Chapter 96 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 96: Tower of Crows 04
Unlike the root system of a plant, the center of an animal's vitality lies in its heart.
Through her resonance with Jorrona, Lucita had gained sight of the life layer. The distribution of vitality throughout the world was now fully visible to her, rendered into something observable.
Like the blue dove now perched on the branch above her head —
She tilted her head back and met the dove's eyes as it paused in the middle of preening.
The dove's mind was very simple in its composition. It tilted its head and stared at Lucita blankly for a second, then went back to grooming its feathers.
Lucita didn't look away. The dove's body was reflected in her black-and-white irises.
What was hard was the skeleton. What was soft was the tissue. What flowed was the blood. What wrapped it all were the feathers.
Together, they formed a vessel.
A vessel was not "sealed". At every moment, it exchanged vitality with the outside world. That exchange was what sustained life.
Her mind moved at high speed through the mental cosmos, the patterns of vitality deconstructed endlessly, broken down to their finest elements, until every law was transformed into visible lines that mapped themselves into her eyes.
Lucita reached out, and from the air she grasped a mass of flowing vitality.
Using vitality as thread and the gift of life as her guiding force, she wove a vessel of the same form.
When the final connection was made, this complete, independent life force finally began to flow.
The most difficult step in the conception was complete.
Lucita let out a breath.
Then she drew color from the visual world, shaped texture from the tactile world, seized a cooing call from the world of sound, and wove a space perfectly suited to it.
Finally, she returned to the mental cosmos and held out her hand to Jorrona.
"Come with me," she said.
What she touched felt like a bundle of straw, slightly rough against her palm.
She held tight to Jorrona's "hand," pushed open the door of the mental cosmos, and in an instant the light of day blazed, and the real sun cut into her eyes.
Lucita raised the faint silhouette resting in her palm, barely recognizable as a blue dove, and held it before Jorrona: "This will be your body."
Jorrona raised her hand with curiosity, reaching out to touch the small dove-shadow.
In the instant she made contact, the vitality shuddered as though disturbed, ripples spreading outward, and an attraction came from somewhere within.
Jorrona didn't have time to say a single word before she had vanished from Lucita's sight.
At the same moment, the dove-shadow in Lucita's palm gave an exploratory flutter of its wings.
It tilted its head and cooed. Then it seemed to startle awake. It flapped its wings several times, broke free of the surrounding mist, solidified, and descended into the world.
Then it promptly fell to the ground.
"Pfft." Lucita couldn't hold back a laugh.
The blue dove scrambled upright in annoyance, shook its wings twice, gathered itself for a moment, caught the newly risen westerly wind, and flew in a single sweep to the highest branch of an old apple tree.
Lucita watched until it settled on the branch and finally allowed herself to relax.
Gradually, her laughter faded. She brushed back the loose strands of hair the wind had blown across her face and narrowed her eyes as she looked around.
The wind had risen.
The moment the blue dove fully accepted Jorrona's soul and took solid form, a wind had sprung up from the west. It was strong enough to lift scattered wheat stalks from the ridges and send them spiraling into the air. Birds burst from the trees in alarm. A wild rabbit bolted frantically from its burrow. Dust swirled through the air, and with the sun still shining overhead and not a cloud in sight, there was something deeply unsettling about it.
Lucita lowered her gaze to her own palms.
Moments ago, they had created a perfect vessel of life. The instant the blue dove spread its wings and began exchanging vitality with the world, the world itself had been disturbed by this unfamiliar source of life.
Using the blue dove as a point of disruption, she had pried open a gap in the world's life layer. Countless flickering laws revealed their mysterious power, drawing her forward with a presence that felt both tangible and elusive.
The world had opened a path before her — a path that was very hard to refuse — and she was walking it.
As for Lucita, would she refuse?
She studied the lines of her palm carefully, and suddenly let out a quiet laugh.
She would not. Of course she would not.
The wind had arrived strangely. Amid the surprised murmurs of the people around her, no one noticed that the minstrel standing on the field ridge had quietly put away their instrument and risen to leave.
Lucita caught a glimpse of that figure disappearing into the wind, and a guess arose suddenly in her mind. She started forward without thinking, taking two quick steps — until the minstrel, with no apparent awareness of her, tucked away the instrument and walked westward. Then they faded gradually from sight along the ridge.
