Sylver Seeker

A lot of things made sense, now that Sylver knew a dragon was being used to power the barrier. For starters, it made him understand the culture and mentality of the people here.

Most cities struggled to defend themselves from the monsters standing outside their gates.

It was why despite being largely inferior, warriors were still the most common type of combat unit. For a person to become a mage, a mage capable of using offensive magic, they needed a lot of training, time, and came with the risk of being unsuited for actual combat.

And a city that needed people capable of fighting right fucking now couldn’t afford that, even the people with good magical potential had no choice but to train to be a warrior.

But the Schlagen mountains were different.

They didn’t have to worry about monsters outside their barrier, or foreign armies, because breaching their barrier was literally impossible.

On top of that, the mana and Ki in the air made the soil ridiculously fertile and meant they weren’t starving. Aside from some very minor luxury items, these people didn’t have any reason to leave their cozy and well-protected bubble.

Sylver had seen similar civilizations in the past, but those were never so… infantile, the way this one was. Those were careless, but they weren’t stupid, they had some kind of plan for when their impenetrable defenses were eventually penetrated.

Sylver chose not to think about the implications of removing an entire country’s defense, because he didn’t want to, and if he was honest with himself, didn’t care. It was their own fault for standing between him and Edmund, and their own fault for being careless enough to let someone like him inside.

It wasn’t their fault, but at the end of the day, Sylver made a choice, and even if this ended up becoming another Red War type of scar on his name, it was a worthy trade for Edmund.

If it was just a dragon, then there would at the very least be a chance Sylver could threaten it or negotiate with it. But this one was the dragon, going against it would be akin to going against a god. A god that was holding Edmund hostage.

Sylver had a better chance of defeating Rose than he did defeating this dragon.

He did toy around with the idea of approaching the emperor and asking him to force the dragon into giving up Edmund, but that idea had a couple of minor flaws in it. Mainly Sylver wasn’t entirely certain as to what he could offer the man.

Make the dragon give me back my brother, or I will try to kill you?

Make the dragon give me Edmund, or I will work to free it?

All Sylver could offer were threats. And if his understanding of people was to be believed, the emperor would probably choose to kill him, either for threatening him or just in case. That’s what Sylver would have done if the roles were reversed.

Plus, the emperor was allegedly dead, so that further limited Sylver’s options.

The only real path forward was doing as the dragon said and preventing the emperor’s son, and the shield ancestor's daughter, from having a child, and waiting for the chain to snap on its own.

Sylver already knew where the son was, even if he wasn’t in a position to do anything about him. Sylver was “strong,” but invading the equivalent of a country’s capital required a bit more strength than Sylver or Faust, currently possessed.

Which was why Sylver was instead going to focus on finding the girl.

He almost wanted to dance when he had turned out to be right. The symbol carved onto the shield the dragon had shown him, was identical to one of the symbols inside the book Sylver had found in the home that belonged to Fobur Plateforged.

Sylver had read the book backward and forwards, and the symbol kept popping up every now and then. Whoever Fobur was, he clearly had some kind of connection to the shield girl.

The book was coded and Sylver couldn’t figure out how to read it, there were several houses marked on the map.

After he had had a chance to look through Fobur’s house again, Sylver planned on visiting the nearest marked building, and possibly learn of a secret shield ancestor worshiping cult, or something along those lines.

If it turned out to not have any connection, Sylver planned to travel upstream and wait for a boat carrying a girl with a birthmark on her shoulder to pass through.

Because of the fiasco at the Green Rabbit sect, Faust had decided it would be a better idea to send someone else to trade the ingredients Sylver had gathered for jade. They were still seen as “thieves,” but now they weren’t so desperate as to accept whatever crummy deal was offered them.

More importantly, they only needed a little jade, for Faust to kickstart his alchemical career. All he really needed was a big cauldron, a fancy big cauldron, that was special in a way Faust couldn’t explain, but the important thing was that once he got it, he could make all the potions and pills that he wanted.

