A Bloodsucking Demon in a Snowy Town (4)

Then another week passed, making four weeks since I began gathering information, and I learned something interesting.

Apparently, a movement was underway in this country to eliminate Reihon in defiance of the Emperor's wishes.

Of course, it was not a public movement, but a covert struggle taking place behind the scenes.

Apparently, a faction of the military had rallied around Rubium Shurizen, the eldest child of Faud Shurizen, the general executed for opposing the invasion of the Rudoria Kingdom, a campaign whose details remained unclear; several nobles were supporting them.

Their goal was to execute Reihon as a treacherous minister who had led the Emperor astray and set the country right.

From my perspective, though, the Fodor Empire was an aggressor nation, and since it considered slavery legal, there was nothing to set right in the first place.

Still, perhaps exploiting people from other countries as slaves or expanding into the warm southern lands was unavoidable to survive in this country's harsh environment.

Distinctions and discrimination had their purposes, and there were many cases in which society needed them.

As someone who was not one of the people living in this land, that was something I could not understand, and I probably had neither the standing nor the right to interfere.

However, if a country where people I knew lived was attacked and those people were enslaved, I would oppose the attackers without mercy.

So I had no sympathy whatsoever for their principles or cause, but the existence of a faction targeting Reihon was extremely convenient for me.

After all, if I decided to eliminate Reihon and carried it out, then as long as I left no evidence behind, suspicion would naturally fall on them.

They were also an excellent source of information.

Since they operated mainly in the imperial capital, I could learn something of the movements at the heart of the empire—even things the lord of this town could not know—by eavesdropping on their conversations.

In the first place, they had come to Coltoria to become involved in gathering and transporting supplies, draw closer to Reihon, and watch for an opportunity to strike him.

Therefore, as long as I continued watching them, I should be able to take advantage of that opportunity myself.

Still, planning to harm someone while eavesdropping on them like this was... truly corrosive to the spirit.

The dwarves cared about me, but I could not meet with them too often.

People were going about their lives right in front of me, and I could even hear their voices, but I could not join them.

I knew it could not be helped, but this land was simply too cold, and I could not help feeling lonely.

I wonder if Win is immersed in smithing right now.

With that damn dwarf master, Azvaldo, teaching Win, there was nothing to worry about, but I still found myself wondering how things were going.

Kaeha, her family, and the other disciples from the same school... Yes, they must all be doing well.

Spirits were always at my side, and there had been a time when I thought that alone was enough. But after leaving the deep forest and learning to live among people, it seemed I had become quite prone to loneliness.

Though I could not move, this information gathering was something only I could do, so I had no time to feel bored. Even so, I could not help feeling the emptiness beside me.

But setting aside my complaints, the accumulation of so much information revealed things that were by no means all favorable to me.

For example, the dwarves had lost contact with their brethren living in the towns north of the imperial capital.

More precisely, the whereabouts of nine dwarves were unknown: three smiths working in the imperial capital, four smiths scattered among the northern towns, and two serving in something like advisory positions in the smiths' guild.

If they had been ordinary humans, nine missing people would... be an entirely unsurprising number for a large country.

But dwarves had never been numerous to begin with, so the disappearance of nine of them should have caused a tremendous uproar in the Fodor Empire's smiths' guild.

And yet, the fact that the dwarves had gone missing had not come to light until someone investigated, because the Emperor of the Fodor Empire was involved in their disappearance.

Every one of the missing dwarves had received an invitation from the Emperor, gone to an audience with him, and then disappeared.

The imperial capital's castle was guarded by a great many soldiers and filled with officials and servants, yet no one had seen the dwarves emerge from the audience chamber.

If that was the case, then the Emperor was undoubtedly involved in the dwarves' disappearance.

Consequently, the smiths' guild could hardly denounce or investigate the Emperor directly, so it had kept silent about the dwarves' disappearance.

After learning this, some of the dwarves had returned to the dwarven homeland to report it, while all the rest were saying they would descend on the imperial capital and demand answers from the Emperor.

The dwarves were by no means a foolish race, but they were impulsive and valued their comrades, so it was only natural that they could not simply keep quiet after hearing this.

But for them to descend on the imperial capital right now would be an extremely bad move.

According to what I had overheard from that faction, Reihon had ingratiated himself with the aging, weakening Emperor by claiming that he could restore the man's youth.

Apparently, under the pretext of performing rituals for that purpose, he had been killing the slaves he bought up, as well as people of nonhuman races.

Of course, that was a story told from the extremely biased perspective of people who resented Reihon, so accepting it at face value would be dangerously reckless.

But although the Emperor was supposed to have been growing old and weakening, over the past few years he had seemed to regain the vigor of his prime rather than decline, and he had favored Reihon greatly.

Even if that was a suspicious interpretation, the fact that there were grounds for seeing things that way suggested that some of it might be true.

It seemed my bad premonition might have been correct after all.

The other day, I suddenly remembered the continuation of a poem I had heard from the High Elf elders.

Three are those who, though not truly immortal, reached out for immortality.

One is the Demonfolk, the final form of people who fell into demonhood.

One is the fairy race, which cast aside individuality and became a whole, rendering the death of any one of them meaningless.

One is the xianren, arrogant sages who became one with nature's ki and sought to become spirits while still alive.

The Demonfolk were people who sought to evolve by deliberately taking powerful magic into themselves, just as beasts turn into monsters through magic.

Regardless of race—humans, beastfolk, dwarves, elves, or any other—those who achieved evolution through that method were called Demonfolk, feared, and destroyed.

Even so, it was by no means impossible that some remnant of their lineage had survived somewhere.

The fairy race consists of tiny people with butterfly wings—the beings commonly known as fairies—but the entire race is a single life-form.

They reproduce to increase their numbers, but each body is merely one terminal, moved by the collective consciousness of the species.

Thus, the death of an individual has no meaning, and it could be said that they had achieved a form of immortality.

However, because their small bodies were unsuited for battle, they would sometimes kidnap children from other races, incorporate them into their collective consciousness, raise them, and have them protect their swarm as warriors.

Frankly speaking, they were extremely nasty pests.

And finally, there were the xianren... Reihon was probably one of them.