If you start from the northern border of Avenella and head all the way south, you will find that the farther south you go, the gentler the mountains and the warmer the climate. This peaceful and mild climate reached its peak when we arrived at the Ecasta Plain, which is the commercial and transportation center of the kingdom.
The picturesque scenery makes the city of Assinil, located in the center of the Ecasta plain and close to the Galil River originating here, rated as one of the "50 most livable cities in the world" by the academic association. At the same time, it also gained reputations such as 'Jinshan City' and 'Land of Eternal Spring'.
If you look down from above, this important transportation town, which is the lifeblood of the kingdom, and the surrounding scenery will look like an irregular spider web. Well-connected mountain roads connect remote hunting towns closer to the Tambur Mountains. And through them, hunters, mercenaries, adventurers and traveling merchants transport the bits and pieces they obtain to Ashenil and sell them to the large merchant guilds stationed here.
Once every three months, the chambers of commerce that have collected enough materials will gather together to dispatch a large joint carriage team. Transport these magical items obtained from various types of monsters; rare medicinal and magical plants; monster babies and eggs, products, and various ores to wider places.
The large number of people in the joint carriage convoys of multiple chambers of commerce has greatly improved the safety of the journey. Therefore, many travelers who want to go to other places will mostly choose to wait until this time to move forward with the convoys of the chamber of commerce. Many chambers of commerce will also choose to go again. Bring two or three manned carriages and collect travel expenses to make some extra money.
In addition, the necessary escort for this half-month-long journey is also an excellent position for many people.
Each major chamber of commerce usually has its own escort team, but after dividing the escort team into two, with one half staying in the local chamber of commerce and the other half escorting the convoy, the number of people seems to be a bit stretched. But the frequency of once every three months determines that if the escort team is expanded to increase the number of people, it will cost a lot of money to feed these idle people who have nothing to do in ordinary days.
Businessmen who are good at calculation will naturally not make such mistakes, so a salary plan that is higher than the usual guard duty and provides simple food on a daily basis is formulated.
Although it is just simple honey toast, it is rich in portion and tastes much better than the black bread that most adventurers and mercenaries eat all year round——
To use a slang term among mercenaries and adventurers: black bread is a hard wooden pillow, while honey toast is a fragrant velvet pillow.
They are all pillows anyway.
Returning to the original point, we have a very good supply of pillows (crossed out), food and a decent salary, and all we need to do is to occasionally have a brainstorm and decide to attack those thieves who would run away when encountering this number of people in most cases. time to go up and fight. This extremely favorable condition has allowed many well-known mercenary groups stationed in Ashenil City to become regular candidates for the escort team. At the same time, the vast majority of scattered adventurers and mercenaries who happened to be in the local area have also squeezed their heads to get a spot. .
There are countless incompetent people who want to make a living, but the people in the Chamber of Commerce are not here to do charity. They spend money for peace of mind. Even if nothing happens you still have to prove that you are worthy enough to join.
The simplest means of proof is naturally the test, and the test content is also extremely simple and crude: fighting with wooden weapons without armor, and knocking down more than three opponents without being injured is considered qualified.
This test is usually carried out three days before the caravan departs, and anyone can participate by simply signing up.
The team is neither small nor particularly large. Well, at least as far as the area where our two protagonists are standing, if we make a rough estimate, there are probably around a hundred people.
The reason Henry and Mira took this test was very, very simple and very, very ordinary.
-They have no money.
Yes. Not long after the man who claimed to be a sage left the town with the young white-haired girl, they were surprised to discover such a fact.
All that was left in the savings was the cost of one meal, accommodation and various other expenses. Mira had to use her savings. This almost buried the slightest awe the white-haired girl had towards Henry. Got to rock bottom.
And Mira, who is just a maid and a child, obviously cannot be a millionaire - so we have this scene now.
"Mr. Sage is such a terrible adult," the petite girl from Luoan said as she looked at Henry with disdain. This sentence has almost become the girl's mantra now. From time to time, she would take it out and talk about it to express her disdain for Henry - most of the time it was related to money, but today Mira had something else to say when she said this.
Just like any prosperous area of a prosperous city, on the way to the weapons testing site in the north city of Ashenil, where the Chamber of Commerce is tested, there are a considerable number of homeless people and beggars scattered along the way.
Most of the people who come and go are just passing by in a hurry, and even if they have kind intentions, they just throw it away.
Only her life experience is different from that of most ordinary people. Mira, who deeply understands the feeling of longing for help but always receiving cold looks, glanced sideways frequently and clutched her withered little purse tightly.