The jade made from selling those would then be “lent” to the sect members to buy themselves proper gear and weapons, and they would then go out hunting for more potion ingredients. Faust would then “buy” the ingredients off of them, and leave them with a small amount of profit that they will use to settle their debts.

It was a bit of a roundabout way of handling things, but this was Faust’s idea, and Sylver trusted that he knew what he was doing.

Sylver’s hope of finding some kind of clue in Fobur’s house was squashed the moment the building came into view. Sylver hadn’t been certain as to what he hoped to find, but whatever it was, he was fairly certain the fact that the entire building had been turned into rubble meant he wouldn’t have found it anyway.

Scratch that.

There were still some walls left, and the height suggested something very interesting. Whoever had destroyed it, had stopped after they finished breaking apart the place where Fobur had hid his book and letters.

While it was possible this was just a coincidence, the more likely answer, and the answer Sylver preferred, was that the book was important somehow, and the fact that Sylver was in possession of it meant he had a bargaining chip.

All that was left was figuring out who he could bargain with.

***

There were 3 different symbols that marked the buildings on the map in Fobur’s book.

The people that lived in the houses marked with an upside-down Y had all mysteriously disappeared.

Sylver’s “forgetful old man looking for his granddaughter/grandson” act did wonders for learning the homeowner’s name, place of employment, and how recently they had left.

The first two weren’t that interesting, Sylver didn’t recognize any of the names, and none of the people worked for anyone important. They were gardeners, butchers, a fishmonger, and a bard, perfectly ordinary people.

Except they packed up their shit and left in the middle of the night, roughly an hour after the time Fobur was supposedly kidnapped.

They were just gone.

And while this may be a coincidence, Sylver did take note of the fact that none of them were “local,” they had all moved to this area during the last 10 years, but none of them grew up here.

The buildings marked with an O with a line through it were perfectly normal shops. Even when Sylver gave Spring half an hour to search every available nook and cranny, he didn’t find any hiding spots or any other secret wall compartments.

The only thing all of these shops had in common was that they were owned by sect elders that had the word “Green” in their name. The Green Snake, Green Goat, Green Dog, and so on and so forth.

It was almost nighttime when Sylver finished investigating the stores and arrived at the next to last marked location. There were only 2 buildings marked with an X, and in hindsight, Sylver should have probably started with those.

Only the fact that they were so fucking far away from the rest of the marked buildings made him decide to check them out last.

The sects followed a somewhat obvious naming structure, that only became obvious after Faust had offhandedly mentioned it. There were “rings” of red, green, blue, and white, within the barrier that surrounded the Schlagen mountains.

The closer you were to the middle of the barrier, the richer/more powerful your sect was, and the same was true in reverse. White was richest and colorless was poorest. It was quite similar to the system the Garden had, except people could move between the rings freely, ish.

Once Faust paid off the debt his sect owned, their name would be “Something Sect.” After he attained more land, and some part of his sect was within the “Red Circle”, his sect would become the “Red Something Sect.”

From the way he explained it, the sects traded land the way hermit crabs traded shells.

Faust paid to buy the land belonging to a red sect, that then purchased land from a green sect, that then purchased land from a blue sect, that eventually had enough money to purchase land in the White Ring. The end result was that the “ring” would stay the same, but the people living in it would change.

There were other ways of attaining land, but since Faust was handling everything, Sylver left it to him to figure out. All Sylver had to do was not kill someone important, at most he could cripple, and if Faust could forbid it, he would have forbidden Sylver from killing. As it stood Faust asked that Sylver not kill anyone important.

These sects apparently needed an honorable reason to “attack” another sect, and the reason typically tended to be “that sect’s member killed one of our sect’s members!”

Faust also attempted to explain to Sylver how he should act when speaking to someone with a “higher status” than him, but then decided that Sylver wouldn’t piss someone off for the fun of it and told him to do what he thought was necessary.

If someone started shit with someone as polite and amicable as Sylver, then they started shit with him for a reason, and there wasn’t much Sylver could do about it.

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