Two days after leaving Vigen, Turan returned with Vije to the settlement in the south, where reclamation was in full swing.

The settlement seemed to have undergone another transformation in his absence. Quite a few unfamiliar buildings had sprung up, and the population had grown considerably as well.

He landed somewhere suitable and entered with Vije perched on the rod at his side. The settlers who spotted him prostrated themselves.

"O god."

"He's returned..."

Watching them worship him reminded Turan of the citizens of Kalamap who had recently praised him—or rather, his impostor. The sight had rankled more than a little.

The Zahar nobles had probably hoped those feelings would overwhelm him and send him charging straight in. They simply hadn't imagined that their intended captive would see through their identities and plans by some bizarre means, then turn the tables on them.

After first informing Yoz, who managed the settlement, of his return, Turan went to find Solif and Maysa, who were apparently working to the east. They had just finished a stretch of work and were resting.

"You're back?"

"Yes. You haven't reclaimed as much as I expected."

"We need you here. How much do you think we can do on our own?"

Though they had been apart for nearly two months, Turan and Solif spoke as casually as if he had been gone for only a few days. Sitting beside them, Maysa smiled fondly at the exchange, then brushed the dust from Turan's shoulder.

"You made it back safely."

"I promised."

The exchange might almost have sounded dry, but soft smiles lingered on both their faces.

A little later, Turan sat down and explained what had happened in the Gray Zone a few days earlier. Their last conversation through the hand mirror had been just before he reached Kalamap, so neither of them knew about it.

"Wait, you actually threatened Zahar?"

"That's right."

"You crazy bastard."

Despite his harsh words, Solif clutched his stomach and broke into stifled laughter, as though it was too funny to bear.

"Oh, seriously! This is why I have to stick around you. How could you do something this entertaining without me?"

"I don't think this is a question of entertainment... What if they take offense and dare you to try it? I think you might have been too rash."

Unlike Solif, Maysa wore an expression mingling concern and reproach, as though watching a child left alone beside the water.

It unconsciously reminded Turan of being scolded by his mother as a child, and he couldn't help smiling. Maysa let out a deep sigh.

"I'm being serious."

"Sorry. That's not why I smiled... For one thing, I don't say or do anything I can't take responsibility for."

"You really intend to retaliate?"

"Yes. If I have to."

Perhaps sensing the weight of that answer, Solif stopped laughing as well and wiped the tears from his eyes. Turan explained to his two companions why he had done it.

"Even Zahar doesn't have powerful nobles to spare. They probably couldn't keep a force stationed in Kalamap to capture me for long."

Leaving an upper-tier noble and two middle-tier nobles idle for years merely to recruit another upper-tier noble of comparable strength was far too inefficient. If he continued to stay away, they would likely resort to more 'provocative' methods, such as squeezing Kalamap dry.

Given that situation, Turan had drawn a much clearer line for House Zahar. If they quietly governed the city well, he would visit them in as little as ten years, and no more than fifty.

To an ordinary person, that was an outrageous declaration tantamount to saying he wouldn't visit for almost a lifetime, but to high-ranking nobles like him, it was a fairly realistic proposition.

"If they aren't trying to capture me, they don't need to maintain such an excessive force. Sending a single middle-tier noble to govern a city the size of Kalamap isn't a bad deal for them either. It's like planting an eye in the Gray Zone."

"And in time, they might recruit you, someone they estimate to be an upper-tier noble?"

"Exactly. If they put their pride first instead, their prospective recruit becomes an enemy, and they lose the city as well. People who rule a great house ought to be perfectly capable of deciding which choice is more sensible."

They could reap a modest profit while waiting for him to keep his promise, or insist on their pride and fight a battle that would gain them nothing even if they won. Anyone who wasn't a fool could see which was better.

Solif and Maysa nodded in understanding. Having heard the details, they could see that this hadn't simply been an emotional threat, but a decision made after considering quite a few possibilities.

"Let's leave that there for now... Has anything unusual happened here?"

"Nothing worth mentioning. A dangerous monster or two climbed over the wall now and then, and we found a few strange rocks. That's about it."

"So it really was all more of the same."

After chatting for a while, Turan resumed the reclamation work with the other two, who had recovered some of their mana and stamina. For the first time in a long while, the settlers saw vast masses of water rise into the sky, and their eyes shone once more.

