A few hours after Onil's death was discovered, the subjugation force had already sent the Tamer back to the main house in Abacha on the orca monster to report their captain's death.

Naturally, House Karmine was thrown into an uproar. His vile character might have earned him a poor reputation, but in terms of mana, he had ranked among the upper tier of the main house's nobles. And he had died hunting a mere monster?

An investigation team was formed immediately. Among its members was Jemel Karmine—Onil's father, the House Head's younger brother, and one of the house's most powerful nobles.

"Over here, Lord Jemel."

"Hmm."

The members of the subjugation force trembled at the sight of the man approaching with an utterly solemn expression. The leader of the investigation team's son lay right before them as a headless corpse.

Even if Jemel summarily executed them here, holding them responsible for his son's death, he would get away with no more than a few harsh words from the House Head. Compared with knights and middling nobles, nobles of his supreme caliber were far too precious.

Whether or not he knew their fears, Jemel stared down at his son's corpse without a flicker of expression. When he finally spoke, his question was utterly flat.

"Why is his head severed?"

"W-well, we found it inside the monster's mouth, so we believe it was bitten off during the battle."

"An octopus's teeth are sharper than I thought. I had no idea. Perhaps because it was a monster."

As he ran his hand over the stump of Onil's neck, he seemed like a man numbed by the overwhelming grief of losing a child.

"Give me a detailed account of what happened."

"Yes, sir. We set out from the operational area without incident and headed north..."

The adjutant embellished the truth in her report. Onil had really done nothing but drink heavily and cause trouble, but she claimed he had ordered repairs to the damaged areas and actively helped devise their battle plan. Jemel clicked his tongue.

"Enough. He's my son. You think I don't know that much about him? There's no need to praise him. No doubt he was just swilling booze."

"I-I'm sorry."

Astonished by his remarkably objective assessment of his own son, the adjutant admitted the truth. Now that he had seen through her once, she gave an honest account of everything that followed.

He had left her to handle command however she liked while he made a drunken nuisance of himself. Even during the battle, he had stayed back and merely pretended to fight, using his whip to rescue knights. Then, when the monster was nearly dead, he had charged in alone, declaring that he would finish it off...

She wondered whether she should really be telling them all this, but Jemel and the other high-ranking Karmine nobles only looked as though it was exactly what they had expected.

"He charged in alone?"

"Yes. He threatened to kill anyone who followed him, so no one could go to his aid. I'm sorry."

"Hmm. Braver than I thought. I wasn't expecting that. Perhaps I misjudged him..."

At his muttering, the adjutant's eyes widened involuntarily. Until now, she had thought grief had made him stiff and distant, but he was showing less feeling than someone whose pet dog had died.

Her surprise lasted only a moment. As Jemel's gaze returned to her, she quickly lowered her eyes.

"But there doesn't seem to be any mana left in Onil's body."

"We believe it was absorbed while the monster was eating his head. But the monster itself was too badly wounded to assimilate the mana..."

"It died in the middle of absorbing it, and the excess dissipated. All of you, project your mana."

Having ordered the expedition's nobles to project their mana, Jemel confirmed that none had grown noticeably stronger and nodded. That cleared them of suspicion of plundering the mana left in Onil's corpse.

As Jemel conferred quietly with the investigators, the expedition members gnawed at their lips and nails like prisoners awaiting execution. A moment later, their sentence was delivered.

"As I understand it, none of the nobles who took part has reached their growth limit. Is that correct?"

"Y-yes, sir."

"The monster's mana will be divided among the four of you. Absorb it now."

Jemel's decision surprised not only the expedition members but even the investigators. One of the expedition's nobles murmured in disbelief.

"What about... our punishment?"

"There will be none. You did everything you could, and realistically, you could not have stopped Onil. If anything, I should be apologizing to the House Head. My failure to raise my son properly put you all in danger."

"Lord Jemel...!"

Seeing him acknowledge his own failings so calmly despite his son's death moved some of the expedition members to tears. How could such an admirable father have produced such a worthless scoundrel of a son?

While the nobles absorbed the mana, Jemel stood a short distance away and examined Onil's corpse once more. The others respectfully kept their distance, allowing a father his final moments with his son.

"Hmm... Surely this isn't a fake? He's my son, but I can't really tell just by looking at him like this. Might have been easier if he weren't so bloated."

Jemel muttered as he felt Onil's bloated face and body.

The saying that parents knew their children's bodies only applied to commoners. Having left his son to the servants from infancy, how would he know the boy's physical distinguishing features? He had never taken that much interest in raising him anyway.

