Chapter 675: Spy
Translator: imperfectluck Editor: Kurisu
“…As your country’s most loyal ally, even though we are far away in the Northlands, we are still concerned about your country’s combat situation, and we heard that battles haven’t been going well for you, and that much land has been withered, with the powers of death and evil behaving arrogantly, which is why we dared to take certain actions, which we hope you can forgive, that resulted in making a private agreement with Undead Emperor Sandro…”
This was a ridiculously long and verbose letter that lacked punctuation as it was filled with boring diplomatic words. However, the translation was quite simple: “I heard that the undead are beating you badly, hahaha, isn’t that embarra.s.sing? But since I’m your ally, I secretly talked to the strongest Undead Emperor, and he’s now agreed to go easy and only pretend to attack you, so how do you intend to thank me?”
Considering how this official diplomatic letter addressed to Bardi Emperor Halent Milan was likely to be recorded in the future as an important historical doc.u.ment, and maybe even become evidence to help Sandro become accepted by the humans, a direct letter with simple wording would be overly improper. I had actually skipped the rest of this letter for your convenience—it was filled with more than 10 pages of rambling diplomatic speech when less than one page would have sufficed to explain things clearly.
However, I knew that all of the effort put into writing such a ridiculously long letter was necessary and worthwhile.
“…You’re so sly. Even though you’re clearly the one who would like to make peace with the undead, the way you wrote it makes it sound like you managed to convince Undead Emperor Sandro to betray the other Undead Emperors and join the side of the living for the sake of Bardi.”
“Haha, that’s how it will look like based on the results. But this way, it’s not me requesting Bardi, but rather Bardi requesting us. It’ll be Bardi who owes us a favor.”
For example, let’s say two countries were at war, and Country A’s secret weapon was impossible for Country B to deal with, yet a third party suddenly intervened and told Country B that they could deal with Country A’s secret weapon. If the third party truly succeeded, it would become major diplomatic a.s.sistance that would mean country B owing them a significant favor.
Furthermore, with this as the reason, it would also give me a great chance to help Sandro become accepted by the living. A defeated war general would be considered a butcher who would only be thrown in jail. However, people would always conveniently forget the sins of a general who “realized he should join the right side after all”. Such a general would even be held up as an example to convince other enemies to switch sides.
“…The two Undead Emperors had a joyous discussion and laughed off their previous grudges. Sandro forsook the darkness and joined the light. Perhaps your meeting will even become an epic tale in the future.”
Although Harloys’ words sounded rather ridiculous, this was actually quite likely. At the very least, Bardi would think that we had been quite friendly in helping them deal with the most dangerous Undead Emperor who could instantly cast forbidden spells. After all, only we would know the truth.
“Could you be any more shameless?”
“…Yeah! I can be more than twice as shameless!”
And so, in order to show how shameless I could be, I unhesitatingly picked up a pen and paper and started composing another diplomatic letter.
“My dear friends at the Truth Symposium, as I am a nominal member, I heard that you met with some combat difficulties in Bardi. Since I am an undead and ice magic mage, I happen to have a private agreement with Undead Emperor and grandmaster undead magic mage, Sandro. Perhaps I could do something for you, but of course, equivalent exchange is the foundational rule of magical society…”
Rather than shamelessly obtaining benefits from two sides with the same deal, I figured that it would be even more shameless to obtain benefits from three sides simultaneously—from Sandro, Bardi, and the Truth Symposium…
I believed that due to my letters, as long as Sandro showed slightly that he was going to go easy now in his attack against Bardi, both the mega Bardi Empire and the archmages would repay me handsomely.
This wasn’t only for myself. This was also a way for Sandro to clear his name, and with him being accepted by the humans, the future Tark Republic would also be more easily accepted by everyone. It would definitely sound much better if Sandro “officially joined the right side” rather than be defeated.
