Chapter 155
The weekend arrived.
After my meeting with Polaris, I had assumed someone would come — Theodore, or somebody else — but no one did. Predicting the future really is difficult.
Even so, in the meantime, I became certain of one thing. The people I know, and the people living in this world, are the same.
The Purple Twilight Society. They had no idea where the support funds came from. So the moment the money was cut off, and the aid sustaining the Society's charity work thinned because of it, suspicion crawled straight up after them. Someone had embezzled it. Or they had already taken everything there was to take and were pretending not to know. Suspicions of that sort.
They doubted one another, and the people at the center — the ones who had managed the money, the ones who had given the orders — caught a truly impressive amount of abuse. When goodwill goes on long enough, there are people who start to feel it is only their due, aren't there? That was it. They were supposed to receive those supplies as a matter of course, and they hadn't been given, so the people above were the villains.
The ones in charge did say the support had been cut. Some refused to believe it. As a share of the whole they were a tiny minority, but there are always people whose voices are simply loud. Among them were those who had learned as much as a person can learn, and those who had learned nothing at all. They inflated the trouble, blind to the labor of the people who had actually been out in the field, and insisted the ones doing the paperwork were skimming the profits. They seemed to have forgotten that the Purple Twilight Society is a charity.
Hehe.
Not yet. They haven't fought badly enough to start killing one another. But that faction — Harvesters mixed in with those who aren't — is already scheming to raid the people who handled the clerical work and wring something out of them. Cowardly to the last, they are drawing up plans to incite others so that they themselves won't be hurt. People who mean to pocket the gains while the ones they've stirred up do the fighting.
Whether any of it is true no longer matters to them. All that sits in their heads is that they failed to receive what they were owed, and that the bad ones are over there.
Splendid. If I can manage it, I would like to turn the people beside them into Harvesters as well. The royal house of Dormiens has already taken care of the Harvesters' image for me, so I don't have to worry about that image wearing thin until they become a public enemy, the way they did in the second world. Within a few days I ought to be able to obtain warmth.
The trouble is that a fight will thin their numbers...
No. Wait. I don't need to worry about the Harvesters' image anymore, do I? I need to increase them. Obtaining warmth while Harvesters and ordinary people tangle together and fight is perfectly fine, but there is a problem. The experiment I am in the middle of. Daegon and Yuanshi Tianzun — whose art can more easily send people upward?
Culture is dough kneaded with blood. Stack the bricks of technology and blood runs down them, and the mortar smeared over as culture is what keeps the whole from collapsing. But if technology shoots up faster than that, it rises in tatters. And someday the blood and the flesh, even when they are flung, no longer reach the ground. Then the tower comes down under the blood that eventually runs. What collapses then is not technology. It is humanity. After that, you may stack all the bricks of technology you like, and the tower of humanity will never be raised. It only lies strewn across the ground.
There was so much of that, even in the faded memories. In countless factories turning without rest, more than one laborer can die every day and nothing changes. People talk about it, and then it becomes, easily, a thing that never happened. When a single human life weighs less than the inconvenience of a great many people, the world comes to treat the grinding down of people as only natural. You only have to do it once.
Just once.
Then it is over. It never goes back to what it was. A hurdle crossed once is easy to cross afterward, and from then on, however many people die, it is simply something that was always there. Now people say it like this.
"Why are you pretending to be good?"
Broken morality is splendid. It means a world where I can obtain warmth steadily, and that is exactly what I want. A world that goes on about how people have value, and never actually moves for the sake of that value. Because it does not run to extremes, it lasts a long time, and the people inside it turn their faces from the dying for the sake of a lukewarm comfort. A world like that will stagger forward a very long way. Which means I can obtain warmth for a very long time, and that the supply will grow as the number of people grows.
But if this fight thins the Harvesters too far, the advance of technology slips out of reach. So, thinking of the future, I have to replenish them in advance.
I stepped outside without hesitating. If I hadn't gone out, I would only have stayed shut in my room all weekend anyway. Amusingly enough, not one of the people who work here asks where I am going. I say I am heading out, and they change my clothes and send me off at once. So I leave the house, come out onto the avenue, and walk straight along the main road.
The place is the slums of the capital. If this is a world only just beginning to develop, then what I want will be there in abundance. People being crushed and rotting, fervently longing to become my Harvesters. People who will hurl themselves mindlessly at even a small light. People who, like lemmings, charge thoughtlessly for the bottom simply because everyone else is doing it.
Tap, tap. I work my short legs and keep walking.
A rotten scent, faint and yet boring into the mind. The stink of fish, of filthy standing water, and of harsh chemicals, all tangled together. The ground is not the neat stone of the streets I have walked until now. It is split and worn almost entirely down to dirt, and over it come and go people in filthy clothes. A man with a face bright red, staggering as if from drink or drugs. A woman who has come out in thin clothes, telling people to buy her. An old person who has legs but no feet, and crawls.
