Er Mu - Release that Witch

He once again turned in the Lightning’s direction. “Were there any signs of smoke in the vicinity of the ruins?”

“No,” the little girl shook her head.

“Maybe there exist more than one map,” Soraya offered, “maybe there are other people like us, who are also looking for the whereabouts of the tower.”

“No matter what it is, we cannot help them,” Leaves concluded in disappointment. “Nobody can so quickly reach the Stone Tower, except for Lightning.”

“I’m afraid we still need to know the real situation,” Roland touch his chin, “In short, we have to find a way to insure that we can come back safe and sound. For today the teaching will be stopped, we are all in need of a good rest. When the time is right, the riddle will naturally solve itself.”

Leaving Lightning’s bedroom, he turned to Nightingale and said, “There is still another problem that we have to solve, next.”

“Just let her take off the God’s Stone of Retaliation,” Nightingale laughed, “Then everything will be made clear to me.”

At this time the rain outside the window had basically already stopped, the clouds were dispersing, and the sun was already on its way down, tinting the sky red.

Roland opened the door to the guest room on the first floor, seeing Margaret walking in circles in front of the fireplace, seeming quite restless. When Sean, who had been standing at the side of the room, saw that the Prince had just entered the room, he raised his hand to his chest and bowed. Margaret who had also seen the Prince enter, stopped her walking and stepped in front of him, anxiously asking, “Your Highness, how is Lightning?”

Roland became startled, there were several kinds of outcomes he had imagined, from being calm to angry and possibly acting cold, but he had never expected that her first sentence would be this.

“She’s all right… just a little tired.”

“Is that so? That’s good.” Margaret looked relieved.

“You seem to care about her a lot.”

“She looks exactly like her father, especially her narrow eyes and pointed nose… I could immediately see that she was the daughter of Thunder.”

Then with a sigh, she unbuttoned her neckline, lowered her head, and took off a string of gold ornament hanging around her neck. “Only to verify it, previously you said… that you have the ability to judge if I am lying, did you speak about the ability of a witch? If this was what you previous meant and if you wanted to have me prove my sincerity, then could you please let her join in this conversation? I do not like the feeling of being secretly spied on.”

Set into the gold ornament, connected to the gold chain was a hexahedral light blue piece of jewelry, which had to be a high-quality God’s Stone of Retaliation.

Roland had been thinking about what he should say to reduce the other’s resentment and doubts, not thinking that it was actually Margaret who took up the initiative to do so. To be honest, he felt some admiration for the Seafolk woman. Despite being in such an incredibly unfavorable situation, she was still trying to grasp and hold the leading position in their dialogue. Whether it was her negotiation skills or acting style, everything was consistent with the identity of a successful merchant.

He received the offered God’s Stone of Retaliation and put it on a hanger beside the fireplace. Calculating it by the quality of the stone, the estimated suppressive range at which no magic could be used was around one meter. Looking at it from Nightingale’s eyes it would look like a black hole around one-meter big. To avoid the effective range of the God’s Stone of Retaliation, she had to always keep it away from her.

“Let’s go to the reception-room,” Roland offered. Since the other side showed their sincerity, he shouldn’t act so stingy himself. When the two of them entered the reception-room, Nightingale had already stepped out from her fog and was sitting on the side on a couch, with her chin placed on both her hands and deliberately showing a bored expression as if she had already been waiting there for a long time.

When they had seated themselves, Roland first introduced Nightingale: “The name of the woman at my side is Nightingale, she is able to judge the authenticity of your words.”

“Hello, Miss Nightingale,” said Margaret, nodding her head, and receiving a greeting in return.

“You previously said, you don’t harbor negative feelings for witches, why?” Roland immediately started with his first question, which he most wanted to know, “As far as I am aware, the Fjords also belongs under the influence of the Church.”

“But their influence is far weaker than the belief of the Three Gods. Regarding this, the Seafolk and the Sandpeople are quite similar. They both worship the sky, the sea, and the earth. As for me…” she paused, “I had a very important and good friend. In the middle of a fishing trip with my friend, it happened that we were unexpectedly hit by a storm. Fighting for our lives, our sailboat was unfortunately hit by a wave, breaking it into many pieces. During this disaster, she became a witch, getting the ability to breath like a fish. She found me when I had already lost consciousness and was floating on the water, so it was she who dragged me to the shore.

“What happened later?” Nightingale curiosity was picked.

“Soon after I had woken up, she left… perhaps bigger than the wish to be with me, she was more eager to be back in the sea,” said Margaret regretfully, “Since then I have never seen her again. People often say that she would appear during foggy days, raising her body out of the water and guiding the fishing boats with her singing. Guiding them successfully around the rocks. No matter what, my friend could never be evil, nor the Devil ‘s minion.”

Roland nodded, witches who had awakened to their power were previously only ordinary people, and in cases where the people already knew the witches before their awakening and had deep contact with and understanding of them, their impression would be hard to change only by the unilateral rhetoric of the church.

