Ch204-Once Is Happenstance

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Ch204-Once Is Happenstance

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The tension inside the carriage was thick enough to cut with a knife.

Sylver remembered Rosa to be pale, but this was something else. If not for Sylver’s skin being as white as a bone, Rosa would have been a contender for the palest person in the room.

Sylver was sitting near the door and was slightly crushing the man he was sharing his seat with. There were 4 elves in the small carriage with him, Rosa was staring at Sylver, while the other 3 elves were staring at Rosa.

Sylver’s body was almost twice as wide as the elves’, to the point they could comfortably sit 3 people on the seat opposite Sylver’s, while there was barely enough room for the man sitting next to Sylver on the same sized seat.

Rosa was dressed in what Sylver now understood to be their uniform, a very simple loose green robe, and tunic mixture, not that far off from the bathrobes the locals wore.

“How’s it going?” Sylver asked with a polite smile in his voice, which shifted the 3 elves’ attention from Rosa to him. The two sitting next to Rosa were women, and the one sitting next to Sylver was a man.

There was a small pear-shaped thing embedded into the ceiling that was giving off light. The windows had been closed shut, and a soundproof barrier surrounded the moving carriage.

A literal minute of silence passed, during which Spring, who was walking alongside the carriage outside, made a request.

“Can I borrow 5 grams of red jade?” Sylver asked Rosa.

She just continued mutely staring at him.

“My friend outside wants to buy this thing, it’s a pasty made out of peaches, that is then dipped in chocolate. I forgot to bring money with me, and we don’t know how long this particular stall will remain open. I’ll send someone from my sect with the jade when I get home to pay you back,” Sylver said while still looking at Rosa.

Sylver saw all of them flinch as he reached up with his hand to scratch his chin.

“Alright, would you three mind leaving for a few minutes, so we can talk in private?” Sylver asked, and finally made one of them talk.

It was the man pressed up against Sylver, and he spoke in a heavy Elvish accent, that bordered on unintelligible.

“With all due respect but… who do you think you are?” the male elf asked and went as far as to make an effort to shift his body, so he was almost facing Sylver.

Sylver answered the man in Elvish.

“I think you meant to ask, “who are you?” And while I appreciate the way you started the question I-”

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been successfully blocked!]

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been successfully blocked!]

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been successfully blocked!]

Sylver suppressed a groan as he felt as if someone physically tried to punch his brain. He rubbed the back of his skull with his hand as he spoke.

“I don’t want to hear a word about my accent. And don’t do that, it gives me a headache,” Sylver said, as he accidentally caught one of his bandages and shifted it slightly.

Going by the very audible gasp that emanated from the two women sitting across from him, they saw what was going on underneath the wrappings. In hindsight, Sylver should have used more bandages, but it was basically decoration since he wasn’t afraid of getting an infection.

It was just something to hide his blown-off face.

Rosa said 8 words in her language, which to Sylver’s ears sounded like she was speaking backward in Elvish. One of the women placed a small bag onto Sylver’s knee, while the man squirmed out of his seat and, to Sylver’s annoyance, teleported away, as did the other 2 elves.

Sylver was left completely alone with Rosa.

While Rosa continued staring at him, Sylver looked into the bag and found it filled to the brim with red, green, and blue, jade stone. He fished out 5 small red ones, that looked to be about 5 grams, and briefly opened the door on his left to pass them to Spring.

With a bit more space to himself, Sylver scooched to the middle of the seat and made himself comfortable. Rosa remained exactly where she was as if there were still 2 women sitting next to her.

“Spring says thank you, but that he doesn’t recommend the chocolate peach bread pasty. Unsurprisingly, it tastes awful. Doesn’t sound that nice either, now that I think about it,” Sylver said casually.

“Why are you here?” Rosa asked.

Sylver didn’t remember what she sounded the last time he saw her, but he was fairly sure she didn’t sound as “gruff” as she did now. Tired, she sounded tired, in a way Sylver expected an old soldier to sound.

A lot can happen in 5 years…

“I’m an adventurer in case you forgot. I go where the wind takes me,” Sylver said with a grinning tone of voice.

It didn’t work too well against Rosa’s mask of a face. She looked afraid, worried, and yet remained composed in the face of danger. Sylver relaxed his voice and spoke normally.

“I’m looking for someone, and I tracked them down to somewhere here. What about you? Why is the princess equivalent sitting in the very last carriage?” Sylver asked, and ever so slightly nodded at Rosa’s perfect suppression of emotions.

