Not a Single Thing Goes Smoothly — 7
That day, once the afternoon classes were over, I parted from Victoria. She was brimming with resolve, unwilling to give up her dream, and had thrown herself into trying this and that.
The moment we separated, she went straight to the faculty office and consulted a teacher, and on that teacher's introduction she went to see the instructor of the Clockwork Knight course—someone she had never met. He, too, heard what she wanted and said he would let her do it.
Both of them, as teachers ought, were cheering on a student striving for her dream. Not for show. Truly.
What a shame.
For the Royal Academy, isn't this a little too clean? It is, at base, a school that nobles attend, so shouldn't the ordinary teacher be the sort who discriminates, or who will not lift a finger for anything that is not their own affair? And yet they listen in earnest to a student's troubles, and counsel her.
Whether it is only that a full granary makes for an open hand, or whether what Victoria has done has given them reason to treat her well, I could not say—but there was not a bad person among them. She was finding her way with astonishing smoothness. A strange world.
You mustn't be too kind. As I understand it, for human society to advance it needs great heaps of corpses ground to death. There have always been sacrifices, and I believe they will never truly disappear. Those who are thrown away will give me warmth. As the ages pass, and as the ages advance, the sacrifices will only multiply.
I would rather this not be a world in which the formula I know fails to hold. Ah—of course I don't mean that people grow more wicked. Where there are bad people, there are good people too. Even if the ratio stays the same, when the total differs, the warmth one can obtain differs as well, doesn't it?
If the world had not broken when I poured too much of myself into it, everyone would have become a Harvester and given me warmth. I would have gained it with no one discarded. The first world had very nearly succeeded. But how was anyone to foresee that too many Harvesters would shatter a world?
So in the second world, I held back. I held back so far that the Harvesters never passed a hundred, and in the end I was driven out of that world. It was not as though I had come away with nothing but losses—but personally, it was a failure. A failure.
And so in this third world, I mean to move a little more actively. Above all, religion here has been all but cut away. People now believe in reason and technology in place of gods, and they sketch a future in which those can be used to build a better world. Put another way, unlike the Holy God Church of the first world or Kunlun of the second, there is a strong chance that no one capable of obstructing me exists—or that, if they do, they will be unable to bring their power to bear. Very good.
But I will not sow Harvesters. Not for the moment, at least. For now, I will give them only to those who wish for them. In exchange, I will use another method.
At present I have close to ten thousand Harvesters. Which is to say, I have a great many individuals to whom I can send the memories I possess. The memories of the first world are of little use. I did obtain that world in its entirety, and it is not as though there were no passable techniques among them. But they fall short of the memories of Daegon and Yuanshi Tianzun that I gained in the second world.
Daegon, to put it crudely, comes of a civilization built around hero-units, so every powerful technique demands a matching measure of mind and body. They are techniques no one but a superhuman can use. Not all of them are useless, though. He keeps every memory of the age in which things advanced one step at a time—all of it, from the days when he was nothing more than a simple fish-man, through becoming a god, ruling an entire world, and invading another. From the beginning to the very height of his rise. The early portion, then, can be put to use. All the more so in a world whose technology has developed only halfway.
Yuanshi Tianzun's memories are similar, except that a great deal of what he made was fashioned by joining his power with that of fellow immortals. Which means that even Yuanshi Tianzun does not hold every piece of information. I cannot begin to understand the early techniques. Still, if I distribute them, someone who does understand is bound to appear.
After turning over which would be better, I decided to divide them in half for the time being—one side cut from Daegon's memories, the other from Yuanshi Tianzun's—and set them in. While I was at it, I would plant the Single Stroke Heavenly Demon Divine Art in every one of them as well. Whoever learned it would not be able to become the Heavenly Demon, but it ought to help.
There is the minor problem that the memories will not enter a person of strong will at all. But really, how many people have that much self-regard?
Hehe.
I will have to wait decades and more, but it will surely bloom in brilliance.
I know. There was a world that, having pursued pure reason to its end, gave rise not to a massacre but to a Holocaust. A massacre is the killing of people. A Holocaust is the clearing away of things. It was carried out with perfect rationality, and as an ordinary part of the day. The law called it right, and people believed it a moral duty they were obliged to perform. To delete a single race was an act of virtue.
Therefore the law is not something one must necessarily obey, and doing good does not make every deed a right one. They fulfilled the duty laid upon them, and brought about a horrific event that changed an age. In a world where the standard of morality—once leaned upon an absolute being called God—has broken down, how quickly will something of that kind occur?
This is my investment plan. Before human culture can catch up, let harsh technology swallow human nature whole.
I returned to the lodgings where I live, split the memories fine, and sent the necessary portions to the Harvesters living in this world. To the Harvesters in other worlds, of course, I am endlessly sending techniques by which I might be summoned. But a technique for summoning me—whatever form it takes—is, at bottom, the sort of thing that requires an economy of scale...... so I will try, without expecting much.
Hmm. It would have been nice if time had simply gone on flowing as smoothly as this.
"Well. Are you getting along all right at the Royal Academy?"
Sorindiges came openly to the Royal Academy and took me to a guest room in the royal palace.
