Chapter 17 — Tansang Town
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
When Heidi's voice died away, almost everyone present swallowed hard, instinctively.
Only Betty was the exception—the little girl had not understood a word of it.
Rebecca could not help but think of the monsters that had destroyed the family domain; those creatures had been the spawn of a magic tide. Until now she had assumed they had wandered in from the Gondor wastes, breached the magnificent wall, and invaded Ansell—after all, the Cecil domain lay on Ansell's southern border, close to the Gondor wastes. If one of the Sentinel Towers had indeed failed and opened a gap in the great wall, then it was entirely conceivable that a few monsters had slipped through.
But now Rebecca could not help but imagine something worse—what if those monsters had not come from the Gondor wastes at all? What if they had arisen naturally within the Cecil domain?
What if those monsters... meant a new magic tide?
"This... aren't we getting a little too worked up?" Amber was the first to break the silence. The half-elf lady forced a smile and pointed at the notebook in Heidi's hands. "It's just a diary left by a wild mage, and what's written in it isn't even clear. Are we really going to jump straight to thoughts of a magic tide?"
Gao Yang did not argue. Instead he nodded. "Mm. It's also possible that I'm simply too on edge."
After all, it was only a wild bit of analysis based on the memories he had inherited. Sure, reciting seven-hundred-year-old history in the first person, all in one breath, had been thoroughly satisfying—but once he had finished, even he found it a touch alarmist.
"Exactly!" Seeing Gao Yang nod, Amber immediately breathed a sigh of relief. "You've been dead seven hundred years, old man—your mind's still stuck back in those days and hasn't turned the corner yet. I know you lived through a magic tide, so it's probably just some deep-seated trauma—Aiya!!"
Rebecca's staff came down on the half-elf's head. She glared. "You will not be disrespectful to the Ancestor!"
Gao Yang eyed Rebecca's staff with a peculiar expression, thinking to himself that this little girl had been swinging her "Restful Staff Technique" at the Mystic Meridian Sect not so long ago—where had her sense of disrespect been then...?
"Whatever credibility these matters may have, once we reach Saint Sunil, they must all be reported to His Majesty," Heidi said as she handed the notebook back to Gao Yang. "As for how much of it the king will believe... that is beyond our influence."
Gao Yang silently put the notebook away and pressed all his tangled thoughts down into the depths of his heart.
Then he lifted his head and gazed up at the giant "sun" in the sky.
Above the forest clearing there was no canopy to block the view; the sky lay open, and the giant sun had climbed to its highest point of the day. That vast and oppressive crown of light was bringing light and heat to this world—and the power of magic as well.
Perhaps it was that last element, more than anything, that had given this world natural laws utterly different from those of Earth.
Gao Yang's gaze traveled across the sun's surface. Those faint, indistinct patterns were probably storms on the surface of a gas giant. He tried to find those ominous dark-red markings among them, but in the end found nothing: those patterns had likely been a fleeting apparition, and now they had all vanished.
Yet the sense of urgency in Gao Yang's heart did not fade. He merely pressed it down for the time being and silently plotted the road he would have to walk in the future.
First, establish a foothold in this world. True, it was only a declining old family... but any starting point was better than being transmigrated into some desolate mountain grave.