A Hundred Billion Points

The village chief’s house was old, and scrupulously neat. The walls were built of mud and ought to have been shedding dust in clouds, yet the woman of the house was diligent enough that not one speck had settled on the furniture. She kept herself as she kept the house, her hair pulled back into one tight knot, her clothes old but washed clean and sitting neatly on her.

Dong-hui sat down on the backless wooden chair the chief brought out for her and took a mouthful of the unidentifiable tea his wife carried in.

“Mmph!”

The tea in the wooden cup was bitter, and far too bitter at that. Her whole tongue went numb with it, and though she knew perfectly well how rude it was, Dong-hui spat it out onto the floor before she could stop herself.

“Ugh, it’s bitter!”

“I— I’m so sorry. This is all the tea there is in the house.”

The chief’s wife was at a complete loss, close to tears. Dong-hui’s tongue was still numb and she could not lift her head, so she waved a hand about to say that it was all right. The apologies kept coming, and with the bitterness stinging all the way down her throat and her eyes brimming, she raised her head.

“No, no. It simply did not suit my palate, that is all. Anything as bitter as this must be very good for one, I suppose? Ha ha ha ha.”

For the sake of the chief’s wife and her apologies she threw in a joke that was not even funny. It must have worked, because the woman’s face eased a good deal from what it had been.

After the awkward laughter came a silence that nobody managed to salvage. The chief went on gauging Chloe’s mood, wariness and fear tangled thick all over his face; his wife could not sit still; and Nel and Bron, who had shown them the way here, hovered outside the door like puppies desperate to be let out.

“My lady, why should you come to so shabby a place as this…”

The chief broke the silence cautiously, letting the end of the sentence trail away. Dong-hui set down the cup she was holding and looked at him steadily. Both his cheeks were sunken hollow, and his eyes were almost uncannily clear.

The face inspired trust all on its own. If he had told her peanut butter was what meju was made of¹, she would probably have believed him.

“How much food is left here?”

She asked it while working hard not to show the liking that was welling up in her for no good reason at all.

“My lady, the people of this village have barely been eating one meal a day. If you raise the taxes any further than this, our villagers will die.”

The chief had taken fright at Chloe asking after their remaining food, jumped to his own conclusion, and pleaded with her. Frightened half out of his wits as he was, he was still finding courage for the sake of the villagers, and once again Dong-hui thought what a fine man he was.

“It is not about taxes.”

“Then…”

“How much food is left?”

Dong-hui looked him straight in the eye and repeated the same question.

“The truth is that as of yesterday the storehouse is completely empty.”

He answered in a voice that shrank away to nothing, as though he were the criminal here. As his head bowed, the gauntness of the back of his neck stood out all the more, as if a single thought were running through him over and over:

I’m the criminal, I’m the criminal.

“I shall have grain sent to the village before long. It should be enough to hold out a week on.”

“Is that… truly so?”

He had expected nothing of the kind, and put the question back to her as though he could not believe it.

“What is given free stops there. For the rest, work, earn money, and buy your grain.”

“But this is not the busy farming season, my lady, so work is hard to come by. If you would show us just a little leniency…”

The chief did not miss his chance; his voice turned to pleading again.

“I will give you the work.”

Dong-hui let her eyes travel slowly around the inside of the house again. From outside it had seemed presentable enough, but the longer she looked the more broken places she found, here and there.

“What sort of work my lady means to give…”

The chief could not follow what Dong-hui was saying. The lord he had known all this time and the lord sitting in front of him now might have been two entirely different people.

“The village is to be put in order. We shall lay the roads and repair the houses so that you can get through the winter. The materials needed for the repairs will of course be supplied by the estate, and those who work will be paid a fair daily wage as well. You will hear the details from the butler.”

That said, Dong-hui rose from her seat, light and unburdened, as though her business were done.

“Butler.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“I shall leave a horse and a few knights behind, so explain the details and then set off. I am tired, so I must go on ahead.”

Robbers were said to turn up in the area often enough, so she left a few knights behind to protect Handsome.

“Yes, understood.”

Dong-hui left the chief’s house, and Handsome stayed behind exactly as the lord had ordered, explaining in detail to the bewildered villagers everything that had been happening over in the village of Morta. The villagers asked the question over and over as though they could not believe it, then broke into cheers, and from every side came voices thick with tears, saying in their relief that now they would live.

The instant Dong-hui sat down in the carriage, the alarm tone went off in her ears, ding after dizzying ding. Repeated over and over, a sound that had been nothing but welcome at first grew as irritating as the whine of a mosquito’s wings.

“This racket is going to be the death of me.”

That was welcome news. Dong-hui was very tired, and thinking the service unusually obliging today, she nodded quickly.

“Hey!”

She shouted it in belated regret, but the points had already been deducted.

