The Unfrozen Port (1)
"Zaktar? Now there's a country I've never heard of."
Opils said, sounding bewildered.
"Seeing as it sits directly beneath our feet, I suppose that's only natural."
I pointed a finger at the ground below.
In the end, Zaktar had accepted the crown. Ksilak had never had a choice in the matter anyway—his own son had refused to inherit the throne.
— I have no wish to wear the crown.
Ksilak's son remembered, clear as day, that his father had tried to offer him up as a sacrifice. He remembered just as clearly who had saved him.
"Don't tell me... you went and met an intelligent race of the Subterranean World?"
I nodded in affirmation.
"Dwarves?"
Lucian cut in abruptly.
"If an intelligent race lives down there, it ought to be dwarves."
"Why? Were you hoping for dwarves?"
Dwarves were a race whose deft hands were famous across the continent. To exaggerate only slightly, a master blacksmith like Uncle Ruka would rank as merely average among them.
I myself had only ever read about dwarves in books; I had never seen one in the flesh. They were few in number and notoriously insular, and I'd heard they rarely left the western mountains without good reason.
"The political situation in the duchy has my business staring down a crisis, doesn't it? It would take dwarves at the very least to break us out of it."
"My apologies. Zaktar is a kingdom of lizardmen."
"A kingdom of lizardmen..."
Lucian paused.
"Fascinating, I'll grant you, but whether there's money in it is anyone's guess. As I understand it, lizardmen are a horde of fanatics who worship dragons as gods, and their bodies are covered head to toe in damp scales. They share not one thing in common with humankind—I doubt we could sell them so much as a nail. If the demonkin were our trading partners instead, business might not be impossible."
I gave Lucian a wry smile. A merchant's mind through and through.
"Go see for yourself what can be sold. I'll be assembling a delegation soon, and I'll include you in it."
With my engagement ceremony breathing down my neck, I had settled for a verbal contract with King Zaktar before returning: each side would send the other a delegation for cultural exchange.
"Jonathan."
"Yes, Your Grace."
A man in his prime, dark of skin, stepped forward. It was Jonathan, research team leader of the Exploration Bureau.
"Your team will form the core of the delegation. Prepare thoroughly."
"By your command."
Jonathan bowed respectfully and withdrew.
I found myself wondering what these people would say if they could see what I had seen. Countless walled cities and populations beyond counting, a civilization every bit as refined as humanity's...
...and that fanatical worship of Ruby.
I summoned only the senior staff of the Exploration Bureau, gathering them separately in the rear garden of the ducal residence. The delegation's mission was a heavy one—the duchy was, after all, being strangled alive as things stood.
The garden blazed with flowers of every color, the handiwork of the gardener who had tended my grounds exclusively since my childhood.
The senior staff huddled tensely at the garden's center, enjoying the scenery not one bit. The way their pupils wobbled at the mere touch of my gaze was, I suspected, the fault of the tyrant's reputation I'd earned by shattering Chris's leg.
"I know you're all busy. Thank you for making the time."
"Not at all, Your Grace."
Hands clasped behind my back, I walked slowly among them.
"The Zaktar Kingdom is a settled race with roots sunk deep in the Subterranean World."
Then I turned to the one I knew best and asked,
"Do you follow what that means, Jonathan?"
"I take it you mean they cultivate crops and raise livestock. If we could obtain crop seeds and young beasts from them, it would cut our research time down dramatically."
"Correct."
Sharp people, every one of them.
"I'm delegating negotiating authority to you. The seeds and the young stock are non-negotiable—you will bring them back. As for what we can offer in return, work out the details with Opils."
"Understood."
"We must also account for the fact that the lizardmen's dietary habits differ from those of humans," said Expedition Captain Srudal—few people regarded him as a knight these days—in a carefully measured tone.
"The crops in particular are suspect. I will take it upon myself to examine that point thoroughly."
"I trust you, Srudal."
I had, after all, devoured every dish the lizardmen set before me. Delicious, as it happened. But I was Immune to All Poisons, so my clean plate could hardly serve as the standard.
The delegation was set at roughly five hundred strong. I had cast the net across every field I could think of, and the roster had snowballed out of all proportion.
"Eden!"
It was the day before departure. Uncle Ruka barged into my office. Well—if he'd come in with hammer in hand, barged would have been precisely the word for it.
In his hand was a broken staff. The very staff he'd borrowed a few days prior, saying he wanted to study it—the one with an air elemental's core set into it.
"What seems to be the problem?"
He thrust the staff, snapped clean in half, up at me without preamble.
"This was made by lizardmen, wasn't it?"
"Yes. Though exactly who made it—"
"Put me in the delegation too."
A blaze like a blast furnace smoldered in Uncle Ruka's eyes.
"It galls me to admit it, but I couldn't crack its secret. It's beyond my abilities. I mean to seek instruction from whoever made this thing, directly."
"I've no objection, but the delegation's official itinerary runs past two months. Will you be all right?"
"Of course I will. If they can craft things like this, I'd gladly settle in among them for years."
"Years is a problem. Without you here, I can't leave my post."
"...Fair point."
Uncle Ruka nodded as if the logic had landed.
"I'll settle it one way or another inside two months. And if it comes to that, I'll kidnap one of their blacksmiths. But never mind that—I'd best start packing."
