I took a moment to gather my thoughts.
While heading home after class in the afternoon, I felt like I had gotten caught on something. The time outside the window was indeed afternoon, but the day of the week felt different.
Today is the weekend.
It wouldn’t be strange for me to lie around all day. The people living in this accommodation don’t bother me no matter what I do.
During the harvesting period, there aren’t any students at the Royal Academy, so it was hard to know the exact time.
There are two harvesting periods for commuting to and from the Royal Academy.
Victoria and Kanna.
However, Kanna is busy fighting off the swarming monsters in her hometown, and Victoria often heads straight outside as soon as class is over.
If I’m confused about the date, it seems like someone has gone to great lengths to trap me.
Bern City currently has no distinction between weekdays and weekends, and there’s no concept of a day off for harvesters living in Brightshin.
I’m feeling a bit dizzy.
Bern City has gathered around the Purple Twilight Association and is fighting against soldiers coming from outside the city.
In the end, they’ve gone too far. The police are supposed to guard the inside, while the soldiers are supposed to guard the outside, but the soldiers attacked the inside.
And all of this just to hide a truly useless fact.
It was a good thing they had plenty of harvesters prepared in the slums of Brightshin. From what I can see, many harvesters in Bern City are likely to die.
Powerful and conspicuous targets easily become victims of oppression. If you oppose them, whether you’ve participated in protests or not, you’ll be dragged out.
That’s a good thing.
If someone tries to run away, that hatred will boil over appropriately.
Hehe.
Anyway, it’s afternoon, so I finished all the homework assigned by the Royal Academy, ate something, and went to sleep.
Tomorrow will be back to weekdays.
*
Morning arrived.
I commuted to the Royal Academy as usual.
But today, Merryweather’s expression is unusually pale. And there’s fear in her gaze directed towards me.
I have a guess, but it’s hard to ask anything.
There’s still fighting happening in Bern City, and it’s gotten worse since yesterday.
No matter how strong the civilians are, if the military comes pointing weapons, it’s normal for them to be annihilated. However, the civilians could fight back. In fact, they pushed back the army, changing the situation seriously.
First of all.
Even if they can use powerful magic, if they can’t use it, they’re just like civilians.
This world is a magical civilization, so there are no firearms.
The initial protests arose to investigate the circumstances of an accident in Bern City. Then, from the next protest onward, the protesters brought that reason.
Excessive use of power devices causes magical energy to weirdly deteriorate, and that accumulates. If that happens, machines that use magical power become unusable.
Then the power devices excessively absorb mana, reducing the mana present in the atmosphere.
In other words, it means that they can create an area lacking in mana. The protesters who directly experienced the events in Bern City utilized this.
Bern City is a city where cutting-edge technology is concentrated.
Power devices are overflowing. They operated that to make the city a sort of mana vacuum. And a harvester’s psychic ability works even without mana.
When a soldier wrapped in a solid mechanical puppet enters the city, the mechanical puppet just stops working.
In that case, there’s no need to kill them with psychic ability. It just becomes a coffin that once moved. They can’t escape and get stabbed to death by the protesters from inside the machine.
Of course, the soldiers who noticed this changed their tactics to casting spells from a distance, but most of the spells disappear in flight, and the technique of launching projectiles can’t break through the densely packed buildings of Bern City’s center.
So, even though the military has been deployed, Bern City is still fighting.
If Merryweather heard that, it wouldn’t be strange for her to be scared of me.
Making harvesters means that I can produce psychics who can cause supernatural phenomena without relying on mana.
If it were the intelligence department, it would be normal for them to be scared.
Thinking this, I entered the classroom. Today, Victoria sat in a spot away from me.
Thinking back to how quickly she made friends as soon as I distanced myself, I feel like being apart for a little while might be okay.
But there’s one thing I’m worried about. Victoria doesn’t know what’s happening in her hometown of Bern City.
The media isn’t mentioning the suspicious occurrences in Bern City, so it’s actually strange that she doesn’t know.
I hope she remains unaware, and I hope that after the situation in Bern City calms down, she doesn’t get dragged away just because she’s from there.
As I thought all that, before I realized it, the morning class ended, and lunch time arrived.
Just two days ago, Merryweather would have been chatting about this and that, but today she’s silent. Instead, she’s carefully watching me.
Right now, I pretend not to notice her watching me.
But I don’t intend to completely ignore it. After class today, I’m going to create new harvesters.
Then I can check what the kingdom plans to do about the harvesters. If they really dislike the increasing number of harvesters, Merryweather will try to stop me.
If not, it would mean that they don’t see the harvesters as a problem.
If I aggressively utilize the phenomena occurring in Bern City, it could be used to invade other countries, right?
In an age where the world is not organically connected, wars happen frequently.
People can only barely stop wars when the loss from going to war greatly outweighs the benefits of what they can gain from it.
However, they only consider the losses of the leaders who lead the country.
In a kingdom, it’s the king; in a capitalist society, it’s the capitalist; in a dictatorship, it’s only the dictator’s losses that are considered.
In this kingdom, it would be easy to start a war.
I quietly finished lunch for the first time in a while and returned to the classroom for the afternoon class.
Then I immediately left the Royal Academy and headed to where potential harvesters were gathered. This time, the destination is also within Brightshin.
Just like last time, I plan to take a little detour to get a location in my mind that I’ve never been to.
After walking for a while, I’ll head straight, so maybe I’ll realize that I’m wandering around the capital with some intent.