I would also need to tell Reyne and Glina about these things after I finished. At the very least, I needed to tell them about the results of my secret discussion with Sandro. This would avoid making things difficult for me… No, I definitely wasn’t explaining why I hadn’t joined the winter hunt! What a joke, would I really need to explain myself to two little girls?
“…You seem more and more like an unreliable slacker dad who secretly skipped work and is trying to find excuses to tell your serious daughters. And if you can’t find any excuse, you’ll just use your status of a senior against them.”
“…Silly cat, I have a very interesting gender-changing potion here. Would you like to try it?”
“You, you, you, you… just what do you intend to do to me? No wonder you’re not interested in women! So you were interested in cute boys instead! Actually, actually… I might be able to accept this, but you’ll have to wear female clothing as Princess Peach is the cutest…”
I was rendered speechless as I watched the silly cat acting all tsundere. I directly grabbed her by the neck and threw her out the window.
“Go calm down for me in the snow!”
I was feeling such a headache. My soul connection told me that Harloys wasn’t even actually joking. Just what exactly was this Elven Empress thinking!?
She, she had such a dirty mind! Even to the point where a hentai manga could be drawn!
But, when mentioning hentai manga… er, I meant the Spring of the Drowned Man, I couldn’t help but think of Krose, whom I hadn’t seen in so long. Although I had already written her a letter, telling her to come over here, she was far away in Bardi, so it would take her quite a while to arrive.
Every time that I looked at the two bottled potions in my dimensional storage, I would instinctively feel uneasy. My many years of experience with pitfalls told me that if I didn’t hurry and dig a pitfall for others… er, I meant, used up these potions quickly, trouble would likely soon come for me.
But unfortunately, the primary target for the Spring of the Drowned Woman potion, Beifeng, was still in the Chaos Abyss, despite the fact that his letters claimed that everything was going well there and that he would soon return.
I thought about the mega reward money out for him, and how he had gone to the Chaos Abyss in the first place to go into hiding. I could understand that he wanted to avoid returning, yet…
“I don’t care if he lives or dies! If he still doesn’t return, I’m going to have to think of some way to bring him back as I’m about to go crazy…”
[…Primates can typically be divided into the relatively primitive prosimians and the more advanced Anthropoidea, while prosimians can be divided into the lemur suborder and tarsiiformes…]
My System was behaving ever more strangely recently, perhaps due to the imminent birth of Beifeng’s ridiculous descendants. She kept muttering biology textbook phrases from my previous world…
[…Spring has arrived, and life has revived. It’s now mating season…]
Alright, the System was now quoting Animal World? She was constantly making such quotes, which was driving me crazy! In fact, I was even beginning to miss the days when she would constantly set pitfalls for me!
Her constant muttering over the past few days also helped me to understand what Beifeng had accomplished.
Right now, all the major species were technically the descendants of the Creator G.o.ddesses.
t.i.tans, a Gold Species, had evolved into new species such as the giants and the dwarves. The Gold Elves had evolved into new species such as all the current elf species. Even the great demons were descendants of the very first bloodline.
Even though this was now a mixed-blood generation, for a human mixed-blood descendant, such as a half-elf or half-beastman, the bloodline’s inheritance would typically be rather weak. Even if there were descendants, the descendant would typically favor more traits of one species. For instance, a half-elf’s descendant who had 75% human blood would basically be nothing more than a pointy-eared human.
With two more generations after that, the mixed bloodline would no longer have much meaning at all, as that person would become fully accepted as a human.
To the G.o.ddess of Order, the order between species was the foundation of everything. The countless variety of species out there was the foundation of this mystical world. This was also why she had been so crazy back then as to try and give every single species a natural job to perform, with a natural fate.
“Every species has their own responsibility. Dwarves and giants, who are skilled with their hands, should be smiths. Angels should be government officials and service representatives. Elves should be scholars and teachers. Demons should be soldiers and generals. t.i.tans should be architects. Dragons should transport other species on their backs due to their powerful physical bodies and ability of flight…”
Without even mentioning how ridiculous Astrya’s vision of “Order” had been back then, this was indeed the perfect society that she had envisioned as the G.o.ddess of Order.
