52. Field Training (7)
The Pung Empire’s history ran deep, and because of that, there were so many drifting legends and folktales between one village and the next that one could hardly grow bored while traveling.
“I’m telling you, up until just two hundred years ago, there was a gumiho living here!”
“Right……”
With a thoroughly dead expression, Anella did her best to ignore the middle-aged man at the next table in the restaurant, who was rambling away while spraying spit everywhere.
“Hah hah. This kid from another region doesn’t believe a word we say.”
“That can happen! I had a terrible time too, y’know? For twenty-eight years, nobody believed me when I told them about the time I fought a two-headed wolf when I was little!”
“My ass! That one’s just a flat-out lie!”
While the men kept chatting away, Anella quickly rose to her feet and slipped out of the restaurant. The cold sweat running down her skin seemed to melt away in the cool wind of the Pung Empire.
“Whew, this is nice……”
It was certainly the sort of place where clear air could lift a person’s mood.
Those men, too, were only a little too full of themselves. Whenever they saw outsiders, they just wanted to tell them about the famous local legends and customs of their region, so they were not bad people at heart.
Good people. Good culture.
A happy country.
……While my country was destroyed.
“Mmm! Great idea!”
Keeping as much as possible to where the shadows fell, she tiptoed along and looked around. It was something she did in order to avoid standing out as much as she could, but it did not seem to help much.
With sunlight already pouring down brightly, hiding in the shade did not make a person invisible.
If anything, the sight of a young foreign girl creeping around like a cat was rather eye-catching.
“Hm? Student, are you lost? Is this your first time in this country?”
“N-No! I have a map.”
Maybe it was because she was wearing her hair in twin tails and had on the Seberun Kingdom Magic School uniform. At a glance, she looked no older than a middle-schooler wandering around alone, and so the warmhearted people of the Pung Empire kept taking an interest in her.
As someone who had infiltrated the Pung Empire as a Black Mage, it was not especially welcome attention.
She had even heard recently that Eltman Eltwin had nearly succeeded in developing a new technique that could detect the mana waves of black magic.
She could not keep trusting this disguise forever.
‘Besides, I’ve already been found out more than once.’
Even this perfect ability—her black magic suppression technique, which sealed her black magic away so thoroughly that ordinary mages could never detect it—had once been seen through by mere students of Stella.
Flame and Baek Yuseol.
Children who were special in a way no one else was.
She had survived because they had been friendly toward her, but put another way, she had nearly died.
‘More importantly, what exactly am I supposed to do here?’
This time, the order had been absurdly vague. She had simply been told to head to Taeyusan, capital of the Pung Empire, and search for traces left behind by the Witch King.
That was all well and good, but with so little information, how exactly was she supposed to operate?
It would have been best if she never ran into the Witch at all, but if she spent more than a week here without gaining anything whatsoever, then this time she really would die.
So she had to do something, anything, no matter what.
‘Anything……? Like what?’
She felt utterly lost.
With no other choice, Anella wandered around places famous as tourist attractions.
It was not because she thought, At a time like this, when my heart could burst and kill me any second, I may as well relax and enjoy sightseeing.
It was because if she did not do something—anything at all—it felt like she would suffocate from the frustration and go mad.
Taeyusan of the Pung Empire, the Sea Dragon Shrine.
It was said that in the river of Taeyusan, where a “sea dragon” with eight legs and three tails had once ascended to heaven, a shrine had been erected to honor the existence of that mysterious divine beast.
Sea dragons here, sea dragons there.
Apparently even a stone statue of the Sea Dragon standing nearly as tall as a thirty-story building was not enough, because the place was packed with tourist goods related to the Sea Dragon in every direction.
Pretending to browse them, Anella swept them with a flat, indifferent gaze.
‘What would anyone even do with that……?’
Each one cost at least thirty thousand credits apiece, enough to make her jaw drop.
That was enough money for at least three meals.
Poor as she was, Anella could not afford luxuries like that.
“Hey there, student. Here for sightseeing? Why not buy a talisman?”
She had been staring blankly at the goods when an old man at her side shook a talisman in front of her.
“A talisman?”
“That’s right. Only five thousand credits. You’re buying yourself good fortune for five thousand credits.”
“Oh, come on…… who would believe that?”
Anella was an adult.
A grown adult in her forties.
Even if her appearance looked like that of a child, she was not going to fall for sales tricks like that.
“Heh heh…… You know nothing. All right, little miss, maybe you’re right and maybe this talisman doesn’t really have any effect at all. But what matters is the fact that you believe it does. That by carrying this talisman, you can be happy. That you can do it.”
“……And what’s so good about believing that?”
“There’s nothing in this world that can be done without belief. This talisman helps you gather up that belief and keep it stored, so that whenever you need it, you can draw it back out and use it. It helps you believe that.”
“Uh……”
So in other words, the talisman was something that made you “believe” you could take out the “belief that you can do it” and use it.
It sounded strange.
And yet somehow convincing.
Normally, she might have dismissed it as idiotic nonsense, but right now Anella was no different from a little raft drifting in an endless sea.
She had to believe in something.
“I-I’ll buy one.”
“I’ve also got something that gives even more belief to your belief. Want to have a look?”
And just like that, sixty-eight thousand credits vanished in an instant.
Looking down at the talismans and fake sacred relics filling both her hands, Anella let out a long sigh at last.
“How stupid……”
If something like this could really solve everything, then what would be the point of people working hard in the first place?
