Chapter 236
The third world.
I changed from one coach to the next more times than I could count, and only just managed to reach the capital. It had taken days to go, and it took days to come back.
The one small mercy was that nothing truly dangerous happened while I was on the move. I had wondered whether the winter snows might bury the roads, but even in the dead of winter, days of snowfall are rare in this country. Set beside the faded memories, a mildly chilly spell is the coldest winter this place ever knows. A comfortable land to live in.
The road home was hardly peaceful, of course. More than half the towns I passed through had been wrecked past the point of functioning as towns at all, so for safety I took the long way around through cities that still kept a garrison, and that cost me a great deal of time.
The capital has steadied to some degree, but that doesn't mean the country has. It will take a long time for these ripples to settle.
And there is one interesting point. There are more foreigners—not tourists so much as people who fled here simply in order to live. Illegal immigrants, in a word.
Most of those who entered the country that way drift into the slums, so I know a little about them. The same sort of foreigners have been increasing in the Brightshin Slums of the capital, where plenty of Harvesters still live.
Not every city is like that. Berne City has no outsiders at all. Whether that's because the place is so closed off, or because anyone can see at a glance that it's a ruined city and simply doesn't go, I couldn't say. But Nantes Harbor—no, the town that looks ready to swell into Nantes City—has seen a tremendous rise in foreigners arriving by ship.
I can only guess at the reason, and only roughly. What happened in this country not long ago, or is still underway, is happening in other countries as well. I mean the matter of the three corporations throwing national security into disorder.
The state has already forbidden their use, yet plenty of places go on using them anyway, like the fortress-city of Atlan, where I stopped not long ago. This isn't technology at the mere level of industry. It's what holds up the foundation of civilization, and now something has gone wrong with it. Replacing it overnight is difficult.
Some places will replace it properly. Others will compromise. I'm curious to see how it all unfolds.
The technologies to replace it already exist: Daegon's method, and Yuanshi Tianzun's. The groundwork has already been laid to some extent, so the new techniques ought to take root quickly. Berne City, in fact, is developing at speed on Yuanshi Tianzun's arts.
I went on watching the broad current of this world and setting it in order, and before I knew it I had arrived at the lodgings directly in front of the Royal Academy.
The butler had come out to the door to receive me. I greeted him as I always do—said I had gone and come back—and stepped inside. I exchanged greetings with the people I see every time, and then I rested in my room.
Meanwhile, in the fourth world, I have nothing to do. When a stimulus comes, all I have to do is recite the words of the contract.
The mage poked and prodded at my body and my head, trying this and that, and in the end concluded that I have no cognitive faculty comparable to a person's. A rather hasty conclusion. In its place, he concentrated on making use of the byproducts he can get from me.
Yes. Harvesters.
About once a day, he fixes my neck so I can't turn my gaze anywhere else and lowers my head. Once my line of sight is restricted that way, he takes off the blindfold. When I open my eyes, the person meant to become a Harvester is trembling in front of me. I look at them and recite the contract, and there is one more Harvester.
When it's finished, he puts the blindfold back on, returns me to my original posture, and pours pleasure into my brain. My body shakes as a reflex. In that moment I study the mage's expression through the Harvesters. Seeing me tremble like that, he looks satisfied—the joy of believing his technique is working properly. It's all a misunderstanding.
To borrow an image from the faded memories, what he sees is me surrendered to pleasure, hearts all but floating in my eyes. Perhaps demons and gods really did fall that way. Yielding to a body one is possessing is a little funny.
Anyway. The mage is running ever more varied experiments. He'll remove a candidate's limbs or organs and then try to turn them into a Harvester, or do the same to someone who is already a Harvester and bring them before me.
Of course, a person who has become a Harvester once can't become one again. I recited the contract like a machine, and nothing changed. I'm already packed full into the light—what difference would another contract make? I was hit with pain and pleasure several times then, but when there was still no change, the mage finally grasped the rule. Once a Harvester, there is no second time. He figured it out on his own without my having to explain, which was very convenient.
And there's one little trick I played in secret. The women who all wear the same face. Clones, to put it simply.
