CHAPTER 3: From Budding Branches

01

It had been three days since the Labyrinth Suppression Forces escaped the fifty-fifth labyrinth by the skin of their teeth. Three masculine figures were visiting the stratum, but there was no way to confirm that they were indeed men. Their identities could only be extrapolated from their height and gait, for their entire bodies were concealed by baggy, protective monster leather that made them appear to be hairless caterpillars. Each face was covered by a mask and goggles, making them essentially unidentifiable.

The poison gas hadn’t reached the sea caverns of the fifty-fourth stratum. It was a calm and safe zone as usual. But one floor below it, ash coated the stairwell that had once led to the lush forest. Dried vegetation was strewn on the ground. But several hundred yards in the distance, the forest was green again, though its color was dulled by falling ash. Although they’d defeated the boss, the stratum had a regenerative power that was not possessed by most forests.

After descending down to the fifty-fifth stratum, the three people used a syringe to suck the surrounding air into a thin glass tube and a rubber pump to mix the air in a vial containing liquid. Then they checked the change in color of the contents in the glass tube and the condition of the liquid. The shortest among the three might have been the leader, taking the tube and vial and checking them, scribbling something in a notebook, then putting them away to bring back.

The trio repeated the same work in multiple locations, then approached the stairs to the gas leak leading to the fifty-sixth stratum.

When the boss had been defeated, the gas initially spewed out of the opening with force. Now it only appeared to rise hazily as steam. Even still, it was blisteringly hot and full of harmful elements. The gas alone was enough of a threat. Even if it was just water vapor, anything above four hundred degrees Fahrenheit would be enough to cover your body in blisters.

One of the figures approached the spout, taking care to not touch the hot gas, and tossed in a rope tied to a bundle of minerals, vials, and pieces of metal. After a little while, he pulled it back up, moved away from the spout, and checked the change in color of the minerals and pieces of metal and the vials’ contents. He must have analyzed the information from these results because he scribbled something in his notebook again, quickly stowed his tools, and indicated the stairs going up. “Let’s go.”

The three returned to the base of the Labyrinth Suppression Forces via the underground Aqueduct. After removing their masks and their bulky caterpillars of protective clothing, they proceeded to the council room where Leonhardt and others waited for them. In addition to Leonhardt, Weishardt, and Nierenberg, there were several aides with grim faces present.

Among the trio, one of them appeared to be a young scout of the Labyrinth Suppression Forces, and the remaining two were the leader and a bespectacled man who looked to be an assistant, both of whom were invited for the purpose of this survey.

“Thanks for your hard work, Ghark. What’s the situation?” asked Leonhardt.

“The gas’s a typical volcanic gas. If ye wear just a mask, ye’ll probably manage. The high temperature’s more of a problem. It’s out of the question if ye can’t cool it down,” answered the leader of the investigation, old man Ghark.

Ghark boasted the best investigative abilities in the Labyrinth City with his Material Appraisal skill, allowing him to harvest items in the Labyrinth by himself. When it came down to surveying the environment, no one could rival him, though investigating monsters was a different story. This ability was exactly why they had come to him with this request. The man appearing to be Ghark’s assistant must have been an acquaintance. He was taller than average, and his build wasn’t necessarily large. He wore glasses and a calm expression and appeared to be a scholar or a teacher. The assistant handed Ghark’s note to Weishardt’s aide.

This time, Weishardt asked a question as he looked at the note. “Let’s say the masks make the poisonous gas harmless. Is it possible to breathe in the oxygen?”

“I can’t say for sure until we can cool it down, but…I’m concerned about the composition of the gas. It didn’t explode when it opened. Based on that, ye can probably breathe. If that’s all yer after,” Ghark responded cryptically.

Nierenberg caught onto something. “Which means there’s oxygen there. No, you’re implying it’s being supplied. In other words, there has to be something—or someone—there that’s capable of surviving in that environment.”

“Yep. I imagine it’s one hell of a nuisance,” Ghark affirmed Nierenberg’s theory: The climate in each stratum in the Labyrinth had adjusted to the monsters inhabiting it—including poison gas and air.

Even from their limited information, they knew the fifty-sixth stratum was too hot for human activity, pumped full of poisonous volcanic gas, and abnormally high in pressure until the staircase had opened. What on earth could live there that needed oxygen…?

“In any case, let’s do what we can.” Leonhardt spoke up to break through the gloomy atmosphere. “Couldn’t we cool it by drawing seawater from the fifty-fourth stratum and its coastal caverns?”

“Let’s try to recreate the water bullets from the ruins of the Sea-Floating Pillar. I wonder if it’s possible to get a supply of water going.”

“And then the masks. Ghark, what kind do we need?”

“The lungs from a sub-dragon should be enough. A wyvern, to be exact. Better to have goggles, too. But I’m a wee bit worried that glass might not be as strong as we need it. Ye’re hunting wyverns regardless. If ye tan and stretch the wing membrane, ye can make good stuff from it.”

“Wyverns, huh? We’ll have to go into the Fell Forest. Ask the guild. This is a perfect opportunity for B-Rank members of the Labyrinth Suppression Forces to train, too. I’m sure they’ve grown tired of regular subjugation missions in the Fell Forest. Put together a joint operation. Nierenberg, continue to treat those with critical injuries,” instructed Leonhardt.

All present left their seats to carry out their respective responsibilities.

The fifty-sixth stratum remained a mystery. At this current state, they couldn’t even enter it. Then again, they’d spend forever fighting against the King of Cursed Serpents. The fact that they had actionable steps for this mission made this stratum preferable.

“Well then, I’m gonna train this one and then go home. Call me when ye’ve cooled off the fifty-sixth stratum…er, please,” Ghark added, realizing he should be more polite.

Ghark indicated the young scout from the Labyrinth Suppression Forces.

“I don’t mind. I know you’ve retired, and I want to thank you for your help, Old Man Ghark,” replied Leonhardt, using the old nickname in a voice thick with nostalgia.

“Now that’s something I don’t mind, General Leonhardt. A general’s burdened with all sorts o’ responsibilities, right? An’ I’m yer subordinate, so give me all the orders ye like.”

Ghark had once served Margrave Schutzenwald who was Leonhardt’s grandfather. Leonhardt knew Ghark’s personal history, but when he took up his new post in the Labyrinth City, Ghark had already retired and opened a medicinal herb shop. But whenever there was an emergency, the old man helped out for old times’ sake. As he saw Ghark out of the council room, Leonhardt murmured a few words of thanks.

02

“I heard the Labyrinth Suppression Forces are back from the Fell Forest!”

“And they got a bigger haul than usual! Wanna check it out?”

A group of children called out to the young orphans who had come to deliver apriore fruit to Sunlight’s Canopy, beckoning them to go see. After receiving a bag with their payment and cookies, the children rushed outside toward the main road, leaving the door open and letting the cold winter air in. It reminded Mariela and her customers that it was cold outside as they lounged and warmed themselves in the sunlight from the ceiling windows or with magical heating tools.

“Brrr. Jeez, they could at least close the door. Is it already that time of the year for the Fell Forest expedition?” Lynx shuffled to the door, closing it shut. “Winter’s coming,” he muttered.

“Hey, Lynx. What’s the Fell Forest expedition?” Mariela asked.

The children were running as fast as their legs would carry them. This expedition had to be something interesting.

Mariela looked at Lynx with giddy anticipation.

“The Labyrinth Suppression Forces have come back from hunting in the Fell Forest,” he explained. “They parade along the main road, showing everyone in the City their spoils. You can see a ton of monster species, so it’s a fun event for those little urchins. And then after that, the Forces treat people to dishes cooked from the spoils. Everyone loves to chat about what they want to eat.”

Even the Fell Forest got low on food in the winter. It wasn’t an easy time of the year for the monsters, either—even those living deep in the forest came close to the Labyrinth City. Since some of the monsters were beyond the capabilities of the City Defense Squad at the outer wall, the Labyrinth Suppression Forces headed into the Fell Forest to cull the monsters before they could attack the City.

But monsters weren’t the only ones short on food. Even residents of the Labyrinth City were forced to eat less than usual with price hikes across the board. This was particularly true for young people who’d neglected to build up their stores for winter and slum residents who couldn’t afford these provisions in the first place. The Labyrinth Suppression Forces provided rations for those populations and cooked the edible monsters, offering food near the main road of the Labyrinth City. The opening day of these food kitchens was a winter wonderland with events cropping up in numerous places in the City featuring rows upon rows of food stalls.

“I wanna go see!”

“Seriously? But it’s so cold. Can’t it wait until the meal center is open this evening?”

“I wanna see the monsters!”

One would think monsters would be a familiar sight to someone who’d lived in the Fell Forest.

Lynx must have known that this would get her all excited and beg to go, because he stood up from his chair, despite his grumbling. After leaving the care of the store in Amber’s hands, he led Sieg and Mariela toward the main road.

Stretching from the southwestern gate to the Labyrinth, the main road was bustling with people, despite the winter cold. The Labyrinth City didn’t offer much in terms of entertainment. Even huddled up in the cold, the residents were having the time of their lives.

Around a hundred soldiers of the Labyrinth Suppression Forces were slowly parading along the road. Those marching at the front had to make up the army’s elite. Even from looks, the troop seemed strong, waving back to the cheering crowd and followed by ten yagus with fallen monsters piled on them.

The biggest game appeared to be a giant boar spanning three yards. It seemed very powerful with its rocky skin and splendid fangs as long as a person’s arm. It had been placed on a slipshod wagon pulled by two yagus. On the top of it rode a single soldier—he must have been the one to defeat it—posing with a spear, turning to the cheers of the crowd. The throngs of children imitated the soldier, hopping up and down in great delight. Of course, Mariela waved her hand madly in excitement, too.

Next in the procession were the yagus loaded with animals for consumption—from orcs, harpies, and other familiar monsters, to horned rabbits and all kinds of birds, to bats and rat monsters, to bears, foxes, deer, and more normal forest creatures. As if conscious of the fixed gaze of the crowd, the yagus raised their horns high and snorted roughly as they marched.

Next came the backup troops, presumably wearing the same black capes as the primary soldiers. They were carrying so much game on their backs that these capes were hidden as they smiled at the people’s cheers.

“Wowza! So many kinds of monsters. This is the first time I’ve seen that huge boar. What’s it called? Are they yummy?”