Yes. The prince of this country. And he had aimed for the gap at the end of my classes before carrying me off.
If I took apart the voices murmuring then, Sorindiges attended the Royal Academy as well, so strictly speaking it would be more accurate to say he had brought me along on his way home from school. I hadn't known. I wasn't interested.
I had expected the next Harvester to be King Hypion, and so I had paid Sorindiges no mind. He had never once come to see me in the palace, either. I had thought he had no interest in me, and that any meeting between us lay a very long way off—so what could he want?
First, I nodded in answer to his question.
"Yes."
At that, he gave a bitter smile.
"You don't seem to be settling in especially well—not in the palace, and not here. If the place you're living is a burden and it's hard on you, say so. The grace of waking that child is something I will never forget."
Oh?
Gratitude and worry showed through his expression. Had it been consideration, then, that he never came looking for me in the palace?
Now that I thought of it, on the first day, when I returned late to the lodgings where I was staying, not a single person said a word about it. For keeping, or for confinement, the attitude was far too soft.
Hmm......?
Let me call back what I did in the palace, and what I do here. Sitting still. Doing nothing. Yes. From a certain angle, it would not be strange to read that as someone sitting motionless because she was wound tight with nerves, or because the stress was too much. This body has no original owner, and it isn't even human, so there is no particular need to exercise......
The royal house of Dormiens, unexpectedly, did not seem inclined to gather information on me, or to make use of me. Isn't a royal house supposed to be a place where plots and schemes go dancing? Even setting Aurora aside—raised as gold and jade, and so of course unknowing—it was strange that a family should get along so well.
"I'm all right."
Honestly, there was nothing I wanted at the moment. But here, I would leave myself the right to receive help, for the sake of what came later.
"If something I truly need should come up, I'll ask."
Lip service—but if, from here on, I told no lies and spoke only the truth, then the words became a simple fact. They became the statement that I had asked because I truly needed the help. It would be fine if they did not grant it when the time came. Better to have gained the chance of a request than to be unable to speak to them at all.
Sorindiges nodded.
"All right. Say so, and don't feel burdened. Especially if something strange happens, tell a teacher or a knight at once."
There I saw a faint killing intent flicker past, and guilt along with it. Which is to say, the sentence hinted that something was going to happen. Something strange would occur; its object was one that stirred the will to kill; and they meant to use me as the bait.
I wondered whether such a thing could be, and then the moment I had made Aurora a Harvester came back to me. There had been a very faint resistance then. Someone had made Aurora that way, and one could infer that the royal house of Dormiens had failed to catch them—and that the chance of that someone approaching me was high.
The view shifted a little, then. Letting me loose was not simple consideration. It was arranging matters so that someone might attack with ease.
The culprit who had made Aurora what she was. The witch who had laid a curse upon the royal house of Dormiens. No one knew where she was, but if she learned the curse had been broken, she was very likely to come and deal with it. They meant to use me as bait then, and take her.
What a relief.
I had truly thought this world was full of nothing but good people. I had worried it might hold only something wearing the shell of a person, and no people at all. People, it seemed, really were all the same.
The king was the sort who, faced with a person who had nothing to do with him, could grind them down and use them as a test subject without a moment's hesitation. I had wondered whether it was only the king, and the prince had turned out to be that sort of person as well. No—everyone is. Oneself. The people close at hand come first. Those beyond them must come after. Were the ranks equal, such a person would have no interest in the world, or else be mad.
"Yes. If I fall into danger, I'll do that."
When I answered so, Sorindiges nodded as though satisfied, finished the drink that had been set before him when he brought me in, pushed the sweets across to my side, and waited. Out of courtesy I finished my own drink as well, ate a few of the sweets, and that was that.
The moment I drew my hands back, he nodded, content, called for someone, and had me shown out.
This was the royal castle, and so a person was attached whenever one moved. I followed that person out of the castle, and once we had left it and climbed into the car parked in front, the car pulled smoothly away.
Before long the castle wall and the great gate showed beyond the window. Past them stood a wall strung with barbed wire. Leave the stretch where three such layers ran in a row, and there was the Royal Academy. A broad garden had been laid out, of course, so the buildings themselves were still a long way off.
The royal castle and the Royal Academy might as well have been stuck together. So the prince was very likely commuting from the castle—because yesterday, too, he had gone to see Aurora. This person.
And so I had carelessly assumed he had already graduated from the Royal Academy, or did not attend at all. That had been wrong.
For the record, there was also Aurora's elder sister, who was Sorindiges's younger sister, but she attended a school abroad; when Aurora woke, she had looked in briefly and departed again for that foreign country. She was the girl who had seized Aurora's trouser-leg and clung, insisting she would not be parted now that Aurora was well, so it was not as though the castle were shutting her out. At the time Sorindiges had watched that scene and nodded, saying he knew the feeling. The two of them did not get along badly, either.
Which was to say, bringing about anything like a vicious struggle within the royal house seemed difficult for the present......
Too solid.
I would simply have to look to Aurora, and to Aurora's child.
Around the time I had set my thoughts in order that way, I arrived at the place where I was staying.