Chapter 277: A Lesson in Interpersonal Relationships

The first group arrived in Lyra on the fourth day after that meeting.

They entered through the East gate when the sun had just risen. There were seven people in total, dressed in ragged but clean clothes, with neatly combed hair. Each person wore a small bundle and held a travel pass ready in their hand. The guard at the East gate was Elric’s man, having been replaced three days ago. He glanced at the paper bearing the branch’s seal, then waved his hand to let them pass, without even bothering to ask another question.

Six more people entered through the South gate by noon. Five people entered through the West gate in the afternoon. Nine people arrived the next day, divided into two groups, one at the North gate and one at the East gate.

This continued for seven consecutive days, fifty or seventy people each day, no group exceeding seven, no group arriving at the same time as another. All of them headed straight to the abandoned warehouse area behind the branch, which the Department of Labor had just rebuilt into three long rows of newly tiled houses.

No one noticed anything unusual.

Lyra was a city situated at a crossroad. Merchant caravans came in and out every day, refugees from towns and villages flocked in daily to ask for jobs. Adding a few dozen ragged people into a city of sixty thousand residents was just like adding a few drops of water into a basin.

People started to notice on the eighth day.

The first person to notice was a butcher in the East market.

He was chopping bones that morning when he saw a group of four people walking past, and he stopped his knife to watch them. Among those four was a short, broad-shouldered man with a curly beard, whose waddling yet sturdy gait he would recognize even if he were blind.

A Dwarf.

He had seen Dwarves many times, but each time it was a Dwarf being led by a chain around the neck to be sold, or a Dwarf being dragged out of a forge with blistered hands. Yet the one who just walked past him had a bare neck, a straight back, hands in pockets, walking while turning his head to talk and laugh with his three companions, and one of those three was a human.

The butcher stood stunned for a moment, then chopped his knife down on the cutting board with a loud thwack.

"Damn it." He muttered: "I told that old wife the mushrooms were poisonous, but she wouldn’t believe me. Look, now I am having hallucinations."

By the afternoon, an incident broke out at the well at the head of Dyer Street.

That place was where the whole neighborhood went to carry water, yet there was only one well, so there had always been an unspoken rule: the rich carried first, the poor carried later, and slaves had to wait until everyone was done before they could come to scoop the muddy water at the bottom.

Two Goblin children carried buckets to the well at noon that day, which was exactly the time when the housewives in the neighborhood were crowded around the well rim.

A woman turned around and saw them, immediately shouting at the top of her lungs, asking where these sewer rats crawled out from to dare approach someone else’s well, then she snatched the bucket from the older child’s hand and threw it straight to the ground.

The older child did not pick the bucket up. She stood up straight, pulled a wooden tag stamped with a red seal from her chest, raised it to the woman’s face level, and spoke in very fluent human language, slightly lisping on the final syllables but every word was clear:

"Madam, I am a worker of the Lyra City Hall, number four hundred and twelve. You just damaged public property. I must report this to the Department of Public Security."

The entire well fell dead silent.

The housewife stood dumbfounded for a few seconds, then her face turned from white to purplish-red, and she let out a shriek, lunging forward intending to slap the girl.

But that hand was held back by someone else before it could touch anyone’s face.

Steven had been standing there since when it was unclear. He wore coarse clothes, a jade badge shaped like a six-petaled flower hanging around his neck. His left hand was still carrying a bag of rice, while his right hand was gripping the housewife’s wrist. He gripped very lightly, so lightly that she could have snatched it away immediately, but the feeling just now made her stumble back three steps in a row. Her wrist felt as if it had just been clamped between two iron bars.

"You can just let her go." Steven said: "I do not want to cause trouble."

"What kind of thing are you?" A man in the crowd snapped, his gaze fixed on the large, majestic lion ears standing erect on top of the boy’s head: "An animal also dares to approach this street?"

"I am an employee of the Department of Labor."

