Chapter 54

It was an instant answer.

Apparently not expecting her to come back at him that fast, Lyssel looked a little stuck.

"……."

With Iberin staring right at him, Lyssel sat there with his mouth closed like a man with honey in it, until finally he looked away.

"Why aren't you babying me?"

Lyssel just reached out and gave her hair a careful, light stroke.

It was a tiny motion, but you could feel exactly how much agonizing had gone into it.

Iberin didn't tease him for it — she only pressed her head a little more firmly into his palm.

---

The eggs were a massive hit.

Unlike the Cheongyangs, which were too spicy to use as anything but a seasoning, the eggs were filling and tasty, and everyone loved them.

But the egg seedlings died not long after they were planted in the open patch too.

They were going to have to figure out what the actual problem was first.

No new crops had really turned up since the eggs, but Iberin was starting to think that this place hadn't so much failed to grow things as simply never been developed — and that the whole forest might honestly be a jackpot.

She'd assumed tainted ground meant nothing would grow, but it turned out it was just thick with demonic energy and crawling with a few more monsters.

The monsters did make it hard for ordinary people to live there, sure, but Lecashe handled every last one of them, so as a place to live it wasn't actually that bad.

For now, Iberin decided to focus less on finding new crops and more on figuring out how to keep the ones they already had alive.

"We should keep going for walks in the forest, though."

"For your health?"

"That too, but the whole reason we first went into the forest wasn't to find crops."

"Ah… the tremor…"

"Forgot about it, didn't you?"

Honestly, between finding the Cheongyangs and the eggs, Iberin had slightly lost track of the search for traces of the god herself.

It hadn't helped that she'd come up empty.

She'd been convinced the forest had responded to the name precisely because a trace of the god was there.

Granted, the forest was so massive they hadn't been able to cover all of it.

"If we went a little further in, maybe we'd find something? But the forest is so huge… I have no sense of how deep I've gone. You know where we are, right?"

"Further in?"

"Yes. How much of it have we actually walked?"

"The center is dangerous."

"So we've only been on the edge?"

"Not the very edge, but close to it. The monsters deeper in are more dangerous and a lot more vicious. Usually they don't stray far from the tainted World Tree, though."

"The tainted World Tree?"

"You know this is the Forest of the World Tree, right?"

"I do."

Probably assuming her lost memories had taken this with them, Lyssel walked her through it piece by piece.

At the dead center stood the tainted tree of the World Tree.

A sacred tree said to have been there since the very beginning, when the continent itself first came into being.

By now it had been corrupted and steeped in demonic energy for so long it had lost the name sacred tree long ago.

"You can't go there. You're not exactly strong against demonic energy as it is, Iberin."

The monsters deeper inside were on a different level from the ones at the edges, he warned her — and even if he put up a barrier of his own demonic energy, there was no guarantee it'd hold against them.

Whatever else, they'd more or less covered the outskirts of the Forest of the World Tree, and they'd found nothing — which meant whatever was here had to be further in.

But with Lyssel laying out the danger like that, Iberin wasn't exactly eager to push deeper either.

"That time, did you go in by yourself all the way to the inside?"

"I did, but again, nothing seemed off…"

He trailed off.

"I see…"

"Is it weighing on you?"

"…Honestly, a lot."

"I'll handle it so nothing happens that you'd have to worry about."

"You don't even know what I'm worried about."

"Whatever it is."

"…I really do want to go in just once. I think then I could finally let it go."

By now, no matter how many times she whispered Demedeto, the forest didn't respond anymore.

What in the world had that tremor been?

The person in the original who'd found traces of the god first — had they discovered something in there?

She was curious.

She also wondered how anyone had even thought of pushing into a place that strained someone as strong as Lyssel.

"…You really have to go?"

"…If it's going to be too hard on you, it's all right."

She wondered if she was being a burden.

She was physically weak, after all, and to him she was basically deadweight.

So she said it like she really meant it's fine — but Lyssel thought it over for a beat, then answered.

"No. Let's go."

---

Even if they did turn up traces of the god deeper in, there was no telling what kind of variables would jump out, so Iberin decided she absolutely had to find out who, in the original, had been the one to discover them.

"Haa."

But now that Lyssel had actually said he'd come, she couldn't help worrying.

Would it really be okay?

I'd prefer it to be after your health has recovered a bit more, though.

There was a condition tagged on, sure.

Still, walking into this with no preparation was worse than waiting.

Because Iberin was starting to suspect that the person in the original who'd found traces of the god might have died before they could ever say so.

If that wasn't the case, there'd be no reason to keep it secret.

If anyone was still out there looking for traces of the god's power, they could very well show up here with questions about the tremor in the Forest of the World Tree.

For the moment, Iberin decided to sit quietly and wait.