Beggars and vagrants. A place where the dregs that have fallen out of society gather. I remember places like this being driven far off, not left in the middle, because the deeply despairing are what I have been detonating. To avoid that, they ought to have thrown the exploited far away. This place is in the center of the city. Have they forgotten? Or have they simply failed to realize that these people are in so serious a state? I don't wastefully detonate them anymore, of course, but it does leave me a little doubtful.
Thinking that, I walked into the middle of the street. The lack of soot, at least, is pleasant. Places like this are usually where every kind of filth has piled up, and there is none of that here. They burn through too much mana, so the city may run short and suffer side effects like the ones that struck Berne City, but at worst it is only the smell of uncleared waste, or of living things going rotten. Unlike a place such as Whitechapel in the faded memories, I can breathe.
The moment I step in, countless gazes stick into me, like a welcome. My clothes are quite clean. They could kill me and strip them, or catch me and sell me. I walk deeper into the street. There are the gazes, of course, and there are people following me. I stop in the middle of the street and wait for someone to take the bait. A young girl in expensive clothes, standing there blankly — someone is bound to come over.
And just as I expected, a man whose face is pitch-black with grime walks up in front of me. As if to keep me from running, he sets a hand on my shoulder and grips it.
"Little one. You lost?"
"Hello."
The person I wanted has come. A man with desire smeared all over his face. Then I should use the memories, and open the conversation.
"You're screaming."
"Hey, the girl's saying something."
"Hehehe. The one screaming isn't me, it's you."
Skinny men drift in from the side. I was waylaid once on a ship, and here I am being waylaid again. Is the reason they don't snatch me up at once that this is their territory?
"People ought to do what they want to do."
The moment I offer the line I always keep on my lips, the whole street becomes a sea of laughter.
"If you can, how about you take those clothes off right now!"
"Damn, look at that fair skin."
"Isn't she a little too white?"
I simply keep speaking, my eyes on the man who addressed me first.
"There is something you want to do, but you've forgotten it. With nothing left to hold you up, survival came first. Even so, you dreamed once, didn't you?"
Smack. I was struck across the cheek.
"Is your head a flower garden? You think the world's a fairy tale? You must've seen something strange somewhere."
Obscene talk mixes in with the rest of it. But there is not a single person nearby who pities me. A place rotten to just the right degree. To make a Harvester, I speak the words of the contract.
When I finish, the men ringed around me snicker.
"Well, now. Says she'll give us her body. A saint's been born."
"Hehe, hey. This is a really different flavor, isn't it? I told you, let's take her quick."
"Oho, is that right? Good. Hand it over, then. A brat with no chest. Huh?"
With this many of them, at least one is bound to agree. Words that promise you will do anything dig into the heart like magic. When they come from someone weaker than yourself, they sound like submission.
One man's skin changed, turning like porcelain. Then, with a crack, it began to flake away like broken china. The men screamed and backed off.
"What the hell did this bitch do!"
"What — you come here to lay some evil spell on us, witch!"
Startled, they glare at me and shout. They shout even louder to hide the fear. But I point a finger at the Harvester.
"Uh. What. My hand. It's white. It's weird. My body feels cool. It doesn't itch at all."
Hair gone purple, skin gone pure white, the man looks down at himself with a dazed face.
"Because I gave myself to you. It's all right for you to dream."
Eyes gather on me. Amid the murmuring, someone who knows about me begins to speak of me — the incident in Berne City. The royal family advertised it in earnest. With this many people, there is bound to be one who knows.
Doubt soon becomes understanding, and understanding becomes desire again. The usual strategy in a place like this is to tell people to believe in a god and drag them off to a den, but a religious coloring is something the royal family visibly dislikes, so I changed it to a dream.
"Everyone has the right to dream. You should do what you want to do, obtain what you wish for, and draw a splendid future."
And I turn, slowly and on purpose, meeting one by one the eyes of the people looking this way.
"Don't scream anymore. I'll change you."
I never said they would be better off. It is more horrible than being shoved into a slaughterhouse, but they will not know that true nature until the moment they die. So, to finish, I say this.
"Everyone here."
I will make you into Harvesters. When I speak with that meaning folded into the words, they glance at one another. Grow weak, and watching the others is only natural. But there are people in a hurry. The slums are a place where such people cannot help but exist, which is why I came. Someone with plenty would take it for a scam and ignore it, or think a little longer and slip away. Not here.
"You're saying you'll fix this?"
Look. A big man, half his face stuck and seared as if from a burn, walks toward me. Whether it was an accident, I couldn't say. I recite the contract at once, and he accepts. He does more than recover cleanly. He grows healthier. The people who had been watching him touch a face without a single scar soon come running to me, crowding in, desperate not to miss their turn.
After that, it is easy. I make contracts without regard for man or woman, old or young.
Now I push the memories into them. If the experiment succeeds, the lowest of them will come to hold a splendid technology.
Goodness. The socially weak have risen in value? I don't even need to say it. It's obvious.
Now all I have to do is wait.