No matter what world it is, there are surely plenty of people smarter than me.
So I’ll go east for one day and west for another.
I think I’m filling out the map with irregular movements, but if someone smart reads patterns from my actions, there’s a 0% chance they’ll understand my intention.
So I stay on guard, knowing I might get caught at any time, and I keep moving forward today.
Today, I’m walking in a deserted area.
It’s not as much of a slum as Brightshin, but it’s a place away from busy streets. I’m walking along a narrow road with dilapidated buildings sparsely set up.
If it were a guard, what would I say to Merryweather? She’s looking at me with a mix of fear and animosity.
Again, she’s not a guard.
Instead, a witch attacked me.
A witch named Maleficent. It seems she somehow touched the area below the surface and drove me out, but I need to be careful.
Since I’m a special monster, I was arrogant enough to think that no magic could affect me. Didn’t Wonsi Cheonjon say I was like the opposite of mana?
So I thought I was immune to magic, but I didn’t expect to be vulnerable to mental attacks.
At some point, I had been hit by magic, and while Bell’s body was lying flat on the bed, I was aware that I went about my daily life.
Considering that someone else’s time stopped in the afternoon, it means that Bell’s body itself was under the influence of magic.
From an objective standpoint, I had been lying down and woke up in the afternoon.
From Bell’s perspective, I woke up in the morning, attended class, and headed to a strange location on the way back.
From the perspective of other harvesters, time flowed normally and stopped at some point in the afternoon.
When the perception of one body distorts, it means that I share that moment within that body.
That’s why yesterday, even though it was the weekend and Victoria didn’t have class, and she studied mechanical knight all quietly in her room, she didn’t feel anything strange.
When I encountered Victoria in the hallucination, I was seeing Bell from Victoria’s perspective.
I didn’t expect to be weak against this kind of thing.
The part of the memories that spark a chuckle with Daegon and Wonsi Cheonjon shines, but I pretend not to notice.
As I walk along the area where light doesn’t reach, I arrive at a neighborhood where lower-class citizens live; it’s not as bad as Brightshin.
As soon as I enter, I spot a man lying on the ground.
He’s holding a liquor bottle, and his face is red enough for anyone to tell he’s drunk. One of his fingers holding the bottle is missing, and his toes, visible through his torn shoes, are as white as bone.
He’s dying.
This is a common sight in places like this.
I sat down in front of the man.
But before I could say anything, he raised his tattered eyebrows and, with his clouded eyes, swung the bottle at my head.
Crash!
Hmm.
An unhesitating attack. The bottle shatters, and glass shards scatter everywhere. Plus, a bit of my blood and brains too.
“What? Why aren’t you dead?”
Blood flows from my head, coloring one side of my vision red.
“I don’t die.”
“Haha, what’s this? Am I getting crazy? I’ve never seen a girl like you before.”
There’s extreme hatred, resignation, and despair in his gaze. Light, just out of reach, is shinning above.
This only shows that I’m still very much alive.
I placed my hand on his cheek. He was taken aback in surprise. Then he reached out and grabbed a handful of my hair.
This guy is really acting aggressively.
Crack.
A chilling sound echoed. With that, the skin of my scalp along with the glass shards pulled away from my skull. From the feel of it, my brain must be exposed.
“If you pull that hard, it’s just going to break, right?”
The man, holding the skin in his hand, looked at it absent-mindedly and then shifted his gaze back to me.
“Are you a monster?”
“Yep. You’ve probably heard of me at least once. Or should I say it like this here?”
Straightening up, I said to him,
“I’ll let you have me. But after you finish everything, I want to receive all that you have. What do you say?”
It’s the contract document everyone should know by now.
It’s been broadcasted and appeared in newspapers several times. Even someone completely uninterested would have heard it once.
At least if you live in the capital.
The man nodded after looking at my bleeding face and the shards in his hand.
I shoved myself into him immediately, twisting reality as I thought.
My skin cracked and broke, and blue flesh popped out. A robust man stood in place.
He was thrown away as his body fell apart, a disabled soldier. His body bore the scars and diseases he obtained from fighting monsters on the border of the country. He was an ordinary human dying with parasites entwined.
He gazed down at his hands in confusion. Then he took off his shoes and wiggled his toes.
He probably wouldn’t hear the screams from his body anymore, and he would breathe comfortably. He stood in the posture of his prime, the soldier he was, and looked at me and asked,
“What do you want from me?”
“Now go do what you want. Whatever you couldn’t do before, whatever you’ve wanted to do. Anything is fine. That’s what I wish for.”
Then I rose the newly reborn body into a harvester. Though the man looked at me with complicated eyes, he soon lost interest once he became a harvester.
But I got attacked, and the guards aren’t doing their job. So I subtly turned around to look at the guards.
Merryweather is staring at me with an expression of terror.
Normally, a person would’ve died from that, but I’m not a person; I’m alive. However, an attack is an attack. If she’s not even going to act like a guard, I think I’ll have to report this to the king or prince.
And to mention that I was attacked by a witch as well.
Thinking that, I resumed my journey toward my destination when suddenly, a man came chasing after me near Merryweather.
Merryweather remains still, even though the harvester is approaching. What is she thinking?
I went to a house where a child covered in boils from disease and malnutrition, dying, was living. And I turned that child into a harvester.
The harvesters cried in joy, saying it was a miracle, while the ones who saw the newly healed body rejoiced too. And a harvester stared at me wide-eyed while Merryweather looked at me as if I were something disgusting.
That day ended like this.
