Master (1)

“I guess we’ve unintentionally given those kids a vacation.”

Patrick, Lina, and Laila. Those three are still staying in the city where Maria was found. Not right now, but soon I’ll need to contact them and tell them to come this way when they get the chance.

“Are you planning to take them on the expedition?”

“I need to keep training Laila. And there are things for the other two to do as well.”

Though not as much as Arisa, who is a mature elf warrior, Laila is also growing quickly as a spirit knight for her age and experience.

Patrick, with his skills, experience, and maturity, is perfect to put forward as a representative, and Lina is specialized in attending to me.

I would like to keep moving with them if I could. It’s just that I can’t be with them once I show my face.

“So you all need to be as prepared as possible.”

I put down the newspaper I was holding and turned to Maria, who was standing next to me with a very stiff expression.

After being washed and dressed neatly, she was quite a pretty girl, aside from looking a bit thin.

“I, I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, no one can teach you about the power you possess.”

I didn’t deny her words. The hero Ian and the other saint Melissa already have a kind of curriculum built up by the Order, after all.

But not for Maria. She had to figure out her power entirely on her own.

“The help I can give you is limited. The rest depends on your effort.”

The fact that I can help her even a little now is thanks to the water spirit I’ve recently come to interact with.

Earth spirits specialize in the center, wind spirits in freedom, and water spirits in flow.

If she can use that concept of flow well, it should help Maria use the power dwelling within her.

“Come here.”

I stood up and placed my hands on her body. It was different from simply lending her my mana; it was closer to drawing out the power she possessed.

All of this was entirely decided by the water spirit. I don’t know about it either, anyway.

“Ugh…”

Maria flinched and hesitated, seemingly feeling something strange. Arisa was watching us with an intrigued expression.

If I weren’t in the body of a young girl not much different from Maria, but rather a hairy old man, this scene would look quite strange.

“If you can feel what’s flowing in your body, that’s enough. In the end, what’s important is practical experience, and that’s something we can’t do in a room like this.”

The power that traveled through her wrist that I was holding moved to her fingertips, manifesting as crackling sparks. She was now able to freely draw out Parma’s power without a medium like a contaminated artifact.

However, this is literally just taking the first steps.

“This is the power I have…”

I slowly removed my hand from her body and stepped back. Maria was staring blankly at the power of Parma she had summoned.

Still, she seemed to be interested and happy rather than scared or hesitant, so her mindset didn’t seem bad.

“Did you bring everything I asked for?”

“Yes. Here are the reports on erosion from across the continent, collected by our Order.”

I couldn’t just stick to Maria’s side. Walking briskly while accepting greetings from everyone I met who didn’t know how to react, I boldly opened the door and entered. The priests inside the conference room flinched.

Only Lebevre calmly handed me the prepared materials.

“The numbers have increased, but not a single one has been resolved. Am I right? You need a special power to completely close the holes.”

The information network of the Order of Light, spread as widely as Ethan’s organization, is accurate and fast. While Ethan’s organization has advantages from being in the shadows, there are also things that can only be done in the light, like the Order of Light.

“Isn’t it resolved if we eliminate all the enemies that pop out of the hole and seal and blockade the area?”

“That’s just a stopgap measure. We don’t know when more enemies might pop out of that hole.”

When one of the priests said something foolish, I glared at him to tell him not to talk nonsense.

This is one of the reasons why people live so peacefully even though erosion, the starting point of the Great Apocalypse, has been discovered and widely known.

Even when erosion occurs, nothing too serious has happened yet.

Of course, it’s common for people to die or get injured from the magical beasts that crawl out of it.

But nothing big enough to be called the ‘end’ has happened yet. Suddenly, I remembered a movie I saw in the past.

A disaster movie where no matter how much scientists warned, neither the powerful nor the citizens paid any attention, and they ended up ruined.