* * *

With Turan's strength added to theirs, the reclamation project once again progressed as smoothly as a ship with a fair wind. The reclaimed land, which had already covered more than half the designated area, now exceeded eighty percent. Even after drawing in every idle loafer in the vicinity, they still lacked workers.

At some point, monsters stopped appearing even when they burned the forest. Presumably, those with territories of their own and the freedom to move had long since fled the forest to escape the flames spreading from the south.

While continuing to expand the vast settlement, Turan also made sure to practice the new technique he had learned during the battle against the great sea serpent: using the Spirit of Fire to strengthen his stone-slinging.

His first objective was to use it reliably with his usual small sling, rather than only with a huge one as before. His second was to control it without damaging the sling.

Unlike that miraculous initial success, the projectile often failed to fly properly unless he timed the explosion precisely. Mastering it took considerable time.

"Ugh. I just can't get used to that noise."

BANG!

At the explosion, Solif let out a quiet groan from where he was resting and turned his head. The projectile was tearing through dozens of trees as it flew off beyond the unreclaimed land.

"How much mana did you put into that one?"

"Less than a hundredth?"

"That's insane."

"With enough power behind it, that would punch straight through most top-ranking magic tools."

Turan smiled sheepishly at their admiration and retrieved the objects he had launched. They weren't stones carefully carved into egg shapes, but rounded pieces of metal.

Their forward ends were tapered into an oval shape, while deep recesses in the back allowed him to pack in large quantities of the Spirit of Fire.

"Fetching those every time must be quite a nuisance."

"I can't just throw away magic tools. It's not that hard with tracking magic. I can sense their mana too."

Just as he said, the metal projectiles were magic tools Maysa had personally enchanted. Their functions were simple: to harden themselves and increase the force of impact upon collision.

If Turan now launched one at full strength with the Spirit of Fire, the blow could probably punch clean through even the great sea serpent they had fought. Of course, with only a limited supply, he would have to use them more carefully than ordinary stones.

"Don't worry. I can always make you more if you need them."

Turan smiled at the dependable young Enchanter's assurance. Having a powerful Enchanter among their companions was useful in ways like this as well. There was one drawback, of course: since their location was not entirely safe, they had to remain ready for battle and couldn't spend long periods creating immensely powerful magic tools.

As they spent their days reclaiming land, developing new tactics, and improving their equipment, the librarian brought news. He had extracted the information they needed from the Mimic god's soul fragment.

"Let me say this first: even I cannot tell whether this information is true. It is merely what remained in this soul fragment."

"That's fine. I'll take it with a grain of salt."

"Hmm. Somehow, being told you'll take it with a grain of salt is rather offensive in its own way... Well, never mind. Listen carefully and write this down."

What the librarian told him fell broadly into two kinds of knowledge. The first was how to acquire the ability of a bloodline presumed to be the Waverider.

It required fulfilling two conditions: travel ten thousand kilometers riding natural waves while standing atop something, and kill ten leviathans, collect their blood, and drink it.

"... That's more normal than I expected."

"I know. Last time we had to burn people to death and cover ourselves in their ashes, so I thought we'd have to drown people this time."

Turan felt much the same as his companions. The one sticking point was what exactly a leviathan was—

"It appears to be a kind of sea monster, but I don't know precisely either. This method isn't all that accommodating."

In any case, neither condition was easy to attempt near the reclaimed land. They concluded the discussion by agreeing that, if they visited the coast later, they would all try the first condition and ask around about leviathans.

Next came the secret to acquiring what they presumed to be the Mimic bloodline—

"Take equipment of the corresponding type to each of the four advancement officers and complete the advancement missions."

Turan didn't bother asking the librarian what 'advancement officers' or 'advancement missions' were. His expression already made it clear that he would answer that he didn't know.

Both phrases somehow felt similar to, yet different from, the terms the fallen gods often used. Unfortunately, neither Maysa nor Solif had any useful information either.

Their disappointment at the uselessness of the first two pieces of information was short-lived. Fortunately, the third and final piece proved quite useful.

"... Water of Death?"

"Yes. It seems to be a recipe. Like that Spirit of Fire you mentioned."

Turan didn't miss the way Maysa grimaced at the words 'Water of Death.' Having lost her family to an unidentified poison, she was bound to find something that sounded poisonous from its name alone deeply unsettling.

