Chapter 29

“Hnghh…”

A groan escaped my lips as I stirred awake. Opening my eyes a little bit, the first two things I noticed were the soft sunlight coming in from the window near me and an unfamiliar ceiling. Scratch that, the ceiling actually felt familiar. I’d seen it before. Turning my head left and right while lying on the bed, I confirmed where I was.

‘The Tower’s Clinic, huh…’

I tried getting up from the bed with a grunt, only to fail. The heaviness I felt in my body was preventing me from doing so. ‘Why am I here…?’ Digging through my memories, I tried to remember the reason why I was here.

‘Right, I was helping chase the kidnappers and successfully freed Luna, then a Dark Mage appeared.’

The memories of what happened started to come back gradually. I remembered everything up until the Saintess and her knights left the cave, then I was talking with Master Elara.

‘Looks like I just passed out after that.’

I must be too exhausted after all the chaos that happened. Who would have thought that trying to save a kidnapped kid would turn into a mortal combat with a Dark Mage? Master Elara said that the Dark Mage was weak, but…

‘If that Dark Mage was weak, then just how strong is Edmund?’

“Heh…”

A chuckle involuntarily escaped from me once I realized just how weak I was in the grand scheme of things, and it seemed that my chuckle stirred someone else awake.

“Hrmm…”

Looking to my side, right beside my pillow lay a spirit that looked like a girl, with three sets of wings and bluish-silver hair. She was only the size of an adult’s palm and was sleeping soundly.

“…Hwi? You’re awake?”

“Good morning, Lirael. Sorry, did I wake you up?”

Rubbing her eyes as she rose from the bed, she looked at me with sleepy eyes.

“Yeah…”

Then she started to float above me while stretching her body.

“How do you feel?”

“Bad. My body feels so heavy that I can’t even move.”

“Well, you did push yourself past your limit. You’ll probably be bedridden for a day or two.”

“You can diagnose too?”

“No, that’s what the healer guy said.”

“Healer guy?”

“Yeah. Don’t you know him? That man with scruffy hair, stubble, and a tired-looking face.”

“Oh, you mean Mr. Phillips?”

“Maybe? I don’t remember his name.”

She kept floating above me while we talked. She acted normal and looked fine for now, so that was a relief. But then I remembered the promise I made to her.

“You said that you need me to supply you with mana until you find a contractor, right? Do you need it now?”

Lirael shook her head.

“It’s fine. Your Master gave me her mana, so I should be fine for now. Besides, you’re not in any condition to do that. Your mana is still empty, right?”

I tried to check my heart, the place where mages stored their mana, and she was right. It was empty.

Mana did not recover naturally after all. A mage needed to actively absorb the ether in the air and convert it into mana before storing it in their heart. Since I had passed out, my mana tank was still empty. While I was at it, I also inspected the condition of my blood vessels, more precisely, the coating around my blood vessels.

“Sigh… I’m a wreck.”

I noticed that some of the coating on my blood vessels was broken and needed to be repaired, especially the coating on the blood vessels throughout my lungs. Probably because I breathed in a little bit of that miasma.

“Looks like I’ll need some time to recover,” I said to myself.

“Of course. Just surviving that battle was actually a miracle, so you actually came out of that fight relatively unscathed.”

“No kidding.”

Creak…

“Oh, you’re awake?”

While I was talking to Lirael, the resident healer, Mr. Phillips, came into the room and walked straight toward us.

“How are you feeling?”

“Bad.”

I gave him the same answer I gave Lirael when she asked me the same question.

“My body feels heavy, I can’t move, and my coating needs to be repaired, so I feel bad just thinking about how several months of my progress have gone to waste.”

“Heh, that’s fine. Judging from what the Tower Master told me about you, you’ll be able to repair your coating relatively quickly.”

“Probably. Still sucks, though.”

“Just suck it up, then,” he said with a shrug before continuing. “Anything else?”

“I’m hungry.”

“Of course. I’ll get someone to bring you some food later. What do you want?”

“Anything as long as it’s not bread with beans.”

“Alright, I’ll prepare it.”

“It’ll be better if there’s meat.”

“Okay, I’ll add some meat too.”

“Also, make it a stew with potatoes and plenty of spices and coconut milk.”