The man burst into laughter, and the crowd laughed along, the kind of laughter Steven had heard for eight years in the arena, the laughter of those sitting on the stands looking down.

The boy’s hand tightened around the rice bag’s handle. His nails began to grow long and sharp, piercing into the fabric cover.

But he remembered Kaelen’s instruction the night before, that when you go out, if anyone curses you, just let them curse, cursing cannot kill you, but if you hit people, then all three thousand people lying in those three rows of houses will die with you.

Therefore, he retracted his nails, bent down to pick the wooden bucket up, dusted it off, and handed it back to the two Goblins.

"Go back." He said softly: "You do not need to carry water this afternoon, I will get it for you."

The three kids turned their backs and walked away, and behind them, the crowd was still laughing.

That night, when Kaelen walked past the back houses, he saw Steven sitting huddled on the steps in the dark, hugging his knees. He sat down beside the boy, without saying anything.

After a long while, Steven finally spoke up, his voice choked:

"Father, that day at the branch, when you told me to stand by the chair and the whole crowd of monks prostrated at my feet, I felt very happy. I felt so happy that I could not sleep for a long time that night. Yet today, when people cursed me as an animal, I just stood there stunned, unable to say a single word."

"Mhm."

"Why is that, Father?"

Kaelen looked up at the sky for a moment before answering.

"Because that day at the branch, they knelt before the golden mask, not before you. You knew that, so you were happy. That happiness was borrowed happiness, and borrowing from someone else is always comfortable. But today, she cursed directly at your species, and your species is truly yours, you cannot borrow it from anyone."

Steven fell silent.

"Do you know why I forced you all to take off your silk clothes?" Kaelen continued: "Because borrowed power can also be lost. The day that golden mask falls, that entire crowd of monks will stand up, dust off their pants, and spit in your faces exactly like the vegetable vendor did today. Therefore, I do not want you to get used to that. I want you to get used to this instead."

He pointed to the jade badge on the boy’s neck.

"This, no one can take back. Because it does not say who you are, it says what you can do."

Steven looked down at the badge in his hand for a very long time.

"But she does not need what I can do." He finally said: "She only saw my lion ears."

"Yes, that is true today." Kaelen nodded, the corners of his mouth curling up slightly to form a cold arc: "But if tomorrow you control the entire clean water supply of this neighborhood, the day after tomorrow you are the only one distributing rice to her, next month you are the one deciding whether her roof gets funding for repairs or not, then no matter how much she hates non-humans, she will have to obediently bow her head to you.

I do not need you to make them like you. I need you to make them unable to live without you. That is the true power of the badge on your neck. When you hold the power of life and death in your hands, the one who curses you today will have to bite their own tongue tomorrow."

Steven snapped his head up to look at him, the ears on top of his head twitching slightly, a fire seemingly just ignited in the depths of his eyes.

Kaelen stood up, patting the boy’s back: "Whatever I say now, you will not fully absorb it yet, just go eat. Tomorrow you go to the third house, I will assign two hundred people to you, you teach them how to line up at the Department of Labor."

Meanwhile, in the front room of the City Hall, Brian was sitting amid a pile of ledgers stacked up to his chin.

He had been sitting there for four days, twelve hours a day, to sort three thousand people into columns. The first column recorded names, the second column recorded age and race, the third column recorded occupation, the fourth column recorded literacy level, and the fifth column was the one he added himself, recording a single word.

That word was "fear".

Kaelen walked in, looked down at the open ledger, and asked:

"What is this column?"

"Yes, it is where I record who is still afraid." Brian answered without looking up: "For the past four days I have been talking to each person; some dropped to their knees as soon as I opened my mouth, some trembled so much they could not write their own names when I handed them a pen. If those people are sent out on the street now, they will cower at a single curse, and the more they cower, the louder people will curse."

"So what do you intend to do?"