Physically at least, if Sylver was just looking at her, he wouldn’t have known he had struck a nerve just now. Luckily for him, he could feel her soul nervously shifting around.

“I ask because if I know what you’re up to, I can be careful not to step on your toes, so to speak. I may not be able to fully trust you, but I know you’re a reasonable woman, and you know I’m a reasonable man. Maybe there’s something we can help each other with,” Sylver said and got another reaction out of Rosa.

If she wasn’t forcefully maintaining the appearance of someone calm and relaxed, she would have been shaking.

“See if a deal can be made,” Rosa quoted, in that odd half-breath way people described Sylver’s speech pattern.

He did vaguely remember saying that but wasn’t 100% certain if he said it to Rosa. It certainly sounded like the kind of thing he would say.

“Officially we’re here to look into a disease that the local healers believe to be magical in origin. As far as everyone outside of this carriage is aware, I’m just another mage to help out where I can,” Rosa explained.

She wasn’t lying.

“Do those 3 know who you are?” Sylver asked as he realized how strange this would look from the outside if a random man entered the carriage, and then asked everyone but one random mage to leave.

“They don’t know the specifics. But they’ve been instructed to jump, if I tell them to jump,” Rosa explained.

Sylver waited for her to continue, so he wouldn’t have to ask the obvious question, but he ended up having to ask it anyway.

“What’s the “unofficial” reason you came here?” Sylver asked.

Rosa once again started staring at Sylver, without saying anything.

“Why are you here?” Rosa asked.

“I’m looking for someone,” Sylver repeated.

It wasn’t even a lie. He was looking for Edmund, and to find Edmund, he was looking for the shield girl, and to find the shield girl, he was looking for Fobur Plateforged.

A very optimistic part of Sylver had hoped Rosa was the shield girl in question. It would have been so easy to end everything here and now if this was her. Sylver could threaten her Eldar tree, he could threaten her, he could force the sterilizing potion down her throat, and worst-case scenario, he could kill her.

But sadly, she didn’t have the birthmark on her shoulder. Sylver had checked.

More importantly, Rosa had too much elf blood to be able to have a child with a full-blooded human.

The full-blooded human thing was an assumption on Sylver’s part, but anything else wouldn’t make much sense considering literally everyone Sylver had met inside the barrier was a human.

He couldn’t exactly kill Rosa just to be safe, that wasn’t how Sylver did things. Well…

Not when she was one of the few people here that he could consider an ally.

“Do you still have that metal card I gave you?” Rosa asked, with a hint of excitement in her voice.

Sylver rummaged through the bone he kept as deep inside of him as he could, the one where he kept the most important things. The metal rectangle Rosa had given him when they parted ways was there. He summoned it into his hand, and Rosa had an almost toothy grin on her face.

“You will be able to ask for anything from everyone here. Within reason, but with that card you effectively have a… what’s the word? Royal decree?” Rosa guessed as Sylver turned the card over in his hand to look at it.

For the second time today, Sylver wanted to slap himself across the face for not realizing this sooner.

The small metal rectangle Rosa had given him, which he was currently holding in his hand, was identical to the keys the dark elves had.

It wasn’t “similar” it was identical. They left all of them back in their old realm, inside their underwater dome. Rosa had given him this before Sylver had gone to their realm.

“Where did you get this? Or, I mean, what is this?” Sylver asked, as he held the metallic rectangle out towards Rosa, who looked like she was going to laugh at his utter astonishment.

“If you present it to our leader, Tarragon, he’s at the front wearing a bright red robe, he will test it against a different card, and will do just short of anything you say. If helping you doesn’t interfere with his mission, he’ll do it… Within reason…” Rosa explained as she mimed tapping the card against another card.

“Alright, but where did you get this?” Sylver asked again, as Rosa just shrugged her shoulders.

“I can’t tell you… And if I could, there honestly wouldn’t be much to tell… What are you going to ask of him? Or, I mean, are you going to ask something of him?” Rosa asked as Sylver disappeared the card back into his [Bound Bones] storage.

“I might ask for a small loan… And I may ask for a public alliance or something along those lines. My friend’s sect doesn’t have the best reputation, and I think having you vouch for us, would help quite a bit,” Sylver explained, as Rosa nodded along, albeit somewhat reluctantly.

“What happened to your face?” Rosa asked.

“I got in a fight and got caught in my own explosion. I haven’t had the chance to fix it… I’m going to ask this one last time Rosa. Why are you really here?” Sylver asked as he felt Rosa’s soul somersault.

