Guardian's Farm 24

Once I pulled the boar to a small alcove to hide my tracks as much as possible, I continued exploring. While all signs pointed that the disease was not in the same league as the Blight, that hardly meant that it was harmless. Add in the conspiracy, and continuing was my only option.

I ventured deeper. Soon, I didn’t need to carefully smell the source, or cut through the bark to measure the intensity of the disease. The trees started to show signs of the disease openly, rotten bark, dried leaves, and corrupted roots.

“At least there’s no corrupted magical beasts,” I muttered happily — going by a very loose definition of happiness — as I continued. Yes, corrupted ordinary beasts were more dangerous than their healthy counterparts, but they were still weak enough that all I needed was good timing to deal with them. No mobilization of internal energy was necessary.

Mobilizing internal energy in a fight was different than using it for carving, or any other daily task. There, all I needed was to be careful as I circulated the energy, slowly feeding the edge. In battle, things were different. A lifetime of reflexes, a lifetime that I conditioned myself to fight despite the worst of the pain and discomfort, took over, causing my wounds to flare up.

I still felt the discomfort from my fight against the spies despite the medicine, and that was merely two proper punches.

“Is this how it feels to get old?” I muttered as I continued deeper into the forest. Here I was, great Magna, vanquisher of Darkness, Grand Guardian himself, trying to pace myself against a few corrupted beasts.

A few years ago, I was able to fight against the dark legions from dawn to dusk without break, cutting a swathe through an army of dark creatures, each strong enough to devastate a town. Maybe things wouldn’t have been this bad if I was able to rest and recover after that final battle, but duel after duel, it forced me to fight, never to recover as I did my best to support our position —

“No excuse to lose focus on a battlefield, Magna,” I said to myself as I continued to walk, ducking under the thickening canopy of diseased branches, my boots enough to destroy the weakened roots and broken trunks. Deeper in the area, the rot infected the trunks badly enough that it was like walking through a swamp, the heat of a summer day not making it any more pleasant, disgust rising in me, my stomach getting queasy.

“I’m not just getting old, but also soft,” I muttered in disappointment. Before the final battle, I wouldn’t have blinked at such a location. I was used to fighting the dark and the diseased, but it looked like living in the capital for two years had softened me more than I had expected.

Clearly, duels with spoiled nobles were not a substitute for true adventure.

The realization that I wasn’t the same warrior, whether physically or mentally, was a tough medicine to swallow.

As I walked, I couldn’t help but remember Garum, always complaining about his aching knees whenever we had to walk for long in a location where he couldn’t use his magic to make it easier for him. Back then, I wrote it off as the habits of a mage, but age clearly played a bigger role than I had expected.

“My apologies, my old friend,” I said as I touched the earth, wishing for him to create another earthen golem to respond from a distance. Unfortunately, he was in a place where my voice could not reach him anymore, no matter how much I wished otherwise.

Finding the center of the disease didn’t take too long. The diseased area was big and confusing, but knowing the patterns, it was easy to traverse toward the center, killing the occasional corrupted beast I stumbled upon.

Until, I reached the center, a small groove where several trees had been taken down to create a gap where a dark crystal platform, holding something that was enough to destroy my somber mood, and replace it with deep fury. It wasn’t a big item. Merely as big as my fist, a greenish-black, with a small crack running through the middle.

A scale.

One that I would recognize even if someone had gouged my eyes, cut my fingers, and destroyed my hands until they were turned into mere stubs before asking me to recognize it.

Just the sheer feeling of darkness radiating from it, seeping into the ground, was enough to recognize it.

A scale from the Dragon of Darkness.

I was worried when Eli was taken in due to what seemed to be a conspiracy. I was mad when I saw him being tortured. I was concerned when I realized the conspiracy was bigger than something a border baron could cook, realizing I had to be careful not to ruin retirement.

Now, I was furious. Furious enough to see red.

I wanted nothing more than to go and smash the scale and shatter the platform, burn every single tree that was affected, hoping that it would keep my fury down.

If it was two decades ago, or maybe even a decade ago, I would have done it and damned the consequences. Even a fragment of that abomination didn’t deserve to exist, not after everything it had caused.

Unfortunately, while age might have ruined my body and sapped my will to live, it also taught me many lessons about allowing anger to make such important decisions. Ultimately, a scale, while disgusting, wasn’t something that was so dangerous that it needed to be destroyed immediately.

Not when it would function as an excellent bait for whoever was responsible for it, one that was far more important than destroying a remnant scale. I needed to learn who was behind this abomination.

After circling the crystal a few times to see if there was any clue I could extract without leaving a mark — there was none — I walked back, though my trip took almost ten times as much time as I did my best to erase any sing of my presence carefully, from brushing away my footprints to dragging the animals I had killed together, and adding enough wounds to make it look like they died against each other — corrupted beasts were not exactly famous for getting along peacefully — and applying a dozen other tricks.

While my hands were busy with the work, my mind was occupied by the nature of the conspiracy. Unfortunately, the scale was the kind of clue that answered some questions, but created far more.

The first problem came from the fact that they were not exactly impossible to find. The Dragon of Darkness hadn’t been a peaceful creature, nor were we the only ones who fought against it. More than one battle had resulted in it getting injured enough that it was forced to escape, especially whenever it attacked one of the well-fortified cities and breached the outer walls.

There was a reason the nobles were able to watch the disaster from their ivory towers with only token efforts to truly quell it rather than putting in everything. Ultimately, they weren’t afraid of the risks. Dragon had managed to breach the outer walls, but doing so against the well-fortified inner keep while under attack from the armies wasn’t the same.

However, the relative abundance of the scales as a war trophy didn’t mean that any two-bit cultist could bring them along. Even separated from the main body, carrying those scales — whether to use, store, or destroy — was not an easy challenge.

Keeping one from fading away for more than two years, even more so.

It meant whoever was responsible for the presence of the scale had to be a true mover and shaker.

The problem, there was no reason for someone truly strong to care about a small corner at the border. Off the top of my mind, I could count twenty ways for a worshipper of the dark to create mayhem incomparable to a diseased patch of forest and a few mad beasts with one— especially since it would not spread like a natural disease.

But, one thing I learned while fighting, the enemy might be ignorant or shortsighted, but they were rarely truly stupid enough to miss so many obvious options. “It means, they have a bigger plot in mind. But, what…”

When I finally left the clearing, it was already late afternoon, and my task of erasing my presence was not made any easier by the necessity of trying to stay hidden from any possible scouts.

Luckily, for the moment, they seem to be satisfied with the blockade by the guards, thinking it would be enough to keep the area safe.

I took even more care as I avoided the guard patrols, not wanting to ruin all my effort at the last second. But, as I got closer to the farm, another question slowly took the place of the earlier realizations.

What should I cook to bribe Sage with to convince him to keep an eye on the diseased area, and alert me of any movement.