“That’s called a delicious pig,” Lynx responded, flippant. “And over there’s a tasty bird and delectable rabbits and bony birds. Blech, I think I see forest wolves. Mystery stew, again?”

While Mariela was bouncing with excitement like a little kid, Lynx didn’t seem to remember the names of any of the monsters except the forest wolves. But he did remember how they tasted. Maybe he just wasn’t interested in them.

“That thing is called a rock fang boar. It may be a four-legged monster, but it’s a lot stronger than an orc. Both the fur and the skin are as hard and tough as rocks, and the large fangs are its weapons. The black birds are…” Sieg industriously told Mariela about the monsters to supplement Lynx’s vague explanations. He had extensive knowledge of these animals, which made sense for an ex-hunter.

However, Mariela’s interest had been captured by another phrase.

“What’s mystery stew?!”

“You see how they’ve got a lot of game, including the gross ones? They’re going to toss in a bunch of small fry into a soup to hand out. And it’s distributed after the sun sets, so you won’t know what kind of meat’s in it unless you eat it. Forest wolf is tough and absolutely reeks, so getting it in your bowl is like pulling a losing ticket. With so much game, they don’t need to put it in, but since it gets everyone all riled up, they do it every time.”

“That sounds like fun!”

“Yeah. But it takes a long time to cook. When the stew’s done, the street vendors will be done setting up, so let’s go back for now and get ready for the main event.”

If Mariela was left alone, she was liable to follow the parade all the way to the front of the Labyrinth. With skill, Lynx managed to calm her and lead her back to Sunlight’s Canopy.

Mariela would get sick if she loitered around in this chilly weather for hours, and Lynx simply had no interest in standing out in the cold.

Well, I guess I did follow the parade when I was a little brat myself. Caught a cold every time.

As he watched the children pursuing the Labyrinth Suppression Forces parade carrying their game, Lynx recalled his childhood.

Lynx was not yet ten when Dick had made a name for himself in the Labyrinth Suppression Forces. Although they were both orphans, Dick was active on the front lines of the Forces with his spear, and other orphans, including Lynx, wanted to be just like him.

In his younger years, Lynx used to follow Dick and the rest of the Labyrinth Suppression Forces, just as the kids had trailed after them earlier today. He always believed he’d someday be that strong and do great things.

Even now that he’d begun to understand his own aptitudes and limits, his feelings hadn’t changed. He knew his shadowmaster abilities were suited for scouting. Even though he knew he fell far short of Captain Dick’s fighting power, even though he realized he hadn’t gotten much taller lately, he never lost sight of his aspiration to be like the captain.

The training at the Ahriman Springs hadn’t been easy, but he felt he’d grown tremendously. With the knowledge that he could become stronger still, Lynx pictured a bright future for himself, just like he had as a child.

“Ffffh, ffffh. Oh, I got a winner. Mm! Yum!”

“That’s great, Mariela. Crunch-crunch.”

“Sieg, dude, meat isn’t supposed to sound like that. You’re not reacting, but I’m pretty sure you got that forest wolf meat.”

“What?! Uh-oh, Sieg, did you lose?”

“…It’s not good, but I can eat it.”

At the start of their rationed meals, Mariela ate with relish, while Sieg had no luck on his side. That said, he ate with perfect stoicism, so she didn’t grasp the depths of the darkness of his stew.

“Let me try a bite,” she said, then fished a chunk of the forest wolf meat from Sieg’s bowl. “Blerg-urp. What the heck?! It’s tough and dry, and I just keep chewing it and chewing it and it won’t go away. And the gamy taste keeps getting worse.”

“Ha-ha-ha! Nice reaction, Mariela.” Lynx burst out laughing at Mariela’s displeasure.

Mariela had discovered that the magic spell of Let Me Try a Bite would let her pick the weird pieces of meat from her friends’ dishes, giving her the excuse to try all the skewers and desserts at the food stalls to cleanse her palate. As they mingled with the other City residents who’d gathered on the main road for winter entertainment, the three thoroughly enjoyed their rationed food.

The food distribution continued from evening until the time the children fell asleep. The place had bustled with children and families around sunset, but as it grew late, the stalls began to set out alcohol so the adults could party.

Even though the bite of winter had started to abate, the nights were still cold. Under the clear, starry sky and the abnormal number of lights from the stalls, adults gathered with bottles in their hands next to magical tools to warm themselves. It was an extraordinary sight to the children. Even as they rubbed their sleepy eyes, they tried to wander close to the crowd as their parents or elders pulled them by the hand and hurried along the road home.

Mariela and Lynx shared this sentiment, but Mariela had to make potions after this, and Lynx had to carry them. So Lynx parted from Mariela and Sieg, returning to the Black Iron Freight Corps’ base for the time being.

When it grew very late, Lynx joined up with Lieutenant Malraux, traveled through the underground Aqueduct, accepted the potions in the cellar of Sunlight’s Canopy, and carried them to the Labyrinth Suppression Forces’ base.

With this, his work was done. Malraux returned to his own home, and Lynx returned to the base. Now that the lights from the feast in the Labyrinth City had all been extinguished, it seemed even quieter than usual, making it lonelier.

The Black Iron Freight Corps’ base had been built in an unsafe part of the City near the slums, in a building that used to be a cheap inn for new adventurers. Since it had originally been built as an inn, each room was small, though they were many. Although the slaves shared a room, Lynx and the others had each been allotted their own. The stable and the place to store carriages were used as a raptor pen and a storehouse. All in all, it was a very convenient property for the Corps.

He’d already had dinner today, meaning he didn’t stop by the kitchen to eat. Lynx headed for the communal bath to wash off his sweat. Captain Dick and the rest of the transportation group hadn’t returned yet, making Lynx and Jay the only people in the base.

He couldn’t have a conversation with the voiceless Jay, so Lynx returned to his own room. The base of the Black Iron Freight Corps was so hushed that the hustle and bustle from earlier in the night honestly could have happened in some distant world.

What an empty room, Lynx thought as he looked around.

This was the first time he’d had a room to himself. As a child, he’d lived in an orphanage with other people. When he’d joined the Black Iron Freight Corps, he’d taken naps in the armored carriages or temporarily stayed at inns in the City.

Although the room was small, there had been two beds in it back when the building was a cheap hotel. Other than his bed, the space was large enough for a desk and shelves. But the only other thing in Lynx’s room was a small bookshelf—no desk or chair.

As far as his personal effects, he had a few changes of clothes and miscellaneous items that all fit into a single box—with the exception of his equipment. That was about as much as a temporary residence inn like the Yagu Drawbridge Pavilion would let him bring in.

Even considering those circumstances, Lynx’s room was almost dreary.

He didn’t even have any magical tools for lighting. Lynx could perceive the state of his room from the faint light of the stars shining in from the small window, which might have been a side effect of his shadowmaster skills.

At times, he didn’t think it was inconvenient, and at times, he had little interest in his room other than to sleep. Just as he had the vague belief that he could still become stronger, he thought about the potential for this room—if he only had the inclination to change it. But he hadn’t bought anything extra for it yet in particular.

I had fun today. Lynx lay on his bed and thought back on the day.

He’d eaten and laughed with Mariela and Sieg, and he enjoyed himself a lot more than usual. This must have been why he’d thought the room looked very empty, when he hardly paid attention to it most days.

Come to think of it…

Lynx produced a candle from his pocket. Mariela had given it to him today, and it was no ordinary stick of wax.

This one was mixed with some extract from bromominthra. Monster repellent.

“It’s a scented candle to use against monsters,” she had told him.

He thought scented candles were therapeutic for the soul. But if monsters found it pungent, could it still technically count as aromatherapy?

“Monsters will have a hard time coming near it, so use it when you need a light in the Fell Forest,” she’d said as she handed it to him. A candle’s original purpose was to light up dark places, though, not ward off monsters. With the thought of letting it perform its original job, Lynx placed the candle on a plate on top of the shelf and lit it.

Surprisingly bright, Lynx thought as he gazed at the flickering flame.

The warm, orange flame flickered in a clumsy dance, which was just one of the ways it reminded him of Mariela.

As soon as he’d lit this candle, the room felt warmer, although there was no way a small flame could change the temperature of a room by itself. Both the shelf and the rough, angular bed that looked like it was built from broken pieces of wood appeared soft in the light of the flame.

Huh, that’s pretty nice.

If he put more of his own things in his room, in his own space, maybe his day-to-day life would be more fun.

If he had someone who could shed light on him, even as he pursued his vague goal of becoming as strong as the captain, maybe his days would be brighter.

Oh, I see. I guess I…

The warm light of the candle brought forth images of a life with Mariela to Lynx’s mind—days filled with laughter. At that moment, he understood the feelings waxing in his heart.

But there was something he didn’t realize.

The flame of the candle was so small and weak that it didn’t illuminate the entire room. Next to the soft light spilling across the area around him, the rest of the space was shrouded in shadow.

A single candle wasn’t nearly enough to illuminate a distant place—and the distant future that Lynx wished for.

The light of just one candle attracted insects and was easily extinguished by a draft before settling into darkness. The young Lynx hadn’t yet realized it would take many, many candles to drive away the darkness.

03

“Hey, Sieg! Let’s go hunt wyverns.”

Lynx was so relaxed, it sounded like an invitation to play.

“Wyverns, huh…?”

That was the monster that had crushed his right eye, Mariela remembered. Words caught in her throat, and she glanced over in Sieg’s direction.

Sieg wore a blank expression, at a loss for a reply.

It had been almost half a year since Mariela and Sieg had started living together. During that time, she’d heard how Sieg lost his eye and the sequence of events leading to his fall into slavery.

Whether or not he noticed the silence falling over the pair, Lynx continued. “Hey, they awarded you B Rank for completing the request to beat the needle apes, right? You’ve come this far; let’s aim for A Rank.”

“But I need to protect Mariela… Besides, becoming an A-Rank seems…,” Sieg said evasively.

It was clear the purpose of stationing Nierenberg and Labyrinth Suppression Forces soldiers at Sunlight’s Canopy under the guise of medical examinations was to protect Mariela. It was as close as they came to saying that Sieg alone wasn’t fit to be her escort. Nierenberg’s intensive training had continued every morning even after Sieg returned from the Ahriman Springs, and Sieg had continued to be going against the grain almost every day. He repeatedly asked for training, even as he confronted his own lack of talent, because he wanted to keep being Mariela’s escort.

