Chapter 237
Watching the mage work through a clone harvester's eyes, I realized something.
There is one clone the mage calls an assistant. At first I thought every clone was addressed that way, but the mage distinguishes among them. That clone, of course, is not a harvester.
Mm.
It is a good thing, when someone matters. If that someone is not a harvester, an opportunity will come along someday.
I look over this world while I imagine the moment I swallow the mage.
To begin with, measured against the faded world, this one resembles the twentieth century. The difference is that communication by radio wave has scarcely been developed at all. There are oil-burning cars and trucks, and vehicles like motorcycles. Trains exist as well, though they are neither steam engines nor trains that run on mana. From their shape, I would guess they are something like diesel locomotives.
None of the harvesters I have obtained know enough to say for certain. At best there is a mechanic who used to repair cars. Radio is missing, but electrical equipment is not wholly absent, and neither is equipment that uses mana. Inside the engine sits a component that requires magic, and that alone is a black box no ordinary person understands. It is not that no one has pried one open in secret. They say those who did died not long afterward. So it is not incomprehensible that technological progress has stood still for some three hundred years.
And one thing more. There has never been anything like a world war here. Perhaps that is because, developed as this world is in its own fashion, so much of it remains an unknown that cannot be explored.
Worlds that possess mana are full of powerful living things. Humanity is not the lord of creation, and so, somewhere along the way, it compromised. If you ask why, it becomes easy to understand the moment you imagine a creature that would not die even under a total assault from the strongest nation in the faded memories. A nuclear bomb is not a powerful weapon, either. How much would it hurt, to fire one at a monster that is a volcanic eruption itself? Could anyone, alone, defeat a monster that turns summer into winter?
From the first world to the fourth, every one of them has monsters of that kind. In that respect, the world inside the faded memories was an exceedingly lukewarm place. Perhaps because of it, this world looks to me like a mosaic. Mana itself is the strangest thing of all.
Anyway.
The level of technology is far higher than what I first saw through the harvesters, because the thing lighting the mansion is an electric bulb. I had assumed they used mana stones, as in the third world, but wires were connected, and there was even something that looked properly like a transformer.
Harvesters seized or sold out of the slums knew nothing whatsoever about electricity, while those who had touched civilization to some degree know a fair amount. I wondered briefly why the gap in knowledge was so wide, and understood soon enough. There is no compulsory education here. The state provides no education at all, so those who do not know never come to know. It would be a stretch to call it a policy of keeping the people ignorant. A human without even the most basic knowledge is not convenient to use. Tell someone to fetch electricity, and the fool who simply grabs a live wire and dies is nothing but an obstruction.
It startles me to realize that what I had vaguely assumed even a child in kindergarten would know was, in truth, knowledge society had taught.
Then how much knowledge does this one called a mage possess? I look forward to the day that comes.
Pleased that my knowledge has grown—because a foreigner was mixed in among the test subjects brought here, too—I cast out the bait called a harvester, and I wait.
Meanwhile, the third world passed quite uneventfully.
The day after I returned to my lodgings, I was summoned at once by Hypion. I wondered whether he meant to scold me for acting on my own, but he only asked why I had gone there. So I told him everything that had happened up to then, and explained that Victoria had gone off as she pleased and I had followed.
Hypion, king of this country, gave a bitter smile and said I had been too harsh. It was true, so I nodded. When he asked what had become of Victoria, I answered that on the last day she never showed her face, and we parted like that.
The king's expression then was terribly funny. It was the face of a man who, told that the children had fought, calls one of them in to ask what happened, only to find before him a child sulking that she did nothing wrong. And he was feeling how very strange that was.
Is it really so astonishing? Isn't it something every father with a child would know?
No. Mm. That's right. Hypion is not a father. He is a king. It is difficult for him to experience what a father experiences in an ordinary society.
He sent me away with the awkward reply that I ought to meet her sometime later and have a proper talk. An answer he was still turning over himself, wondering whether it was even the right one, would have been better left unsaid. Of course, I did not go out of my way to tell him so.