“You seem to know a lot about the power of witches. Only with one sentence, you were able to guess that I had more than one witch.”

“Honestly, because of the relationship with my childhood friend and partner, I became interested in witches. I had even thought myself about the possibility to host those strange women.”

Margaret smiled, “Unfortunately, King’s City is completely differently than Border Town, in the end, I had to give up on that idea because the risk was too big. Seeing that Lightning had directly moved into your arms, it seems that she is very close to you, plus she’s a witch… So, I thought that you could be the same as me, someone, who doesn’t hate the witches. As a Lord, hiding a few witches shouldn’t be a difficult task for you, especially here in the borderland. But you still have to be very careful, if you are found by the Church, it would be hard for you to save them.”

Speaking of it, until now Nightingale still did not find any sign that the other had lied. With this, she had already rejected the possibility of Margaret informing the Church. Roland also finally came to a conclusion in his heart, so with a slightly apologetic tone he said: “It seems that I was indeed a bit oversensitive, I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, Your Highness, after all, it was also for Lightning and the safety of the other women…” Margaret waved dismissively with her hand, “Au contraire, if you didn’t care, then you would truly be an irresponsible person.”

“Are you familiar with Thunder?” Roland asked. “Your love for Lightning is much greater than the concern of ordinary people for the heroic children.”

In the face of such a question, Margery hesitated for a moment. Roland had said, if she didn’t want to answer a question, she should just act as he had never asked, but she eventually slowly started to speak: “To tell you the truth, later when I left the fishing village, I joined one of the expeditions of Sir Thunder, together with them I explored the sea for a long time. As a young and new team member, Sir Thunder and his wife took extra care of me. On the day that Lighting was born, I was also there.

“She was born on board?”

“Yes, during a storm. Outside of the cabin, the thunder rolled and lightning continually lit up the sky. However, shortly after her birth, Sir Thunder’s wife died because of a sepsis infection, and I… acted as her half-mother. But I couldn’t give her any breast milk, I used to chew wheat porridge and mixed it together with fish eggs and flour, slowly feeding it to her. “Margaret’s voice has become very gentle. “Although Sir Thunder was incomparable sad, he still had to command the flotilla, without him as the backbone, the crew would quickly collapse after only a few months. During that time, I just stayed in the cabin, watching over how Lightning slowly grew. Until Sir Thunder found the Shadow Islands. After the discovery we returned to the Crescent Moon Bay, and the expedition was over. Not much later I left the Fjord and settled down in the Kingdom of Graycastle.”

“So that was what it was,” Roland lamented in his heart, no wonder that when she heard the name of Thunder, her reaction would be so strong. As for why Margaret had decided not to continue to follow Thunder on his adventures, he could roughly guess one or two reasons. Even so, it seemed to be the beginning of a love story, it didn’t mean that the ending would be one, one had hoped for.

Such a coincidence, to meet again after crossing many rivers and walking along windy mountain roads… Now that they had already such a close relationship, wasn’t it possible to get an even bigger discount for buying and selling? He coughed twice, “Ms. Margaret since we can be counted as acquaintances, about that deal.”

“Your Highness, that just won’t do,” Margaret laughed. “A deal is a deal. This is the businessman’s eternal principle.”

Kyle Sichi walked into the Alchemy Workshop.

“Head Instructor,” when the apprentices saw him enter they immediately bowed.

He waved his hand, “You may carry on.”

The apprentice squatted down again, once again busying themselves with their work.

The outermost part of the workshop was the cleaning and sorting room; it was here that all of the gathered materials from all over the Kingdom of Graycastle was cleaned, sorted, filtered and ground down. The design of the cleaning and sorting room was very ingenious, laid within the stone floor were two rills with water flowing in them which were also parallel to each other. The area in the middle was the path, while the outermost sides of the room were used as cleansing area, and were accessible by wooden bridges.

At first glance, the long and narrow washroom was divided by the two streams into three sections. The light would fall into the room through windows on both sides, shining on the stone floor and streams, sending strips of lights through the long room. The overlap between light and dark resembled the strip of a snake.

Nearly one hundred apprentices leaned against the walls, dealing with the materials assigned to them. If the impurities could be easily cleaned and were lighter than the water, it could be directly thrown into the stream. If it was heavier than water, they would be put into a basket, to be brought out of the washing room and then discarded. The effect of cleaning with running water was several times more effective than cleaning in a cask of stagnant water.

The apprentice had to study here for three to five years. Only when their proficiency in the sorting and cleaning of all kinds of materials were good enough and the corresponding knowledge was known by them, did they get the opportunity to be selected as a disciple under an instructor, and in so doing moving on to the next room.

Kyle marched through the washing room, stepping into the core area of the Alchemy Workshop, the refining room.

When he opened the door, his line of sight suddenly opened to a wide panorama, twelve giant wooden pillars, all of which came out of the Concealing Forest and were delivered by ship, propping up this extremely spacious room. Within the surrounding stone walls, there were many windows, and even the roof was included in the construction and had many windows connected to the patio, making the room very bright.