Rosa looked away from the spot where Sylver’s eyeballs used to be and just stared at the closed window on her left. She sat there quietly and going by the ever so slight nod of her head, was weighing the pros and cons of getting Sylver involved in this.

Sylver knew her answer, even before she cleared her throat, and used that annoying official voice nobles sometimes used when they said something to make it sound official as if they had no say in it. This wasn’t exactly the case, but that was the tone of it.

“I do not believe you would be able to help in this particular situation. If that changes in the future, I know you can be trusted to keep a secret. Officially, I am here to help the healers and that is all I am here to do. I forgot to introduce myself, my name is Rosa,” Rosa said.

Sylver rolled his eyes, metaphorically, as Rosa explained herself.

Should I ask her about Gorynych?

And do what if I find out she’s here to help them maintain the chain? Kill all the elves?

What does that achieve? The goal is still to find the girl, and sterilize her before she can give birth…

If I tell Rosa what I’m after, and she’s not on my side, I lose my ally, and she and her people will warn the emperor… The whole country will come after me, after Faust, and will make moving around inside very difficult.

Sylver scratched his chin as he shifted in his seat and was informed by Spring that he found an amazing stall that sold waffles made from banana flour. It sounded rather nice.

The risk is too great…

Even if we are on the same page, and both trying to find and sterilize the girl, the amount of help they would provide wouldn’t increase from what I’m going to get from them from using the metal card.

Plus, I might be able to figure out what it is they’re here to do without having to tell them what I’m doing. I have a perfectly valid excuse to spend time with them, especially after they fail to heal the curse away, and will happen to overhear my expertise in all things black magic related.

Sylver almost slipped up and asked about how their Eldar tree was doing. He could see Rosa was still a normal elf, and Sylver wasn’t even supposed to know what their “flower” was.

Flower…

“How could you tell who I was?” Sylver asked as Rosa smiled at the question.

“You have a very distinct way of moving, not to mention you’re wearing the same robe you wore back then,” Rosa explained, as Sylver could do little but nod along.

Even though Sylver had gone out of his way to use his muscles to walk, multiple lifetimes of puppeteering yourself to walk wasn’t the kind of thing that went away overnight. Although he had thought he was doing a good job of it.

“I guess that’s that then. If it so happens that my actions end up getting in the way of your “unofficial” business, please remember that I gave you every chance to… I can’t think of a good polite word. Anyway, best of luck in everything,” Sylver said, as he opened the door.

The door whined as Rosa’s magic pushed it back and closed it. She waited for the soundproofing magic to reapply itself before she spoke.

“What do you know?” Rosa asked, as Sylver gave the door an experimental push, and felt Rosa’s magic strain from the effort of keeping it closed.

“Could you be a bit more specific?” Sylver asked with a warm smile in his voice.

“Why are you here?” Rosa asked, and Sylver decided that even if he wasn’t going to fully fix his face, he would at the very least give himself eyes.

“I’m looking for someone. And if you don’t want to tell me what you’re really here for, then we’ll both just have to keep our fingers crossed that we don’t accidentally get in each other’s way,” Sylver said, as he increased the amount of force he was exerting on the door, just enough to make Rosa sweat from the effort of keeping it closed.

It felt like a switch had been flipped, as Rosa released her magic, and Sylver just barely managed to stop pushing the door to keep it closed in time.

Going by the way Sylver could almost smell the fear in the air, Rosa decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to threaten Sylver or force an answer out of him. He remained where he was for a couple of seconds, before he opened the door, and left.

***

“Did you have to be that rude to her?” Ria asked.

“I wasn’t rude to her. Spring, was I rude to her?” Sylver tapped out the question, and the shade walking next to him nodded.

“You were. You’ve been in a bad mood since the moment you saw her,” Spring answered, as he took another bite out of his strawberry stuffed caramel wrap.

“Thank you for that Spring. If there was a man out there that could end my existence with a thought, I would personally always take his side, but that’s just me,” Sylver said, as Spring shrugged his shoulders.

“Last time a woman tried that, you explained in great detail how you would kill her in the worst way imaginable,” Spring countered, and even Sylver was caught off guard by Ria shaking slightly from suppressing her giggling.

“I wasn’t rude to her,” Sylver repeated, as he scratched his chin.

“You didn’t swear, but you were rude,” Spring clarified, as Ria nodded along.

“I wasn’t rude… I wasn’t polite, but I wasn’t rude. Why is everyone so on guard against me? I’ve been nothing but fair and reasonable, where do they get this-this reluctance to be upfront with me? It’s not like telling me would have changed anything,” Sylver wondered, as Spring provided an answer that almost physically hurt him.