At the very least, until dimensional invaders broke through the dimensional walls and shattered this perfect society, both the Creator G.o.ddesses of Order and Chaos indeed viewed this as an acceptable world.
However, the end result of being defeated by the dimensional invaders was that the G.o.ddesses of Order and Chaos teamed up to seal all holes in the dimensional walls, and that they started having different opinions about the proper path of evolution.
The G.o.ddess of Order adamantly insisted that her way of giving every species a proper role was correct. She even strengthened this further, having her species study their specialties, turning all her species and individuals into small gears that were part of the whole society, all in order to strengthen Eich. Meanwhile, G.o.ddess of Chaos Cynthia took the demons down a path of self-evolution.
The G.o.ddess of Order couldn’t accept Cynthia’s choice. However, Astrya’s only joy was that the great majority of species didn’t become as chaotic as the demons did. The foundational “order” of other species was still present.
But currently, not only had this “order” been broken, even the most basic racial purity had been shattered. Not only were Beifeng’s half-blood descendants not half-Dracons, each and every single one of his descendants could be considered a unique species on their own. Additionally, all of his descendants had also inherited their father’s powerful reproductive abilities, and they would be capable of creating even stranger descendants with other species in the future.
To others, this might not seem like much, but to the G.o.ddess of Order, this phenomenon had completely shattered her worldview. Soon, the entire world would be filled with thousands of strange creatures, so the original unified and peaceful balance of species would be shattered.
Not only would there be enough to fill in a biology textbook, Beifeng might even receive a new nickname such as “Mother of Ten Thousand Species”.
[…I swear upon my name as the G.o.ddess of Order that if you don’t deal with that source of pollution for me soon, I’m going to think of a method to annihilate those divine beast mothers…]
“Calm down, at least those divine beast mothers are innocent. Well, perhaps they aren’t that innocent, but their children… Fine, I won’t mention their children!”
I could even see a shadowy item spinning around in the cold wind. If I saw the item correctly, it was another ancient nuclear bomb item, which I had previously used up before—Salo’s Crystal!
I definitely didn’t want to see if my System had the power to exchange for one of those for her personal usage, so I hurriedly told her to stop. The shadowy image of the Salo’s Crystal disappeared, but this was definitely no laughing matter.
Even though it was freezing outside, I was sweating bullets. This was my first time seeing my System act like this. Beifeng truly deserved his spot of #1 on the Calamity Rankings for being able to make the G.o.ddess of Order so hysterical.
At this point, I was even getting worried that if Beifeng suddenly appeared in front of me, my System would suddenly try self-destructing in order to get rid of him once and for all.
Soon, I no longer had the time to slack off.
“The ability to disguise themselves? So, they’ve already sneaked into the Northlands’ cities?”
“Our warlocks indicate that the devils’ disguise abilities are incredibly powerful, so it’s highly likely that they’ve already snuck in. Also, judging from our dissection of their brains, they should have intelligence exceeding that of ordinary people.”
What just surprised me was a report that I just received. This was a dissection report that we invited the Mist Alliance’s demon warlocks to perform on those previous “noodle-like” faceless demons.
Typically speaking, demons at the same power level would be stronger than devils. The biggest reason for this would be that demons’ abilities would have countless variations. This would be an advantage in single combat.
Meanwhile, devils’ job cla.s.ses were fairly fixed. In fact, they would often choose or create their own special job cla.s.ses in order to obtain certain abilities that they wanted. This would be an obvious advantage in military-scale combat or special operations.
These “weak” devils didn’t have particularly strong combat strength. However, they possessed powers of corrosion and demonization, along with spiritual abilities of hypnosis and beast taming. They were probably a special devil species that focused more on the mind and magic.