“Now you’re just pushing it.”

“Hehe.”

Lirael giggled as she watched me shamelessly ask for food while Mr. Phillips shook his head.

‘What? I worked very hard trying to save someone and even take down a Dark Mage. At least I deserve a proper meal, right?’

That was what I thought to myself, shamelessly forgetting that it was Lirael who actually took him down and that I had only helped create an opening in his defenses.

I was about to say something when the door opened again with a creak…

“Yo, you’re alive, kid?”

It was my Master, coming to visit me.

“No, I think I’m dead,” was what I replied to her. “It seems I turned into a Lich and can only be purified with a meat stew with lots of potatoes, spices, and coconut milk.”

“Toast with beans is enough for you.”

“Noooooo! It tastes disgusting! Don’t feed me that!”

We joked around in the room for a while before Mr. Phillips excused himself and went to the kitchen to prepare my food. Well, I said that, but it wasn’t Mr. Phillips who was doing the cooking. He was just going to tell the resident cook of the Magic Tower about my order, and the cook, Miss Josephine, would prepare it for me.

With only the three of us left in the room, Master dragged a chair over and sat beside my bed.

“Now then, you must have a lot of questions, so I’ll start explaining what happened,” Master Elara said before she began explaining the situation.

“What do you want to know first?” Master Elara asked me directly.

“Before I fought the Black Mage, I saved a kidnapped girl from the slums. Her name is Luna. I made her run back to town first to get help. Do you know what happened to her?”

“Ah, that kid. She’s safe. Right now, the girl and her brother are under our protection, so they’re both safe.”

“I see. That’s a relief.”

It was truly a relief that my efforts to save her hadn’t gone to waste. She was safe.

Wait, under our protection?

“You put her under the Tower’s protection?”

“What? Anything wrong with that?”

“No. I’m just surprised you did that.”

My surprise was not unwarranted. Master Elara must have known about the slums, and she had even told me not to go there. If she were the kind of person who cared about the slums, she would have already done something about them.

But she wasn’t.

That was why it was surprising that she cared enough to put a couple of slum kids under her protection.

“Sigh… I know what you’re thinking about, kid.”

“Hm? I’m not thinking about anything in particular.”

“Yeah, right. You must be thinking something along the lines of, ‘She helped slum kids?’ aren’t you?”

“Is there a mind-reading magic?”

“I don’t need any magic to know what you’re thinking. You wear your thoughts on your face.”

‘Dang, it seems like I need to train my poker face more.’

“It’s not like I don’t care about them, alright? It’s just that there’s nothing that can be done about it. Even if you prepare jobs for them so they can return to being proper members of society by having a stable income and paying taxes, more of them will just fill their place. Then, thanks to the environment in the slums, the kids who are born there will almost always end up becoming criminals.

“The only way to help the slum kids is to completely pull them away from there. But then where would they live? We’d need a place for them to live, give them an education, and make sure they’re fed and clothed until they grow up and become working adults. How much money do you think would be needed to do all that?”

“A fuck ton.”

“That’s right. To help all of the kids there, we’d need a fuck ton of money. The Tower is rich, sure, but we can’t just spend that much money to do something like that.”

“I see. That makes sense.”

It all came down to money problems, huh?

Truly, no matter what people said, the world revolved around money no matter where you were.

“Then is there a reason why you put both Aaron and Luna under the Tower’s protection? Aaron is also a criminal, you know?”

“A petty criminal is still fine. Besides, he still has a heart in him. He can grow up properly with some guidance. That Luna kid also has the makings of a mage, so I decided to pick her up.”

“Hee, is that so? You’re taking her as your disciple too?”

“That’s right. She will be your junior disciple, so make sure to welcome her later.”

“Understood. Then, my second question.”

“Ehem!” I cleared my throat before asking the crux of the question. This was something I really wanted to know, especially because I had almost died to that Dark Mage.

“I’m sure I gave Aaron my Tower Badge and told him to go to the Tower first to ask for help. That thing has a tracking function, right? Why did the help come so late? It was so late that I literally almost died.”

I asked while huffing and puffing, but the answer that came from Master Elara was something I truly did not expect.

“Well, about that…”

Master Elara paused for a moment.

“Some of the Tower mages sabotaged the search.”