Mariela was kind. Even if Sieg was inadequate, she would probably let him stay with her and give him a stable life. But for Sieg, that just wasn’t enough. He wanted to be recognized as Mariela’s escort through his own capabilities. He didn’t want to give this role to anyone else.

If only I had my Spirit Eye.

Every time he was reminded of his own powerlessness, he regretted losing his Spirit Eye. If he’d just had his Spirit Eye, its divine protection would have brought A Rank within reach for him.

After he returned from the Ahriman Springs, he’d purchased a bow and arrows for practice and tried to use them just once.

But he’d been haunted by that experience ever since. He hadn’t even come close to hitting the target. In fact, he didn’t even know how he should aim. He’d worked with this weapon since childhood. Muscle memory should have kicked in. But it was as if he was handling it for the first time. It was the same uncomfortable feeling as having a word at the tip of your tongue. He’d managed to fire an arrow that arced far away from the target, landing in a thicket in the medicinal herb garden. He was so clumsy that if his old self with the Spirit Eye could see him now, old Sieg would have told him, “You have no talent. Just give up.” So Sieg had placed the bow and arrows away on a shelf in his room.

He hadn’t drawn a bow in years, and even his dominant eye had changed. Of course he would feel out of place. He wouldn’t be able to regain his intuition with just a single shot. He’d slung bows ever since he was a child. There was no doubt he would remember the archery stance, etched into his body—if he’d chosen to practice over and over. But Sieg couldn’t even come to terms with this obvious fact. He believed the loss of his Spirit Eye was the source of everything. He hadn’t realized he was looking for an excuse for his own weakness in his past.

I’m weak without the Spirit Eye. I’m not even a match for Lynx, who’s far younger than me. I want to become strong. But I couldn’t handle a wyvern even back then. For me, becoming an A-Rank seems…, thought Sieg, face clouding over.

But before Sieg could turn him down, Lynx continued.

“I heard from Haage that if you can reach A Rank in the Labyrinth City, you can receive a pardon to free you from slavery.”

“Really?! That’s great, Sieg!” Mariela exclaimed after a moment of silence. Sieg opened his one eye wide and intently stared first at Lynx, then Mariela.

“That said, it requires the master’s permission and a recommendation from an A-Rank. On top of that, you also gotta be reviewed and stuff before you can get promoted. Plus, even after you’re released, you gotta register either in the Labyrinth Suppression Forces or as an adventurer exclusive to the Labyrinth City for ten years and pay half your earnings to your former master. Just a bunch of rules. It’s honestly a pain in the ass. For some reason, Haage said he’d recommend you, and since the captain is A Rank, you could ask him, too. Give it a shot.”

“Is this true…?” Sieg finally asked.

“It is,” replied Ghark, who’d been quietly sitting in his usual seat in Sunlight’s Canopy drinking tea. “As far as the Labyrinth City’s concerned, possessin’ power worthy of an A-Rank is worth a pardon. Of course, they can’t afford to release murderers, which is why there’s a review. But in yer case, there shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Mr. Ghark, are there a lot of A-Rank people who got released?” asked Mariela.

Ghark shook his head slightly. “Nope. To my knowledge, there’s only been one. It’s not such an easy thing gettin’ to A Rank. Rare that ye’ll find those with the ability, and if ye do, their masters don’t want to let ’em go. Even if they would get half the slave’s earnin’s fer ten years, some masters can’t abide the idea of their slaves happy,” Ghark spat out.

What had he seen? But he said no more on that subject and gazed fixedly at Sieg.

“Listen, sonny. Chances don’t just come along any old time.”

After leaving these words with a bewildered Sieg, Ghark returned to his own shop.

“Sieg, I’ll be rooting for you! I know you can do it!” Mariela cheered.

With Ghark’s warning and Mariela’s encouragement, Sieg stared at her for a little while. “I’ll try it.”

“You heard the guy. Well, let’s hurry to the Adventurers Guild to get you registered!” Lynx urged, striking while the iron was hot, and the two left Sunlight’s Canopy.

“See ya later!” Mariela called out, sending them off with a smile and wave. But the smile immediately slipped off her face.

After they were gone, she gazed silently at Sunlight’s Canopy’s door. I’m happy Sieg has a chance to be free, but…

Mariela felt restless at the hazy feeling in her heart. She absentmindedly recalled the dull hours she’d spent alone in Sunlight’s Canopy while Sieg and Lynx were at the Ahriman Springs.

When he’s free, would he still come back to live here?

Mariela couldn’t put that thought into words—because she was unaware of its true character.

The pair had left through the door to Sunlight’s Canopy, reminding Mariela of the door to her little house in the Fell Forest after her master had left.

04

After finishing his application for the wyvern hunt at the Adventurers Guild, Sieg parted ways with Lynx and made his way to Ghark’s Herbal Supplies. He was curious about what the old man had said before.

Upon seeing Sieg, Ghark was ready to talk.

“Ye want to hear the tale of the man who was freed from slavery, right?” He led him to the back of the shop where he began to weave his tale.

“In the imperial capital, orphans from the slums usually become thieves—if they ever get the chance, that is.”

Rather, it was rare for someone to survive to an age where they could become a thief. From the time these orphans were born, they hadn’t been granted the basic necessities for a decent life.

“Well, it was the same old pattern until he was caught and sent to the Labyrinth City as a penal laborer. Even then, he was a lucky bastard. The Margrave Schutzenwald of the time was a character, givin’ decent work to even penal laborers with useful skills.”

Apparently, that “lucky bastard” had the Appraisal skill. Maybe it was because he’d rooted through the garbage for things he could eat or sell ever since he was old enough; in fact, he’d become a thief because someone offered a price for his skills. The margrave at the time authorized the man to study with a focus on that skill, and he was assigned to the Labyrinth Suppression Forces as a scout.

“He’d scavenged high and low to find food and valuables to line his pockets. Comes as no surprise that he found a lone woman in the Labyrinth, too.”

She’d needed help, but not because monsters were attacking her. Although all the monsters in that stratum had been defeated by her powerful lightning magic, a falling pillar happened to pin her down, and she was struggling under it. It was a pretty dumb story.

“She wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, if ye know what I mean, but she had an absurd amount’a firepower. Dunno what she was thinkin’, but afterward, she said she’d fallen in love with the slave who saved her and went all the way to the Labyrinth Suppression Forces to enlist.”

The Forces couldn’t turn down a woman who was a high-ranking adventurer and possessed this powerful protection. Furthermore, to grant her request, the man was transferred to the same squad as her to provide support.

“Anyhoo, she was strong, but she solved everythin’ by bulldozin’ through it with magic. Even if the poor bastard on her team had nine lives, they wouldn’t’ve been enough. If he took his eyes off her fer a moment, this woman—Emeralda, she called herself—would be caught in some trap and surrounded by monsters. She’d probably die if that happened, so the man started to rack his brain fer ideas.”

Emeralda had an extremely eccentric personality, but she listened honestly to what the man had to say. In fact, she could often be found giggling. She’d throw herself in a swarm of monsters if she had the chance, and he had to provide backup with surveys and tactics. Every time they barely managed to escape death, they would burst into laughter. It was said the man who skillfully supported Emeralda and achieved military gains was allowed to act more freely than others of his social position because of his relationship with her. Perhaps the margrave knew they loved each other.

“Every day was a good time in its own way. But the man was a slave, and there was no reason fer them to be with each other, y’know. So when he heard they’d conceived a child, he panicked.”

The man had been given responsibilities in the Labyrinth Suppression Forces and received a small allowance as compensation, but it was by no means enough to support a family. And above all else, with his history as a penal laborer, he couldn’t reveal himself as the child’s father.

“I’m the one who’s gonna give birth and breastfeed. There’s nothing for you to worry about,” Emeralda had said, chuckling.

“But that wasn’t the case, o’ course,” Ghark said, suddenly fixing his eyes on Sieg.

His tone made the assertion sound more like a question.

Many people in the Labyrinth Suppression Forces had families. Of course, since it was dangerous work, there were also many who’d departed this world and left families behind. Around that time, an orphanage had been established in the Labyrinth City to raise children with deceased parents. But he was still alive. And yet, he was unable to provide for the woman who loved him and their child on the way. He couldn’t have felt more pathetic than that.

He’d looked on his past, wondering what he could have done different to live an honest life. But there was nothing he could do about it now. Considering his background, the fact he was working for the Labyrinth Suppression Forces as a penal laborer was preferable. Even though he knew he’d made wrong choices in the past, he couldn’t turn back time and do things over. The future was the only thing that could change. All he could do was try as hard as he could to make it happen.

Even if he couldn’t change his social position, he could probably change his own circumstances from here on out.

With this on his mind, the man worked harder than he ever had before. He used his ingenuity to gain knowledge, appraise things, and make progress in the Labyrinth. When he heard that he could be released from slavery by becoming an A-Rank, he felt grateful to fate for giving him another chance at life.

Eventually, he gained his freedom after the birth of his child. Raising the child had been a busy but happy time, until Emeralda was poisoned by a monster and abruptly passed away. He hadn’t been able to do anything to save her, but Emeralda laughed, leaving him with “We had a good run.”

“And that’s the reason for the herb shop?” Sieg asked, piecing together the rest. Ghark had begun running a shop dealing in medicinal herbs because he’d lost his wife, Emeralda, to monster poison.

How did he figure out the man in the story was Ghark himself? Maybe it was when the old man had said “there’s only been one” in Sunlight’s Canopy.

Ghark evaded Sieg’s question. “It’s a hobby fer a retired old man. Did ye know? When ye tell someone ‘I appreciate it,’ it means ye know how much what they gave ye was worth. I’m sure ye’ve experienced those kinda feelings yerself.”

This exception to free slaves might be a formality—a front—meant to motivate them. With more talent in a slave, the master would become more reluctant to let them go. This made the last part of the rule—requiring the master’s permission—the most difficult prerequisite of them all.

Just as Ghark had said with scorn in Sunlight’s Canopy, there were probably many people who had the power of an A-Rank but had never been released. Ghark may only have been released because of the adventurer Emeralda.

In other words, the road to becoming an A-Rank adventurer provided to Sieg was something to be grateful for and a favor for him to repay.