The clones are already under contract, but I'm not inside them. So he wouldn't notice the difference, whenever a clone was brought before me I treated her exactly as I did anyone else. I put myself only into the clone right in front of me. And so, through the Harvesters, I became able to watch the mage.
Harvesters made from people brought in from outside were all thrown into a grinder and ground up once the experiments ended. The clone Harvesters, he left as they were. The reason is obvious. The mage can't trust people. He can trust only the creatures he made himself, and because of that, he is far too optimistic about his own creations. That was his mistake.
At first he kept the clone Harvesters only in the research sector. But once he had made a few more, he brought them into the quarters where he lives. My field of view keeps widening. Through the Harvesters, I look outside.
The place where the mage lives is an enormous mansion. The laboratory lay underground, beneath it. And in his living quarters I saw several little girls come running toward him. They aren't ordinary children. They're children with a demon's horns and tail, or a halo above their heads.
Mm. Just as I thought.
So extracting power through babies wasn't a complete lie. Clever of him. He possesses a pregnant woman and has her give birth to a baby with those traits. Judging by the fact that the clones who served as vessels are nowhere to be seen, they most likely died. And not one of those young ones has noticed my gaze. Whether that ability simply needs time to grow, or whether even fully grown they'll never be able to notice me, I couldn't say.
Identical external attachments? Seeing several children who bear ones of exactly the same form, I suppose he produced more than one from a single mother. It's a little funny, the way they call the mage Papa.
Becoming the parent of one's own creations is, as a rule, an extremely efficient method. Ordinarily the self swells and a rebellious phase comes, but raising them from a very young age so they never can is not especially difficult.
And one thing more. They don't call the clones Mother. If anything, they look at them the way one looks at a maid who does as she's told. Concentrate attachment on a single object, and control grows difficult later—so light up the memories of Harvesters who once worked in similar trades. Slave traders, collectors of orphans; there were a great many people in lines of work much like that.
To begin with, the very word adolescent is a concept invented after modernization. Before that, there was no such thing. Child and adult. Only two. Sending a child up a chimney to work at eight wasn't some uniquely vicious practice peculiar to the Industrial Revolution. By that age, one was already working at home, learning the trade from the small tasks up. From that age on, one was already a laborer. The idea that children should be protected from dangerous creatures has long existed, but the idea that children should not be given filthy, dangerous work is a concept invented rather late.
In other words, he has formed an excessive attachment to the young hybrids who even now open their arms toward the mage and call him Papa.
The mage lives in far too closed a world. An environment in which he has left only what he can trust, and what loves him. Which is to say, he has far too many weaknesses.
Hehe.
His unstable mind feels close enough to take in my hand. Whether from handling so many toxic reagents, or because his face was always like that, edema swells across it, and his walk is somehow crooked—a mage unsteady in body and mind alike. Unfortunately, it isn't only his heart that's unwell. His body is, too.
This is about the time the charm of a Harvester begins to show. Regeneration, and enhancement. If I keep on like this, a Harvester vending machine, I suspect that someday this mage will ask to be made into a Harvester himself.
Mm. Then it's simple. I don't need to think about anything else. I only have to keep spilling the same words like a perfect fool, and not only do the Harvesters multiply on their own—the knowledge of learned minds capable of summoning me comes flowing in as well.
If I had shown a personality, that man would have suspected me more. I might have slipped and been found out. But if he sees me as a mere tool, he doesn't suspect. He already did suspect, and the result came back, didn't it?
People tend to believe blindly in conclusions they reached themselves. They hate admitting their own mistakes, and underneath it all lies the thought that they are right. And so, no matter what wicked thing they do, they can say they were correct. That is an easy thing to steer. Once a conclusion has been drawn, doubting it again is not easy.
People call a genius someone who can doubt, again and again, even the knowledge they themselves have built up. And as I see it, the mage is no genius. What's more, because he has made his surroundings comfortable, there is no one to give him a cutting word of advice. He has no choice left but to come crashing down to me.
I hang in the middle of the laboratory in the basement, and I wait at my ease. A delicious apple—one that will roll into my mouth on its own, so long as I keep it open.