Still, since she had already bought them, she could not throw them away, and as she moved to tuck the talismans into her bag, one object caught her eye.
An old, worn talisman Baek Yuseol had once handed to her and told her to keep.
“……This is a talisman too.”
In the world of mages, talismans were something profoundly unfamiliar. To begin with, talismans belonged less to magic and more to spellcraft and occult arts.
Spellcraft had long since fallen out of use as inefficient compared to magic, though she had heard there were still a few who carried on that tradition.
Unlike magic, which manifested through precise calculation, spellcraft was said to manifest through belief and faith.
It sounded strange just hearing it.
“What in the world is this even used for……?”
Then her gaze shifted back toward the old talisman peddler.
She had already bought a bunch of talismans from him anyway, so surely asking this much would not hurt.
“Excuse me, Grandpa.”
“Hm? You buying more? No refunds.”
“No. It’s just…… I happen to have this talisman from before. Is this also one of those, um, faith talismans?”
“A talisman? Let me have a look.”
Anella held out Baek Yuseol’s spirit talisman, old and torn in several places, and the old man’s eyes widened.
“Hm? This is……”
“Do you know what it is?”
Ignoring her question, he narrowed his eyes and stared at it for a long time, then took out a magnifying lens from a drawer and kept peering at the talisman with unwavering focus.
“This is…… ancient windcraft script, something that disappeared more than three hundred years ago.”
“Windcraft script?”
“That’s right. A sorcerous script unique to the Pung Empire, similar to the rune language you mages use as the language of magic. I heard the tradition was severed long ago…… my, how strange. And it looks as though a very powerful sorcery had once been placed on it too…… Little miss, where in the world did you get this?”
“I-I just did.”
“Anyway, that talisman is a very precious object, so treasure it well. There’s no knowing what mysterious power it might contain.”
Taking the talisman back, Anella looked at it with renewed eyes.
A single old, torn talisman.
By itself, it had felt far too small and absurd a thing to believe in.
She had even begun, little by little, to doubt whether she should truly believe Baek Yuseol’s words—whether believing him could really make her human.
‘……It was real.’
He had not lied.
“Then…… by any chance, can you tell me how to use it? Or interpret it?”
“Mm, no. To interpret this, you’d need to find a traditional sorcerer. Someone like me doesn’t know a thing.”
“Is that so?”
It was disappointing, but there was nothing to be done. The bloodlines of real sorcerers had all died out long ago, and there was no way some old man selling talismans on the street could interpret something genuine like this.
No, wait.
Didn’t that mean all those talismans he had sold her were fake too?
Just as irritation flared up and she was about to say something, the old man spoke first.
“Ah, right. I heard a young sorcerer came into town recently. I was told she properly inherited the tradition, so if you really want to know, you could try finding that girl.”
“A young sorcerer……?”
“That’s right. They say she’s around your age, but apparently she’s remarkably capable. I heard she can sometimes be spotted on the castle-wall road……”
“What’s her name?”
“No one knows that. And hardly anyone’s even seen her face, because she wears a mask. That should make her easier to find, really. There aren’t many young sorcerers wearing masks.”
“Mm. Thank you……”
After bowing her head politely to the old man, Anella walked down the street, staring blankly at the talisman.
Finding the Witch was important, yes.
But she wanted to uncover the secret of this talisman as soon as possible too.
‘A young girl sorcerer……’
Could she really find her that quickly?
She hoped so.
Murmur, murmur—
As she walked the streets of Taeyusan clutching the talisman tightly in her hand, she heard the sound of a crowd buzzing not far away.
“What’s going on?”
Concentrating black magic into her eyes and looking carefully, she saw mages in black suits standing in formation and blocking people off.
And between them, a large, magnificent carriage.
On it was engraved the vivid green emblem of the Byeol Cloud Company.
Seeing that genuine crest—one said to be reserved only for the head of the Byeol Cloud Company and his true daughter—Anella’s eyes widened.
‘Did the head of the Byeol Cloud Company really come here in person……?’
The Byeol Cloud Company, the true power of the Southern Plains—to say nothing of the fact that it practically fed the entire Pung Empire.
“They’re seriously terrifying.”
“No kidding. To think that just because one merchant shows up, the Seven Houses of Wind come out personally to receive them……”
“Well, if they slight the Byeol Cloud Company, they’ll get hammered at the succession ceremony coming up soon, so they’ve got no choice. They’re practically groveling.”
“And I heard it’s not even the chairman himself who came, but his daughter?”
“The chairman and his daughter both hate noisy fuss, so they usually never come to Taeyusan unless it’s something major.”
“Then there’s definitely something incredibly important going on.”
“Really? They own thirty percent of Taeyusan real estate and still hardly ever show up? Must be nice having that much.”
“Well, it’s Byeol Cloud. Of course it is.”
So that was who it was.
It seemed Zeliel, daughter of the Byeol Cloud Company, had come to Taeyusan herself.
To think that a country would stir this much just because a girl not even twenty years old had arrived—it made her realize all over again just how overwhelming their influence really was.
‘Amazing…….’
The difference between them was so absolute that she even felt a kind of reverence.
A being who lived in a world completely separate from her own.
In the distance, she caught a glimpse of Zeliel’s profile.
An ice-cold expression, more dried of emotion than even herself as a Black Mage.
‘Sigh, what’s the point of paying attention to that kind of person.’
Their lives would probably never cross even once again for as long as she lived.
Shaking her head briskly, Anella broke into a run toward the castle walls.
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