But after hearing the story, Sieg felt that Ghark wasn’t trying to really talk about the “value” of the chance to be released, but the “grateful” frame of mind toward the present.

Sieg’s heart had been searching for a reason for his weakness, and Ghark had struck right to the core of it: “That wasn’t the case.”

05

Wyverns lived on a steep, rocky mountain south of the Labyrinth City.

The mountain range towered above the Labyrinth City from the north to the far east, walling it in. On the south side of the City, it met the Fell Forest.

Where they touched, the mountain range ended abruptly as though it’d been sliced through. The terrain hosted mountainous clusters of boulders, which made it impossible for vegetation to grow. Among the towering rocks, the groundwater that ran through the Labyrinth City had joined to make one big stream that gushed with rolling rapids. This river weaving through the peaks and valleys prevented monsters from the Fell Forest from surging into the mountain range.

This section of the Fell Forest near the complicated, rugged terrain was populated by nests of monster herds, including orcs and goblins. And the mid- and large-size monsters that these monsters preyed upon. Among the steep cliffs, harpies made their nests.

Wyverns could prey on all these monsters. They had inhabited this cornucopia from ancient times, preferring to nest on the cliffs.

Their territory was relatively close to the Labyrinth City, about three hours away by yagu. Two centuries ago, it had been a popular hunting ground. A road had even been developed.

But then the monster-warding potions completely disappeared from the market. These hunting grounds had a high probability of encountering goblins and other small fry—more than wyverns—making them inefficient places to hunt. With less foot traffic, the road had been covered by the overgrown forest.

A group of adventurers trudged toward wyvern territory, clearing the old road. The cold had started to abate, and there was no snow left in the Fell Forest. The days were growing longer, too, so if they set out for the wyverns’ territory early in the morning, they would have plenty of time to hunt even if they needed to return to the Labyrinth City by sunset.

The Adventurers Guild had handed down a request that was limited to B-Rank adventurers and promised to add points toward a promotion to the next rank based on the number of defeated monsters. The bounty and sale price of wyverns were reasonable, but for this request, they could trade in their spoils on site. Since they didn’t have to carry their haul themselves, they could stay at the hunting ground for a long time and focus on defeating monsters. This was more efficient than going into the Labyrinth. On top of all that, they were sprinkled with a little monster-warding potion to shoo away the small fry on their way to wyvern territory by the contact person of the Labyrinth Suppression Forces stationed at the City’s southern gate. In all honesty, there was no better deal.

Because there was a limit of one hundred wyvern trade-ins, B-Rank adventurers aiming for A Rank rushed to be first.

“Wait, why am I here…?”

“A-Rankers get all the girls, Ed.”

“They’ll fall head over heels for you, Edgan!”

“Oh really?”

It was a lie. Obviously.

Just look at the A-Rank adventurers in their lives: Dick and Haage.

Well, Haage was a married man popular among the needle apes, and Dick’s wife was the Amber. Although if they hadn’t been childhood friends, it was questionable whether the latter couple would have happened. Regardless, both men were married, bringing lunches made by their loving wives to work. You could probably say those men were popular compared to Edgan.

Lynx and Sieg had dragged the good-time Charlie of the Black Iron Freight Corps, Edgan, along with them to participate as a trio. Incidentally, the Black Iron Freight Corps had been asked to transport the wyverns by the Labyrinth Suppression Forces, and they were stationed in the Labyrinth City.

The trees growing in the road to wyvern territory had been hurriedly chopped down to clear the road somewhat, but the stumps hadn’t been removed and the ground hadn’t been compacted, making it impossible for armored carriages to get to the destination. Collected wyvern materials were dismantled on the spot, loaded onto raptors or yagus, and transported to the Labyrinth City with an escort to protect against monsters from the Fell Forest.

Employees had been dispatched from the Adventurers Guild and the wholesale market to dissect the monsters, and the transportation was undertaken by the Labyrinth Suppression Forces or private transportation groups like the Black Iron Freight Corps. If you were carrying a load, normally wolf-type monsters would close in on you in droves for a delicious meal, but thanks to the monster-warding potions, they didn’t even dare to make their approach. Every once in a while, an A- or B-Rank monster came upon their path, which was immediately defeated. It was an easy road.

From the Black Iron Freight Corps, the animal trainer Yuric drove the raptors and yagus, and Dick served as an escort. They made two round trips per day. The other members were enjoying the long vacation of their dreams.

“Ooh! Look there! And there and there and there!”

Wyverns had already started soaring over them when they arrived at the mountains. Even from a distance, they could see the creatures. In fact, one of the wyverns had taken notice of the trio and swooped down on them.

These creatures were lizards classified as sub-dragons with two legs, a pair of wings, and a long tail. The schools of thought differed in their opinions on the differences between dragon species and sub-dragon species, but the presence or absence of magic was one of the classification methods that they all agreed on. For example, in the case of winged dragon species, the wings often didn’t counterbalance body weight. Scholars believed these species flew with magic, while in contrast, wyverns and other sub-dragons used their wings to fly.

Excluding their wings and tail, their bodies were longer than horses, but their wingspan was wide, and their long tails added to the impression of size. Despite that, they weighed less than horses, and their tails were spiked with a poisonous barb to supplement their low attack power.

Other than their wings, they were lizard-like. Their taloned wings had perhaps evolved from forelegs, gripping onto objects with the dexterity of hands. Their faces were reptilian, but their mouths were as sharp as beaks, and opening them revealed a row of fangs.

Their large eyes with vertical-slit pupils zeroed in on Sieg’s group. For two centuries, not a single human would have paid a visit to this place. Did the creature think they were goblins or ogres? Either way, it saw them as food.

“Kra-ka-ka-ka-ka!”

The wyvern must have thought Sieg’s group would be easy prey because they didn’t run when they saw it. The creature made a sound reminiscent of a bird and nose-dived toward the group.

“Sieg, you’re first. Go get your revenge,” Lynx urged.

Sieg took several steps forward.

“If you stay calm, it’ll be no problem. And we’ll help out if anything happens!” added Edgan with his easygoing candor.

Sieg unsheathed his mythril sword.

Nothing would get between Sieg and the wyvern.

Has it already been… six years…?

The looming wyvern made Sieg recall the day he lost his Spirit Eye.

Six years ago, I was able to achieve B Rank thanks to the divine protection of the Spirit Eye, Siegmund thought.

Back then, whenever he loosed an arrow, he would hit a monster in its weak point. When he’d gone to the forest to hunt wyverns with his hunting party, he’d expected an easy step up from the low-grade monsters cloaked in their soft hides.

They had settled on a hunting zone in the forest where it was difficult to fly over, far from the wyverns’ habitat. With difficulty, their scout led just one wyvern to this advantageous terrain, but the shield knight had no ability to draw its attention like he was supposed to. Well, the other party members weren’t much different. The wyvern had gotten to them, and they ran around trying to escape.

In the midst of the chaos, the wyvern had decided Siegmund was its prey, swooping down on him. And Siegmund didn’t have the ability to defeat it alone at the time.

Thud-thud-thud. His heart hammered against his chest. Siegmund recalled the pain as his vision was blotted out by the red of his own blood that day.

There was nothing between Sieg and the wyvern to intercept the creature’s attack. The wyvern nose-dived from high above, coming just about ten feet away. It was probably going to strike him with its poisonous barb before making a sharp turn back toward the sky. He could tell from the high position of the tail and the contraction of the wing muscles preparing for a turn.

I can see it…

Back then, he had allowed the wyvern to get close, letting his tail drive him away and poison him. Now he could detect the slight shifts in its tail and wings, letting him guess their trajectory. With only a slight movement, he dodged the poisonous tail that swung at him and cut it off with his mythril sword.

Back then, I didn’t even know I could infuse my weapon with magical power…

He’d only ever felled monsters with ordinary iron arrows. Because that was the only kind of hunting that he’d known, he’d never even thought to sufficiently train his body. When he thought about it now, he hadn’t even known how to use his other muscles. The wyvern’s hide had repelled his arrows, and he had no hope of wounding it, but his mythril sword with magical power in his hands now severed the wyvern’s tail as if it were cutting through rope.

“Kra-ka!” Shrieking in pain and rage, the wyvern immediately corrected its balance, thrown off by the loss of its tail, and flapped its wings to fly again.

“Wind Edge.”

That was when Sieg’s blade of wind cut through its wing membrane. Now that it’d lost its exit, the wyvern’s wings beat the air in vain as it collapsed to the ground.

“Kra-ka-ka-ka-ka!” it screamed in rage, standing up on its two hind legs and running at him like a raptor. Though their habitats were on cliffs and craters, the muscles on their legs were developed enough to give them the speed of raptors. The talons on its wings grabbed at Sieg’s head, and it bared its fangs to bite the nape of his neck.

Just like back then…

He was remembering the time when the wyvern’s talons caught the right side of his head and crushed his Spirit Eye, tearing up his head and leaving a deep scar on his face. When the wyvern had opened its mouth wide to bite down on the unprotected left side of his nape, the arrow he’d nocked just happened to pierce its mouth into its brain. It was only by simple chance he’d been able to defeat the creature.

The talons extended toward him just like the past wyvern’s. Sieg caught the talons with his mythril sword and used all his strength to thrust them aside. Back then, it was Sieg who had been pushed around by the wyvern, but now he was able to turn back the talons on its wings. He drove his sword straight forward into the wyvern’s open mouth, all the way to the back of its head and into its skull, then lopped off its head. With a thud, the wyvern collapsed to the ground.

That was anticlimactic…

It hadn’t even been a struggle. It was almost as though he’d watched someone else felling the wyvern with ease…even though he’d doubted he could even defeat one when he heard the conversation about wyvern hunting.

He raised the mythril sword and gazed at his face reflected in the blade.

Who is this?

On that day six years ago, Siegmund had been intoxicated by the power of the Spirit Eye and believed it to be his own strength.

The man reflected in the sword didn’t have a Spirit Eye. The one with the Spirit Eye had been easily routed by a wyvern. Now this one-eyed man had trained day after day, crawling along the bare earth and facing his own weakness—his lack of strength to protect his master.

Who is this?

