The Dream Lost — 12
A week has passed since the day of the international conference, and the weekend is here.
The cold has come in, and with it a great many happy things!
Nothing else, really. Only that warmth keeps finding its way to me!
Hehe.
Oh — not that the Royal Academy has turned into a killing ground. Very little there has changed at all. Unlike the schools I know, this one has no notion of field trips or training retreats whatsoever. It is, to that extent, profoundly quiet.
At most there were trifles. Two boys in the dormitory dueled over a single girl and were both carried off seriously wounded, or someone broke into the girls' dormitory hoping to spend the night, was caught, and set off an uproar. Shut young people into a place like a dormitory, and that is simply what you get.
In short, it was peaceful.
The Harvesters are another matter. Poverty is scorched fast to their bodies, and they are sending me warmth — not the feeble kind I cannot even feel, the sort that comes of killing beasts and insects, but proper warmth.
Yes. It means they are killing people as freely as they please.
No riot has broken out. They are using legitimate violence: catching bandits, killing them, and harvesting the warmth.
Most of Brightshin's Harvesters work in transport now. Purple hair and white skin — or blue skin — are enough, by themselves, to inspire trust. And if trust is required, it is because trust is being lost, again and again.
There is work for them. Work that puts a life up as collateral. As ever, in a world where human beings live, human beings are the cheapest thing to spend. The reason that cheap thing is being spent is simple. Outside the city, just now, the land is full of bandits.
Bandits are ordinarily a rare sight in this world. The wilds are far too dangerous for one to live in. A village without soldiers and equipment past a certain mark does not last the year; the wild swallows it, and it is gone. Only natural. Even Daegon's advance party came and could not raise a proper base. This is a world where monsters of that order walk free.
And yet the bandits have multiplied. Transport workers have been attacked even inside villages that ought to have been safe.
The Harvesters on those runs are beginners, not long at the work, so they do not know the faces. I do. One man peddled for a living, ruined himself at gambling, and was rotting away in the Brightshin Slums when he became a Harvester. Another lost a leg when a clockwork machine meant for hauling caught him mid-run, and lay dying in the slums after that. Memories belonging to Harvesters with pasts like those light up, insisting these are people they know.
A great many of those attacking from outside were ordinary people once. The memories shine to say so. They chose banditry over the family trade, and that is how grave things have grown.
The Harvesters meet them. And so that they themselves may eat and live, they kill them. Then the warmth comes in to me.
It is still only autumn.
Winter will be here soon. Winter in this country is not a cruel one. Even in the dead of it, rain falls more often than not; the climate is mild. Snow is something you might see once in several years, or might not see at all. A pleasant country to live in.
That does not mean plants grow here all year without rest. As in most countries, winter halts the making of food, and people get through on what they have stored, so the stores must be laid in before the cold arrives. If there is no food, then even knowing they will be hunted down the year after, they attack their neighbors now, because there is no rice to eat today.
To harm another in order to live is a living thing's instinct. From a living thing's point of view, those who became bandits have done no wrong.
From society's point of view, they have done a great deal of wrong.
The bandits show themselves in just about every sort of place. The only spots holding up at all well are, of all things, the fishing villages.
No. Not of all things.
The sea has plenty to eat. Manage to stomach food of a rather grotesque appearance, and you will not starve to death. Which is another way of saying that everywhere else, food has grown scarce enough, on the whole, that ordinary citizens are changing trades and taking up banditry.
In the memories of the Harvesters and the Warmth Carriers there is no separate talk of a famine year. So this is very likely an effect bound up with the companies. I had supposed there would be consequences someday. They have arrived far sooner than I thought.
However thoughtlessly the clockwork machines were smashed, bringing in a harvest should still have been possible, and the incident only came out in the middle of autumn. This year's food, at least, ought to have been secured...
And already the food is failing? Badly enough that empty stomachs drive people to choose banditry?
I go back through the memories with food as the thread. Among the Harvesters out of Brightshin, all but those still working hard have grown increasingly afraid to buy it. Neighbors from the same slums gather and tremble, fearing they may not last the winter this way. The price of food rises and does not stop.
