Kestra still had nine of the fifteen slaves that had begged her not to be freed.
She had no illusion that they didn't want their freedom: they were terrified that as soon as they were free they would be cast aside and easy prey. None of them had made it over level 4, and they were all of an especially timid nature. There was also the prestige of being owned by the City Lord. It was a level of protection.
And that was how Kestra intended to fix this little mess.
She had set an appointment with Lady Nar and Lord Astril. Laura's interview had gone far easier than Kestra had hoped, and looking at that 145 / 147 freed slaves felt good. Hopefully, she could finish off this quest, and sever the last tie binding her to Sortalheim at the same time.
The Living Scroll notices she received just before the pair were ushered in only made her smile with genuine joy.
♦•♦•♦ Proposal of New Community Stone Operational Template Accepted ♦•♦•♦
Proposed plan for Community Stone operations in low mana zones has been accepted with minor corrections.
♦•♦•♦ ▲▼▲ ♦•♦•♦
♦•♦•♦ Congratulations! Planner ♦•♦•♦
You have proposed an update to a Heavenly system -- and it was accepted!
♦•♦•♦
Rewards:
- 500,000 Challenge Points
- Scroll: Reward Store (Consumable)
♦•♦•♦ ▲▼▲ ♦•♦•♦
After the tea had been poured and sipped, Kestra passed the pair identical documents. "Please read through these. I swear before the Heavens that if you accept the bargains I have described in these documents before you leave my office now, I will honor my end of them."
The light of the Heavens shimmered over Kestra.
Lord Astril and his mother read, and then conferred through communication devices. Kestra merely sat back and enjoyed her tea.
The youth cleared his throat. "Why? I know you said you planned to give up the city, but, why did you come here? Why did you kill Father? Why-- all of this?" he asked, brandishing the document.
"I killed your father because I believed him when he said he would never surrender. It was as quick and as clean a death as I could give him, though that was not in his honor, but to preserve my own. Which was also the reason I came here. Oh, the Myriad Realms issuing a quest to free those he had unjustly enslaved was confirmation, but I was coming here before the Blessing of Benevolence kicked in."
Lady Nar was doing her best to blend into the background, but Kestra saw the bloodless white of her tensed hands on her cup. Lord Astril didn't; he was too busy peering intently at Kestra. "You never shared the details of your quest. Was it to kill my father?"
"No. It was to free those he enslaved. Challenging him for his fealty oaths was necessary to that end, and taking control of the city was also intended to remove his power to enslave. When I first got the quest, the count was 132 unjustly enslaved. Now, the total is 147. As I said, he died because I believe him when he refused to consider surrender."
"But you were coming here before you got the quest. Why?" Astril asked.
"You met Tami and Puck. They evaded your father's attempt to enslave them, and discovered the poverty he inflicted upon the people whom he should have been protecting. It wasn't too hard for them to find people who wanted to free their families from your father's authority.
"They warned me of your father's actions, that he was enslaving strangers to Sortalheim that didn't have anyone stronger behind them to restrain him. When I first heard that, I was weak. I got stronger, and when I was telling my friends that I needed to see what I could do to stop the wrongful acts of your father, well, we all got the quest."
The boy looked back at the bargain. "Why would you give me the city?"
"One, I'm not. I'm naming you the City Lord's Successor under the authority of a Regency Council. All I'm giving you is the opportunity to take the city. That is an important distinction.
"Two, Oste. Under Oste's laws, you are the rightful successor to your father, and I am a usurper that they're honor bound to kick out. That's a war no one needs to fight, and blood that's better left unshed.
"Three, your mother. In that viper's nest of a seraglio your father made, she didn't turn to murder, but instead inspired the kind of loyalty that kept you safe. You have much to learn from her, and I expect that with her guidance you will become the kind of City Lord that the Heavens issue quests to support instead of supplant."
Kestra remained relaxed while she said all that, and now she sipped her tea.
The boy's lips moved, talking through his communication device, and his mother answered. He looked over the document, sucked in a deep breath, straightened up and said, "Before the Heavens, I accept this bargain you have presented in these pages."