Lucita stopped. She did not give chase.
That was Gaia, the Mother Goddess, whom she had not seen in a very long time.
She turned and asked the blue dove that had just come to rest on her shoulder: "Through your eyes, what did the life cycle of that minstrel look like?"
The dove tilted its head and cooed twice.
Jorrona's familiar rough voice sounded in the mental cosmos: "A minstrel? What minstrel?"
"Can't you see…never mind." Lucita had started to ask, then understood at once.
Gaia had appeared, and she had expected someone else to be able to see her. She must have lost her mind.
Ever since she had come to understand the power of time, she had not seen Gaia.
Now she had taken an extraordinarily aggressive step by creating life, venturing deeper and deeper into the territory of mastering the world's laws. She had even disturbed the physical world itself, causing a west wind to rise from nowhere.
What was Gaia's response to all this?
Just now, Gaia had appeared in the guise of a minstrel, playing a melody of the harvest, helping Lucita enter a state of deeper comprehension of the cycle of life.
Lucita's gaze settled on the direction in which Gaia had disappeared, and she fell into a long silence.
Only after the blue dove bid her farewell and flew southward without a backward glance did Lucita finally turn and leave.
Behind her, sage plants pushed up through the soil with every step she had taken, coaxed into existence by the vitality she had spilled, swaying gently in the wind.
By the time she returned to the seed shop, it was already afternoon.
Looking at the noticeably depleted seed shelves, she scratched her head, swept the shop clean, locked the door, and headed into the back courtyard.
There had apparently been trouble in the south recently. The royal guard had begun expanding its ranks, and training intensity had increased significantly as well. Violet had developed a keen interest in human military tactics. For the past several days, she had headed to the training grounds in the western district at dawn, perching in a tree beside the practice field to observe. Somehow, she had also acquired a set of technical drawings for study.
The elven love of archery seemed to be a law inscribed in the blood.
As for Linnea, having left Irttat, she had missed a semester of schooling. As the weather grew colder, Lucita discussed the matter with her and arranged for her to study alongside her playmate Emily under the guidance of Emily's family's private tutor, learning history, literature, and arithmetic.
The tuition fees were, of course, a necessary expense.
Human history and culture were novel enough to fascinate Linnea; and for Delphine, equally so.
In any case, the day was not yet over, Violet had not yet returned from the training camp, and Linnea and Delphine were not yet out of lessons. The house was empty.
Having skipped lunch, Lucita had no choice but to forage for herself.
She took some cloves, cinnamon, and tsao-ko from her storage space to replenish the kitchen's spice jars, then steamed a fresh flounder she had kept in storage. This was a familiar routine. Alongside it, she set two loaves of bread and a pot of rice to cook in the rising steam.
Partly because of the northern climate and partly because of poor soil yields, autumn vegetables in Viktori were rather limited. Meat remained plentiful enough, but vegetables consisted mostly of potatoes, turnips, onions, and common cabbage.
Of course, the aristocracy's table was far more varied. Southern produce traveled year-round aboard dedicated steam trains to the upper city. Purple eggplants, green garlic, and prized lantern squashes appeared on noble tables in their proper seasons.
On most days when Lucita was feeling lazy, she would go to a shop in the upper city and pay a premium for vegetables they didn't often eat, just to treat herself. Today she had made a detour to the upper city on her way back, only to be told they were out of stock.
Lately, the train service coming from the south had been unreliable.
She gave up in mild frustration, dug out a bag of out-of-season pea seeds from her storage space, brought them to fruition in her own garden, and used the harvest together with a tender cut of venison to make a stew.
By the time she finished cooking, the evening sun had already reached the porch.
Lucita settled into the rocking chair beneath the eaves. Her thoughts drifted from the expansion of the royal guard to the repeated disruptions of southern rail service, and a vague unease settled in her chest.
The name of Kelsey had already reached her ears, indistinctly.
Those respectable neighbors who worked in government or at law offices would occasionally murmur at their afternoon gatherings, and those sounds would travel through the sound layer of the world and reach her eardrums with perfect clarity.