"Jujak said he sensed something exceptional about him, so I'd thought of giving him some proper training... Tsk. To think he'd go and die like this."

It was certainly a shame. Not only had he been reasonably useful in his own right, he had also been a reserve body they could use in an emergency if one of them died in an accident. But, to reiterate, that was all.

One child had died out of the hundreds he had already had and the thousands more he would have in the future. Thinking this, Jemel erased Onil's face, name, and the few memories he had of him from his mind.

One secret to living through the ages was to clear out unnecessary information in a timely fashion.

* * *

After leaving Onil's suitably waterlogged corpse for the expedition to find, Turan had remained concealed and watched carefully to the very end.

If Jemel or any of the other investigators probed deeply into Onil's death and uncovered something suspicious, he would never be able to use this sort of substitution again.

Fortunately, the Karmine nobles more or less accepted the performance he had staged. A detailed examination of the corpse might have exposed a flaw or two, but when faced with an apparently obvious conclusion, people generally did not go looking for a complicated, difficult truth.

Once he had confirmed that Onil's body had been placed in a coffin, Turan was finally free. Disguising himself as an ordinary fisherman, he bought a boat on a nearby island.

"Now, where should I start looking...?"

Rather than returning straight to the southern reclamation site, Turan had ventured into the North Sea to find the merfolk. More precisely, he was looking for the merfolk royalty of Armani's faction, who had fought the great sea serpent's wraith alongside him.

Having witnessed the octopus monster's attack, Turan had concluded that there was a good chance it was not a natural occurrence. The octopus attacking the city had seemed less driven by rage, hunger, or curiosity than intent on carrying out someone's orders.

When he explained this through the mirror, Solif asked with a worried look,

["You're going to meet the merfolk alone? If they use the great sea serpents' power, you'll have a hard time on your own."]

"I'm not going to fight them. I'll just find out whether they're really driving monsters toward the coast."

Once he knew the truth, he could come back with Maysa and Solif when they had time to spare and smash the place. The other side wasn't the only one allowed to bring allies.

His report finished, Turan sailed alone across the North Sea, his boat gliding over the water.

'Traveling alone by boat really is lonely.'

When he had traveled with Solif and Maysa, it had been a little dull, but they could pass the time talking and laughing. Watching Vije's adorable antics had been fun, too.

Fortunately, he was not entirely without something to do. He still had several books from Asiz in his High-Capacity Pouch, and reading them helped pass the time.

With a book open before him as he propelled his boat across the North Sea using the Rapids bloodline's power, Turan looked like a scene from a painting.

"Ah, found them."

Three days into his search, he came across a band of merfolk attacking a ship.

Judging by their clothes, the people aboard were pirates. Having lost the will to fight, they were jumping into the sea, only to be caught by the merfolk and eaten alive. Villains or not, Turan had no desire to watch people being eaten, so he decided to intervene immediately.

With a single gesture, seawater surged up, turned into dozens of ice spikes, and shot toward the merfolk.

"Kyaaah!"

The precisely aimed spikes tore their arms and legs apart in an instant. All they could do was writhe on the deck, shrieking.

The pirates, covered in bite wounds, reached desperately toward Turan, but he ignored them. He had left his restorative magic tool with Maysa, and even if he hadn't, he had no intention of saving pirates—creatures of the wolf's ilk.

Pulling one of the merfolk over with telekinesis, Turan barked at it.

"Bring me one of your royals. I don't care who. Do it, or I'll kill you."

His demand elicited only an animalistic snarl and struggling.

He tried the fundamentals of torture he had learned through Reto, but those proved useless as well. Every one of the merfolk merely drooled and snapped its jaws at the scent of human flesh. Meaningful conversation was impossible.

"Tsk."

After putting down all the merfolk, Turan searched the ship. As expected, it was a pirate vessel, but it was much older and shabbier than the one he had sold before, with extensive damage, so he abandoned it. He had no convenient way to sell it this time anyway.

He encountered merfolk several more times as he ranged across the North Sea, but their reactions were always much the same. It was not until his seventh encounter that he finally met one capable of conversation.

"Y-you... are..."

This merfolk spoke even as drool poured from its mouth. It held somewhat more power than the others, and its sturdy build suggested that it belonged to the noble class.

"Hey, can you hear me?"

"Y-yes... No, you... You look so delicious... Why...?"

"Are you a merfolk noble?"

"Yes..."

