What Changes, What Remains (20)

The caravan circled around the outside of Zieden's royal capital before entering it.

Naturally, this was to remove the rocky hills blocking the capital's three entrances.

Removing the rocky hills before the negotiations—and, so to speak, withdrawing the blade held to our opponent's throat—was also meant to show how easy it was for elves to do so.

Actually, I imagine it would be quite difficult for anyone other than me—the one who created them—to clear them away, and reproducing them would be difficult as well.

To keep them from realizing that, I deliberately removed them in an instant.

But in the negotiations that followed, I had no role to play.

In fact, I didn't attend the negotiations at all.

Appearing at the negotiating table would mean exposing myself before Zieden's rulers.

Airena and the others had taken this into consideration because they thought it would negatively affect my life in the future.

I stayed behind in the carriage.

Yes, I intended to continue wandering alone around the central part of the continent and living as I pleased.

Appearing before rulers could interfere with that.

Airena was one thing, but the other elves wouldn't be able to help worrying about me while they were there.

Even if they didn't discover that I was a High Elf, if they somehow came to think I held a position of importance among the elves, things would become extremely troublesome.

It would be bad enough if that scrutiny remained limited to Zieden, but if word spread to other countries as well, I might have to leave the central part of the continent again for twenty or thirty years—or even longer.

That was how long it would take for the people at the centers of various countries to change over several generations and forget that I existed.

Naturally, the people I hoped would not forget me would forget me as well with the changing generations.

For now, my acquaintances from the Yosogi school—Shizuki and her children—were probably still alive.

But after thirty years, it wouldn't be strange if not a single person who knew me remained.

That would be far too lonely.

That will happen someday.

Eventually, it will.

Even so, that time is neither now nor thirty years from now.

It could wait another hundred or two hundred years.

Still, sitting around in the carriage was boring, so I thought I'd talk a little about Win.

I had a letter from Win in my possession, one that Airena had been keeping safe for me all this time.

It had been... thirty years since Win left me.

He was now sixty-two, which would put him somewhere around the middle of his twenties in human terms.

Comparisons were largely meaningless, but if his age were converted to human years, Win had already surpassed me.

Ever since my time at the Yosogi school dojo, letters from him had arrived roughly once or twice a year.

Well, there had been times when none arrived, but those letters had probably been sent and then lost somewhere along the way.

In this world, delivering a letter to a distant place was truly difficult.

Having one delivered cost a great deal, and there was no guarantee that it would arrive even after being sent.

There was no way to confirm whether it had arrived, either.

Someone might simply pocket the money and throw the letter away.

Even if it was carried in good faith, bandits or monsters might attack along the way.

It might be misplaced and lost when loaded onto a ship, passed from one person to another, or mixed in with something else.

Even so, in this world, all one could do was send a letter and trust that it would arrive.

From the incomplete letters in my possession, I couldn't learn in detail where Win was or what he was doing now.

But the most important thing the letters told me was that he still existed somewhere in this world.

That made me happier than anything else.

...To the south of the Pulha Great Forest, there was a small stretch of land between the forest and the sea.

It was too narrow for a country to claim, but it formed a corridor that reached around to the western side of the Pulha Great Forest.

This empty stretch was called the Pulha Great Highway, a route that made it possible to travel between the eastern and western sides of the Pulha Great Forest.

Though calling it a road was generous—it wasn't maintained like a true highway, and free people who disliked belonging to any country, criminals, and other people with circumstances of their own had settled there and built villages, while monsters frequently emerged from the Pulha Great Forest in search of food—it was a fairly dangerous place.

In fact, almost no merchants would have wanted to travel through the Pulha Great Highway to trade.

Rather than pass through such a dangerous place, traveling by sea was at least safer and took far less time.

Yet Win had deliberately headed west through that place, which could reasonably be called a semi-dangerous zone.

Perhaps he had wanted to gain practical experience for what lay ahead, rather than simply test his skills.

That wasn't a bad idea at all.

Venturing into the Pulha Great Forest itself would have been recklessly foolhardy, but Win was more than capable of dealing with the monsters that emerged from it.

The truly greater danger was the hardy humans who had settled there.

They were far more cunning than monsters and would use any means necessary.