Kelsey, one of the rebel leaders of unknown origin…
She frowned in thought, considering whether to write another letter to probe the situation.
Just then, the front gate facing Rosebush Street rang with the clear chime of the doorbell.
"Who is it?" she called, stepping outside to see.
Violet scaled walls like other people ate and drank. Delphine was a spiritual being who could drift through and open the door for Linnea. Who on earth would ring the doorbell that practically no one ever used?
Standing at the gate was a postal worker in a dark blue uniform.
The plain middle-aged woman looked somewhat flustered. Sweat glistened faintly on her forehead from the exertion of her rounds, and her shoulder bag hung nearly empty. She appeared to be nearing the end of her shift.
The moment she spotted Lucita, she seemed even more flustered. Holding out a letter with both hands, she said, "My lord, this... this is your correspondence."
Lucita looked at the woman's short, tousled golden hair, and was suddenly reminded of the golden-haired young woman at the postal office in Tirol City, who had pressed a tiger jasmine into her hands as a farewell gift when she left.
Blue suits red best of all.
She chose a perfectly-bloomed red rose from the autumn rose bed at the side of the gate, snapped it from its stem with a bend of her fingers, held it out to the postal worker with one hand while accepting the letter with the other, and smiled at her: "Thank you, and I hope you have a pleasant evening."
The woman smiled back in spite of herself — a shy, warm smile — accepted the red rose, tucked it into the breast pocket of her uniform, nodded several times, and turned to leave.
Lucita closed the gate and opened the letter as she walked back.
The name at the bottom of the letter was familiar-sounding, yet also somehow unrecognizable: Vivian.
The sender's address: No. 11 Bluebell Street, Western District, Viktori.
Lucita had passed Bluebell Street once while visiting a tailor to have a cloak made. It was a row of terraced townhouses inhabited mostly by middle-class residents.
She unfolded the letter with a head full of questions.
"To Lord Cameron:
Good day to you.
I am an employee of the Gast Law Office, Cesar Vivian. I do not expect you to know me, though perhaps another identity of mine may seem familiar: I am the creator of the first silver-screen production, Vivian's Garden.
I write without invitation and offer my sincere apologies."
No wonder the name had given her that familiar feeling.
Since Vivian's Garden, several more accomplished productions had appeared on the silver screen. Yet as the first formally commercialized work of its kind, it retained an unmatched influence.
In the wake of Linnea's Starfire, only Vivian had truly understood what it was trying to express. She had seen its gentle compassion for those at society's lowest ranks. She had grasped that faint sliver of light illuminating the human heart and transformed it into something capable of speaking to audiences in the same language.
A truly perceptive artist, Lucita thought. What could have prompted her to write?
She continued reading.
"My speculation may be offensive, but please forgive someone who is alone in the world and has little time left. Were it not for my recent diagnosis of tuberculosis and the knowledge that I have less than a week to live, I would never have sent such a presumptuous letter. I would have had a lifetime in which to seek the answer myself.
Please indulge the curiosity and admiration of a person on the verge of death."
"I have heard that you keep an extraordinary seed shop, capable of growing crops at several times the yield of ordinary grain. I have heard that the recording conch was your creation; that you were elevated overnight to a place of honor with the king by virtue of astonishing magical ability. I have heard that a superb musical production was staged in your back garden, where flowers of every season bloomed in a single night.
Rumors about you circulate throughout the city.
'Divine emissary,' 'deity's representative on earth' — these are the most common guesses. Everyone believes you will bring hope to this country, and that your reluctance to associate with the nobility is simply the aloofness befitting a divine herald.
Is that so?"
"Probably not — am I right? Once again, please forgive me; I intend no offense."
At this, Lucita gave a quiet, dry smile.
A somewhat proud artist.
She was deeply fascinated by mysteries and clearly believed she had uncovered a fragment of the truth. There was a faint note of satisfaction beneath her words, barely concealed. In a certain sense, this Vivian was not only perceptive; she was clever enough to match her perception.
"You hold the great lords, and even the king herself, in no particular regard. You concern yourself with ordinary people, giving them ideas to think about, which does little to support the stability of this nation."
"I can only conclude... that your purpose is the destruction of this country."
Lucita narrowed her eyes.
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