Our demon warlocks’ dissection report also told us that these faceless devils actually had the ability to form any face that they wanted. Plus, since they were psychology experts, they were just like natural-born spies. In that case, it seemed highly likely that many such devil spies had already snuck into the Northlands’ cities.
The missing beast stampede, along with excellent spies. These two added together made me feel really uneasy. Currently, the Northlands cities had only planned for the beast stampede’s attack. If these devil spies disguised themselves as human warriors, and then backstabbed the city guard and opened up the city gates, allowing the beast stampede to enter the city…
“Have the Northlands countries been notified yet?”
“Not yet. Her Highness Reyne wishes to ask for your opinion.”
“…What opinion could I possibly have? Swiftly notify the other Northlands countries. It seems that the devils really want to do something major here.”
Originally, I had only an average a.s.sessment of this devil species, thinking that even though they had the ability to demonize and corrode, these were only low-level abilities in the Chaos Abyss, but now that we learned that these devils had the ability to disguise themselves, and possessed the intelligence and knowledge necessary to act as spies, then these devils definitely weren’t as dumb as they looked. They probably also had some spellcasting abilities.
“…My original a.s.sessment was wrong. The first devil that we captured must have been pretending to be of low intelligence. These aren’t low-level devils at all! They’re all high-level! They’re a type of high-intelligence devil species focused more on magic and scheming.”
A group of low-level devils might mean that some high-level devil wanted to take personal revenge against me for whatever reason. However, casually tossing out several thousand or even tens of thousands of such high-level devils that didn’t seem replaceable meant that the existence behind this was truly going all out. Being willing to sacrifice so much definitely meant that the existence wanted even more.
I recalled my past interactions with the devils and how I had made them suffer, making me feel like even a Devil Lord personally attacking me soon wouldn’t be strange at all.
“What is it? You have such a big frown.”
“Yeah, it’s because your brothers have pushed me into such a pitfall.”
“Brothers?”
Harloys still had snow on her head as she just flew back in from the window. But, she then looked at the dissection report, and thought of those distorted noodle-like devils, instantly erupting in anger.
“Slimes and noodles are no brothers… Ptui, I’m not a slime, I’m an elf!”
I grabbed the silly cat who was about to pounce on and bite me and tossed her aside onto the wooden table.
“Stop messing around. I’m quite frustrated right now. Just thinking about these things entering Diffindor, and that there might be devil spies around us right now, makes me so frustrated.”
Harloys paused in surprise for a moment, but then laughed out loud.
“Ha! It’s impossible for them to enter Diffindor. Even if they did, it would be impossible for them to act as proper spies.”
I was the one who was rendered speechless in disbelief this time.
“Why’s that? I highly doubt that the ordinary city guards will be able to tell the devils apart from ordinary humans.”
“Did you forget? Diffindor is the crimeless city, while devils… Can you find a single devil who won’t commit a crime for 24 hours straight? Especially when the devil enters an unfamiliar city while penniless?”
Penniless? I mulled things over, and that was indeed the case. Devils didn’t have the habit of carrying gold coins with them. Their normal soul coin currency from the lower planes would be completely unusable here. While they indeed had the ability to “make money”, they would only do so by methods such as… stealing, scamming, illicit trading, and so on. Most devils would be outstanding at using illegal methods to make money.
With so many devils, they would definitely have a high-level leader who knew the overall objective and plan. Such a high-level leader obviously wouldn’t be staying outside in the cold. The most likely scenario was that the leader had already arrived in Diffindor.
Devils would also need to eat. They would also need to spend a great deal of money in order to obtain information. But, if they used their typical methods to make money in Diffindor, a beam of red light would instantly s.h.i.+ne upon them, bringing over two Justice Knights who would capture them… A top-level spy being captured by traffic cops? This scene seemed so comical!
“Perhaps we can look around in Diffindor’s jails. Maybe our target is a vagabond who instantly committed a crime right after coming to Diffindor!”