Chapter 230: Song of the Betrayed — 10
But it was already far too late to stop me from telling it.
Look. The faces of everyone here aren't exactly pleasant, are they? Honestly, it is too cruel a thing for any one person to bear. Even so, what am I supposed to do? It is already past, and I have already said it.
I looked at Morris and Victoria, whose unhappiness from here on is all but sealed, and at Beatrice, standing on the boundary between them.
And I looked at Gain and Rebecca. When Morris came home, he had not seen his parents in so long that he would remember them as having aged all at once. At the most conservative estimate, he had not laid eyes on them for as many years as Victoria has been alive.
The reason is simple. Morris had not wanted to live in the countryside, so he fought with his parents — who insisted he take over the family trade — and left.
Fortunately, Morris succeeded. But if you consider the state he was in when he came back, it would not be strange to think he had returned a failure. No. He is a man the changing times flung clear of themselves, so perhaps failure is the right word after all.
That alone would leave his parents ill at ease, and Beatrice is a city person through and through. If those parents still look on the city with distaste, then Beatrice might as well be the city given flesh. I suspect the awkwardness between Beatrice and the grandparents springs from exactly that.
Everyone has their own reasons, and everyone lives their own life.
I turned to Victoria, who was glaring at me, and said this.
"Dream. Don't stop. Go farther."
Half of me thinks so. The other half thinks the opposite. She has already done more than enough. The warmth I have taken in through the Harvester called Victoria is immense. The people she drowned by raising a sea into the sky, and the people who went mad and died from nothing but the terror of that sea coming down — together they number well over a thousand.
Put in terms that are easy to grasp, it comes to this. She has already more than earned her keep.
To speak plainly, even if she rests here for a while, it will not be long before she starts killing people again. There are few decent human beings in this world, and when something stands in the way, settling it with violence is all too easy. Of course, use it without restraint and society will hold you down. Rise above the law, though, or disguise it as an accident, and you will be just fine.
"You came all this way just to say that?"
Mm. A sharp reply.
I drew away from Victoria. I had told the people here everything they needed to hear. What Victoria needs now is time for the wound to heal.
"I've said all I came to say."
Then I looked around at the family gathered there. Gain watched me with an uneasy, reluctant face, and Rebecca looked at me and at Victoria with pity. Morris wore an expression of profound discomfort, and Beatrice stared as if she were listening to something that made no sense. Victoria was furious.
Well. She had cast me off as if we would never meet again, and I had come trotting after her. Of course that would be tiresome.
I remember one awful thing, kept in a faded memory. There was a puppy abandoned twice. Once, it found its owner because of a chip buried in its body — and the owner simply cut the chip out with a knife, never even treated the wound, and abandoned it again.
I wonder if this is not something like that.
When I turned toward the door, Beatrice flinched and took a few steps back. I slipped out through the gap, then, still under the eyes of the people watching me, offered a greeting.
"Goodbye."
An ordinary farewell, and then I left the house as I was. I must have talked for a long time. The sky was already dark. I followed the road onward.
With this, I have done everything I meant to do. At least as much as I did for Soo, I think. I helped her dream as far as she could, and I carried the aftercare through to the very end. On top of that, it is a prize for the Harvester who has killed more human beings than anyone else in this world, and by no small margin.
Walking a night road without a single light, I look at the world through the eyes of the Harvesters.
For now, the capital has the chaos more or less in hand. Soldiers stride the streets in the place of the police, but people are no longer dying at random the way they did last time. Food is being issued out in separate rations, and when a crime occurs they gather the parties and the onlookers on the spot and punish them in a public trial.
An orphan who stole something to eat because he was hungry is tried, and his wrist is cut off. An old woman who stole clothes because she was too cold is stoned to death.
It is not a proper trial. But if the point is not to stop people from doing wrong, and is instead to stop society from coming apart, then it is working exactly as it should. Theft soon becomes robbery, and robbery spreads into a riot like the last one. Better to be harsh, and cut the sprout before it can grow.
The cost is that the minds of the people living here are being badly broken — though not yet so badly that a riot will break out. And in a society like that, the Harvesters are living well.
Someone, after all, still has to haul goods through dangerous places like these. Stop the transport because the situation is bad, and things do not grow safer. They grow worse. And though at first there was only a single person, somewhere along the way more and more have come to wield the Heavenly Demon Divine Art.
One Stroke
It is a way of fighting by using me.
They draw out the me sealed inside them and hurl it at their opponent. That alone kills. Whatever arms the other bears, whatever technique they use, it pierces straight through and drops them dead where they stand. I do not know why it works. They do it all the same.
