NOVEL NEXT Chapter 77: Winter across the kingdom
The family didn’t have enough food and money to last the winter. At the very least, the weather in the Rosewood fief would be a little more forgiving.
So, they packed up all the food and money they had, carried anything they could take, returned their lands to the local nobles, and left.
They had an old donkey and a wagon, reserved for the weakest family members. They knew the approximate direction: they needed to head south. They would ask for more directions along the way.
They got lost.
By the time they were back on track, the family patriarch was afraid that some of them might not make it. They still had to cross one more fief, but the roads were covered in snow, the travel was hard, and they had no more food or money.
“—Ho ho ho, what do we have here?”
The mentality of the family members collapsed as a group of roughly dressed bandits blocked the road ahead of them.
“We don’t have anything!” one person shouted desperately. “We have no food, no money!"
“You have clothes, you have a donkey,” one of the bandits said.
“You have people,” another leered.
The family patriarch thought about the small multi-use knife at his waist. But how could he use that against all the bandits? The tall men of the family started to move forward. They had to do something—
“Mama, what’s that thing flying in the air?” one of the children in the wagon suddenly asked.
“Shit! That doesn’t look like a bird!” the bandit on lookout notified his group.
“No, this isn’t the Rosewood fief, why is that bastard earl here!!!”
One side grew sudden hope. The other side grew sudden panic.
In the air, Ren Xiyang’s eyebrows rose slightly. He was dressed in black with the red Rosewood emblem embroidered on the back of the coat. He carried a large bag and stood on top of a large flat wooden platform.
He was flying over the neighbouring fiefs because he had received some (politely-worded) complaints for the neighbouring noble families about migrating groups of people passing through their fief looking for the Rosewood fief.
He hadn’t expected to find bandits, though. He had flown around the Rosewood fief many times and never encountered them.
The bandits scattered as he landed, but his ring of fire around them was much faster. At the same time, he heated the air around the travellers, giving them respite from the cold.
He looked at the bandits. “What should I do with you?” he asked them directly.
The bandits cowered facing the little cold earl.
“Sir—my Lord! Please, let us go! We were just passing by!”
“We’re innocent, my Lord! We’re just travellers!”
“Don’t kill us! I have a wife and children at home, I’m just going out looking for work, my Lord!”
At each sentence, the fire around the bandits grew higher and higher.
Did they think he’d believe them? Each of those things could be strictly true—because Ren Xiyang had come in time before they did anything this time. If they knew about him, if they could travel about, then they could have come to his fief to get food and clothes in exchange for some honest labour.
Since this wasn’t his fief, Ren Xiyang didn’t technically have the power to charge them. But that didn’t mean he’d let them go.
He turned to the travelling group. “Are you headed for the Rosewood fief?”
The patriarch of the family stepped forward and bowed deeply. “Yes, my Lord. We heard that the Rosewood fief had a soup kitchen, and one of my nephews has been ill…”
Ren Xiyang took off his bag. Inside was some water and food. He gave them to the group. “As many of you as possible, get onto the wagon. Sitting over the edge is fine. The rest of you, stand on this platform with me. The donkey too.”
The confused people hurried to do Earl Rosewood’s bidding.
“Good. Now, don’t panic.”
Ren Xiyang ended the fire ring around the bandits. A moment later, the wagon, the platform, and the bandits all started to levitate!
“Hee-haw!” the donkey brayed in shock, stamping its feet on the moving platform beneath it.
“Arggg—!” the bandits screamed in fear as they squirmed in the air.
It would have been unethical for Ren Xiyang to firmly levitate them to the point they couldn’t move their limbs.
But there was no need for such dramatics: they were just 30 centimetres off the ground.
Ren Xiyang took the entire group down the road, going faster than a galloping horse. The bandits in the front helped block some of the wind. Eventually, the bandits stopped screaming, and eventually the travellers relaxed enough to eat and drink some of the food provided.
Upon approaching the nearest largest town, he left the travellers with the wagon and the platform at the outskirts, while he continued with the bandits to the closest guardhouse.
The guards all hurried out in surprise when they saw him approaching.
“I accidentally caught a group of bandits,” Ren Xiyang said, setting them down in the middle of the ring of guards. “I assume you have local laws to deal with them.”