The man with the Spirit Eye had looked at himself in the mirror every morning, thinking he was hot stuff for his good looks and the women he attracted. The face that lingered in his memory was repulsive to him, oozing an intolerable haughtiness. After he lost the Spirit Eye and fell into slavery, he hadn’t even had the confidence to really look at his reflection in a body of water. He hadn’t hesitated to rub his forehead on the ground for scraps of food—his expression was vacant and ugly. And he hadn’t even felt indifferent about it.

Now reflected in the blade was a man unlike anything Sieg remembered. After he came to the Labyrinth City, he stopped staring in mirrors for any purpose other than to fix his personal appearance—because he had someone he wanted to look at, someone he couldn’t take his eyes off.

That someone faced a mirror every morning, combing her hair and nodding in satisfaction. You could almost hear her think, Perfect, as her head bobbed. Where she couldn’t see, her bedhead remained perfectly intact.

That someone didn’t avert her eyes from the festering scars of a slave, when he was so dirty that no one should associate with him. Rather, she had used her own hands to heal him and straighten his foul hair. It was only when she’d trimmed his hair too short that she averted her eyes in embarrassment.

That someone boasted incredible magical reserves, nonchalantly whipping up a hundred high-grade potions every day. And yet, she appeared as though she could trip on thin air.

He had gazed at his master with such intensity that his own face had become unfamiliar to him.

The man reflected in the blade had nothing that even came close to resembling a Spirit Eye.

However, Siegmund felt that man in the blade could fulfill the hopes and hidden wishes locked away in his heart.

This… This is…me. Siegmund gripped his mythril sword tightly.

Mariela had poured half of her own fortune into this sword for him right after he came to the Labyrinth City. At the time, she hadn’t yet sufficiently planned out how she was going to make a living. She must have worried that Sieg would be in trouble if anything happened to her, bestowing him with this extravagant sword, which Sieg considered an unequaled, priceless treasure. This sword had adapted to Sieg’s magic, and its sharpness increased with the clarity of magic infused into it.

The man reflected in the blade was worthy of this sword. Or he most certainly would be, even if he wasn’t quite there yet. Siegmund knew this as fact.

“Hey, Mr. Siegmund! Hellooo? Knock-knock! Is anyone home?” called out Lynx.

“Lynx, let him bask in it a little longer.”

Sieg stood stock still as he gazed at his sword. Edgan sat on a nearby rock in complete observation mode, offering live coverage of the transpiring events, complete with titles: “Chapter One: Sieg’s Fight for Revenge. Chapter Two: An Emotional Victory.”

“Ah, sorry. I was lost in thought.”

Lynx’s voice brought Sieg back to his senses, and he turned in the pair’s direction.

“No worries. Hey, you beat the wyvern, right? We probably have a chance at A Rank, too,” said Lynx.

“That’s right. After we take this one to the transportation group, let’s keep knocking them down.”

Sieg sheathed his sword and walked back toward the other two. He seemed refreshed, as though all his worries had been dispelled. More than that, he emanated a strong determination to strive for his goal and move forward.

“Huh. You look like a whole new person. I’m glad. Hey, Sieg, I have something I wanna tell you,” Lynx called over to him as he approached.

Sieg had adopted a look of peace, feeling like nothing could disrupt it. “Hmm? What is it?” he asked, urging Lynx to go on.

“When I get bumped up to A Rank, I’m gonna tell Mariela how I feel.”

Siegmund instantly stiffened, his calmness completely dissolved.

“Whoa. Is this the start of ‘Chapter Three: A Formidable Foe’?” Edgan narrated.

Siegmund was the only one frozen in place. He couldn’t even feel the blast of winter air blowing by.

“Nah. I think ‘Head over Heels’ is better, right?” Lynx corrected before shifting his attention to the inner part of the forest as if following the path of the wind.

He could tell buds were beginning to grow on the trees swaying in the wind, although they were still tightly closed. On a closer look, sprouts were breaking through the undergrowth at his feet. Straining his ears, he could hear the breathing of forest animals waking up from hibernation mingled with the wind tousling the vegetation.

Spring would shortly arrive in the Labyrinth City.

06

The wyverns were only easy to hunt on the first day, falling for every trick in the book.

They had just seen humans for the first time and swooped down on them, thinking they were easy prey like goblins or orcs. As the adventurers felled their comrades one after another, however, the creatures must have come to understand that they were powerful enemies. Rather than launching an attack, the wyverns started to gaze at the humans from on top of the rocky mountains.

Given the situation, the adventurers would be forced to scale the mountains to defeat them, so they needed to come up with a way to lure the wyverns down. People wearing orc skins and even those who painted their faces green to appear as goblins tested their luck. This battle of wits between the adventurers and the wyverns continued for about a week until the Labyrinth Suppression Forces’ trade-in limit of one hundred was reached.

During that time, Sieg’s group continued their days of setting out from the Labyrinth City every morning before dawn and returning to Sunlight’s Canopy at dinnertime. Although Lynx had been the one to spring an unlikely surprise on Sieg—which could be taken as a declaration of war—he neither touched on the subject again nor changed his usual behavior. He saw Sieg and Mariela at the same frequency as always, returning to Sunlight’s Canopy with Sieg and Edgan. “We’re back!” he would announce before eating dinner and returning home.

Mariela would make those dinners with Sherry and Amber. The father and daughter of the Nierenberg family fell into the habit of eating before going home for the night. As expected of newlyweds, Amber ate dinner with Captain Dick in her new home, except she placed the food from Mariela’s in a container and took it with her. After all, she had a hand in making it, too. It wasn’t not her cooking.

“You see, the owner of the Yagu Drawbridge Pavilion always fed me, so this helps me out a bunch,” Amber had said, all cheery—never once recognizing that she was essentially cutting corners.

With sauce on her cheek, Mariela looked so happy to have a chatty dinner surrounded by people. Sieg couldn’t imagine the day when he wouldn’t be able to sit next to her anymore.

The Black Iron Freight Corps had taken the request to transport the wyverns, but no armored carriages saw any action. Since raptors and rented yagus were used to carry loads, only Yuric and Dick made those round trips. Apart from Malraux, who was discussing future support with the top brass of the Labyrinth Suppression Forces, Donnino, Grandel, Franz, and the three slaves were relaxing at their base in the Labyrinth City.

“Hey, Nick, spanner,” Donnino spoke simply without using a single verb.

The slave named Nick passed off a spanner to Donnino, who had crawled under an armored carriage to work on upgrading the wheels. When the Black Iron Freight Corps first bought the slaves, they’d nervously stuck together most of the time, but the slaves had gotten completely used to the Corps by now. Each one’s personality and special skills had begun to show.

Nick seemed to have an interest in the armored carriages, because when Donnino messed around with them, he came over and offered to help.

He was originally a lowly thief, as were the other slaves. He had sticky fingers and a fuzzy boundary between good and evil. Apparently, he had wanted to carry things he could use as weapons, as Nick constantly nicked tools for maintaining the armored carriages and shoved them into his pockets. Of course, Donnino noticed his antics. Since the slave wanted to carry tools so much, Donnino bought an artisan’s tool belt for him to carry them all. Nick was thrilled, feeling stronger just by having so many iron tools—pseudo-weapons—and Donnino, too, was delighted to have a walking toolbox.

Although Nick had been granted a great number of tools to carry, he was absolutely obedient not only to Donnino but all the other members of the Black Iron Freight Corps. It was known that he would never use the tools to attack them.

And that reason was extremely simple.

It went back to the time he’d gotten down from a carriage to rest in the Fell Forest. A goblin happened to attack him, and Nick retaliated with his hidden spanner. The goblin snatched it from him and turned the tables.

“Don’t you treat my tools poorly!” boomed Donnino.

His fist of rage defeated the goblin who was ready to pounce with the spanner. That’s right. The spanner lost the battle against Donnino’s bare fist and was bent out of shape. Now who was it that was treating tools poorly? More importantly, Nick swore obedience from the bottom of his small knavish heart in the face of Donnino’s—er, the Black Iron Freight Corps’ power.

Nick jangled around with tools swinging from his body like an adventurer’s weapons, perhaps reveling in being taken under the wing of a powerful man. Nick stuck close to Donnino and helped with the maintenance of the iron carriages.

When the slave stooped under the weight of the heavy tools, he looked especially weak, but Nick wasn’t aware of this.

Another slave called Newie worked hard making preserved foods in the base’s kitchen.

The Black Iron Freight Corps spent the majority of the month on the move. They couldn’t make a leisurely trip through the Fell Forest, but during their journey to the imperial capital, they set up camp, making and eating their meals. Naturally, that was a slave’s job. Among them, Newie was known as the best cook, and ever since this had been discovered, he’d been assigned the role: not only when they made camp, but also at the base, whipping up meals and preserved foods.

Almost all the members of the Black Iron Freight Corps dined out for every meal while they were in the City, but after Newie started cooking, more people began to have breakfast and lunch at the base.

Newie just couldn’t shake the same habit as Nick. His sticky fingers were irreparable, snatching up food while he was cooking. He could have been gluttonous—vying to eat more than others—or just insatiable. He deliberately thickly peeled the skin from vegetables, washing and drying them to fry in oil—making them into snacks to eat in secret. Naturally, the members of the Black Iron Freight Corps knew about this, but the body was an asset in this line of work, and no one found fault with him eating his fill, so they let him do as he wished.

“Wouldn’t it be better to have seconds than sneaking bites of half-cooked veggies?” Yuric had said, echoing a common sentiment, but the healer Franz was the one to correctly guess Newie’s feelings: “Stealing food lets him taste a sense of accomplishment, too.”

Since there was no real harm in it and the person in question was satisfied, everyone pretended not to notice.

But his original recipes were starting to develop in all the wrong places. Newie didn’t even know the fundamentals of cooking—including preparing soup stock in advance.

The others, including the shield knight Grandel, were impressed with Newie’s fixation on food, and they bought a variety of seasonings for him.

“Newie, c’mere,” Grandel called to the slave, who rushed over in a fluster. In his hands were a washed apron and a cooking knife, which he held on to as if they were treasures. Both were items that Grandel had bought for him.

“Listen carefully to what the owner of the Yagu Drawbridge Pavilion tells you.”

Newie nodded repeatedly at Grandel.