For Win, who, as far as I knew, had never killed anyone, that must have been a trial in itself.

His letters gave me no way of knowing what trials had befallen him or how he had overcome them.

In any case, Win reached the western side of the Pulha Great Forest.

...Actually, I had been mistaken about one thing: the western side of the Pulha Great Forest apparently wasn't the western part of the continent after all.

The Pulha Great Forest lay almost at the center of this continent, and the regions on either side of it were both called the central part of the continent.

A region on its western side, about the same size as the eastern side that I had mistakenly believed was the entirety of the central continent, apparently existed as well.

But that western central region—it's a little confusing, so from here on I'll call it the west-central region—was a chaotic place where the ideologies and cultures of the continent's true west and of this side, the east-central region, were all mixed together.

To give one concrete example, the western religion that held humans to have the highest status and the east-central churches that worshiped a god of abundance, teaching that all people were equal as children of the earth and should live each day with gratitude, were apparently fiercely competing to gain followers.

Because countries had different state religions, those differences sometimes even led to wars between neighboring countries.

In other words, Win must have experienced firsthand what the humans living in the west he intended to visit were like.

But even so, he continued westward.

In the west, Win apparently avoided going near human countries.

That was because the only nonhuman races allowed into human countries there were those who had been enslaved.

And elves were apparently among those enslaved nonhuman races.

The drugs and methods used to enslave elves in the Kingdom of Rudoria had probably come from the west.

Perhaps missionaries trying to spread the western religion to this side had approached nobles of the Kingdom of Rudoria to gain a foothold... It sounded entirely plausible.

I wondered what Win had felt about that.

But because he stopped going near human countries, his letters became even more fragmentary.

In the west, Win made an acquaintance among the beastfolk.

I didn't know the details, but apparently Win had intervened in a conflict between humans and beastfolk.

According to his letters, the beastfolk were divided into the Horned Tribe, which valued knowledge, and the Fanged Tribe, which valued martial prowess.

This was only a vague impression, but perhaps it was something like the difference between herbivores and carnivores.

The first of them Win befriended was a member of the latter, the Fanged Tribe.

The letter referred to this person as 'she' rather than 'they,' so Win's acquaintance must have been a woman.

In any case, they wore animal pelts, hid their faces behind masks, and fought with the ferocity of real beasts.

They did so using physical abilities far superior to those of humans.

And yet the Fanged Tribe apparently continued to lose its battles against humans.

The reasons were the difference in numbers and the difference in equipment.

In a one-on-one fight, the difference in strength between a Fanged tribesperson and a human was obvious.

But once humans donned iron armor, took up spears, and formed a phalanx, the Fanged Tribe suddenly had no way to fight back.

Fortunately, heavy infantry was slow, so the Fanged Tribe was never wiped out in a single crushing defeat, but its sphere of influence continued to shrink, and many beastfolk were captured by humans and enslaved.

With captured iron weapons, the Fanged Tribe's strength was enough to punch through even iron armor.

But the weapons they acquired as spoils were nowhere near sufficient in number, and the beastfolk, who had always relied on their physical abilities, apparently had no technology for producing weapons.

Yet Win appeared there and helped the Fanged Tribe.

He had saved the daughter of an influential member of the Fanged Tribe, and the value of that achievement must have more than made up for the fact that Win was half human by blood.

More important than anything, Win possessed the weapon-manufacturing technology they desperately wanted.

And not merely human technology: he had smithing techniques taught to him directly by dwarves, technology superior even to that of humans.

I didn't know what Win had felt or thought about the situation in the west.

The incomplete letters contained only reports on the situation, not his feelings.

After that, his letters stopped describing even the situation and became nothing more than messages assuring me that he was safe.

I had no idea what Win was doing in the western lands now, but... he had probably come into full-scale conflict with the humans of the west.

Perhaps he was wary of his letters being seized by humans and the information within them leaking out.

The only thing the letter said was that he wanted to have another match with me someday.

Ah, I feel the same way.

Win must have grown stronger, and he would continue to grow stronger.

If we exchanged words and crossed swords, I was sure I would come to know the parts of him that letters alone could never convey.

I have no idea when that will be, though.