The light of the Heavens shone over him, and then over Lady Nar when she repeated his words.
Kestra grinned, holding back an internal sigh of relief.
"Let's go to the City Stone, then."
It was a matter of a few moments for Kestra to enable citizenship and turn on the legal code and new operating parameters. Inspri quickly checked the changes to the parameters, finding the "minor corrections" made some of the descriptions more concise.
Next up, Kestra offered citizenship to every adult who had lived or maintained a home within Sortalheim or its territories for the past year, or been freed from slavery within the territory of Sortalheim during that same time.
"You need to accept the citizenship offer for the next part," she advised.
Winks of white light put a pendant with Sortalheim's heraldry around the necks of the Lady and Lord. While they studied the tokens, Kestra set up the successorship. There was an option for appointing a regent, and that went to Lady Nar as the head of the newly confirmed Regency Council.
Again, Inspri checked everything before Kestra confirmed the changes.
Last, but most importantly now, Kestra abdicated.
It felt so good to answer YES to that confirmation screen. Streams of golden light -- the anchors of the fealty oaths sworn to Sortalheim's City Lord which she had seized as spoils of the duel with Ramakith Ard -- flowed into the City Stone.
Astril slapped his hand on the Stone and then stood there for several minutes with a glazed over look on his face. He pouted a few times, but mostly his face was slack with a glut of new information.
Both Kestra and Lady Nar steadied the boy when his hand came off the Stone, his whole body swaying from the mental strain of taking in all the notices tied into his confirmation as Sortalheim's new City Lord Under Regency.
Kestra gave the boy a few moments to adjust before she prompted him with a pleasant voiced, "After you."
Back in Kestra's office, her nine slaves entered. She hated that they knelt, but it was this world's custom.
"You received the notice that I am no longer the City Lord of Sortalheim, correct?" she asked.
"Yes, Mistress!" they chorused.
"Anyone who wants to serve the City Lord shall have to accept their freedom first, but I have secured a Heavenly oath that those of you who choose, here and now, to serve the new City Lord will be taken into his personal service as paid servants, and shall only be dismissed for a breach of loyalty." Then she went through, one by and one, and rid herself of nine slaves.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Frustratingly enough, her quest count now listed 146 / 147 slaves freed.
Well, there was one last thing to be done and then she could track down that 147th slave. Maybe they were on a different realm now?
Kestra bowed to the young Lord. "Now, I'll be off. May your life be long and prosperity find you."
She exited the Lord's Donjon and headed toward Azure Village.
At the gates leaving the city, Kestra spotted a vaguely familiar face. It was one of the guards, and as she paused to wonder why the sight of him tugged at her memory, she overheard him grumbling to one of the other guards, "Man, she just left me! I'm a good provider, I am! But, nope, my wife thought ten silver was better than a lifetime with me! How crazy is that?"
"I'd pay ten silver to be rid of you, Emgars!" the man he was complaining to growled back. "Sergeant's coming so shut it!"
Kestra felt like slapping her own face for stupidity as she remembered the first guard she had heard tell Emgars to shut it.
"If I weren't oath bound in service, I'd've left, but it's my life to leave."
Kestra set herself in a safe spot out of the way and poked her servitor. «Inspri, how many people are still oath bound to me because of Ramakith Ard's oaths?»
A pause filled with the sense of searching out the answers. «594.»
"Before the Heavens, I release all of the oaths I won from Ramakith Ard that are within my rights to release," she declared.
Spots of golden lights streaked out of her.
♦•♦•♦ [COMPLETED] Quest: Free the Slaves! ♦•♦•♦
Requirements: Free those Lord Ramakith Ard of Sortalheim has unjustly enslaved.
Progress: 147 / 147 Freed Slaves
Rewards:
- Considered title
- 500,000 Challenge Points
EXP: 12,005
♦•♦•♦ ▲▼▲ ♦•♦•♦
Now, that felt great!
♦•♦•♦ Considered ♦•♦•♦
You completed a task for the Myriad Realms with great forethought.