With Grandel’s arrangement, Newie was going to help at the Yagu Drawbridge Pavilion starting today. It would only be for a short time, but he would learn how to cook from the owner while working as his assistant. Grandel didn’t look the part of a shield knight at all with his lanky build and the way he carried his nicely wrapped umbrella like a staff. Between the gentlemanly Grandel, with his trimmed handlebar mustache and smart dress even on his day off, and Newie trailing behind him, the two were the picture of a master and servant, or perhaps a master and apprentice.

Better butter him up and steal his recipes, Newie thought in typical ex-thief fashion. But those could also be the thoughts of a new apprentice, too. His master gave him attention and trained him well; the man’s daughter, Emily, had begun frequenting Sunlight’s Canopy and left him rather lonely. Newie was becoming more and more like a chef’s apprentice both in appearance and in disposition. You could say those days were fulfilling in their own way.

And then there was the last slave, Jay.

“Hhhhhhhh, ffffffffffffh!”

In a corner of the stable where none of the raptors currently stayed, Jay screamed wordlessly through his crushed vocal cords as Franz punished him.

“I can overlook eating a few bits of orc meat for the raptors, but not when you replace it with rotting, second-rate stuff and steal the change.”

Yuric, the animal trainer of the Black Iron Freight Corps, was present. If the raptors sensed their food was different, Yuric would know. But Jay was shortsighted enough to give them meat that wasn’t just lower rank but rotting, which shocked even Franz.

The Corps had a rough idea of the crimes that the three slaves had committed from the slave trader Reymond, so some amount of sticky fingers was overlooked.

Also, everyone in the Corps knew how much Sieg had grown since he’d met Mariela. For these three slaves, they wanted to recognize their individual personalities, bring out their strong points, and gradually let them be more independent.

But this act of Jay’s was unacceptable. The Black Iron Freight Corps used the raptors to pull their armored carriages through the Fell Forest. Although the effects of the monster-warding potions reduced the danger, it was by no means a safe trip. Raptors were important assets with fighting power that rivaled each member of the Corps. Actions that could harm their health were absolutely inexcusable.

At Franz’s quiet wrath, Jay felt a fear that chilled him to the core.

Franz was a healer blessed with an excellent constitution, but he always wore a hood low over his eyes and a mask that went above his nose to hide his face. Healing magic leaves traces behind with the appearance of burn scars, and since there were no potions in the Labyrinth City, a person hiding their face wasn’t uncommon.

What terrified Jay was Franz’s vertical pupils peering at him from under the mask and the steely fingers gripping and prying open his jaw.

Th… This demi-human bastard…

The hand was too big for a human’s, with skin so tough it was impossible to make a dent. At the end of every finger was a claw, and the hand hardly looked like it belonged to a human at all.

A race known as demi-humans lived on a continent beyond the sea. They lived longer than humans and resembled beasts. Long ago, they cut off diplomatic relations, and even now, the dwarves were the only ones among them who were friendly with the Empire. However, as if proving the existence of cultural exchange in the past, every once in a while, a human possessing demi-human characteristics was born in the imperial capital. They had to lurk in darkness, actively avoiding the public eye, which only spoke to the circumstances of the diplomatic break.

“I see you have an aching tooth. Perfect.”

Gr. Grind-grind. Creak. Creak.

“Ffffffffffffffh…!!!” Jay desperately struggled against the unbearable pain stabbing his skull, but he had no hope of standing against the strength of Franz, who gripped and pulled down the slave’s jaw with just one hand.

Riiiiip.

There was a sound of something being torn, and Jay lost consciousness.

A yellowish fluid audibly streamed out, staining his pants and soiling the floor of the stable.

“…Wetting yourself at this age? That’s a first.” He tossed away Jay’s decaying tooth as if it were so much garbage.

Franz produced a conical lump of bluish-black clay and chanted a particular kind of healing magic.

“Been a long time since I used this,” he muttered, stuffing the tip of the cone into the gap of his missing tooth, and Jay was assaulted with a stabbing pain again. His eyes opened and rolled back into his head, and his body trembled and jerked around like a dying fish with a knife stuck in it. He lost consciousness again after the convulsions abated.

The bluish-black false tooth was a convenient charm that stuck to the bone in place of an extracted tooth, connected to the nerves, and changed shape according to the rest of the teeth and the subject’s bite. It was called a Cursed Tooth, and it bordered on illegal.

A respectable healer wouldn’t touch something like this, but when Franz opened a clinic in the slums of the imperial capital, it was often requested for penal laborers and lifelong slaves.

The effect was simple: to give pain. It connected to the nerves of the teeth, and under specific conditions, it caused intense pain similar to what Jay had experienced when his tooth was forcibly removed. His slave brand could activate the effect. Think of it as strengthening the mark of subordination.

Anything that influenced the psychology of the subject—including brands given to slaves, oath magic, and contract magic—could be classified under the same magical system.

The most common was contract magic, established by using ink with blood to sign a special form that would execute the magic. The effect differed depending on the rank. For the lowest-ranked ones, when the contract was broken and a party to the contract became aware of it, the ink mixed with the violator’s blood changed color as proof of the impropriety.

In high-ranked magical contracts, the contract stipulations were etched into the parties’ psyche. When they got close to unintentionally breaking it, a “warning symptom” would activate—for example, a headache or labored breathing. The warning symptoms were not unbearable, but they became more severe if the contract was broken on purpose.

All magical contracts provided proof of a breach, but there was nothing that forced the contract holders to keep their promises. Protecting contracts and handing down punishments was the job of the justice department.

When it came to confidentiality contracts, they could cause temporary memory loss to prevent any information from leaking. But in the private sector, the thought that the culprit had “broken a promise” was enough to trigger its effects.

With an oath, the warning effects were activated when one party became aware that they’ve “told a lie.”

In the case of lifelong slaves and penal laborers, their marks of subordination granted the masters to change the “key” that triggered these warning symptoms—from telling a lie to breaking a promise. These marks restricted their behavior without their consent, meaning they weren’t given to debt laborers. After all, they had human rights. They were forced to work until they cleared their debt, which meant their Contract of Servitude didn’t involve any branding. The details of their contract were the usual: “Obey your master’s commands. Don’t run away. Don’t cause harm.” Of course, these vague details made the warning symptoms weak, too.

But combine a Contract of Servitude with a slave brand, and its coercion became stronger, too. This was because the master could designate specific orders through the brand. By using the largest brand known to man, the slave would be completely manipulable, and the master would be able to control it for a short period of time—just look at Robert Aguinas and the bandit that he’d commanded without any regard for his personal will.

That said, the magical power in an Order decayed over time. And if the slave resisted the warning symptoms in protest of outrageous Orders, its magical effects would begin to weaken. That was why those imposing unreasonable Orders onto their slaves chose to plant Cursed Teeth or use other methods to up the effects of the warning symptoms.

To think the day would come when I used a Cursed Tooth myself… Franz looked down at Jay with cold eyes as he lay there unconscious and convulsing.

When he had opened a clinic in the slums of the imperial capital where he was prepared to conduct borderline illegal activities, many of the slaves with Cursed Teeth had complained they were innocent. Which could have been true. After all, their masters were deviants who took pleasure in inflicting pain.

The fact that he needed to hide his face behind a mask spoke volumes about Franz’s bloodline. Even with the mask, he drew the attention of those around him. It was the same for Yuric, whose accent and facial features made the young animal trainer appear foreign, but the two of them had managed to get the authority to establish a clinic in the slums. That was before Franz had become fed up with his work of making the weak even weaker. He had relinquished everything and accepted the Black Iron Freight Corps’ invitation with his foster child, Yuric. And yet, here he was—doing what he had done back then.

Franz was dumbfounded by Jay’s low intelligence. Jay must not have thought that earning a profit from swapping out the raptors’ meat for a rotten, cheap substitute was something that would hurt his masters. Even if that thought had crossed his mind, his awareness must have been low enough to trigger only the slightest of warning symptoms. He must have been a habitual criminal since his time spent at the slave trader Reymond’s business.

After casting a glance at the foolish man who’d reminded him of his unpleasant past, Franz left Jay lying in the stable, departing the Black Iron Freight Corps’ base to have lunch with Yuric, who would soon finish the morning transport and return to the Labyrinth City.

When Jay woke up with his new Cursed Tooth, it was well past noon. The throbbing pain in his head was still there, which must have woken him up.

His pants had been soiled with his own urine—revolting. He needed to clean the stable, too. Jay couldn’t stand to endure another punishment. He stood, slowly, using the lifestyle magic Water to sloppily wash the floor, changed out of his soiled clothes, and tossed them in a laundry basket.

I’m starvin’…

Since he lost consciousness before noon, he hadn’t had lunch yet. With his hand clutching his sore cheek, he headed to the dining hall and took one person’s portion of bread and soup, and just a little bit of meat.

The Black Iron Freight Corps was an all-male household with the sky as their proverbial roof. On this base, thoughtfulness and consideration were in short supply. The bread, meat, and soup had been left out without even a cloth or lid to cover it, leaving the bread dry and hard, and the cold soup had a thin membrane over it. The meat, too, was leftovers. Only fatty scraps remained, and those had become dry and rubbery. That said, the Corps had set aside Jay’s meal, and that alone was thoughtful enough.

Woulda been nice if they’d woken me up, he grumbled in his head. He picked up a piece of meat and tossed it into his mouth, chomping down on it as always.

Ah! Gack! Pain shot through the Cursed Tooth, as if he’d been struck with a hammer.

Yow! Oow! Jeez! The jolt went past his teeth, zinging his cheekbone with a throbbing pain. What’s happenin’? What is this shit?! That seriously hurts!

The nerves connected to the Cursed Tooth were oversensitive. This would die down over time. However, Jay didn’t know this and held his cheek in despair.

Can’t I have the satisfaction of eatin’ my fill? Son of a bitch. This is all just beast food!

Between the raptors and a penal laborer like Jay, the former was far more valuable. It wasn’t every day that you found masters who allowed penal laborers to eat three meals a day—and meat for lunch at that. The cattle were fed better than Sieg when he was a debt laborer.

Jay didn’t reflect on his own part in this at all, spewing resentment instead. That was when a damp, smelly cloth flew through the air, slapping against his skin.

What the hell?! When he whipped around in anger, he saw Nick carrying a bag of tools and scowling at him.