Still, they couldn't simply pass up the method for making it. Given how useful the Spirit of Fire had been, acquiring something similar would offer a truly significant boost to their strength.

Knowing this too, Maysa noticed Turan watching her expression and forced her features to relax into a smile. He gave her a small nod of thanks, then wrote down the recipe that followed.

The ingredients were salt water, graphite, lightning, and the sun. The method was to shape the graphite into two rods, place them in salt water, strike them with lightning, then expose them to sunlight and 'combine' them.

"Graphite is a kind of rock. It is black, crumbles readily, and leaves traces easily, making it useful for marking things."

"Oh, I know what that is. We called it marking stone back home."

Solif snapped his fingers as he promptly spoke up.

"Where do you get it?"

"It's rock, so it comes out of the ground, of course. It isn't useful for anything except making marks like that, so I doubt anyone would go to the trouble of opening a mine for it."

In short, it was in much the same situation as sulfur and saltpeter, the ingredients for the Spirit of Fire. Why did these recipes always call for such hard-to-find ingredients?

At least the other ingredients—salt water, lightning, and the sun—were readily available, making this considerably easier than the Spirit of Fire.

He had only just clicked his tongue in disappointment at the difficulty of finding graphite when he decided to ask Yoz on the off chance. He received an answer at once.

"I've seen that sort of rock near a coastal city. I went there in my youth to reclaim marshland near the shore."

"Is it far from here?"

"Not particularly. Probably ten to fifteen days on foot for an ordinary person... Am I to understand you're going out again?"

"I'll be back soon."

Once he learned the exact location, Turan flew straight east with Vije. The city near the South Sea was over two hundred kilometers away, but even carrying him, Vije could reach it in an hour.

'The south seems to have a lot of things like this... Though perhaps I could find them in the north too if I looked hard enough.'

A little later, the farmers near Boronum, a city east of Ravista, received a strange request from a young man who appeared out of nowhere. He offered to pay them to gather the black, crumbly stones they sometimes used to mark boundaries.

"Eh? You'll pay us to gather those?"

"Would you be able to do it?"

"It's a slack time of year, so that's no trouble... But will you really pay?"

"Here's an advance. Bring them in, and you'll get twice this."

Searching for this graphite piece by piece himself would have been a waste of effort. By paying twenty gold coins in two installments, Turan was able to mobilize every commoner nearby with time to spare. It took only half a day to gather well over a hundred kilograms of the graphite scattered around the area.

Returning with the graphite, Turan immediately immersed himself in making the new substance. The first obstacle was placing two carved graphite rods in salt water and striking them with lightning.

For someone with the Storm Bloodline, calling down lightning was as easy as breathing. The problem was its intensity. The slightest excess of power tended to vaporize not only the salt water, but also the container and the graphite rods. Fortunately, after several rounds of trial and error, he learned the knack of supplying the right amount of electricity.

The next problem was the 'sun' listed among the ingredients. Ordinary sunlight wasn't working, leaving him puzzled, until it seemed that what they needed was the Sun bloodline's secret art, the Light of Judgment.

Turan could produce it himself, but with Solif beside him, he enlisted his help instead. As he summoned a halo, Solif asked in bewilderment,

"Why would this god's recipe require the Sun bloodline, though?"

"Who knows... Perhaps his other two bloodlines were Pyromaniac and Illusion."

The only two bloodlines they knew the Mimic god possessed were Waverider and Mimic, so it wasn't impossible. Or perhaps this had always been something that required another person's help to make.

After all manner of trial and error, they finally succeeded in perfecting the process.

As they ran lightning through the graphite, bathed it in the Light of Judgment, and imagined everything mixing together, a flash erupted, just as when they made the Spirit of Fire. What remained where the salt water and graphite rods had been was—

"... It's water?"

"It's water."

To all appearances, it was clear, transparent water.

"Did something go wrong?"

"It felt like something changed... Wait."

SIZZLE...

There was what sounded like something burning, and suddenly a hole opened in the wooden bowl holding the water. Its contents drained out completely. What had looked like transparent water was in fact a virulent poison that dissolved everything it touched.

Watching the spilled liquid dissolve even the soil and form a deep hole in the ground, Solif murmured,

"Water of Death... That's certainly a straightforward name. Pour that on someone, and there wouldn't even be a skeleton left."

Turan and Maysa nodded silently in agreement.