Spiritual Synchronization
"Please, have a seat."
A pretty round table sat in the garden. Around it stood five chairs, though at the moment only the Spirit Deity Duke and Leo occupied them. Naphras and I took our seats as well.
Chirp, chirp.
Why was Naphras still in her sparrow form, anyway?
"I called on you rather suddenly, my friend, as the matter felt urgent. I do hope it wasn't too much of an imposition."
"Not at all. I had some free time. No need to worry."
I shook my head as I lifted the delicate teacup resting on the table. A soft pink tea wafted up to meet me. It smelled wonderful.
"And also…"
"?"
"Aack?"
Squish~
The cheek beside me stretched and stretched. Thanks to how far along Leo's unification had progressed, it was now indistinguishable from a genuine nymph's squishable cheeks.
"Leo asked me to, and who am I to refuse?"
"Not my cheeks agaaain…"
"Hehe. Leo is adorable, after all."
"Uuuuuu…"
I finally let go of the marshmallow-soft cheek. Leo rubbed it with both hands, grumbling the whole time.
Chirp.
Naphras, too, lifted her head mid-sip from her sparrow-sized cup.
─So you still adore nymphs even now, I see.
"They're cute. Why would I dislike them?"
One of the few sources of comfort in a world hurtling toward destruction. Back then, nymphs had been so wary that I'd hardly gotten to touch them at all — but perhaps because they were so rare, each touch carried that much more satisfaction.
─And what of spirits?
"Spirits are cute too. It's just that their abundance made them less of a novelty."
After all, spirits clung to you of their own accord, while nymphs were always too busy running away.
Besides, spirits were ethereal beings. Unlike nymphs, I couldn't physically touch them, and even forcing the issue never yielded much in the way of sensation.
Naphras seemed to understand, nodding her whole body up and down — since a sparrow barely has a neck, that was simply how nodding worked.
Clink.
The Spirit Deity Duke, Arne, set down her teacup.
"You seem quite familiar with the Wind Spirit King."
"We crossed paths, briefly, in the past—"
"Oh! Is this an otherworldly-days story?!"
Leo, who had been playing with the spirits nearby, lit up. She'd already figured out through the unification and various hints of the past that I was no ordinary user. She didn't know the exact truth, but there was no reason to hide it in a moment like this.
"Yes. Nothing all that impressive, mind you."
"Nooothing impressive?! You totally don't look it… Have you perhaps met Spirit Kings other than wind and earth?"
"Of course."
"Gahk!"
Leo toppled backward in shock. The earth spirit cushioned her fall, and the wind spirit promptly helped her back to her feet. Great reactions, both of them.
"Fire, water, lightning, ice. I've met them all. Though I have no idea where any of them are now."
"Then what abou… no, wait — what about light?"
"The Light Spirit King, hmm…"
There were eight elemental attributes among spirits. The first spirits had numbered only four — fire, water, wind, and earth — but as time passed, four more were added to their ranks.
From fire and wind mingled together, 'lightning' was born; from water and earth, 'ice' came to be.
And then there were light and darkness…
Dark spirits had come into existence through the experiments of the Demonkin. Light spirits, however, were not born of the Celestials.
"Unlike the Demonkin, the Celestials don't experiment on spirits. And even if they did, spirits couldn't withstand divinity in the first place."
Where the demonic arts carried the traits of 'corruption' and 'erosion,' divinity carried the trait of 'purification.' When an ordinary spirit was exposed to too much of it, its body didn't transform into light — it simply oxidized, burning away under the intensity of that power.
"I know Leo contracted with a light spirit, but in truth, it's more accurate to say the Light Spirit King doesn't exist at all. You haven't seen one either, have you, Naphras?"
─I did once confirm the existence of a light spirit, but never its King. I suspect it came into being through Leo's peculiar power.
Leo was no ordinary human or nymph — she was a user, subject to the influence of the 'System.' Rather than a light spirit existing from the very beginning, it made far more sense that some other spirit had been granted 'the power of light' by the System.
"What do you think, Arne?"
"Hmmm… since the light spirits themselves are of dubious existence, I'd have to agree with the Spirit King."
"……"
"Though my disciple, of course, most certainly did contract with one."
Leo sulked, nuzzling against her light spirit, and Arne — evidently finding her disciple adorable — reached out to pat her head.
"Now, then. I believe it's time we got to the heart of the matter."
With a smooth motion, Arne's gentle expression hardened, and she fixed me with a serious gaze.
"You know Birang Brenis, I trust."
"Quite well."
Birang Brenis, Sixth Sword of the Empire, the Cloud Envoy Duke. A blade of the Empire who wielded the Ghost Cloud Sword, and an ally of the Spirit Deity Duke. And also a student attending lectures at Eli Academy.
"At the Duke of Yellow Embers' command, that child has been studying at your academy for some time now. Her spiritual growth has come along nicely, I'm sure — but her physical growth has barely advanced at all, wouldn't you say?"
Birang was one of the Empire's five strongest, a master capable of cutting down even the Sword God at full strength — or Leo herself. Moreover, as a native of this world and not a user, she had never had any real need to learn mana manipulation in the first place.
In other words, Birang had no particular reason to be at the academy.
"Still, her talent is magnificent. And her pride in her own strength is outstanding."
Even if I had beaten it into her once, rather painfully.