“Because to her you’re not some personified force of nature, you’re just a necromancer. She knows you’re good at killing things, but she has healers with her and is protected by the guards, she thinks you won’t be able to get to her, so you’re irrelevant,” Spring explained, with an alarming insight into Sylver’s innermost thoughts.

“I’m tempted to go out of my way and attack her, just to prove a point,” Sylver said, but all three of them knew he didn’t mean it.

“You said you heard the name Gorynych from her,” Ria asked in an attempt to change the topic of conversation.

“He said he didn’t recognize the name, and Rosa said that it doesn’t matter since he didn’t want to get involved. So, this dragon is somehow involved with the elves, and their Eldar sapling? Or do you think she knows something about the dragon, and she thought you were somehow involved with it?” Spring asked, as Sylver ever so vaguely remembered what the shade was talking about.

“I’m old, the dragon’s old, maybe she thought us old people all know each other?” Sylver offered sarcastically.

“And the fact that she gave you one of the dark elves’ keys as proof of being owed a favor is just a coincidence?” Ria countered.

“Yes. Because the alternative pisses me off so much that it’s in everyone’s best interest for me not to think about it,” Sylver explained and hoped Ria would drop the subject.

“She was acting really weird though. From the way she thanked you the last time you saw each other, I would have thought she would be going out of her way to help you. Instead, she was guarded, reluctant to communicate, and above all else, afraid of you… The council started searching for you, right after you left that dungeon,” Spring offered.

Or rather, he vocalized the thoughts Sylver had thought he had done a good job of hiding away from himself.

“She was afraid, but I didn’t sense any hostility… You think she ended up joining the council and was afraid I know and would try to kill her?” Sylver offered, as Ria chimed in.

“That does fit with her reluctance to tell you why she’s here,” Ria offered.

Sylver physically shook his head and made a decision.

“Doesn’t matter. Council, dragon, elves, dark elves, Eldar saplings, I just need to find the girl and talk her into drinking a potion. Everything else is irrelevant,” Sylver said with finality, and all but shushed Ria as she tried to continue theorizing what Rosa was doing here, and why.

Sylver’s conversation with Tarragon was short and sweet.

He showed the man the card, the man tapped an identical card against it to confirm it was genuine, and then allowed Sylver to sit next to him at the front of the carriage.

Sylver refrained from asking for a loan right now, or an alliance, and was content with simply seeing what the new emperor looked like.

Under normal circumstances, someone from a sect that basically didn’t exist would never be allowed anywhere near the emperor. Unless that person was sitting next to the head of the group of magical healers that were called in to save everyone.

Tarragon was a surprisingly relaxed and polite young man, who happened to also be a level 417 [Ancient Druid]. He didn’t even ask any questions regarding who Sylver was, or where he had gotten that metallic card from, and seemed more interested in the fact that Sylver’s robe was connected directly to his nervous system.

He even offered to heal him, free of charge.

***

The closer they came to the center the fewer food stalls there were. They also started pricing things in green jade, and as much as Sylver enjoyed having Spring experience various foods, he wasn’t willing to spend a whole gram of green jade on what amounted to a tiny cube of meat soaked in some sort of fancy-sounding sauce.

Sylver toyed around with the idea of pickpocketing the required funds from the high-level cultivators walking around, but even if they were walking around with blue jade, it wouldn’t be worth the risk. Especially given Faust’s sect’s already tarnished reputation.

Tarragon offered to buy Sylver a small soup dish, that cost 3 grams of green jade, but Sylver refused using the excuse of being on a very strict diet. He also had a hole in his throat, and the soup would have likely leaked out of it if he tried to drink it.

Gradually Spring started sticking out like a sore thumb, there weren’t enough people for him to blend into the crowd, and now people went from staring at Sylver to staring at the skin-covered shade, who unmistakably looked foreign.

Although, if it weren’t for his height, Spring wouldn’t look too out of place here. If you removed the resemblance to Sylver, he’d fit right in.

Given that Sylver got him from Poppy, and he was a cultivator…

I wonder how many coincides are necessary until you have to start calling it a pattern?

At some point, Spring found a good dark corner, slipped out of his skinsuit, wrapped it around his torso to make it a part of himself, and then returned to Sylver’s shadow.

Given the fact that the palaces were all at the top of the mountain peaks, Sylver had expected for there to be a ramp of some sort. Instead, he saw that the road led into the mountain.