♦•♦•♦
You are now eligible to serve on a Heavenly Tribunal of the Myriad Realms.
♦•♦•♦ ▲▼▲ ♦•♦•♦
♦•♦•♦ Congratulations! Liberator ♦•♦•♦
You have freed over 500 slaves in a single month and restored to them the control of their own destinies.
♦•♦•♦
Rewards:
- Spell: Liberator's Aura
♦•♦•♦ ▲▼▲ ♦•♦•♦
♦•♦•♦ Liberator's Aura ♦•♦•♦
Suppress any and all magical compulsions in the radius of effect, including Summoning Contracts. This ability also affects the caster's own magical compulsions, and is centered upon the caster.
GRADE: Expert
Components: None
Cost: 100 mana per second per meter radius
♦•♦•♦ ▲▼▲ ♦•♦•♦
And that was a mixed bag. Kestra wasn't complaining about the Liberator achievement, even if it would be a long time before she could cast the spell in a useful setting. No, it looked like she had somehow been given the reward of more work for a job well done.
Eh. There were a lot worse ways that could have gone, and it wasn't like she wouldn't have intervened somehow without the quest in the first place. At least she got more Challenge Points.
She still had something to do in Azure Village, so she picked herself up and set off once more.
----------------------------------------
Kestra took her time on the way to the village, harvesting as she went. It was a familiar habit for her, though she had to admit that she felt a little weird at first when she started harvesting entire trees with a bit of Control Earth to fill in the depressions where the roots had been.
Inspri had been in raptures of joy because, according to the Myriad Realms, Ramakith Ard had owned nearly all the skill manuals used to train the city's administrators, laborers, and guards. When Inspri brought that to Kestra's attention, she bought out the stock of one of the city's paper mills and enough ink to fill those pages. Then she tasked Inspri with figuring out how to make physical copies of the manuals.
That turned out to be an Apprentice grade Calligraphy technique called Copy Scroll. Essentially, it was Control Water and Earth to lay out the ink and dry it at very fast rates. Kestra got the skill ups for Inspri's efforts, which she didn't mind at all, especially when the Apprentice rank gift was a scroll with the technique to make consumable documents, Transmute Knowledge.
When Kestra had made Inspri handle the notices from winning the challenge duel with Ramakith Ard, the sprite had controlled which of the possessions were transfered via the auto-loot system. Of course that had included all the skill manuals, but also most of the things that had come about through mining the transmigrators' other-world knowledge.
Kestra gave the city the copies of the skill manuals Inspri made. She had no intention of ever surrendering the other-world inspired writings or devices.
Since Kestra had won possession of most of the furnishings, art objects, and magical tools and artifacts kept in the Lord's Donjon, she hadn't felt the slightest bit of shame in moving over the pieces she liked to her own personal realm.
However, there were more than enough ideas from those skill manuals that Kestra wanted to try out which required wood, like paper making and creating coke, a special kind of char used by blacksmiths in making resilient iron. From the description, she thought this Base grade of iron might actually be what had been known as steel back on Moh, but she wasn't sure.
So, Kestra wanted wood, but she didn't want to fell any of the trees in her private realm, not least because she was pretty sure her Nature Sprite buddy would be offended. Graemire had been teaching him how to harvest the plants for alchemical ingredients, and only the idea that he would be able to make better fertilizers and curatives for the plants he was tending had convinced him the whole concept of Alchemy wasn't profane.
Strangely, if it wasn't one of "his" plants, the Nature Sprite had no care what became of it. He only cared about the fate of the ones he had cared for. Graemire assured her it made perfect sense, so she accepted it as an Elemental thing.
"Why are you storing trees?"
Kestra jumped, turning to face the voice. The shadowy figure that had traveled with her from Song Village to Sortalheim tipped their ... head?
Kestra tried her new Liberator's Aura spell, limiting it to just barely above her skin, but the figure was just as indistinct and hard to focus on as before. So that was probably an illusion, or the shadowy figure was an actual animate shadow.
"Hello, again. I'm going to do some Woodworking, and it's quicker to store the tree entire than to stop and strip it down right here. Are you following me?" she asked, keeping her tone light and relaxed.
