Chapter 19 – Fire and mes (2)


    Still the blue and gold lights waited, otherwise inert. They had infinite patience, and I had to go forward at some point unless I wanted to die down there.


    I stepped into the room with the two lights.


    The wall silently closed behind me, leaving me in the circr room.


    I observed the lights with the system to see if they could give me any sort of hint as to what they were.


    The System returned nonsense.


    VWOOOoooooo.


    The lights brightened, the blue and gold colors warring with each other in a collision of illumination that blinded me.


    Then, after the light became unbearable and the warble in my ears reached its peak, everything stopped.


    I felt a warmth on my face, and a steady glow lit up the backs of my eyelids.


    A gentle breeze brushed past my face.


    I opened my eyes.


    A barrennd surrounded me atop a hill I stood at the apex of, next to an old, withered tree. Thendscape was ck, and the smell of ash and burnt wood wafted through the air.


    A steady gray fog of ash covered thendscape, drifting down around the hill.


    Far above, in a sky of red and ck, a zing rock hung on the horizon, seemingly unmoving.


    “What do you think?”


    The raspy, echoing voice of a woman sounded out from next to me as I looked out over the horizon.


    The voice startled me, I would have sworn that I had been alone up there at first. There wouldn’t have been anywhere for someone to hide.


    I turned.


    A robed figure stood, leaning against the withered tree.


    The figure gestured vaguely with one hand, her face hidden within the hood of the robe.


    “Excuse me?”


    “The vige, what do you think of it?”


    ‘What vige?’


    There wasn’t anything that could be described as a vige in the bleakndscape.


    “Who are you?”


    ‘Is this an apparition of the system?’


    The figure wagged a finger at me.


    “Look.”


    I followed the figure’s pointing finger with my eyes.


    There, only a short distance from the hill, a semi-translucent image of arge wooden building appeared, other buildings around it even hazier and harder to make out, no more than mere shapes.


    “The vige, what do you think of it?”


    However I looked at it, it must have been another test from the System, so I decided to y along.


    It didn’t look like much of a vige, only a building with a few vague shapes at most.


    “Ah, but imagine what it could be. Tell me, what do you see?”


    The figure spoke as if reading my thoughts. It probably was.


    I had never interacted with the System in such a way. Monsters and dungeons existed and werergely believed to be creations of the system, yes, but I hadn’t heard of the system creating an “NPC” before.


    “Don’t get distracted, tell me what kind of vige you see there.”


    “I’m not sure what you mean…”


    “Do you see a rigidly structured, organized vige, nned out ahead of time by settlers, or do you see a vige that grew around a singr structure and popped up spontaneously as it grew over time?


    “…”


    I imagined in my head how such a vige might look. I liked the idea of something that grewmunally over time, sudden and spontaneous, a ce that people grew to love and stayed with for the location as much as the people, a ce unlike any I had experienced thus far.


    “Good, hold that image.”


    As I watched, the blobs of indistinct shape assembled themselves into huts and buildings, arrayed loosely around therge central structure.


    “And what kind of figure leads this vige?”


    I imagined a leader who put the people first, one who was impossibly selfless and struck strongly to their values.


    “The vige experiences an attack by monsters, the vigers fight off the monsters and decide to create a better defense for next time. Do they fortify their measly walls and create an organized lookout structure, or do they revel in the feel of crushing those that would wish destruction upon them?”


    The vige I had created in my mind was one ofmunity and selflessness. It didn’t sound right for the vige to revel inbat.


    They would have found some other way tobat the monsters and focused on their defenses, not sought to destroy them.


    The vige solidified in front of us. It was surrounded by sturdy, stone walls that seemed to contrast its gentle wooden huts and otherwise somewhat sporadic organization.


    As we looked over the scene, ming rocks began to rain from the sky, crashing against the ground in a radius around the vige, leaving it untouched.


    “The vige faces a crisis, you can help them. Depending on the level of the crisis, you will be rewarded ordingly. How bad is their crisis?”


    “What?”


    “…”


    How bad was their crisis? If I had correctly caught what she was saying, then the vigers of the vige that she had conjured through my imagination would suffer from a crisis based on the level of reward I wanted.


    What would that mean for the vigers? Would they be indistinguishable from real people, as the figure I was speaking with seemed to be? If so, then would my want for a higher reward lead to a higher amount of suffering for otherwise real people?