“We need to close them completely before they get bigger. For now, it seems best to clean up at the site before the erosion scale gets bigger, and then go around treating the cleaned-up places.”

“That, that would require considerable effort. It’s the same as saying that the rulers of each country need to resolve their conflicts and oppositions and join hands.”

“…Tell them to keep doing that if they all want to perish together.”

I could only respond with cynicism to the priest’s words that sounded like excuses. Despite having an absurd civilization with spatial jump points, they were living lives no different from the past.

Competing, fighting, conflicting… Of course, I know that this is a natural law. Desire doesn’t discriminate between races, and without competition based on those desires, there would be no development.

The problem is that if they’ve been doing this until now, they need to cooperate right now.

“I’m not going to say something naive like the whole world should become one. Instead, those who are trying to solve this should be given the authority to move around without such restrictions. Like how the Adventurer’s Guild and the Order of Light are cooperating with most countries now.”

No ruler likes armed groups moving around in their territory. But it’s certainly not impossible.

What I want is at least that level of solidarity for now.

“What do you plan to do with those who refuse to cooperate even then?”

“Do you want to die because of such people? No, right?”

I answered with a smirk to Lebevre, who had been watching carefully before speaking up. Seeming to understand what my rhetorical question meant, Lebevre nodded as if he had expected as much.

“Damn, this isn’t what I was trying to do…”

When I first learned that this world was 10,000 years after the fall of the Tower, I was in a state of feeling only emptiness, unable to grasp anything.

No matter what I did, that emptiness didn’t disappear. It felt like I didn’t belong here.

But not anymore. There were too many things to do now to feel any emptiness.

“Please, tell us the meaning of this passage. It was recorded on the wall by our Order’s ancestors long ago. It must be part of a great scripture that we haven’t deciphered yet!”

“Seems like that person had nothing better to do. It’s just song lyrics.”

“That, that can’t be!”

For now, most of the work was the ‘translation’ tasks that were flooding to me. Countless people from the Order rushed to me with what they claimed were artifacts and records from the mythical era that they had been researching.

Thanks to the privilege of language and text freedom given to Climbers, I could read anything, but most of it was trivial stuff.

Ethan, who’s on a leash to me because of artifact purification, would probably be upset if he knew, but I had to use whatever skills I could for my position for now.

“How about this? This term written here is clearly a title given to beings that people in the mythical era regarded as gods. Therefore, this is…”

“‘Chicken God’ is just fried chicken. Rather than scripture, it looks like something written by someone lamenting that they want to eat chicken.”

What I felt through this work was that I came to understand more clearly how an era that was completely denied affects later generations.

Those memories of that time, which are so obvious and still vivid to me, were like mirages with barely a trace left in thick fog to them.

‘It’s impossible for me to explain everything.’

I’m grandly called a 10,000-year-old High Elf or an ancient being, but in reality, I was just an ordinary person.

Even if it was the era I lived in, would it be possible for me to explain it all? Someone who’s forgotten almost everything he majored in?

“In the mythical era, there was no status or discrimination, everyone was equal. We should be like that too!”

“Don’t talk nonsense! How can you say such things when there are so many records of status differences left from that time…”

I blankly watched the two priests arguing about their research topics in front of me.

No matter how I thought about it, it seemed impossible for me to correct and inform them of all the facts. Even what I say will obviously be distorted and changed as it passes through rumors.

There’s a truckload of people who will maliciously manipulate my words to use them to their advantage.

‘We have to go separately.’

I thought that things that have come down through an unimaginable amount of time are valuable just for that.

It’s not like I have some strong sense of mission, so I wonder if there’s really a need to correct and fix everything.

“Let’s just do our job, Arisa. How are the kids?”

“They seem to be training hard with their masters.”

Leaving the scholars to fight among themselves, I got up from my seat and moved spaces with Arisa.

The truth is, the reason we can afford to be this relaxed is because of the kids who aren’t fully prepared yet.