So, What Should I Do?

I explained our situation to Akabane-san and the others, who had knelt before the radiant, glowing Divine Beast power of Wheel-san.

Naturally, I also told them we weren’t using the leylines in any strange way.

It was a bit complicated emotionally that Mago-san and Mego-san wouldn’t accept it when it came from me, yet believed Wheel-san without question when he said the same thing—but to keep things moving, it couldn’t be helped.

When the conversation turned to Utena-san and the others who had gone to Tree Village, Akabane-san bowed with a graceful motion.

“Hm, I see… even Utena has been causing you trouble. You must have been inconvenienced.”

“No, no. I can understand how the elves feel.”

Apparently, as a fellow member of the same investigation group, he knew Utena-san.

He apologized as if he were certain she’d caused problems.

“Well, she did say a few things, but I’m not bothered by it anymore.”

“That is a relief. We elves do not wish to incur the displeasure of the Divine Beasts.”

Akabane-san didn’t feel very “elf-like,” or rather, he felt surprisingly human.

He didn’t look down on us either.

When I asked, he told me he’d only recently returned to the elf settlements—before that, he had been living under the protection of a human kingdom as a guest.

Apparently, he had lived in an eastern island nation far from our kingdom.

That probably explained why his speech sounded so archaic—maybe it was a dialect from there.

“More importantly, I would like to speak about what we should do next.”

“Quite right. We do not have much time either, so that helps.”

Utena-san and Akabane-san had come because abnormalities had appeared in the flow of the leylines.

There were four changes happening right now, and two of them were at Tree Village and Guinea Village.

Meaning one of those two had to be the reason the leylines had become abnormal.

I had heard elves were famously isolationist, a people who rarely involved themselves with other races.

If they had come all the way to a remote frontier like this, that meant something serious enough to be unacceptable had happened.

Come to think of it, I still hadn’t been told what, exactly, had happened.

Utena-san had only hesitated and never explained it.

So when I asked, Akabane-san told me the circumstances without seeming particularly bothered.

“In truth, the World Tree possessed by the elves is beginning to wither. Our researchers have concluded it will fail completely before long.”

“The World Tree… is withering?”

To me, a World Tree was something I could produce fairly casually.

If I had four Smile Points, I could plant one—right now I could probably put out around two hundred a day.

The Tree Barrier was convenient, the trees didn’t wither, and on top of that they bore absurdly valuable fruit, so I’d thought of them as nothing but a useful, all-purpose tree.

But for the elves, it wasn’t like that.

They were guardians of the World Tree.

They had likely watched over it for hundreds—thousands—of years as it grew.

By using the World Tree and drawing mana from the leylines, the elves had maintained their barrier and cultivated fertile fields.

But because of the abnormalities, they were no longer able to do that, and the elves were taking a severe blow.

Now they were sustaining the barrier by personally casting magic nonstop to keep it running.

Crop yields were also clearly decreasing year by year.

“…”

I couldn’t bring myself to say what I was thinking.

I listened to Akabane-san in silence, then decided we should separate for now so I could organize my thoughts.

Could I solve their problem?

Probably… I thought I could.

One idea had already come to me, and even if that failed, I could likely eliminate the leyline abnormality by using Wood Golems in overwhelming numbers.

But negotiating with the elves posed a problem.

Because even if it was only on paper, I was still a member of House Conrad, sent here with the goal of greening this desert.

I had been given full discretion over desert matters, so dealing with the dark elves hadn’t been an issue—but elves were different.

If a diplomatic problem arose, I had a duty to report it to Father and seek his approval.

I couldn’t just help the elves on my own authority.

And if it was Father, he would almost certainly turn any relationship with the elves into some kind of profit.

Given the kind of man he was—often funding war costs through war slaves—the outcome was nearly guaranteed.

Nine times out of ten, it would lead to the ravaging of the elf settlements.

And if it became known that I was dealing with the elves, it would unravel from there and expose Tree Village too.

Right now we’d managed only because we had no contact, but if that changed, who knew how heavy a tax burden they would slap on us.

…Maybe I was standing at a crossroads in my life.

Who should I help, and how?

It seemed like I needed to think about it—seriously—at least once.