“We do, Earl Rosewood!”
Ren Xiyang nodded. “Have a good day.” He flew up into the air a moment later.
The guards blinked in bewilderment as Earl Rosewood flew away. Did that just happen?
“Quit daydreaming, these bandits are on our wanted list!” the guard captain shouted. “Tie them up and throw them in the cells!”
“Yes, captain!”
The extended family group waited until Earl Rosewood flew away before whispering among themselves.
“This bread is yummy, Mama!”
“Good, have some water too.”
“Was that really Earl Rosewood?”
“How are we so lucky?”
“By the Saintess, that was so scary!”
“How can we repay the earl?”
“We owe him our lives…”
“Papa, why is the earl so short?”
“Shhhh, he’s still a child like you!”
“That sounds fake, papa!”
They lapsed into silence again when they noticed the earl returning.
Earl Rosewood silently levitated the wagon and wooden platform and they were moving once again. This time, Earl Rosewood levitated them higher and went a lot faster.
The scenery whizzed by. Children and adult alike had their eyes wide open as they looked around. The trip was exceedingly smooth and fast.
Soon, they arrived at the outskirts of a town. There was a big building surrounded by many mud-brick houses. The wagon and the platform landed.
Two Rosewood staff hurried forward. “Earl Rosewood, we’ll handle the rest.”
“Thanks. Get off the platform. They can help you.”
The people on the wooden platform hurried off it, pulling their numb-to-life donkey too.
“Thank you, Earl Rosewood! We’re forever in your debt!” the patriarch said humbly.
“No, it’s fine,” Earl Rosewood said dismissively. He and the wooden platform ascended and flew away once more.
The two Rosewood staff were very attentive. They asked the group about their plans and their goals. They showed them to two adjacent empty mud-brick houses to stay in and showed them where and how to get food and medical attention. They explained some brief rules and resources, such as the special task group dedicated to helping women and children. Each person was given a wooden ‘card’ needed to access the soup kitchen.
The patriarch and the relevant parents took the ill nephew to receive some medical attention. There weren’t any healers in attendance, but there was a skilled doctor who seriously examined the young nephew.
The rest of the extended family lined up and got some food—the first meal was free.
“What’s this? It smells so good!” they whispered to themselves.
The food-service staff smiled knowingly and served generous portions.
The family soon realised many other families and groups had trekked their way to the Rosewood fief, just like them.
“Hehehe,” one of the local men boasted after overhearing the family talking amongst themselves. “I was part of the team that build those houses! Did you see how the floor was warm? Even some of the rich merchants don’t have floors like this!”
“I wasn’t imagining that?”
“Hehe, that’s right! The earl showed the foremen how to do that. He wants some proper houses built after the winter ends, you look like you could do some hard work too haha!!”
“Most of us are farmers…”
The man pointed to the person next to him. “He didn’t know anything about building, he just acted like a coolie carrying materials. You can learn on the job, you know.”
“I knew more than those women who also built some of the houses!” the second man protested.
“Hehehe, who knows what Earl Rosewood was thinking, he insisted that the builders had to be gender balanced between 40% and 60%, whatever that means, so you ma’ams could also build some houses in the future!”
“But if you like farming, you can ask them”—the second man pointed to the Rosewood staff at the other end of the building—“about any farming jobs, you know? The Rosewood estate has a lot of farmland.”
The family members knew this, they had been told by the two Rosewood staff. “Actually, the earl himself flew us here!”
“Wow, lucky!”
While a few of the adults talked to others, the children were happily eating. “This tastes different! It tastes so yummy!”
“Wow, is this meat?”
“Hah, no that’s the earl’s invention, it’s called seitan. It’s made from flour. Cheap, for the likes of us.”
“It really does taste like chicken though…”
“If you want more, go and get more food, they don’t mind. It still counts as one meal.”
“!!”
The family members looked at each other. As they had warm food in their stomachs and a warm place to stay, they, like many others, were glad of their decision to head to the Rosewood fief.
Unlike Ren Xiyang who was collecting a lot of frequent-flyer experience, Rian spent the cold days ‘obediently’ in the Capital. His schedule was full of classes and meetings, some of which were more secretive than others.