Arne seemed to read the gist of my thoughts and smiled softly. Then, wearing a somewhat subdued expression, she lifted her teacup once more.
"…Seeing you here, my friend, tells me the Duke of Yellow Embers' objective has been more or less achieved."
"Is that why you called me here?"
"I have watched the Duke of Yellow Embers since before the Empire existed. I walked beside him for hundreds of years, and I know his temperament and his mind better than anyone alive."
Hooo.
"The Duke of Yellow Embers intends to keep carving his debt of the heart into you. It will begin with those closest to you, then spread — the weak who fall at a single blow, the fragile creatures of the world, the fate of nations, and even stranger beings besides."
"……"
"Birang is a child raised in the palm of the Empire from the moment she opened her eyes. Her life is bound to the Empire, and she will never be able to abandon it."
"And you think if I grow fond of Birang, I'll be unable to strike at the Empire?"
"Of course not. The friend I saw during the last war granted recognition even to those who crossed the line — but never beyond it."
That was why the Duke of Demonic Suppression had lost her seat among the Three Great Dukes and become a fool. She had crossed the one 'line' that must never be crossed.
Tak.
"The Duke of Yellow Embers will never cross that line himself. He will flatter you as best he can, and in the meantime he will keep sending people like Birang — souls who can accumulate ever more light in your heart."
"I heard he's sending Nea. She's late, but still."
Nea, the Imperial Saintess. I'd meant to give her a proper etiquette lesson at some point, but for some reason she hadn't shown up even a week before the new year. I couldn't tell whether the order had been rescinded midway, or whether she herself was refusing to come. Probably the latter, I suspected.
Arne's expression sharpened slightly.
"…Ah. I see. So Nea is, in effect…"
"How the Duke of Yellow Embers is handled will not be decided by anyone's personal fondness for him. So you need not worry."
My criteria for 'execution' extended only to whether someone had committed sins grave enough to cross the line. No matter how dear a friend pleaded on their behalf, anyone who crossed it would find no exception made.
"For the time being, I intend to leave the Empire be. There are promises between us, after all."
"…I understand, for now. That isn't what matters at the moment, anyway."
"? What do you mean, that isn't what matters?"
Had she not summoned me because of the Duke of Yellow Embers?
"That is of course important. But there is something I must ask of you that comes before it."
At Arne's light gesture, a small droplet of water took shape in the empty air. And curled up inside that trembling sphere, a tiny life slumbered, writhing in its sleep.
A small, blue…
"A spirit?"
"My friend. Have you, by any chance, encountered a water spirit recently?"
"…Water spirits?"
Water spirits. Now that I thought about it, I hadn't crossed paths with a single one lately.
Unlike in the past, spirits were dreadfully hard to find in DeoEn these days — but even so, wandering the continent or clearing dungeons, you could still stumble across the occasional low- or mid-tier spirit. Spirits were conglomerates of natural elements, after all, and running into one or two was easier than most people imagined.
But I hadn't seen a single water spirit.
'Come to think of it, I…'
"You were in the sea the whole time, Professor Lily!"
"Right. I practically lived in the ocean."
I'd spent all my time in the sea clearing the Sea Dungeons. And even before that, I had plenty of experience clearing Kiki Island and other ocean-related dungeons — and never once had I met a water spirit.
Leo nodded along vigorously, clearly in full agreement.
"That's right! I've been all over the coast too, and I didn't catch so much as a whisker of one!"
"The water spirit population has plummeted over the past seven to eight months. They've been vanishing from sight bit by bit, and within the last month or so they've all but gone extinc—"
─Allow me to explain, my contractor.
The sparrow hopped over her chair and fluttered straight to the center of the table. Nibbling at a small cookie held in her beak, she went nom nom for a moment.
It looked as though that tiny beak was doing the talking, but in truth her voice traveled through a mental connection.
─The water spirits are currently in a state of Spiritual Synchronization.
"…!"
Spiritual Synchronization.
A Spirit King was the master and sovereign of all spirits of their element, and as such held the authority to command them. Ordinarily, however, no such commands were given unless circumstances demanded it — and when that 'command' deepened, it could induce something called Spiritual Synchronization.
A state in which the spirits gradually transformed to mirror the Spirit King's own condition.
Something similar had once existed among the beastmen. They, too, had their emotions shift in accordance with the emotional state of their ancient king. When the king laughed, they laughed; when the king wept, they wept — a strange, shared affliction the scholars had dubbed 'Emotional Synchronization.'
But it paled in comparison to what spirits endured.
'Where beastmen merely share emotion, spirits are transformed in body and soul — and even in mind.'
That Spiritual Synchronization — a thing that should never, under any normal circumstance, have been invoked — had been unleashed all at once, and so abruptly…
"This is connected to the Kraken, isn't it."
─It is.
The Water Spirit King was water itself — the natural element incarnate. And the Kraken was a being that exerted tremendous dominion over the sea, over water itself. The odds that the King's state had been warped by the monster's power were all but certain.
Worse still, in ages past the Spirit Kings had fled the Demonkin by dissolving their very existence into the natural world. If, while Naphras and Nord slept their long ages and their beings were finally rejoined, the Kraken's authority had seeped into the merging—
─…Then something far graver than even Nord's condition may come to pass.
Before long, the Kraken would appear, leading a great host.
Water spirits — and with them, a minion bearing the name of the Water Spirit King.