love of blue-stone necklaces. And because this wasn't the game's system, Haste itself might turn out to be garbage.
For now, I'd be satisfied with this necklace. Even this much would pay off once that era arrived. If I ever got a chance to reach an alchemist, I could look into the rest then.
I was busy sketching out that happy little future in my head when Evelyn smiled, pleased, and stroked my hair.
"You like that necklace that much?"
"...Yes."
She seemed to think I was simply staring because I liked it. Either way, I was killing time with thoughts like that when the show we'd been waiting for finally looked ready to start.
Tok. Tok. Tok...
The lights illuminating the tent went out one by one, and darkness swallowed the place whole. The performance had run late, and the sun was already gone. The interior was darker than I'd expected, and the crowd was just starting to grow restless when—
Pat—!
A circle of light dropped onto the stage. Standing there, arms spread wide and perfectly at ease, was a woman who could only be the ringmaster.
"You've waited long enough! I am Haity!"
"Waaaaah!!"
The cheers were enormous, the applause thunderous. So it was finally starting.
"We of the Haity Circus have taken this stage to give you, for today's festival, the most beautiful and unforgettable night we can offer."
"So set down your worries, if only for a little while."
"Inside this tent, the impossible becomes possible."
"Ordinary people become heroes."
"And dreams become real."
She finished the speech that had the crowd leaning forward, swept off her hat, and flung it into the air. Then she spun her cane in a flashy arc, caught the hat on it, and set it back on her head, talking all the while.
"And now, the first act we have for you!"
The ringmaster threw both arms wide. I tipped forward in my seat. Honestly, I was looking forward to this. A circus meant lion-taming and tiger-taming. But this was a fantasy world, so maybe I'd get a wyvern hatchling, a juggling goblin, or a troll balancing on a ball. For someone who'd been too scared of wolves to step outside, the chance to see monsters like that from somewhere safe was more than a little exciting.
My heart thumped. What would come out first?
That hope was smashed by the very next words.
"Spirit artisan Rian, and his Dance of Starlight!"
...
What? A spirit artisan? Not a monster, not a beast-tamer?
Whether I was thrown or not, the crowd went wild.
"Waaaaah—!"
The applause died down, and a young man walked out onto the stage. He raised a hand, and small spirits of light began to appear one by one. That alone drew gasps.
"Ooooh! Light spirits!"
"Incredible! I've never seen anything like that!"
Ah. So this was everyone's first time seeing light spirits. If that was the case, the reaction made a certain amount of sense. Still, the act itself would be decent, right? Clinging to that last scrap of hope, I focused on the performance again.
But...
The act was honestly pathetic. The spirits scattered through the air like stars, spun in circles, formed the shape of a flower, wobbled, and vanished. They were doing so little that I assumed it was a warm-up and waited. Then it just ended.
That was all?
And yet the crowd roared as if they'd witnessed something extraordinary.
...Was this a hidden-camera prank? This was worse than a drone show hired for some local event. Give our Hellfire a little instruction and it could probably manage that much.
Startled, I checked Evelyn's face. She wasn't acting. She looked like she'd genuinely enjoyed it.
Wait. That was actually supposed to be fun?
While I sat there dumbfounded, the guy—Rian, or whatever his name was—had already vanished backstage. What came up in his place was the ringmaster, Haity herself. Shameless as anything, she appeared looking thoroughly pleased with herself, threw both arms up, and called out.
"How was our first act? Was everyone satisfied?"
I wanted to shout No! more than anything, but I obviously couldn't do something that conspicuous. I hid among the crowd's agreeable Yes! and simply stared at her with a blank face.
"Even if you weren't satisfied, the next act will be different! Because the next one is far more spectacular than the last, and far more... dangerous."
Haity's speech was built to stir anticipation, and at that I finally relaxed a little, letting the tension out of my face. See? Of course. If it was much flashier and much more dangerous, then this had to be where the monsters came out.
Then the next line forced my expression to lock up all over again.
"And now, our next act! Dancers and a fire spirit present the Dance of Flame!"
"What?"
Another spirit?!
And so the performance ended.
In the end, I couldn't hide how bitterly disappointed I was. I hadn't seen a single monster. It had been spirits, start to finish. A flower spirit blooming gaudy blossoms and handing them out. A wind spirit spinning a few plates in the air. A fire spirit shaping sculptures out of flame. I'd gotten my hopes up for nothing, and they had gone flat all at once.
I must have been wearing the disappointment openly, because Evelyn asked me about it.
"What's wrong? You didn't like the show?"
"...It was kind of bad."
"Why? You handle spirits too. Wasn't there anything you could learn from it?"
"Learn from it?"
Only then did I understand that the Haity Circus was a troupe whose whole selling point was a spirit circus.
Seriously? A spirit circus?
I could have laughed. If people would applaud something like that and call it entertaining, I ought to drag them to my mansion this instant and show them what my summons could do. They'd be shocked enough to pass out.
"That kind of thing isn't even difficult."
"Oh my. Is that so?"
To someone who wasn't a spirit artisan, it might look hard. For my kids, it was beginner-level trickery they could pull off if I so much as said the word. Setting aside Unit 1, who was closer to a monster in more ways than one... Unit 2 had been able to roll left and right in formation from the day it was born, with hardly any effort. And Unit 3's gardening was fast, wide-ranging plant control that left that flower-spirit nobody in the dust. I hadn't specifically summoned Hellfire to train it yet, but thinking back to when it drove off that wolf, I had no doubt it could manage the cheap tricks those shoddy fire and light spirits had shown.
In other words, if you could command spirits at all, any random person could do it. Putting that on as a circus was enough to leave you speechless. Even if spirit artisans were rare in this world, they could at least put in some effort. You get a whole tent full of people excited, and then this? They made their living off it. Didn't they think that was lazy?
Not that I had any right to lecture anyone about effort. Still, even gold-farming takes a certain kind of diligence.
I was turning that over when I spotted the ringmaster in the distance, packing her things to leave the village.
No. I had to say something about that performance. If I'd been alone, I never could have walked up to her. But Evelyn was right beside me.