Eleanora frequently thought about how right she was in her firm belief that this small Dhampir was far more fearsome than Birkyne and the other Pure-breed Vampires.

She was thinking the same tonight as well, but at the same time, as she thought about the policies of her master, the most fearsome being in this world, she asked herself, “Why?”

By selling the Goblin-head-shaped communication devices, Vandalieu could easily acquire a fortune and the position of baron, so why was he so fixated on the process of becoming an adventurer, gaining achievements and becoming a nobleman?

Even without the communication devices, he could use Golem Transmutation to change the shapes of gemstones or even Magic Stones, combine them and turn pebble-sized gemstones into large ones worthy of shining in the crown of a king. Wouldn’t he be able to easily gain the status of honorary nobleman if he demonstrated this ability?

For Magic Stones, only Magic Stones from monsters of the same race with the same Rank could be combined due to issues with Mana compatibility, but even so, Vandalieu would be able to combine Magic Stones to create larger ones when previously the only improvement possible was to polish them.

These were Eleanora’s thoughts, but Vandalieu had told her, “I can only see a future where influential people turn me into a slave or something and simply extract my Mana for their own use.” Indeed, Eleanora didn’t believe that all influential people were virtuous. In fact, she believed that over ninety percent of them were conspirators or villains.

But at the same time, she believed that unimaginably foolish influential people would make up less than ten percent.

I think that as long as they are not unimaginably foolish, they would realize that turning Vandalieu-sama into their enemy would lead to their ruin, but…

Enormous, black wings flapped gently. The wings that had grown from the back of her master.

“It feels nice to fly like this,” said Vandalieu. “Everyone, how does the ride feel?” he asked.

“Things are great here, too!” replied Zran. “The wind is strong, but it’s perfect for a hot summer’s night!”

“You’re amazing, King!” said Braga. “The humans making camp on the ground look like ants!”

Eleanora gave a vague smile as she glanced sideways at Zran, Braga and the other Black Goblins who were shouting excitedly.

“Vandalieu-sama… The ride is comfortable, but… Why have you changed… no, evolved, just for a method of transport?” Eleanora questioned.

“Hmm? I just grew some spirit-form wings; I haven’t done any changing or evolving,” replied Vandalieu.

With three pairs of wings protruding from the neck of a bird consisting of only a torso, he resembled a very ominous bird indeed.

Vandalieu had returned to the Seventh Cultivation Village, said farewell to the priest who had left for the city in a hurry, killed time doing training and such with Kasim and his friends, and spent the night at the jack-of-all-trades store. In his room, he had informed Eleanora and the others that he was heading for the city tomorrow.

Incidentally, the room in the jack-of-all-trades store was nothing but a room with eight people’s worth of crudely-made bunkbeds of straw. It didn’t rely on its income as an inn in the first place, so the bunkbeds had apparently been made by the owner himself. There was no disadvantage for him to have Vandalieu stay there in addition to Kasim and his friends.

The owner was quite shrewd; he had decided that this made them even for having mistaken Vandalieu for a ghost.

Leaving that aside, Vandalieu had regrouped with Eleanora and the others and immediately began trying to execute his idea.

Using the Spirit Form Transformation spell, the Spirit Form skill and the Materialization skill, he began trying to grow wings.

Now that he thought about it, Bone Bird, who was now a part of Knochen, had used spirit form feathers with its bone wings to fly.

Also, Vandalieu had been using Spirit Form Transformation to grow extra limbs and heads and even branched them out into tentacle shapes.

With that being the case, wouldn’t he be able to grow something like wings fairly easily? And wouldn’t he be able to use these wings to fly?

That was why Vandalieu tried it.

He used Spirit Form Transformation on part of his back, used the Spirit Form skill to change its shape the way he imagined it in his mind and stretched it out. He materialized it here and there using the Materialization skill, adjusting the skill’s intensity depending on the spot.

And so, Vandalieu acquired enormous wings.

Each of the wings were as long as a wing of a jumbo jet, and the torso was large enough for Eleanora and the others to ride on with room to spare.

Perhaps because they were made of spirit form, or because he had used an owl’s wings as a reference, or perhaps because his death-attribute magic’s Erase Presence was active, the wings made almost no noise despite their size.

He was flying at a height where arrows wouldn’t reach, at a speed equivalent to a racehorse sprinting at full speed. Though the wings’ black color was inconspicuous in the night sky, if people on the ground did notice Vandalieu, perhaps they would faint in terror.

“Vandalieu-sama, are you planning to go beyond creating legends and start creating myths?” asked Eleanora.

“It’s nothing as exaggerated as that,” said Vandalieu. “There are lots of flaws, too.”

“As a method of transport, it is indeed inferior to the Teleportation spell of the space attribute,” said Eleanora. “But even so –”

“No, even Knochen could do this much,” said Vandalieu. “At the very least, it would be able to fly while carrying everyone here.”

“Th-that’s true, but…”

“And you know, even if you consider the fact that no other people could do this, it doesn’t give me any additional options in the future other than spending my days running a delivery business.”

Indeed, since no other person was capable of this, even if one were to tell Vandalieu to do it in a way that other people could replicate it, it would be impossible.

“And there are flaws to this. To fly like this, I need multiple instances of Parallel Thought Processing and High-speed Thought Processing, and it consumes a lot of Mana,” Vandalieu explained. “And since I can’t handle tight turns, fighting in the air is impossible.”

