Chapter 140 — Byron's Great Adventure, and a New Guest

"We'll go in and take a look," Byron said, his face still cautious, though his heart had begun to leap. As a former mercenary who had roamed every ruin of the Southern Region, great and small, without ever coming to grief, he seemed already to scent something good. "After searching so long, we've finally found something!"

...

While Byron and his party pressed ever deeper into the mountain ruin, a new guest was at the same moment setting foot upon the new territory of the Cecil family.

She was a young woman of exquisite figure, dressed in gauzy garments that did not seem to follow Ansul style, her long hair falling loose behind her back. A pale violet veil covered her face, leaving only a pair of bright, lively eyes exposed. And just like that, she walked openly into Cecil's domain, past the soldiers' sentry posts, through the gate of what was now a small town rather than a camp, and on between row upon row of neat wooden houses.

Cecil's subjects hurried to and fro around her, busy at their labors, yet every one of them looked straight through her as though she did not exist.

Thus the veiled woman strolled along, unhurried and unbothered, observing with open curiosity this town that, by any reckoning, could only be a few months old. In other places, those orderly wooden houses would already have counted as proper town buildings—after all, in most parts of this era, commoners' dwellings could not even compare with such structures. But in truth these wooden houses were still plainly "transitional buildings," for along both sides of the town's main avenue one could everywhere see houses being demolished and rebuilt. Those had tamped foundations and were being raised in brick and tile, unmistakably the next generation of homes for this little town.

An odd noise came from not far off. The veiled woman followed the sound and found that it issued from a cluster of workshops from which smoke and dust were rising. Curiosity drawing her on, she walked over and pushed the door open without a shred of hesitation—then stared, dumbstruck, at the scene within.

So this was where the bricks and tiles were fired, but beneath the rain canopy in the middle of the yard stood two strange-looking machines. One of them gave off an obvious magical reaction; driven by some sort of arcane mechanism, it rotated and, through a powerful axle, drove the other machine connected to it, while that second machine ceaselessly pressed the mud-and-sand mixture used as raw material into neat, solid brick blanks. The two machines were not only astonishingly efficient but plainly required no complicated control: only two commoners in coarse cloth trousers stood by watching, while everyone else was busy loading the swiftly formed brick blanks onto handcarts and pushing them toward the row upon row of kilns on the far side of the yard—kilns that stood a good several sizes larger than ordinary brick kilns.

Those two large magical devices... what were they?

Arcane mechanisms? But where were the mages who controlled them? Who was feeding them magical power? Who was regulating their flow of magic? Who governed their speed and their starting and stopping?

Could it possibly be those two ordinary people who showed not the slightest magical reaction at all?!

Come to think of it... magical reactions seemed to be detectable everywhere around this place. That was truly strange. Could this entire domain have been built atop a focal point of magic?

The veiled woman frowned her lovely brows. She very much wanted to pry those two machines open and have a look, but to attempt such an outrageous act would defeat even the most skillful stealth or psychological suggestion. So she could only shake her head in regret, back out of the yard, and close the door behind her.

And just then, a voice suddenly came from behind her—strangely familiar, and brimming with vitality: "Ah! Who are you?!"