The Blue Road Home (7)

This time, the ship I was aboard encountered no major obstacles, and after visiting several islands for trade, it finally entered the harbor of Mintar, a powerful country on the coast.

I had probably been aboard for about a month.

It had been a fairly eventful month, and I had grown attached to the ship, but this was where we would part ways.

I would transfer to another ship and head west, while Suin's ship would stock up at this port before returning to the Yellow Ancient Empire.

Suin had arranged to find my next ship through his connections.

Mintar was a powerful country that prospered through maritime trade, so apparently quite a few ships traveled from here as far as the central region.

As a capable merchant who was well connected even in Mintar, Suin said he would have no trouble arranging a ship bound for the central region.

It would apparently take a few days, but I was grateful for his help.

If I had to transfer between several ships, the extra time would surely amount to more than just a few days.

Well, this journey had lasted not merely years but more than a decade, so whether it took a few days, weeks, or months was nothing more than a rounding error. Even so, the sooner I could reach my destination, the better.

However, that meant I would be spending several days in Mintar's harbor.

Those few days would leave me with too much time on my hands if I did nothing, yet they were far too short for anything substantial.

In the end, sightseeing around the harbor was about all I could manage.

Mintar's harbor was quite large, so I wouldn't get bored if I spent a few days there.

Now, unlike the Yellow Ancient Empire, where the grassland people, who seemed to revere the environment of the Great Grassland, as well as divine beasts and immortals who were dragon kindred, gathered the faithful, the coastal countries, including Mintar, generally followed religions venerating the sea gods and wind gods.

Places that worshiped the sea gods and wind gods were apparently called temples rather than churches, but their actual role didn't seem very different from that of churches in the central part of the continent.

In other words, they were places of faith that served as a source of comfort from birth to the grave, while providing basic education and searching for children with an aptitude for divine arts.

Thinking of it that way, Juyal, who had been called the Child of Flame in the Great Grassland, might actually have been in a precarious position.

He had been an extraordinarily powerful user of pyrokinesis—a superpower and a type of divine art—but if he had continued rampaging as he was, the temple organization might well have moved to deal with him.

After all, a powerful user of divine arts who did not belong to a temple, did not even believe in the gods, and used that ability to commit acts of plunder was obviously an inconvenient situation for the temple organization.

Organizations such as churches and temples gathered people with an aptitude for divine arts and developed their abilities, so naturally, they had a deep understanding of divine arts.

Juyal had made no attempt to hide his ability and wielded it openly, so anyone affiliated with a temple would probably have recognized almost immediately that it was pyrokinesis.

No matter how powerful an ability was, if its nature was understood, dealing with it was by no means impossible.

If multiple users of divine arts—especially ones whose abilities were advantageous against pyrokinesis—had been dispatched, the Juyal of that time would have been helpless.

As a rare and powerful user of divine arts, he might not have been killed immediately, but if things went badly, he could have been treated in such a way that he would never breathe the outside air again.

That was only the Juyal who had been at the mercy of his ability. The Juyal of today was not so helpless that merely countering his pyrokinesis would be enough to deal with him.

That was assuming he had continued honing his swordsmanship and confronting his own ability, but with Juyal, I had no reason to worry.

To begin with, I thought someone like him would have stopped the Dalia tribe's acts of plunder without trouble.

While walking through the market in Mintar's harbor, I spotted a mat woven from sheep's wool, presumably acquired through trade with the grassland people, and suddenly found myself remembering the past with nostalgia.

It had only been about ten years since we had parted ways in the Great Grassland.

My nostalgia prompted me to ask more questions, and I learned that there was apparently some major movement among the grassland people.

The stall owner did not know the details, but apparently one tribe was at the center of it all, forming alliances with the major tribes or bringing them under its sway, and a great power was in the process of taking shape.

Was this a sign that a storm was about to break over the eastern part of the continent, with the grassland people at its center?

I felt a little uneasy, but Juyal, Tseren, and Shuro should all have grown into fine adults by now, so they would probably overcome most difficulties.

The harbor market displayed not only goods from the grasslands, but also tea leaves and ornaments that had presumably been brought from the Yellow Ancient Empire, and I found the jumble of wares interesting.

There were also many goods that had apparently come through trade with other coastal countries and the islands scattered across the sea.

Even merely looking around the market reminded me that, despite spending more than a decade traveling, I had seen only a tiny part of the eastern half of this continent.

Besides Mintar, the coastal countries included a large nation called Scroom, and even in the Yellow Ancient Empire, I had yet to visit Red Mountain Province.

Suin had cursed Scroom six ways to Sunday, but that was because their commercial interests were at odds. I would have to see the place for myself before I could know what it was really like.

Apparently, there were snake people I had never seen in Red Mountain Province, and the country of the eastern dwarves lay nearby.

There must also have been many tribes in the Great Grassland that I had never encountered.

Ah, speaking of the Great Grassland, there were halflings and fairies there as well.

I had almost no dealings with the halflings this time, and I had never been particularly interested in fairies, but I had learned that they, too, were far from a united people.

Perhaps some kind of change was taking place among the fairies.

There were things I had missed by hurrying past them and places I had never visited... Ah, it was certainly a shame, but all of them could be opportunities for another time.

For an ordinary human, traveling all the way around the eastern region might be the journey of a lifetime, but I was a high elf.

Compared to a lifespan of a thousand years, the more than ten years I had spent in the east amounted to no more than a brief span of time.