Henry, who was walking aside, naturally watched all this in silence. Mira, who had spent some savings to change into a maid outfit that was not convenient for traveling, was wearing simple girly clothes. She deliberately bought a hooded vest just to cover it up. She had her eye-catching white hair, but no matter how many times she put it on, Henry would only take it off.
The girl who was irritated by this move looked at him angrily, but at the same time, she couldn't help but feel an inexplicable warm feeling in her heart.
Perhaps it was because of this feeling that when she finally couldn't help but want to go up and help a girl who looked younger than herself and was begging. Henry's move to stop her made Mira so angry.
"Mr. Sage is such a terrible adult," Mira said to Henry with her dazzling blue eyes: "Did you use up all your sympathy just once when you helped me?"
"Obviously she, obviously she also..."
The white-haired girl lowered her head, which was how she behaved when she was unhappy. What an understanding guy, Henry thought, but remained silent.
It was impossible for him not to notice the begging girl on the street corner that Mira was referring to. Unlike what the white-haired girl thought she was ignoring, Henry actually saw far more than her.
But it was precisely because of this that he chose to stop Mira.
The child had dirty blond hair and tattered white clothes. His bare legs and feet were covered with scars and blood scabs from years of walking on the rough stone ground. His delicate shoulders and upper arms were covered with dirt. Some long scars of the same size can be vaguely seen under the surface.
She held a board with her name written on it: Lavinia. He also wrote a short story using informal writing symbols widely used by West Coast folk.
The content of the story touched Mira, and perhaps some other people, because the girl begged for far more coins than other beggars. Tragic stories can always arouse the pity of others, but for the white-haired girl, it may not stop there, Henry thought as he looked at Mira, who was still angry.
The treatment of Luoan people in society has made many children of Mira's age become extremely precocious, unlike the previous generation who had experienced the prosperity of the country's existence and the hardships of the Patriotic War. They were born into the contempt and hostility of the world. They were ignorant enough to deeply understand the dangers of people's hearts. Ironically, they retained the most beautiful and pure side.
It was precisely because of this that he stopped Mira.
Because Henry didn't want her purity to be tainted by reality.
The starting point of his perspective is the same as hers, but in the eyes of the sage, the world that has been interpreted is very different from what the girl sees.
-The girl called herself Lavinia, but her name was a complete lie.
The suffix Nia comes from the Lamanite conquest period. While the arrogant Lamanites conquered lands, countries, cities and people, they also deprived the conquered of their culture and traditions. In Lamani, a language that few people on the west coast know, the conquerors from the east called themselves 'Lamani'. Laman means 'people from the east' and Lamani can be translated as 'men from the east' or 'men of Laman'.
In that era of male supremacy, women did not exist independently but were dependent on men's 'things', so the Lamanites usually called their women 'Lamania' - meaning the possessions of Lamanite men.
These women included not only the wives and daughters of the Lamanite men, but also the female slaves they conquered and plundered.
The glory of the past after the disintegration of the Laman Empire 1,300 years ago no longer exists, but the suffix Nia has been passed down since then as the names of those conquerors and conquered peoples - but only in the Laman Empire at that time. ’s territory—in other words, only among those with brown, brown, red, and black hair.
A blond-haired Westerner who had never been included in the imperial territory and had never even been heard of by those who drew the map was determined not to bear such an Oriental name.
Even if we take a thousand steps back, the many countries that still speak the Lamani language on the other side of the Tambor Mountains and across the inner sea of Morbigas, with their strong sense of racism and xenophobia, would not be able to accept a seemingly Foreigners who were many different from them became one of their own.
So this name can only be a random one.
If this alone only aroused Henry's suspicion, the detailed and moving story that obviously could not be written by her herself and the scars on her upper body would be enough for him to deduce the truth behind the whole incident.
Henry was very familiar with scars of this shape. The long swellings were covered with bloody scabs and were distributed very regularly. If other beggars attacked her out of jealousy, the wounds would not be so regular. With the special shape and distribution area, he could easily guess that these were caused by using specific tools under specific circumstances. of wounds.
The aim is to inflict pain that is subduing rather than actual harm, plus most of it lands on the back unnoticed. The methods used by slave owners in the past are still effective today. The girl's earthen jar is filled with coins. It must be taken away by some pot-bellied slave owner after dark.
'This is really a profitable way to make money,' Henry thought with a hint of irony in his heart. There were many children around him who were similar to that girl, and they were all girls. Combining the number with the distribution area, he roughly deduced that this was probably a gang crime, and one person could not handle so many.
I think they probably adopted these children from some orphanage in the name of good people, but who would have expected such a fate waiting for them?
——Maybe there are many people, but no one cares. Henry looked at Mira.
The white-haired girl was still angry, but she suddenly stopped and let people come and go, just standing in the middle of the road.