Victoria needs time to rest. Or she might seize the chance to slip free of me entirely. That is her choice. In the end I will take the warmth regardless, so until then she may do as she likes. That is what I want from a harvester. To do the thing they want to do.
Since Hypion sent me off without much else to say, I returned to my lodgings and spent the time at my ease.
I learned one thing from this. I am considerably free.
Judging by the way he touted my ability to create harvesters to people of other countries, he does mean to use me. But it does not seem he intends to grip me as tightly as one uses a tool. If we are speaking of taste, the fourth is more to mine. Treat me wholly as a tool, and they do not investigate me myself. They fret over what to do with the harvesters I make. The focus falls not on me, but on the harvesters.
And harvesters have an element of randomness, don't they? Humans are creatures who lose their minds to gambling. A human sunk in it will turn even parent and child into chips and throw themselves into the game. When they say they want to return to the past, it is not that they regret their ruined life. They want to go back because they could gamble again. In the past, they had money to gamble with, didn't they?
Go near a gambling house and there are always people like this. To that extent, a gambling house is a place that can earn enormous sums, and also a place that produces humans it is socially acceptable to discard. A human ruined by gambling is very easy to use. Give them the slightest bit of money and they readily put their hands to crime, and even if they vanish, no one looks for them. You may use them as pieces to be sacrificed, put them into a mine as laborers, or, if serviceable organs can be had, use them as material.
Of course, in a proper nation a gambling house is nothing but a loss that shrinks the working population. In a twisted society, though, a gambling house brings profit. Money can be gathered with ease, and labor or materials obtained along with it. That is the allure of the draw.
Harvesters carry a slight bias, but at a glance they gain supernatural powers at random. Similar powers exist, yet cases of gaining a completely identical one have been rare. The more one looks at harvesters, the more they possess a charm that draws people in.
Honestly, if there were no harvesters, I would have been finished. Because I can make them, the future of suffering the cold forever beneath the water has grown a little fainter. And there is no boredom. Watching the harvester channels all at once, I am always entertained.
I feel some intention in my having an ability like this. Since I cannot yet even know whether a god exists, I will keep my eyes closed, so that the moment I find one, I can drive in a harpoon and drag it down beneath the surface.
Anyway. More than I expected, I am being treated as a guest of this country. If I go somewhere the ability to make harvesters shines, like the fortress city of Atlan, and make one now and then while living a long, long while behind the mask of a virtuous person, that ought to be enough.
Besides, as a person lives, a dangerous moment comes at least once. It might be illness. It might be an accident. When that time comes, people will come to me and ask to be made into harvesters. And in a woman's case, if she is told she will grow prettier and will not age easily, it will be even harder to resist.
No. Any living thing would want to flee from aging. And I can grant that once.
On top of that, the future of this world is, at present, very unclear. The chaos that once blanketed this country is breaking out in other countries as well. Foreigners fleeing the calamities of their own lands and running here keep increasing. And it is not a matter of one nation or two. They have discovered a fatal flaw in the technology that upheld the civilization of the world, and they have learned that the flaw was not a mistake or a want of technical skill, but something made artificially, with intent.
The ruin of the great corporations is certain. If they do not bring it about, they are not a country. Only, I still do not know what those three corporations truly wanted. There are many harvesters who came out of the corporations, but every one of them was only someone faithfully doing their own work.
Honestly, I would not mind a dramatic reversal in which the great corporations suddenly rise, swallow every nation, and found a corporate state. At the least, it is true that something is going to happen. It is also true that countless people will die in the process. And it is true that, as humans made unhappy that way multiply, they will want to reach a hand out to someone.
Harvesters are stronger than ordinary humans in all sorts of respects. You might as well call them Human 2.0. So they will certainly climb upward. The greatest problem, in that case, is that humans who sense a crisis will name harvesters the enemy and cast them out. But in the third world, Hypion has promoted them exceedingly well.
The game is already won.
Hehe.
So I will not go out of my way to play the villain. I will make a harvester now and then, and live like an ordinary human.
I hope the fourth world turns out well, too.