Chapter 689: A Tale of the Past. The Witch Hunt - 1
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 689: A Tale of the Past. The Witch Hunt - 1
The frigid lands of the north were empty.
Beyond the border where civilization met the cold, the frozen earth stretched out, an endless expanse of white without a single blade of grass or a lone tree. In this plain, devoid of the bustling sounds of life, only light was clamorous. A snowfield where light bent, shattered, glittered, and ricocheted, running wild as if its reins had been cut.
An unwelcome guest had arrived.
They were refugees, fleeing the False Gold War.
The war had erupted in the nascent days of alchemy, and its cause was trivial. It all began with the controversy over whether the currency the Marigold Duchy had used for a major payment was, in fact, an alchemically replicated fake.
The accusation was partly true, and the situation caught fire when the Marigold Duchy responded with a nuance that essentially said, “It’s not like you can tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fake anyway.” The conflict grew like a flame spreading through dry straw.
Historians would later call it the war fought for the most shameless of reasons, but the cause was merely a fuse—a fuse that was destined to burn sooner or later.
The Divine that had brought the Golden Empire to ruin now cast its immense shadow over the world.
Even the two great duchies that held sway over the western continent were weak and helpless in the face of such colossal change. Distrust in established values. Fear of alchemy. Chaos and conflict. Losses brought on by change. Everything became a problem, crashing down upon the duchies.
The skills a blacksmith had honed for decades became useless, and currency lost all credibility. Everyone hoarded goods in their storehouses with no intention of bringing them out. Peddlers who roamed the towns starved to death, and even the great merchant companies of the duchies collapsed in an instant. Once the flow of money stopped, every part of the duchies began to rot.
Poverty amidst plenty. The order built on gold crumbled in a moment. The higher the ascent, the longer the fall. The Marigold Duchy, which had once operated dozens of merchant companies and amassed a fortune, now found its entire nation plunged into an abyss of debt.
An easy way to solve a festering problem is to create an external enemy. The various duchies blamed everything on the Marigold Duchy, clinging to the belief that if only Marigold were destroyed, the world would return to normal.
That belief was realized in the worst possible way.
Thanks to the war, a wartime economy was activated. War was an abyss that devoured resources. As provisions, weapons, and lives were consumed at a frantic pace, stagnant money began to flow. Trust is not a requirement in a wartime system. There is only the desperate struggle to avoid death.
The war economy saved millions of lives. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died, scattering their blood on the battlefields, but in the grand scheme of the continent, it was a trivial matter.
The war, born of necessity, grew more ferocious by the day. Countless refugees fled the fighting. But the other duchies, mired in their own alchemical chaos, had no capacity to accept them. Inevitably, the refugees passed through the lands of the seven duchies and headed for the uninhabited lands of the North Sea.
Ostracized alchemists, artisans who had lost their jobs, witches and druids who had left their burning forests—they too became refugees and settled in the lands of the North Sea.
“Alchemists are not welcome in our village!”
Slam. A door was shut in the traveler’s face. A frigid wind slammed against the firmly closed door.
This harsh land was not so forgiving as to allow humans to fight amongst themselves. Such inhospitable treatment was worthy of condemnation, even among refugees.
But it was a different story if the other party was an alchemist. Who had started the war, after all? Wasn’t it because alchemists had replicated gold and enjoyed lives of luxury? The refugees, one and all, hated alchemists.
The traveler pounded on the door and shouted.
“Hey! We are not alchemists. We are scholars! We only learned alchemy as a refined pursuit!”
“How can a wicked sorcery like alchemy be a refined pursuit!”
“It’s easy once you learn it! And quite useful. You people need firewood, don’t you?”
“How can we trust anything an alchemist gives us! What if the things you offer turn to sand overnight!”
The door did not open. The group of scholars shivered in the cold.
“Tsk. This is why the masses are so ignorant. They don’t even know how alchemy works!”
A scholar could not help but be drawn to alchemy. Alchemy was the study of the essence of matter. It was mystical, academic, and above all, useful.
Telescopes, beakers, flasks, tweezers, and more. All sorts of experimental tools could be easily made with simple engineering techniques and a bit of mana. Scholars learned alchemy as they would a liberal art and systemized their knowledge of it.
However, the madness of war was too great to be quelled by reason. It was a world where even renowned scholars were thrown into molten iron simply for having studied alchemy. Even the children of noble families had to flee to the lands of the North Sea to survive.
A scholar, Fahrenheit, crossed his arms and muttered.
“I simply cannot comprehend their judgment. Treating a mere ten alchemists with such hostility? What do they intend to do if the alchemists decide to attack?”