His meetings with Viscount Obsidian, and later some other Obsidian members, were not a secret.
Ren Xiyang had given Rian detailed descriptions of the ‘phones’ in his previous world. Rian had picked out key features and design elements and communicated them to Viscount Obsidian, with the intent to produce a new generation of crystal balls.
Since the Obsidians were developing the spells and would be handling production, they would take the largest final cut. But given how expensive these would be, and how useful they would be, Rian would still be profiting. Not to mention, this collaboration firmly tied the Obsidian family to himself and Earl Rosewood.
His meetings with his agents were a secret. Those agents had cover jobs and cover reports, but the actual work content was classified.
Rian received word that they had tracked down certain Angio researchers—the people who had made the plague-curse in his first life. Neat reports of these people’s backgrounds graced his desk. There was a poor magical researcher, a healer working in the Angio capital, a criminal necromancer and others. He’d need to think about what to do about this information.
He knew exactly what to do with all the profit he was gaining from the heating lamp sales. He took a small fraction for his daily expenses and diverted the rest into the rapidly expanding Royal Healers’ Service. As the Service gain notoriety due to the aristocratic gossip, more healers came out of the woodwork to volunteer to join, either part-time or full-time.
Rian also personally asked various healers not affiliated with Duke Schauss to join.
Rian wasn’t scorning Duke Schauss, oh no, of course not. The Royal Healers’ Service was just his little project, there was no need to bother Duke Schauss over this matter, right? If any healers affiliated with Duke Schauss wanted to join the Royal Healers’ Service, then he would be overjoyed to have them! It’s simply that none had volunteered yet for ‘whatever’ reason…
A Schauss carriage entered a town in the Schauss fief.
Three people descended from the Schauss carriage: Duchess Schauss, Perseus Schauss, and Cassiopeia Schauss.
Due to the cold snow, Cassiopeia was warmly dressed in white fur and a red cloak. She exhaled as she clenched her fists inside her hand warmer.
Her servants wouldn’t tell her, but her friends told her about the latest rumours about Earl Rosewood and Prince Rian.
About how Earl Rosewood was providing emergency winter accommodation to help poor people. About how Prince Rian was setting up some charitable healing group to help poor people. About how the Schauss family were pretending that Prince Rian’s actions didn’t exist, and the subtle sense of schadenfreude among the rest of the aristocracy towards the Schauss family.
Cassiopeia was a good person. She was a better person than Earl Rosewood and Prince Rian!
She wished she had the internet and could ask “Am I the bad person” anonymously. But there was no internet, Cassiopeia needed to have confidence in herself. She was going to be a good person and go out and help some people too! And this little town was where she’ll do that helping.
Aside from the Schauss guards, one of the Schauss aides also joined them.
The aide introduced the town as they walked. “Weilhofen town has a population of ten thousand people, making it one of the more populous towns in the Schauss fief aside from the main city. Over there, we can see the main hospital of the town, and over that side, we see the Church of the Saintess. The church has a charitable healer clinic open today, where we will go next…”
Cassiopeia walked in between her mother and her brother. The commoners moved out of their way, giving them a clear street to walk down. Cassiopeia briefly forgot about her troubles as she took in the sights.
Since she had recovered her memories, she hadn’t seen many places like this. With the white winter snow, the town had a beautiful charm to it. It was as though she was visiting a fantasy medieval town out of a novel.
She had a feeling that something was wrong when the guards drew closer and the buildings around them became shabbier.
“…And this district could be considered the slums of the town. Despite efforts otherwise, the poor continue to congregate here…”
Cassiopeia’s gaze skipped uncomfortably over the groups of badly dressed people huddled together at the doors of some of the houses. Looked away from the houses that wouldn’t pass health and safety.
The beggars stirred and looked at the group.
But there was one person who seemed to be staring into the distance.
The person wasn’t moving at all. And their skin didn’t look right.
“Ah,” Duchess Schauss said. She moved, blocking that person from Cassiopeia’s view. “You, get someone to clear that body away…” she ordered one of the guards.
Cassiopeia suddenly felt sick. Had she just seen a dead person?!
Rian: All according to my plan ^_^
Ren Xiyang: You mean, just according to keikaku.
Rian: What?