Jay had tossed that cloth in the laundry basket just before: It was his pair of pants stained with his own urine. He’d intended for Nick—who was in charge of laundry—to wash his soiled clothing without rinsing them first. In the process of tossing his pants in the basket, he’d soiled the laundry in there already.

Nick was furious, glaring at Jay as if to threaten that he wouldn’t think twice about using his tools on him.

You son of a bitch, Jay mentally cursed, picking up his own dirty pants before going to wash them himself.

Damn it! Damn it all!

At the washing spot in the rear yard of the Black Iron Freight Corps, Jay cleaned his dirty pants, stomping on them to get the stains out. He only had one change of clothes. He couldn’t afford not to do laundry.

Why is Nick allowed to carry around tools?! And Newie gets a cookin’ knife! Why them?! Why not me?!

This is unfair! Ridiculous! Why do they get special treatment?!

Nick had been entrusted with tools and helped with maintenance as ordered.

Newie had been given a cooking knife and prepared meals as ordered.

Jay had been handed money, refused to follow orders—instead buying inferior products and pocketing the difference. He couldn’t comprehend something that was so easy to understand.

Damn it! Screw it! Damn! It’s all because that smiley punk tricked me!

As he trampled his drenched pants in anger, Jay recalled the day Lynx had taken him out for lunamagia gathering.

07

On the day after Jay had realized the Black Iron Freight Corps had secretly taken the medicinal herbs somewhere, he followed Lynx.

He confirmed with his own eyes that Lynx had gone into the storehouse in the middle of the night. Jay hid, waiting for him to come back out.

He sure is slow…

Although there was only one entrance, where Jay waited a long time, Lynx didn’t come out.

It was strange. Just as he was about to peek inside, Lynx called out to him.

“Jay, what’re you doing?” His voice came from behind Jay, outside of the storehouse.

Wh-when did he…?

Lynx was a scout in the Black Iron Freight Corps; Jay barely stood a chance of successfully tailing him.

“Jay, stay quietly in your room at night, okay?” Lynx Ordered with a laugh, and his smiley eyes became especially smiley. He must have seen through Jay’s plan.

Jay had no choice but to head for his own room.

There had been a one-in-a-million chance that he’d be able to follow Lynx. But even if he had succeeded, he would have been devoured by monsters in the Fell Forest before he’d even reached the entrance to the underground Aqueduct. Let’s say there was a miracle, and he managed to reach the Aqueduct. The only future for him would have been as slime food.

Damn it! Screw it! Damn it all! There was no way Jay was just going to withdraw—or know that his life had been spared.

If I just knew what they were carryin’, I might have a rough idea of where they were goin’.

While Lynx and the others had been out, Jay had searched every nook and cranny of the base. He even rooted through the trash—slime tanks. He’d coated thread in the sticky lubricating oil used for the armored carriages, lowered it into the tanks, and retrieved documents that had been crumpled and thrown away. When it was shopping day, he tied up the documents in his stack, pretended to leave, and made his way to a familiar food shop in the slums.

“’Zat ye, Jacob? Not dead yet, eh?” called out a petite, middle-aged man who appeared to be the shopkeeper. He came out from the back of the shop, dragging one leg behind him.

He must have started drinking at noon; the reek of alcohol drifted from the gaps between his sparse yellow teeth. His brown clothes looked like they hadn’t been washed in days. All in all, his appearance was not what you’d expect of someone handling food in a shop. Even the slave Jay wore cleaner attire than him.

Jay tried to convey why he was there by pushing the documents from the slime tank at the man and gesturing.

“Whazzis? Ye can’t talk? Ga-ha-hah, ye’ve done it this time. Ye used ta charge me money fer even the most useless information.” He looked at Jay and laughed crudely. “So? Ye want me ta read ’em?”

Although he grimaced in displeasure at the shopkeeper’s vulgar chuckle, Jay nodded.

“That’ll be one large silver coin. Ye have that much, right? Yer with the Black Iron Freight Corps now, after all. Yer job’s buyin’ feed fer the raptors, eh?”

The shopkeeper went to the magical tool for refrigeration at the back of the shop and took out a hunk of meat that had turned brown. One large silver coin could have been an even exchange for the quantity, but this was spoiled scraps.

Isn’ that stuff even worse than usual? Jay glanced at the shopkeeper and scowled.

“Ye haven’t been in here fer a while, so it got a little old. Fiiine, fine. How ’bout this?” he said and threw in a bottle of cheap alcohol.

While Jay was at Reymond’s slave trading company, he’d been in charge of buying feed for the customers’ cavalry animals. He bought stale food that only the poorest people in the slums would buy and pocketed the difference. Even if the raptors complained that it wasn’t the freshest, the only one who could understand them was the animal trainer, Yuric. Even then, Yuric would only complain if the food offered to them was exceptionally bad. Up until now, his secret had been under wraps, and he’d made a tidy profit.

Jay looked at the offered alcohol, licked his upper lip, and paid the large silver coin. Then he pestered the shopkeeper to read the documents as he immediately began drinking.

“Mm, this’s a certification of tax payments. Ye sure ’bout bringin’ this here? Lunamagia. Fruit of a treant. Bones from a bone knight. And this here says nigill buds. What’s this? Has the Black Iron Freight Corps started doin’ business with an alchemist? Fer a group who can travel through the Fell Forest, they sure are stingy ’bout their deals.”

Whaaat? An alchemist? No way someone like that’s here. This’s the Labyrinth City.

There ought to be a hint somewhere. Jay wanted to have a better look, so he spread out the other crumpled paper scraps, demanding the man read them. However, after he’d read the scraps from corner to corner, no documents with any apparent significance besides the certification of tax payments on potion ingredients could be found.

No way. You gotta be kiddin’ me!

Once his drink was gone, Jay took the rotting meat and the bundle of papers, preparing to leave. The shopkeeper looked at him and laughed crudely. Jay had guessed wrong, it seemed.

“Heh-heh, too bad, Jacob. Well, come back and buy meat again some other time.”

Jay certainly had guessed wrong.

The Labyrinth City charged taxes on goods when they were taken out through its massive front gate. Most transportation groups would pay for both the goods and the taxes at the same time, receiving a certificate of tax payment at the shop. Otherwise, calculating taxes on each product at the gate would delay their departure. The certificate was affixed to official papers and sealed inside the box holding the product, which simplified the final check at the large front gate.

Every once in a while, those who wanted to evade taxes would place unpaid goods in a box with paid goods, concealing them under the floor of a carriage or carrying them out of a gate beforehand to hide them. But the guards were used to this kind of behavior, capable of sniffing them out and levying a hefty fine.

Jay guessed the Black Iron Freight Corps was moving products nightly to dodge taxes. However, the paper in his hands showed that the taxes had been paid. If it had been thrown away, the products had been transported somewhere within the Labyrinth City. The Corps had expressly paid dues on the portion that would be used within the City and didn’t require taxing in the first place, and they even pretended to take the goods outside the City. And the contents of the cargo…

There’s really an alchemist? In the Labyrinth City?

That must have been why he was smelling money.

And a huge mountain of it, at that. Too big for me to mess with…

The potions created in the Labyrinth City were only effective within the City’s ley-line region, and the Corps were bringing in a lot of materials. Meaning an equivalent number of potions had to be made. But they weren’t circulating in the City. Where on earth had they disappeared?

That would explain why those guys in the Labyrinth Suppression Forces hang out here.

The Black Iron Freight Corps was secretly supplying potions to the Labyrinth Suppression Forces.

If it were a shady little get-rich-quick scheme, he’d be ready to get his hands dirty in it, but this was dangerous. Carelessly getting involved with an alchemist could mean being erased and tossed into a slime tank.

Son of a bitch. I wasted a large silver coin on worthless information…

Although the money had been entrusted to him to buy raptor feed, Jay felt as though he’d been swindled out of his own savings, and he was enraged.

On that day, Jay hadn’t tossed the rotting meat he’d exchanged for a large silver coin—or even mixed it into the fresh meat. Instead, he had given it to the raptors as it was. When Yuric and Franz heard them complaining, he was punished with the Cursed Tooth.

Yuric had threatened to make Jay into slime food, and Franz only had good intentions when he punished Jay with the Cursed Tooth to pacify Yuric.

Damn it! Damn it all to hell! Jay stomped on the soiled pants, cleaning them with his kicks. Just thinking about it made him angry.

He’d taken great pains to fetch those scraps of paper from the slime tanks! And it had been for nothing!

And I bet that asshole is usin’ my money to sip some good booze right about now!

He redirected his anger to the shopkeeper who took his money and handed over meat that he’d immediately seen was rotten.

Ain’t it Nick’s job to do the washin’ today?! And he pushed it onto me!

Nick had used the tool in his hand to threaten Jay, intimidating him into washing his own clothes soiled by his own blunder. Jay hated him.

I just know Newie’s eatin’ his fill right now!

He was jealous of Newie, who’d been taken by Grandel and even given a cooking knife to help at the Yagu Drawbridge Pavilion.

They got money! And power! But I get punished for every little thing! What’s a guy gotta do to get some proper treatment?!

Franz had yanked out his tooth, and all the members of the Black Iron Freight Corps had roughed him up. He envied them all.

Damn it! Screw it all! They can all rot in hell!

I hate them! Lucky bastards! Why can’t I be like them?!

Jay was doing the bare minimum, as he cursed them all. He cleaned the stable just enough so that no one would complain.

As if responding to these innermost feelings, the Cursed Tooth sent throbbing pain into his skull.

Damn! What the hell?! This is all bullshit!

He was seething in hatred, jealousy, and desire.

Jay went through his entire day nurturing these feelings before crawling into the bed given to him. But in his agitated state and with the stabbing pain of his Cursed Tooth, he just couldn’t get himself to sleep.

Do I gotta live with this body forever now? Yow! Damn tooth. And I can’t speak. Ah, son of a bitch. Why? Why me?

If anyone could have heard his internal monologue, they would have been shocked at his exaggerations.

If Jay behaved properly, the Cursed Tooth wouldn’t have hurt him. The pain stemmed from the oversensitivity of the nerves from the implant. And it wasn’t unbearable. Hadn’t the other two slaves found their own paths, even without speaking?

He hadn’t been entrusted with tools or a cooking knife but with something even more important: money. Because of the Cursed Tooth, Jay was incapable of understanding the kindness extended to him and how he had betrayed that trust.