At that, Celsius hastily interjected.
“Ah, no. Fahrenheit. If you do something like that…”
“I’m not saying we will. I’m just puzzled by the basis of their judgment.”
An alchemist could create weapons even with their bare hands. This group wasn’t truly alchemists, nor did they have any intention of using force, but what if the situation were a little more desperate?
“If we were real alchemists, antagonizing us to our faces would not be a wise choice. We could have gotten angry at their hostility and attacked, couldn’t we? A small village like this wouldn’t be able to withstand our assault.”
They had the ability to raze the village to the ground and take whatever they wanted. They simply chose not to. There were several reasons for this.
The reputation of alchemists was already poor. It was best to avoid accumulating more infamy and becoming a public enemy.
Furthermore, in the lands of the North Sea where one could not stay outside for long, the distance between villages was a matter directly linked to the survival of any group of travelers. Destroying one village would only make the next leg of their journey more perilous.
Well, there were many such rational reasons. But there was a far more primal and important one.
“But we won’t do that. Though they find themselves in difficult circumstances and have momentarily forgotten the words of the scripture, they know better than anyone that they must help each other.”
“Sister Rene.”
“I will try to persuade them again. If I use the name of a missionary, they might lower the walls around their hearts and welcome us.”
“If you step in, Sister, I’m sure it will all be resolved easily. Tsk. To persuade the ignorant, one must rely on authority, I suppose.”
It was because, for the most part, they were good people.
It wasn’t just the refugees who banded together to survive. Scholars, too, sought out and gathered with others of their intellectual caliber. Intellectuals from the Empire and the seven duchies, all of whom had been cast out for learning alchemy as a hobby, formed a collective.
Among them, the most famous and brilliant group of scholars was ‘Babel,’ brought together through the introductions of Sister Rene.
Among them, everyone was a teacher, and everyone was a student. The scholars, who had dedicated their entire lives to their studies, were masters of their own fields but possessed only a dilettante’s knowledge of others.
Now, with all the scholars gathered in the lands of the North Sea, putting their heads together and desperately thinking of ways to survive, humanity was taking a giant leap forward, half a step away from the Empire and the duchies.
And among the geniuses of Babel, there were two who could be called truly special.
“Now that Sister Rene has stepped forward, the door will open soon.”
One was Rene, a nun who had achieved outstanding academic feats and had gathered these numerous geniuses.
The other was…
“Hey, assistant.”
“Yes! Professor Fahrenheit!”
“Go and fetch Professor Principia.”
“Yes! Professor! It’s time to wake up!”
The small child called ‘assistant’ scurried over to a cart and woke a scholar who was curled up asleep inside. After a moment of mumbling, a man with crookedly worn glasses emerged, yawning languidly. Supported by the assistant, he staggered forward, looking frail and clumsy.
But that was only his appearance. Fahrenheit, Celsius, Pascal, and several other renowned scholars respectfully made way for him.
The scholar of scholars, who embraced the geniuses of Babel.
He was a man called Principia.
“This space itself is the relic.”
Saint Rene, the mage who controlled space. Her relic was, grandly enough, space itself.
The wind that blew was cold, and snow crunched underfoot on the frozen ground. My shivering body instinctively sought a sturdy roof.
But one look at the clear night sky, sparkling with starlight, and all longing for a roof vanished. It was so beautiful and mystical that I found myself wishing, in a good way, that tomorrow morning would never come. Beneath that vast sky, in that expansive void, how small and insignificant is a human being? Just how much knowledge must we accumulate, how high a tower must we build, to reach that end?
Should we feel sorrow for how much we do not know, or joy for how much there is to learn?
Perhaps in the early days, in the clear skies of an era before the Mage Federation was founded, Rene’s Spiritual World was filled with that very emptiness.
Reading the memories of the relic, I witnessed the beginning of it all. Babel. A gathering of scholars the likes of which history would never see again. And among them, the two most peculiar: Rene and Principia.
“Is that the Mage King?”
If this was Saint Rene’s relic, it had to be connected to the Divine and the Mage King. To think that the only clue, the only power to overcome this crisis, was in the closest place all along. What a ridiculous coincidence.
…Though Shei probably prepared this in advance, anyway.
“I don’t know if it’s because this is a holy relic or because it’s Rene’s subspace, but the mental image is vivid. Is it trying to show me something? Well, shall we take a look?”
The door opened. Saint Rene, benevolent, beautiful, and backed by the authority of the Sanctum, was welcomed by the villagers as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The scholars entered the house one by one, and I followed them, moving on to the next scene.