    I thought back to what I had experienced for the previous six years, how I had to struggle for every penny earned to have a chance at living the life that everyone else took for granted, all the sideways nces in the street, the pity-filledments and whispered judgments.


    If someone were in such a position over me, where my entire life and memory were formed in mere moments, what would I think if they decided to make it harder for me and hinder my dreams just so that they could be slightly stronger against some unknown future event?


    “Make it as easy as possible, even if it makes the reward less.”


    “…”


    There was silence. The rustle of a brief wind against leaves from above met my ears.


    I looked above me, leaves jostling against each other in the branches of the tree returned to its former glory.


    “Unfortunately, we don’t always get to choose what the consequences of our decisions will be.”


    I nced over at the figure again, who had vanished and left me alone at the top of the hill.


    Thosest words had left an ominous atmosphere behind.


    ‘Great…’


    * * *


    Reaper Scans


    [Author – Farlight]


    [Proofreader – Harley]


    Join our discord for updates on releases! https://dsc.gg/reapeics


    * * *


    The road to the vige was long disused. As I drew closer to it, patches of grass popped up from the ground and extended towards the vige walls, growing thicker and steadier up to the stone.


    Chunks of rock continued to fall around the vige, just past the hill I had started on.


    The road could only be called as such from the slight discoloration where the earth had been long tread in the past, bits of gravel and stone scattered over it to dissuade the growth of the nt life and grass.


    Tall walls of thick stone rose to meet me at the end of the road, doors that looked to be made of a reinforced wood that seemed small inparison to the towering wall were set at the base of the wall at the end of the road.


    “A person! I see a person!”


    A mor broke out atop the wall and I saw a head peek out to look at me, yelling at others that I couldn’t see.


    “Get the chief!”


    The figure vanished again, leaving me to watch as various heads peeked over the top of the wall at me intermittently, whispering things I couldn’t hear.


    After a few minutes of waiting, the upper torso of a withering old man appeared above the walls, his hair long greyed and wrinkles covering his face.


    “Traveler! You’ll have to excuse my wariness, but where are you from?!”


    He had to almost shout down at me for me to properly hear him, his voice loud and carrying.


    It made sense that he might be somewhat confused. I judged from the constantly falling meteors around the vige that they probably didn’t get many visitors.


    Could I just tell him that I was sent from anothernd to help?


    “I’m an explorer from another world!”


    I knew how unbelievable it sounded, but it was more usible than being vague and saying I was from a nearby city or something when I didn’t even know if such a city existed.


    The chief was silent for a moment, seeming to contemte something.


    Finally, he turned and said something to someone beyond the top of the wall.


    “Very well,e in and we can discuss more in safety.”


    ‘In safety?’


    The meteors themselves were falling what seemed to be a safe distance from the walls, so what other danger could there be?


    Krrrrrr.


    The chief went back over the wall.


    The doors swung open not long after, revealing a gentle earthen path past the doors into a spacious vige with huts spaced here and there in the grass around the intertwining paths connecting them.


    People watched me from near the huts and structures, still carrying clothes, baskets, and other objects from tasks in their day-to-day business.


    The chief stood, leaning on a walking stick, at the forefront with a person on either side of him. There was a nervous, slim girl next to him.


    She had a youthful face and looked to be just old enough to use the System, as it wouldn’t activate for anyone below the hard-set age of twenty for some reason. She was the one who had previously seen me and shouted for someone to get the chief.


    On the chieftain’s other side was a middle-aged man in sses with a slim face, holding a book under one arm.


    “Rodrig…”


    The chief spoke, ncing at the man in sses, who was watching me carefully and absently thumbing at the book under his arm.


    “Ah… Yes, of course! Ahem…”


    The man hurriedly approached me with the book, opening it and flipping through the book to find a certain page.


    “Sorry… If you’ll excuse me…”


    He gave me a nervous smile, his movements somewhat hesitant and clumsy as he reached up to my forehead.


    He looked down at the book, the script unrecognizable to me, as he held his hand in front of my head and began a stuttering mumble from whatever he was reading.


    A hazy golden light soon connected the man’s hand to my forehead, and he jumped back in surprise, nearly dropping the book.


    The girl who stood next to the chief tugged on the chief’s sleeve in excitement as more whispers went around the vigers watching us.


    “Grandpa, it’s him! It’s really him!”


    It looked as if they were expecting me somehow, some doing of the System that had created them?


    “It’s the man who’s going to save us!”