---

"So it's because of this undergrowth, you think?"

"Yes."

The Lecashe territory in the south had originally been grain country, but it had been tainted for ages.

So what had once been farmland was now nothing but bizarre tangles of growth.

Once they'd started thinking about developing the territory, she and the staff had set about clearing it.

"It grew back like this again?"

"Yes…"

But the undergrowth was a nightmare — it grew back lush by the next day.

The stuff had such an aggressive growth rate that even after they cleared it spotlessly and planted fresh seedlings, it seemed to steal even the nutrients the seedlings needed.

"I knew it was bad, but I had no idea it was this bad."

When she'd first woken up inside Iberin's body, she could remember Tami clearing undergrowth with practiced ease.

It grew so well that that level of weeding was apparently nothing — she'd just whisked it out of the way.

At the time Iberin had thought huh, impressive, but now that she was actually trying to wipe it out, she could see it was no small thing.

"Pesticide doesn't work?"

"They tried it once. Instead of dying, the stuff grew even better."

That was from Rotte.

When the staff couldn't keep up with how fast it grew and started losing it, they'd tried every method under the sun to get rid of it.

Pesticide had been the first thing they'd reached for.

"Not just pesticide — we tried straight poisons too. We sprayed them to kill the stuff and it took the dose like a stimulant and went absolutely…"

"…Yikes."

If it grew any more from here, what was it even going to look like?

She felt a little dizzy.

"Should we just give up?"

The actual ground that was supposed to grow crops was thick with nothing but weeds.

"What if we tried holy power?"

Rozelia, watching quietly, piped up.

"Holy power?"

"Yes — the demonic energy's strong here, so the plants should be weak to holy power."

"…Hm. But there aren't any priests here, are there?"

"…I'll train harder."

"You're already training plenty hard. If you push any more, you'll just wear yourself out."

"Still…"

"Even if you can't use holy power, Rozelia is Rozelia, and you matter just as you are — so really, don't push yourself."

Rozelia's cheeks flushed a sweet, peachy color.

She'd been a bright, brassy kid from the start, but lately, eating and sleeping well, she'd filled out into something even better to look at. Her looks were really coming in too.

While they were grinning at each other for a long, fond stretch, Iberin had a good idea.

Her face lit up and she clapped her hands.

"Instead of just cutting the undergrowth back over and over, what if we look for its natural predator?"

"Natural predator?"

"Yes. No matter how strong something is, it's always got an enemy. Demonic energy has holy power as its weakness — there's got to be something this undergrowth is vulnerable to too, right?"

"We don't know what that is, though."

"Right, yeah."

Iberin's mouth snapped shut.

True — there had to be at least a few thousand kinds of plants growing wild here, and the thought of combing through every single one of them was overwhelming.

But then —

"Hold on, I don't think it's a bad idea, actually."

"Hm?"

"Now that I think about it, this undergrowth only grows in certain areas."

"Hm? Certain areas?"

"Yes. Flat ground, no shade."

The Lecashe territory was near the forest, so there were a lot of dense trees.

The weather was perpetually overcast to begin with, so "shade" wasn't really a category here, but with more trees the light still got a little dimmer — and this undergrowth seemed to grow only in tree-less spots.

"But we can't exactly plant trees in the middle of a field… can we?"

"For your usual farming, no."

"…Wait."

"You know it as well as I do, Lady Iberin. Things grow fine here even with trees around. The crops you've brought back have all been ones that were growing perfectly happily under trees!"

"Oh!"

She was right — absolutely right!

Like they'd just stumbled onto something earth-shaking, both of them stared at each other, stunned.

---

While Iberin and Rozelia were throwing themselves into the undergrowth war, Ether was over in a corner of the office, hard at his lessons.

The truth was, Lyssel didn't really have a knack for teaching.

Or — the premise itself was wrong, more accurately.

He simply wasn't used to other people.

His method of teaching Ether was simple.

Hand him a book, tell him to study it.

Once Ether had dutifully studied it, ask if anything didn't make sense.

Ether would then ask questions, and Lyssel would explain those sections.

Going that way, in less than a month they'd worked through twelve books in total.

"Have you fully internalized this one?"

"Yes!"

"Then the next one is this."

The book Lyssel held out was An Introduction to Imperial Tax Law.

By any measure it didn't look like something a small child could digest, but he handed it over like it was nothing, and Ether took it like it was nothing.

If anything, the way he received the book made his eyes shine.

He seemed to genuinely love learning something new.

With the lesson wrapped and the new book in his hands, a heavy silence settled over the room.

Ahem, ahem.

After clearing his throat, Lyssel cautiously broke it.

{"…Would you like to stay for some tea?"}(#0ml8mb77fh62)