"I intend to keep them in here for another month." Brian looked up, his face slightly pale from lack of sleep but his voice was very firm: "During that month, I will have them work in the backyard, go to the market only once a day, two people at a time, buy one item, then return. Increase it to two items next week. I will not let them take official jobs until they can go to the market without bowing their heads anymore."

Kaelen looked at the boy for a long time.

"When did you think of this?"

"Yesterday." Brian looked down, his finger unconsciously rubbing the edge of the ledger: "Because yesterday a Goblin uncle insisted on calling me "Sir". He is forty years older than me. I told him not to call me that, but he kept calling, calling endlessly, calling until I got annoyed. Then I lay down thinking at night and finally understood that he was not flattering me, he was afraid. He has been in the mines for thirty years, whoever holds a ledger he calls Sir, that is all."

Kaelen reached out to rub the boy’s head.

"You did the right thing. Just do it your way, I will not interfere."

"But Father." Brian called after him as he walked to the door: "I calculated, three thousand people eat two hundred and twenty pounds of flour every day, not counting salt and oil. The jade sold from the first batch can only feed them for four months. By the fifth month, it will be all gone."

"I know." Kaelen stopped at the doorframe: "Therefore, we must start plowing the eastern land next month."

"Nothing has grown on that land for three generations, Father."

"I did not say it could grow." Kaelen turned his head, grinning: "I said we must make it grow."

...

That night, in the bell tower of the City Hall, Kaelen sat alone looking down at Lyra city.

The lights were still on in the three houses at the back, where three thousand people were sleeping, and each person was a mouth to feed, a body to clothe, a name to record in the ledger. He had dragged them out of sixteen cities, and now they were entirely in his hands, their life and death determined by him.

In his palm, the threads of faith had thickened to the point of being uncountable; they were intertwined, warm, tangling together like a tangle of tree roots.

Kaelen sat for a very long time, then chuckled softly.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, he sat on the Divine Seat, with an entire world prostrating at his feet, yet he had never felt heavy even once. Now there were only three thousand people, and his shoulders were already drooping.

Kaelen rolled up his sleeve, revealing the Star Steel bracelet worn on his left wrist, the item that he and Sane had stayed up all night for a whole month in the forge in Aegis to make. The moonlight shone down on the silvery-white metal surface, threading through the hollow carvings, making the figure of the Lac Bird and the fire winding around it stand out clearly, while the cinnabar lines mixed with gold ink hidden in the array grooves gleamed a dark red color like dried blood.

The magic stone in the middle of the bracelet was still full; he had just replaced it three days ago.

He transmitted mental power into it, followed by Magical Energy, and the bracelet immediately warmed up under his palm. The array lines gradually lit up into a blue light ring running around his wrist, completing one lap, then running another lap.

Kaelen closed his eyes and waited.

It should have taken only three breaths for the other end to have a sound, that flippant "Hello, hello" that the other person insisted on saying every time they connected, even though he had scolded him no less than a hundred times that no one taught him to say that word.

But the light ring slowed down as it reached the third lap, dimmed on the fourth lap, then went out completely, leaving the cold bracelet on his wrist like a dead metal ring.

The connection went nowhere. It was not blocked, nor was it that the other side did not pick up; rather, the Magical Energy just radiated out and dissipated into nothingness, exactly like someone throwing a stone into a well and waiting forever without hearing it hit the bottom.

He tried again, and again, until the magic stone was visibly depleted before he stopped. It was the one hundred and ninety-seventh time already.

Kaelen rolled down his sleeve to cover the bracelet, looking up at the unfamiliar starry sky of the Great World.

"Stupid snake." He spoke softly into the wind, not knowing who he was talking to: "What corner are you in exactly? Do you still remember you have a beautiful, well-behaved, gentle, dignified, virtuous mate waiting wearily for you to return?"

The night wind blew past the bell tower, no one answered him. But it seemed the wind had carried his whisper away, sweeping it to some distant place.

In that place, in a dark, damp cave, a pastel purple egg swayed slightly.

A very thin pattern line suddenly cracked on the eggshell...