He had only tried it out as a method of transportation in the first place, so he supposed that this was how it was.

“But it consumes much less Mana than the Flight spell, so it’s not unusable,” he added. “Ah, we’re almost at the city, so I’ll be descending now.”

And so, Vandalieu and his companions made the journey between the Seventh Cultivation Village and the city, which would normally take three days, in a single night.

Of course, they had passed by Froto, the man disguised as a priest of Alda who had left the village before them, along the way.

Incidentally, Kanata was currently using his stolen carriage to head towards a city to the north, past the duchy’s capital. The next morning, he would be surprised to see that the distance between himself and Vandalieu displayed by his Target Radar changed significantly within a single night.

『The level of the Spirit Form skill has increased!』

The city of Niarki.

Until the cultivation project began, it had been a city on the southern tip of the Hartner Duchy for over a hundred years, and currently, it had returned to being the southernmost city. It had a population of ten thousand. Its lord was Viscount Niarki; this city was the capital of his region.

There was a young, white-haired boy wearing a crude eyepatch made of cloth, walking around among the crowd in this city’s marketplace.

He looked at his surroundings with an unimpressed-looking gaze before suddenly approaching a store that his eyes had stopped on.

“An apple,” he said.

“They’re one Baum each,” said the middle-aged woman standing in the store with rows of fruit.

The boy searched the inside of his cloth bag, seemingly unaccustomed to doing so, before finding a silver coin and handing it over.

The woman stared at the silver coin without blinking, and then snorted. “This is fake, isn’t it? There is no way that a brat like you would have silver coins. I don’t know if you’re a refugee or an orphan, but get lost,” she spat. But despite her words, the woman pocketed the silver coin that the boy had handed her. It seemed that she had no intention of giving it back. “What are you looking at? Hurry up and get lost! Do you want me to call the guards?!” she shouted.

Her voice caused owners of other stores and people going back and forth around the marketplace to look towards the boy, but none of them had any compassion in their eyes. They looked at him with irritation, scorn and disgust.

The boy’s expression didn’t change at all despite receiving such gazes, and he left the store quietly. He turned his body around in a natural manner and vanished.

“Hmph, what a weird brat,” said the woman who had acquired a fifty-Baum silver coin as the corners of her lips rose in a smile. She hadn’t noticed that there was now one less apple in her store.

The boy, Vandalieu, was biting into the apple in a place away from public attention. He didn’t believe that he had stolen it, as the woman had received fifty times the correct amount in payment.

“This city is wild,” he murmured.

He had thought that his appearance wasn’t dirty, but the cloth that he was wearing over his eye to conceal the fact that he was a Dhampir apparently gave the impression that he was a refugee or an orphan with no parents.

It was possible that his long hair covering his pointed ears only further strengthened that impression. Well, even if his ears were seen, people might assume that he was a half-Elf orphan.

The thing that shocked him was that the refugees were hated in the city more than he had imagined. It seemed that the people of the city blamed the refugees for the things they were dissatisfied about.

Indeed, ever since the refugees had come from the Sauron Duchy, the economy had worsened, the taxes had become harsher and public order had deteriorated. There were more positions for day-to-day work than before, and the refugees were competing for these jobs with the people who had always lived in the city.

Vandalieu had no intention of unconditionally taking the refugees’ side; he did think that the deteriorating public order and competition over work was problematic for the people who had always lived in the Hartner Duchy.

However, the reason the economy being worse and the taxes becoming harsher was because the Hartner Duchy was putting effort into increasing its military presence, as it was now the frontline in the war against the Amid Empire since Sauron Duchy had been captured.

If the people were dissatisfied with that, they shouldn’t be blaming the refugees but the politicians who had lost the war and the Amid Empire who had attacked.

It wasn’t logical for them to blame anything else.

“The youngsters of these days are quick to torment the weak.”

“That bitch, that woman at the fruit store, I’ll curse her to death! So give me Manaaaa!”

“Anyhow, the lord of the region has been acting strange lately; it was only yesterday that… Huh? Perhaps it was actually ten years ago?”

“The password is, ‘ale and moba bean stirfry.’ They’ll tell you that they’re out, but ignore them and repeat the same order one more time. Then you’ll be able to meet the people from the Fangs of Dark Nights.”

“Hihihi, if you want to have good dreams, I recommend the ‘Indigo Legs’ to the west; they have plenty of good prostitutes there.”

“I see,” said Vandalieu. The moment he asked to hear more about this city and the Hartner Duchy, the spirits had begun talking noisily.

As he listened to them, Vandalieu thought about the discrimination against the refugees, which was to the point that human rights organizations and the media would have a field day if it was happening on earth.

Why do people feel the desire discriminate against other people of the same nation?

he wondered. It was a problem that had been present on Earth and in Origin as well, but –

“Ah, I see. For the people of the city… for the people of the Hartner Duchy, the refugees from the Sauron Duchy aren’t people from the same nation.”

In this world, where making journeys was dangerous even if using highways, it was common for people to spend their entire lives in the villages or cities that they were born in. For them, their societies

were

those villages and cities. People coming from outside those villages and cities were essentially ‘outsiders,’ equivalent to being foreigners.

And the Orbaume Kingdom was a nation that was made up of a collection of smaller nations. Each duchy was one of the nations that had existed since the Kingdom’s foundation.

Because of this, even for those in