With his B-Rank power, Sieg had fallen to the brink of death, recovered, and grown to be a more respectable human being than before he’d become a slave. This was why the members of the Black Iron Freight Corps wanted to give Jay and the rest of their slaves a chance, but Jay couldn’t even comprehend that.

Damn it! Damn them! To hell!

He was jealous of everything, envied everyone, and despised the whole world around him.

If even a single thing wasn’t to his liking, Jay cursed his lot in life.

Full of nothing but resentment and envy, Jay didn’t realize his own circumstances were the direct consequences of the things he’d done.

Even to the end, Jay couldn’t grasp that his inescapable dissatisfaction was equivalent to dissatisfaction with himself.

08

“Yeah, it’s melting well.” Mariela peered into a wide-mouthed vial in her atelier early in the afternoon.

Amber was tending Sunlight’s Canopy for her, and Nierenberg had come to prescribe medicine, so she could afford not to be in the shop. Caroline was busy in her treat-churning atelier. She didn’t even have time to made medicine to sell at Sunlight’s Canopy, so Mariela had been the one in charge of making salves lately. But then, with no one watching, she ended up using alchemy to make medicine. In her free time, she could even make potions.

Sieg’s group had left to go wyvern hunting early in the morning, so there was no time for Sieg to tend to the medicinal herb garden or help with housework. However, Nierenberg’s daughter, Sherry, helped Mariela out—along with Amber, whenever she found herself with too much downtime. It wasn’t a big deal.

A long, narrow plant was being soaked in the vial, and Mariela had added just a little slime acid. After the corrosive liquid had finished its work, she hoisted the vial, carried it to the sink installed in the atelier, and emptied the contents into a sieve above the sink. When water rushed over the plant, the mesophyll came off, leaving only the veins.

The slime-based acid in the vial was caustic—in other words, highly corrosive to plants and animals. The mixture was created by adding salt to a Slime-in-a-Vial with the lightning attribute. This slime spat out caustic acid—along with gas that could rust metal. It was harder to manage than normal slimes, and it could only be found in specialty shops that handled slime acid. The specialized vessel for this slime was extremely fascinating to Mariela. Because the gas dissolved in water, it was collected by passing it through an attached glass pipe containing many layers of water.

The burbling bubbles flowed out of the glass tube, passed through the water tank and the arrangement of complicated glass devices into the filter attached to the last outlet. This contraption was engrossing to Mariela. Every time she went shopping for acid, she stuck to them like a slime and gazed at them. In the early days when she got a large amount of money, she almost bought these things on a particularly profligate whim, but Sieg stopped her.

“It’s not as if you need acid every day, right? Besides, what would you do if the glass container broke? The sacred tree window frames would rust. And they went out of their way to make them for you. You’d need to be sure to check the filter and the liquid every day. If you only want it because it’s a living thing, that’s not good.”

“B-but, you know… If I bought it, I could look at it every day. Wouldn’t that be great?”

It wouldn’t be great at all. Mariela had resisted by bringing up advantages—none of which were good ideas. An employee at the slime acid specialty shop told her: “You can look as much as you like. Even if you’re just browsing, I don’t mind.”

The matter was settled, and she didn’t buy anything. Afterward, Mariela was apparently completely satisfied when she obtained the synthetic part-slime, part-kraken creature named Slaken, and she stopped going to the acidic liquid shop. She didn’t have a reason to loiter around those parts anymore. Slaken’s mucus was an expensive material, but it didn’t damage the skin when you touched it. You could say it was the ideal Slime-in-a-Vial for the scatterbrained Mariela to raise.

I had so much fun seeing a caustic slime again after so long. Mariela recalled her shopping trip as she began to wash the veiny remains of the plant. It was called “horse’s mane,” and although it looked pliant, thick veins ran through it. Perhaps it would be more apt to call them arteries. The marrow within these veins was an ingredient for a potion. On the other hand, the mesophyll was harmful, making it necessary to dissolve and wash away.

“Dehydrate, Pulverize.”

She dried the clean horse’s mane with alchemy, then took a variety of fruits and dried leaves from a cupboard and pulverized them all together. After putting the powdered medicinal herbs in a thick porcelain container, she poured into it the matergo oil that had just been delivered from Merle’s Spices. After mixing them thoroughly, she heated them in a magical tool.

Matergo was a pungent oil taken from seeds as small as grains of sand. It was used for body wellness and for cooking, but since it had a unique flavor, it was often used as seasoning. This time, she was using it for solvent extraction. Before she placed it in the pot, she dissolved Drops of Life into it. When the components of horse’s mane dissolved in oil, its viscosity increased, hardening it at room temperature. It required you heat it to keep it in a liquid state to extract them. As she moved to a different task, Mariela marveled at the convenience of this world. Things that she’d used to do with alchemy could now be taken care of with magical tools. The next task couldn’t be done at the same time as other tasks, so she had become able to work much more efficiently thanks to magical tools.

“Transmutation Vessel, Pulverize.”

She pulverized the lunamagia she recently collected with Sieg in the Transmutation Vessel, then began to control the temperature and airflow within it. In another Transmutation Vessel, she cooled water infused with Drops of Life. She used a nozzle to spray it on the finely powdered lunamagia, controlling the temperature and gas in the nozzle.

When she first came to the Labyrinth City, she couldn’t do this without the cylindrical container from Ghark. But since then, she’d been making a hundred potions every day for half a year. Eventually, the number of simultaneous alchemical processes increased, and now she could cover everything with just alchemy apart from the nozzle. The small size of the cylindrical container prevented her from making a hundred potions all at once, but the fact that she’d been able to shorten the creation time was a big help to Mariela.

When the small ice crystals and the lunamagia powder within the Transmutation Vessel made contact, the ice crystals took on a yellow hue and began to glow. Lunamagia extraction happened when solids came in contact with it. This process progressed faster if the contact area of the lunamagia and ice was larger. In short, it was better for the lunamagia and ice pieces to be small. The lunamagia was finely crushed, and it would have ignited the instant it left the Transmutation Vessel. She wanted to make the ice crystals finer, but this was limited by the size of the nozzle.

If I practice a little more, I bet I could somehow use alchemy in place of the nozzle…

Mariela extracted the lunamagia as she thought.

Next were the arawne petals, thousand-night flower petals, and lund petioles. Since they’d all been processed and stored previously, the extraction was easy. She mixed them with the lunamagia extract, pouring the resulting purple liquid into a large glass vial that looked like it was soaking fruit wine. For the finishing touch, she added one fresh sacred tree leaf and sealed the container.

“As for the horse’s mane…… Yeah, that’s probably fine.”

It was better if the oil was set aside. The medicinal herb components had begun to dissolve, turning the oil a deep amber color. Though it was heated up, it had turned viscous like toffee. She took it from the container and placed it in a Transmutation Vessel, added an equal amount of killer bee honey, and used an alchemical skill to mix them. A mixer was inadequate for combining high viscous things, but with alchemical skills, it was done immediately. As she lowered the pressure in the Transmutation Vessel and sent the honeyed fluid flying, she kneaded it and kept the temperature constant.

The blended amber mass had the appearance of cloudy, hardened toffee. She divided it into eight pieces of equal size that could be held in one hand, connected them to a cord within the Transmutation Vessel, and spun them around at high speed with Rapid Rotation. Each finished lump had been split through centrifugal force into a light brown elliptical portion with medicinal herb residue and a transparent amber elliptical portion. When she lowered them to room temperature, both types of lumps solidified, and when she pressed hard on one, it had waxlike flexibility that made it appear to change shape. She put these lumps in a vial one at a time with the transparent ones on top.

“And the specialized lung magic medicine is complete!” she announced.

Mariela placed the vial of completed liquid and the vial of lumps into a box and began to tidy up the room.

“A specialized lung potion isn’t liquid, which means it’s magical medicine, I think. It’s a little unusual,” Mariela said, acting the part of an alchemist “from the imperial capital.”

The shop had yet to open, and Mariela was answering Nierenberg’s questions.

“You know that thing where you breathe in smoke through water? Would you call it a water pipe? It’s the same thing. You burn the solid medicine, running the resulting smoke through the liquid one and inhaling it. When the smoke goes through the liquid, that’s when it’s done. You have to suck it in immediately, but it goes directly into your lungs, so it’s very effective.”

The soldiers who inhaled the gas on the fifty-sixth stratum had survived thanks to Nierenberg’s medical team. Now they suffered from chronic lung disease, so Mariela had made this magic medicine to cure them.

“For this one, you scrape off the transparent part and burn it. When you store it as is, the transparent part and the dregs will separate. If you put it on the bottom, they’ll mix. You have to be careful. Oh, and if you smoke the dregs, you’ll feel good and have nice dreams. That’s what I’ve heard anyway.”

If it was a normal potion, she’d throw the residue away, but this specialized lung magic medicine was apparently sold with its dregs. Mariela didn’t know this, but the residue causing the “nice dreams” was commonly known as “dream incense” and fetched a high price. The idea of inhaling smoke for nice dreams sounded like degeneracy at its finest, but the substance was mild, with no side effects or addictive qualities. Well, if you didn’t consider mumbling in your sleep a “side effect.”

If you burned dream incense as incense without using a water pipe, you wouldn’t have any dreams, but it would briefly send your mind and body into a deep slumber.

Regardless, it would help one feel refreshed upon waking up, making it a popular product among tired adults and busy people who had no time to sleep. Due to its desirability, some people would even ask for specialized lung magic medicine just to get their hands on it.

With the specialized lung magic medicine, the soldiers afflicted with lung disease were cured. As for those who suffered from hallucinations of Black Fiends, the dregs gave them sweet dreams, helping them return to the front lines. It was never confirmed whether comical sleep-talking could be heard from the Schutzenwald siblings’ bedroom, but it was helpful in maintaining morale in the Labyrinth Suppression Forces who still couldn’t enter the fifty-sixth stratum.

“Is that alchemist a mind reader?!” With dream incense in his hand, Weishardt was even more amazed by Mariela.

Of course, there was no way Weishardt wouldn’t know about dream incense. There was a little part of his guilty conscience that spoke up when he thought about indulging in it.

Nierenberg, who had recently come to understand Mariela himself, considered the matter briefly before offering Weishardt his own share of sweet dreams fragrance and returning to Sunlight’s Canopy.