"If you kidnap someone, the friendly relations we've only just established—"
Uncle Ruka was gone between one breath and the next—at a speed that made me doubt the eyes of a man risen to the Immortality Realm.
After seeing the delegation off, I made for the training grounds. One crucial procedure remained: confirming whether I had truly ascended to the Immortality Realm.
It might sound a little ridiculous, but I was in the middle of doubting that I had become an immortal at all.
It wasn't as if some Daoist association existed to issue me a certificate reading, "Upon inspection, Mr. Eden would appear to have achieved immortality."
I hadn't ascended to any higher plane where immortals frolicked, and no eight celestial maidens had descended to welcome me. By Daoist tradition, the moment one becomes an immortal, the world is supposed to turn entirely upside down.
And decisively, the five desires and seven emotions still clung to me.
Joy, sorrow, rage, hatred, love... things of that sort.
An immortal, of all creatures, whose heart pounds just from holding his fiancée's hand? That was absurd. Shouldn't an immortal stand utterly transcendent above worldly desire?
I had no answer. On this point, even everything my master had taught me was no help. He, after all, had never crossed the threshold of immortality either, breathing his last as a man.
I stood alone in the empty training yard.
First, I began gently, with Samadhi True Fire. It was a technique for kindling flame with internal energy—famed for its firepower, notorious for its inefficiency, and said to be difficult to sustain for long.
FWOARRR——!
Yeesh, that gave me a start.
A colossal pillar of fire erupted from my palm with enough force to punch through the ceiling. I had barely exerted myself, yet the power was staggering—at least five times what it had been before I ate the dragon's heart.
The flame itself had turned blue. That bluish fire rippling like will-o'-the-wisps felt profoundly surreal.
This isn't Samadhi True Fire anymore. Samadhi Divine Fire—that's what I ought to call it now.
The second technique was Thunderbolt Heavenly Bow, the art I trusted most.
I extended a hand before me. There was no need to chant the mantra. I knew, with certainty, that I could now invoke the spell without reciting a word of it.
KRAKA-BOOM——!
Five bolts of lightning lanced out like arrows. With a detonation that threatened to split my eardrums, the training hall wall came thundering down.
"Ha."
I gave a hollow laugh at the breached wall.
Same story here. Thunderbolt Heavenly Bow, which had once strained me to loose a single bolt, could now be summoned five at a time.
Judging by offensive power alone, I could call it a passing grade. Every technique I knew had become as easy as turning over my palm—my desperate struggle against Ogrmar mere days ago now looked almost comical in retrospect.
I had unquestionably grown stronger. But the Dao was never a concept concerned with strength or weakness. If I wished to confirm that I had truly become an immortal, there was far more to verify than the power in my fists.
For instance...
I returned to my office and summoned Opils. He apparently kept residence in the ducal estate, because less than five minutes after my message went out he appeared, immaculately turned out.
"You called for me, Your Grace?"
"Good of you to come, Opils."
Seated with my fingers laced, I received him.
"You were in the thick of it, weren't you?"
Opils gave an abashed wry smile.
"I was drafting the austerity budget... though it appears an austerity plan that satisfies every department simply does not exist."
"What's your read on the domain's situation? Do you believe we can hold out?"
"To speak frankly, it will not be easy. Oradium, our cash cow, has lost its export route, and the development of the underground moves slowly. What trade with the lizardmen might yield remains an open question. And if war were to break out in times like these, forcing us to fund a war effort on top of it all..."
"It could get very ugly?"
"Yes. Precisely."
"Then take a look at this."
I indicated the map spread across my desk. It rendered the territories surrounding the duchy in fine detail.
"I studied the map of the duchy closely, and it turns out we have two ports on land of our own."
I tapped the points northwest and northeast of Esterzy Fortress City.
"The Emperor can hardly forbid us to trade by sea as well. What do you think?"
I traced lines from the points I'd marked to harbors in other countries: west, east, and south, in that order. All of them were regions where powers unsworn to the Pelion Empire held sway.
If we opened trade with even one of those nations, the Esterzy Blockade Decree the Emperor was ramming down our throats would become meaningless.
"Putting out to sea for maritime trade has been the cherished dream of every Grand Duke before you. But a port frozen for two-thirds of the year cannot function as a port."
"So the ports are simply too cold?"
"They are. They were never furnished with proper facilities to begin with—closer to fishing villages than ports, in truth."
"Hmm."
I sank deep into my chair.
"That is the problem I called you here to discuss, Opils."
"If Your Grace merely wishes to make good use of that one-third of the year for coastal trade—"
"That's no fundamental solution, and you know it."
"Then what method did you have in mind?"
Opils asked carefully.
"I intend to melt the sea."
"...Pardon?"
Opils echoed, dumbly.
"Melt. The. Sea."
I repeated it for Opils, enunciating every syllable, while I leisurely savored the sight of his mouth falling slowly open.
In Daoist tradition there is an immortal named Huang Chuping. A man of the Qin era, he was famed for aiding the common people by bending the weather to his will with his arts.
So what, exactly, did I lack compared to Huang Chuping?
Building an ice-free port.
Was that not a fitting first trial for a Grand Duke risen to the Immortality Realm?