"Yes."
"Why?"
The shadowy figure said, "You're interesting. I was trying to find a trace of the Divine Seed, but it really is quite far gone. I don't have the anchor's toll to return home, so I might as well amuse myself."
"How much do you need for the toll?" Kestra asked.
"Two Sky grade mana stones or a High Sky grade Elemental core."
"Can you pay in equivalent Earth stones? That would be twenty, yes?"
"It would and if I had that I'd already be home."
Kestra used Control Wood to sweep up a bunch of sticks and braid them into a crude basket. Then she dropped in twenty Earth grade mana stones.
"Being far from home when you want to return is a sad feeling," she explained as she handed over the basket. "You saw the jie gate in Sortalheim, yes?"
The figure appeared to fumble at the basket before clutching the container into their shadows. "Yes. I ... This is a kindness? This is kindness. How do I respond?"
The words didn't actually seem to be addressed to Kestra, but she answered anyhow. "'Thank you' are the words used to express appreciation or gratitude."
The shadowy figure took a moment to consider. "Thank you," they finally said, before asking, "Why are you being kind to me?"
"I know what it is like to be stranded far from home, so knowing I've helped someone feeling that way to go home makes me happy."
"True kindness," the shadowy figure murmured, wondering, to themselves. Then, louder, they said, "I am known as Xanta Liam of the Dusk Walker clan. Should you Ascend to XiTian, it would be my honor to host you among my clan."
"Xanta Liam, I am known as Kestra to my friends, and when I reach XiTian, I hope I will find that you have prospered."
"I will await you," the figure agreed, before disappearing in a gust of wind.
Kestra quietly decided that she just needed to get over to Azure Village without any more delays. Her nerves weren't quite up to so many fortuitous encounters with entities seeking the Divine Seed.
----------------------------------------
Graemire met her a kilometer away from the village, pouting in his humanoid form. "It truly wouldn't have been any trouble to come and get you."
She smiled and hugged him. "I know, but turns out it was a happy circumstance that you didn't. I wouldn't have been able to help send another of the stranded higher realm folks home."
That just make her cultivation partner stiffen and pull back to search her over.
"I'm fine!" she insisted.
"What happened?" There wasn't a hint of playfulness in his tone.
That worried Kestra, but none of the Divine Creatures had ever explained why they sprang to this serious alertness at the mention of higher realm personages, or at least not in a way she understood, though it was obvious they were trying. Kestra wasn't sure if it was something about being a human or more about being a transmigrator that impeded her understanding.
She sighed at the frustration, but explained the meeting with Xanta Liam, both on her way to Sortalheim and today.
The worry left him, replaced by a very confuddled blankness. After a moment of processing what she had said, Graemire asked, "Dusk Walker clan? From XiTian?"
"That's what ... it? Said."
"And the Dusk Walker shared a name to you?"
"Yeah, Xa--"
"No! Don't repeat it!" He slapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide with panic.
Kestra blinked away the sudden pain-tears, feeling her teeth loosened by the inadvertent blow.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" He was close to tears in his remorse, and healing energy poured over her as he checked her over all over again. He wasn't any less shaken, though not quite as frantically panicked. "Just, don't ever share that name! The Dusk Walkers are Living Shades, and their names are important enough to them that they have razed Sects for disrespectfully pronouncing one of their names!"
That was good to know. Very good, actually. "Okay," she agreed. She pulled out a flask of water and swirled a mouthful over her bloody teeth before swallowing.
"You're planning on coming with me to Sterblich, right? We're going to continue on for a while, yes?" She asked.
He paused, the worry and agitation still close to the surface of his emotions. "Yes," he answered.
"Then I need to temper my body. You do a very good job of restraining yourself, but it's obvious that I'm far more fragile than is safe with all of y'all's stats."
"I am so very sorry!" he said again, guilt weighing heavy in his gaze.
Kestra nodded. "Got that. Doesn't change that I need to be stronger." She put away her flask and looped her arm around his waist. "Let's go see the village."