Sylver hadn’t kept track of time too well, but the suns were setting when the carriage entered the mountain.

He was surprised by the fact that the guards standing outside the mountain didn’t search him or any of the elf carriages, and basically waved Tarragon through after asking him about his kids. Tarragon turned out to be the father of 4 small children. He even showed Sylver a small book that had drawings of them.

Sylver’s surprise was short-lived because he found that the inside of the mountain had hundreds, upon hundreds, of “statues.”

Every single one of which was occupied by a dormant soul, meaning that every single one of them was a golem. Going by the fact that Sylver could feel that the souls were very strong, he didn’t like his chances against one of these golems, let alone a literal army of them.

While this should have made Sylver afraid of going against a country that possessed such an army, it instead made him feel better about removing their barrier. That information alone vastly improved Ria’s mood, who had very likely been thinking about all the death Sylver’s actions were going to cause.

All the carriages fit onto a single circular stone platform, that was then lifted by 4 extremely large chains. Lifting such a large weight using magic would be ridiculously wasteful, and whoever built this seemed to share Sylver’s opinion. Instead of Ki, four men showed up and simply lifted the platform by turning a large metal crank mechanism.

Sylver remained seated next to Tarragon, as the carriages started to move again, and followed behind a small man whose bald head was covered in tattoos, from his scalp, down his face, all the way down to his neck. The pattern wasn’t symmetrical, and looked closer to writing, than random lines.

He and Tarragon spoke in the same language Rosa spoke in for a moment or two before the bald man nodded and started to lead the line of carriages.

“We’re actually staying at the Blue Rat sect, but it’s customary to first speak to the emperor. As the leader and their equivalent of royalty, I’ve been offered residence at one of the sects in the White Ring. I can bring you along as a guest if you’re interested. I prefer staying with my team, but if-”

“That won’t be necessary, thank you for the offer,” Sylver said quietly, as Tarragon nodded at him.

If he had needed to search the sects for traces of Edmund, this would have made it laughably easy. Thankfully, Sylver already knew where Edmund was, all that was left was actually getting him out of the dragon’s grasp.

Tarragon’s group didn’t see much of the royal palace, as they made their way towards it. Giant thick bushes walled them in from the left and the right, and the most Sylver got were a couple of glimpses at a pond, some kind of large sandbox, and what appeared to be a giant mirror on the ground.

Sending the shades out would be pointless, there was a barrier around them, so no exploring unless Sylver physically forced his way through the shrubs to see what was on the other side.

Sylver also noticed that the shrubs were moving and seemed to be used to box the group in, so they only had one path to follow. It was more intuition than anything [Swamp Lord] related, but Sylver got the feeling the man with the tattoos was responsible for the giant moving walls.

Tarragon had his signature warm smile on his face and was so relaxed that Sylver almost struggled to keep his guard up.

After a couple of minutes, they reached two enormous golden doors, embedded with so many gemstones that Sylver didn’t even attempt to count them. There were thousands of glowing diamonds at the top, thousands of glowing sapphires underneath them, then bright glowing emeralds, and finally a small knee-high strip of glowing red rubies.

As they began to open Tarragon whispered the history behind them, how gold and silver used to be used as a way of preserving Ki infused jade, and that Ki infused jade tended to appear naturally in places that had gold ore, and how the two were historically linked to one another.

Tarragon’s fascinating words were interrupted by an ever so faint cough from the man with the tattooed head, and Tarragon, and the elves inside the carriages, all appeared just outside of them, in a neat single-file line.

“You’ll need to bow when we enter, please make sure your head is lower than mine,” Tarragon whispered at Sylver, who just nodded at him.

The inside of the palace was nothing but gold. The floor, ceiling, walls, even the windows had specks of gold inside the glass.

The man with the tattoos on his head introduced the newly appointed emperor in a short speech, that Sylver didn’t hear a single word of, once the emperor’s name had been mentioned.

“Dobrynya Nikitich.”

And if that wasn’t utter motherfucking bullshit, Sylver also couldn’t shake the feeling of having met this man before. It was only when the young emperor brushed his hair out of his face that Sylver realized the emperor looked just like Nameless.

If his soul hadn’t been several times more powerful than Nameless’, Sylver would have thought he was looking at a slightly older Nameless.

Or “Aurick” as the book had told him. The boy for who Sylver had summoned a demon to help him track down the owner of a drop of blood was called “Aurick.”

And if Sylver’s soul sense was to be believed, Aurick was a blood relative of the emperor Sylver was currently staring at.

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