She repeated the motion of exhaling deeply and then inhaling deeply several times.
Henry could probably guess what she was thinking in her heart. As mentioned before, this child is very easy to understand because she basically writes what she is thinking on her face and body language.
——And he did guess it right. Mira, who was standing in the middle of the road and taking deep breaths hard, had a tangled emotion entangled in her heart.
She followed Henry just because she had nowhere else to go and no one else to follow - maybe there was also a trace of unexplainable feelings because he was 'rescued' a week ago - Mira couldn't help thinking about this. She rolled her eyes. To be honest, she thought it was more of a trap than anything else - the incident that had tricked her made her feel that this man who claimed to be a sage might really be a very special person.
Well, although he can indeed be considered special in many things, such as being extremely poor and so on - but Mira is not referring to those.
Even though she was only eleven years old, she had already met quite a few people.
Even though most people like to claim that they are unique, in Mira's eyes, most people have the same face.
The only emotion on his face was indifference.
And she originally thought that the man in front of her was special, but today all this made the girl shaken again. She began to think about whether she should continue traveling with him or find a job nearby.
Ashenil is a big city, and unlike the small town, people here may not care that she is related to a murder that killed several people.
She thought this way, while Henry waited quietly for the girl to make her own decision.
He would not open his mouth to interfere with her thoughts, just as he clearly knew the facts behind the beggar girl, but would not tell it all in front of Mira in the first place.
Henry was not a person who would talk about knowledge like this. He knew very well that for Mira, such a cruel truth would make her even more uneasy.
Only those who know some superficial knowledge and want to show off it all day long to gain the attention of others will talk endlessly about every blind spot they have discovered or think they have discovered, and this kind of person usually only causes the feelings of the person they want to impress. It's just disgusting - our protagonist with the name of a sage will naturally not be so naive.
——Although even he couldn't explain why he was so interested in a girl he had only known for a few days.
...Henry waited like this, but Mira, who had been struggling there for a long time, opened her mouth to say something that was beyond his expectation - once again.
"Mr. Sage is really the worst adult. I never want to be an adult like you!" Mira, who used the maid's usual honorific address but said something quite rude, raised her face and stared at Henry. Said word for word.
"So please teach me how to fight!"
She spoke in a loud voice that caused some passers-by to turn their heads.
Henry was stunned on the spot. The logical relationship between these two sentences was so confusing that his brain stopped for a second or two.
"puff"
"Pfft hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha"
The man who claimed to be a sage but had no manners stood there holding his stomach and laughed exaggeratedly two seconds later. His laughter attracted the attention of more passers-by than before, even those begging on the street corner. All the girls raised their faces and looked at this man.
"Madman" Henry didn't stop laughing until passers-by lost interest, shook their heads and walked away.
As if he could change his face, he straightened up and returned to his original calm and normal expression. Then he stared at Mira, who was blushing to the root of her neck because of what just happened, and spoke slowly.
"I finally understand something..."
"...What is it? Why do I think you are thinking of something very rude?" Mira, who suspected that she was being treated as an idiot, once again looked at him with contempt like "Mr. Sage is such a terrible adult", while Henry just He waved his hand: "Don't care, don't care, compared to that..."
"Come with me. If you have such an awareness, there may be some things that you really should see with your own eyes."
"But before that, please allow me to apologize to you," he said, and Mira said a confused "Huh?" Henry continued.
"It's my fault. I applied my habitual thinking to you and regarded you as someone else who can be seen everywhere."
"This is obviously a big mistake. You are a person who deserves to be taken seriously, Mira." He said this, and the white-haired girl was stunned, and then a clearly visible sight gradually appeared in her eyes - disdain.
"So you like young girls? Mr. Sage is really the worst adult." She patted her shoulder as if there was something dirty on it, and then took a few steps back and away from Henry.
"..." The sage responded with a faint smile. As we said before, Mira is a very understanding child, and he could tell that she was just shy.
Then he looked at the begging girls. Many of them looked at him and Mira with hope and envy in their eyes, but he glanced at them and looked at more with gray-blue eyes. Far away.
"Let's go"
"Where are you going? Hey, it's the test, aren't you going to participate?" Mira looked a little confused, but Henry turned her head and held her hand.
"Don't you want me to teach you how to fight?"
With his free hand, he held the sword behind his back, as if to confirm that he could pull it out at any time.
"Don't you want to help her?"
He gestured to the blonde girl with his chin.
"Congratulations, you now have the opportunity to have the best of both worlds."
The sage carrying the great sword said so.
R: Sorry for the confusing rhythm before. Because Qidian is a "gentle and cute little girl who understands others", I had to upload the first chapter first and then the prologue. This has been corrected now.