If you ask whether the me held in the vessel grows any less for it — not in the least. Suppose that light is a small glass cup. They have only dropped the cup into the sea that is me, and so drawing on me does not empty it. If it did, I would have taken the warmth back at once. But that is not what happens. Only warmth flows in to me, and so I permit it gladly.
At any rate, the capital's Harvesters, most of them come out of the Brightshin Slums, are living well. Of course some are not, and it is not as if no Harvester has starved to death. That cannot be helped. Not every Harvester can live well, can they?
If there is anything to regret, it is that so many Harvesters come and go that, among those living in the capital, few actually use the art I pushed into them. Fortunately, it is not that there are none at all.
A very few Harvesters have built a device that drinks in another person's life and turns it into fuel. There are people who use it in the dark. The existing power units give off a distinctive presence when they absorb mana, easy for others to detect, so use a clockwork device and a mob comes to beat you. This device, it seems, has no such feeling.
Among those who cannot endure the cold, or who cannot survive unless they use a clockwork device, a technique that spends life is spreading in secret.
How do they use it, you ask? They bring in orphans with no parents, old people already near death, or women from the slums who are easy to abduct, and burn them as fuel. Those people grow warm, and I receive warmth on the side.
The bodies are simply dumped in the alleys. Wild beasts tear into them at once, until not even the bones remain, and then they are merely people who died because they could not withstand the cold. This winter is mild enough that water almost never freezes, even at dawn, and yet a fair number have frozen to death. Now especially, with fuel so scarce.
Even so, most of the Harvesters living in the capital get by after a fashion, working in transport.
Meanwhile, Berne City has shut itself away and is developing a new technology. It is not, however, a technology that uses the mana in the air, as things work now, nor a technology that uses life force, as the capital does.
It is Yuanshi Tianzun's technology. Which is to say, the method Kunlun uses.
Rather than sucking mana unilaterally out of nature or out of living things, they open a path for mana to flow, set something like a waterwheel upon it, and make power by following the current. Set beside a power unit, the efficiency is far too low. To match what a power unit the size of a fist can do, you need a building the size of a small house.
But it does not spew contaminated mana. No — it even runs properly in regions already thick with the stuff.
By the measure of this world, a city that took a mortal wound from modern technology has begun to develop a technology capable of standing against that same modern technology.
In the village beside Berne City, at Nantes Harbor, Richard Gaston is working hard to hold on to his rank as a noble. There is, however, the sad report that he lacks the ability to actually keep it, and that having it taken from him is all but certain. He was a bastard of the Gaston house to begin with. Instead of a proper noble's education, he entered the army and lived as a soldier, so it cannot be helped.
The age is moving on, leaving behind those who cannot keep up. And the ones about to move it are Harvesters who have obtained technology from outside this world.
I wonder how all of this will change.
I mean to live quietly in this world, as if I am here and yet am not, and watch the future come. I do not have to be on my guard against people who doubt me to my face, as I did in the first world, and I do not have to sit still in a place with nothing in it, as I did in the second.
Mm. It really is comfortable to live here.
The third world, I think, will do well enough as a testing ground — a place to lay out the knowledge I gained in the second and see just how far it can be used. And gather up a great deal of warmth along the way?
Hehe.
I was thinking that when, before I knew it, I arrived at a small, shabby train station. The place where Victoria had stepped off earlier in the day. Whoever sells the tickets seemed to have already gone home. The door was shut.
A dark station, without a single point of light. Calling it a station is generous. There is one tiny ticket office that a few people would fill, a platform made of stone, and a handful of wooden chairs. That is all.
I sat down on a chair.
Perhaps because there was no light anywhere around me, the sky was full of stars. But those stars are not the ones I have always looked up at. It is not a night sky I know. It is not simply that the constellations are different.
The night sky I used to gaze up at from beneath that surface was a sky strewn with the light living things possess.
I stare blankly up at an entirely different night.
If I stay like this until the sun rises and morning comes, and take the train back to the capital...
"So this is where you were."
A voice came, all at once. I turned my head, and through the starlight a woman was faintly there.
"Ah, Beatrice. Have you come to make the contract?"
Come to think of it, if I went on to the capital, the contract would become difficult, wouldn't it?
But to my surprise, Beatrice shook her head.
"My mother-in-law says we can't simply send a guest away."
She came forward and took my arm.
"I feel the same."
She drew me along, back toward the house. So very earnestly.
This family makes unhappy choices.