Nor is food the only trouble. Fuel is climbing just as steeply. This world has not yet passed from wood to coal, so fires are fed with firewood, and ever since the citizens wrecked the clockwork machines in a fit of feeling, the price of firewood inside the capital has been rising as if it meant to pierce the sky. One cannot simply do without a fire and get by. However mild the weather, with no source of heat it is cold enough that a person dies.
The clockwork machines look as though they could answer it, but people cannot use them. To turn them back on merely to escape the cold, the press has propagandized far too wildly. The machines themselves are sound enough, but fear has been sown that the clockwork machines made by certain companies are killing machines. In the capital there is not one clockwork machine those three companies have never touched. In effect, they cannot be used. If they are, it will be when the cold has deepened and people, resigned to death, set them going again.
But did you know?
Not every clockwork machine commits murder. Accidents born of trouble in the power engines arise only when engines crowded together to excess, as in Berne City, must run for a long time. Just as I was told, nothing goes wrong at once. Trust in the press will fall. A riot may even follow.
Hunger and cold. Food and home, in other words, have come to ruin. An accident is certain to happen, and that accident will surely call down a great many deaths.
A very great deal of warmth.
Heehee.
I have only to enjoy the warmth the Harvesters win by killing bandits, and wait for the day it all bursts.
Ah.
There is one thing I found in the midst of it.
The Heavenly Demon Divine Art.
Yes. That art has come from a Harvester's hand. Set beside the Heavenly Demon Divine Art in the memories of people from the second world, it is woefully crude — and still the memory shines, certain that this is that art.
The single stroke of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art that the Heavenly Demon left behind. It really does work. The record is short and simple enough to deserve the name of a single stroke; if anything, I cannot see how anyone could use the Heavenly Demon Divine Art from this alone.
What the Heavenly Demon and Eunjae originally possessed ran to dozens of pages by itself, and understanding it demanded background knowledge on the order of dozens of volumes. An easy comparison is mathematics. To learn it at a university, you need everything you studied through high school. This is like reading a single page and then solving the university problems.
Nor is it only Harvesters from Brightshin who use it. Among those who survived Berne City, someone has begun to use it as well. They draw on entirely different parts.
And yet.
Both of them are the Heavenly Demon Divine Art.
What, exactly, did the Heavenly Demon leave me?
I cannot understand it. But what can be used will be used. Give a Harvester a powerful martial art, and they will harvest that much more warmth!
Heehee.
In that sense, I suppose I am grateful.
With that, I let the Heavenly Demon rise briefly to mind and buried him again in memory, and looked out the window of my lodgings.
Set against the day I first came here, the view has changed a great deal. Above the buildings packed tight together, the sky that was blue has gone a dingy gray. Murky smoke climbs from every quarter of the city. Let it go on increasing, and a future in which soot blankets the capital lies plain before my eyes.
No. No, that isn't so.
The soot will not cover the capital. A few memories shine, and as those shining memories tell it, this world — unlike the one inside the faded memories — has magic. Anyone can use it, so long as they practice. The highest output depends on talent, but those who actually reach that height are fewer than a handful in a whole age. Magic of an ordinary standard, then, belongs to anyone willing to practice, and magic that warms the body is very simple.
No. Strictly speaking, it is a little different.
If magic is the raising of a special physical phenomenon by means of mana, then most living things in this world are already using it. Just as the mitochondria within a cell make energy out of oxygen, a living body is a magic all its own. Nor is the third world alone in this. By Daegon's memories, at least, every world is the same. I know, dimly, that the single exception is the world inside the faded memories.
Only there.
Yes.
In any case, it means the people of the third world can use magic to warm their bodies in order to live. Temperature can be dealt with.
There is something even magic cannot touch.
Food.
Today costs the same as yesterday, or more, and it keeps on that way. In the slums the price has already climbed so high that people can hardly bring themselves to buy. There is not enough food.
Collapse is near.
The warmth the suffering Harvesters send me without pause was turning a fierce cold faint, and I watched the red sunset beyond the window.
It seems to me I can already see the flames that will surge up there before long, in place of that red sunset, and I am so looking forward to it.