The status window put the question like a confidence trickster, and Dong-hui set her jaw so hard it ground. If only she could actually have seen it there in front of her, she would have liked to grab it by the collar and shake it back and forth.

“No. Leave it as it is.”

Dong-hui carved the character for patience into her heart² and just barely managed to answer.

She glared at the window in irritation, and as she did, the words that had been nagging uneasily at her for a long while now caught her eye. The mp figure. It had settled itself at the bottom of the status window one day without a word, gone on inching its number up bit by bit, and today it had taken her points outright.

“What on earth is the mp figure? You’ve never once asked me about it before. You piled it up however you liked, so why are you suddenly taking my points now? Wait! There aren’t a whole lot of people like me, are there? Ack! Is this a pyramid scheme, something like that?”

At the sudden barrage of questions the letters on the status window wavered from side to side for a moment, blurred, and then came clear again. They were nothing but letters, and still Dong-hui had the feeling the thing was flustered.

“How much does it cost?”

If it came to some 20 or 30p, she was willing to pay. That was how much she wanted to know what mp really was. Up to now the figure had piled up without doing her any particular harm, so she had not paid it much mind, but if it was going to nibble her points away like this, she plainly needed to find out about it. There was always the chance that one day it would run short and stop her doing something.

But the window asked for points in a unit that was hard even to read through in one go.

“Get lost.”

“Not dead loss. I said get lost.”

The status window put up a phrase that had been out of fashion for ages without turning a hair, then blinked in front of her eyes and vanished, as though to needle her.

“Why do I keep getting the feeling I’m being talked out of this?”

The window that had vanished spat out one quick sentence and vanished again. She might not know exactly what the mp figure was, but one thing was certain. It wanted her not to know.

“Ugh, this doesn’t sit right.”

Dong-hui went on grumbling about how it did not sit right for a good while after that, and then nodded off. Her head swayed back and forth for some time before it came to rest against the wall of the carriage with a small thud.

Beside her, a rippling blue status window floated up into the air.

— Bzzzzt.

The faint noise was buried under the racket of the running carriage and slid past unremarked.

The window shook unsteadily for a moment, and as it came clear the silver-haired man appeared abruptly out of thin air and sat down in the seat beside Dong-hui. The shape of a blue hourglass floated up above the back of his hand and began to spin round and round.

The figure had stood at 75 until the 50p taken from Dong-hui was added on. As time passed, the number above the hourglass fell fast.

The man gazed blankly at the back of his own hand, and then gazed just as blankly at the profile of Dong-hui, asleep as though she had fainted.

Instead of answering the status window’s question, the man nodded, his expression heavy.

The window threw its letters up quickly. The man looked evenly at them as they surfaced and vanished in their urgency, then moved his gaze back to Dong-hui. All the while the number floating over the hourglass on the back of his hand went on falling fast.

“That may well be.”

This time too the man did not answer, and kept his mouth shut. The window pushed its letters right up in front of his eyes and blinked, as though it could not bear the frustration, but he sat unmoving as a wax doll.

Until now nobody had ever been curious about the mp figure. Most users never saw the mp figure on the status window at all, and the ten or so who did notice it found their thoughts blurring even as they wondered, or proved incapable of any curiosity beyond that. That was the magic the man had laid on it.

And yet this user had read the mp figure without the least trouble, had wondered what it was, and had even tried to pay points to find out.

What if the window had not named an absurd price? The thought alone was appalling.

The window urged him on as though it could not bear it, but the man did not stir.

That was when it happened.

Something must have caught in the wheels of the fast-running carriage, because it lurched hard with a rattling jolt.

— Thump!

It was the sound of Dong-hui’s head, asleep against the carriage wall, striking it.

“Agh!”

Dong-hui’s eyes flew open in shock, and she clamped both palms over her throbbing head and screwed them shut again.

“Ow. My head.”

“My lady, are you all right?”

The sound of her head hitting the wall must have been quite loud, because the coachman slowed the carriage and asked in concern.

“Mm. I’m fine. Just keep go—aaaaaaaagh!”

Dong-hui had been turning her head this way and that as she said she was fine, and only then did the silver-haired man sitting beside her come into view. She was so startled that she pressed herself flat against the carriage wall and let out a shriek before she knew it.

At Dong-hui’s shriek the carriage stopped its fast run, and the knights on escort duty nearby came running up at speed.

“What has happened!”

Red Bear flung the carriage door open, his face taut with tension. He held a sword with a keen shine to it, in a stance that looked ready to attack that very instant.

“Here! There was some man here!”

Dong-hui sprang to her feet and pointed at the seat beside her.

But the seat was completely empty.

“I beg your pardon? There’s nobody there, though.”

“No! He was there, I’m certain of it! There was a man like a silver hairtail³ sitting right there in the seat beside me!”

The status window had popped up out of nowhere, scrawled strange letters every which way, and vanished.