Perhaps being a noble allowed it to control its urges enough to speak. Turan seized it and pressed for answers.

"Where do I have to go to meet your royals?"

"Our, our royals... fled, through the mirror..."

"Through the mirror? You mean the mirror that leads to the South Sea?"

The merfolk noble gave him a look that seemed to ask how he knew about that.

"Humans know a few things too. So, did all the merfolk royals go south? There are none left in the North Sea?"

The noble clamped its mouth shut, unwilling to answer. But after screaming at the sensation of an ice spike boring creatively into its toenails, it soon spilled everything. Apparently, as instinct weakened and reason grew stronger, tolerance for pain diminished as well.

"Th-the high priest's clan has returned... The royals fled because they didn't want to be killed..."

Its account dragged on as it drifted in and out of lucidity, perhaps from the clash between pain and appetite. After asking the same questions several times, however, Turan pieced together the broad picture.

According to its explanation, once the merfolk royals of Armani's faction obtained the great sea serpent's power, the others fled to the South Sea for fear of a purge. The dregs of the nobility, like this one, had been left behind along with the commoners.

"Why are monsters attacking the coast?"

"Monsters...? Probably, the high priests... control..."

Turan's expression hardened at the revelation that the great sea serpents' kin could control monsters. It made his suspicions all the more likely to be correct. After asking a few more questions, he ended the noble's life.

"Spare me..."

"If you wanted to live, you shouldn't have tried to eat people."

Members of other races who harmed humans were no more than wolves trying to carry off sheep. How kindly they treated their own kind did not matter.

* * *

Unfortunately, even interrogating the merfolk noble had not revealed where Armani's relatives were. It had served a different group of merfolk royals.

According to what he had learned, the merfolk of Armani's faction would all be deep beneath the sea, embroiled in a fierce power struggle. Those coming out of the water, like the noble he had questioned, were merely commoners or nobles who had lost their patrons.

At that point, Turan decided to end his investigation of the merfolk and return. Learning that the merfolk—and specifically Armani's faction—were very likely involved in the monsters' coastal attacks was enough to fulfill his purpose for now. Next time, he probably would not come alone.

Rather than summon Vije, Turan steered his boat southwest himself. Unlike him, Vije had no tracking ability, so he would need to explain where he was for her to find him. That would very likely leave her wandering the vast North Sea.

Better to reach the continent himself, then summon her to a convenient meeting place and ride her south.

'I might as well stop by Kalamap while I'm at it.'

As it happened, heading southwest from his present position would probably bring him ashore in the Gray Zone. Going straight south would take him to the Enril Desert.

After roughly five days of steady sailing, Turan landed somewhere on the continent's coast. Perhaps because he had spent so long at sea, he felt the same strange queasiness he had experienced after disembarking from the Marlin.

"Excuse me, is this the Gray Zone? I was caught in a storm, so I'm not quite sure where..."

"It is. You must have terrible luck. They say there's barely any wind these days."

After confirming his location at a nearby fishing village, Turan changed into an ordinary traveler's clothes and headed inland. Kalamap was the westernmost city in the Gray Zone. If he followed the main roads in the right direction, he would reach it eventually.

[I'll be there soon!]

"All right. If you get there first, stay safe and wait for me."

Of course, how much danger could a monster with the power of a top-ranking noble possibly face? Still, Turan smiled at the sight of Vije holding up a stone tablet on the other side of the mirror.

After about three days of running swiftly through uninhabited country, he reached Kalamap. Deeply moved, he gazed at the city he had saved.

"Looks like everyone's doing well."

From the repaired walls that had once been half demolished to the clothes of the people passing by, little seemed to have changed since his departure. That alone told him that the lord he had contracted with was governing the city reasonably well.

Intending to take a quick look around before meeting Vije, Turan passed through the gate and noticed something unexpected.

'What? My statue's gone.'

Though they had embarrassed him nearly to death, he had secretly felt a little proud of them. Now every statue of Turan that had stood beside the city gates had been removed. Had the house that agreed to govern the city taken them down, seeing them as an obstacle to its influence?

It was a little unpleasant, but not entirely incomprehensible. Clicking his tongue, Turan headed toward city hall. He would simply check that they were keeping their agreement to hunt monsters and the like, then leave.

But then...

"Ha."

A large notice was posted outside city hall. Beneath a rough explanation that new taxes had been imposed for various reasons and must be paid, Turan read a line that made him laugh.

[This is proclaimed in the name of Turan, Lord of Kalamap.]

Naturally, it was not a laugh of happiness.