By the Grace of the Gods (LN) - Volume 9 - Chapter 21

Chapter 6 Episode 21: An Odd Feeling and a Chance Revelation

When Lord Fatoma returned, I asked him to give the place a once-over.

“Incredible! I can’t believe it all cleaned up this well.”

“Looks just like it used to...” Pigu chimed in.

They seemed very happy with the fruits of our labor.

“Thank you, Ryoma,” Lord Fatoma reiterated.

“I’m glad it’s to your liking.” That being said, I was curious about a section of the hot spring that he had told me not to clean. “Are you sure you want the faucet untouched?”

The end of the waterline was still mostly in the same state as it was before we started cleaning, even though it had some buildup blocking some of the water flow.

“If I asked you to clean that, I doubt you’d finish it by day’s end. The line goes all the way down to the source of the hot spring. Besides... I really do appreciate your thorough cleaning of the place, but I rarely come up here to use the cottage myself. I only wanted to restore it to the fullest possible extent to have as a memory of my father. I think that what you’ve already done is more than enough. If anything else, I would have hoped to see the view from here again, but the bamboo’s simply grown too much...”

“We definitely neglected those too,” Pigu added.

“So the bamboo wasn’t always here?” I asked.

“No. Back in the day, my father planted a bamboo shoot he had brought home from somewhere a little ways away from here. He often brought me fresh shoots to eat. And now, after years of neglect, this is how it’s ended up.”

“We used to have a wonderful view from here...”

But now, the bamboo largely obscured any and all scenery from the entrance of the hot springs. The members of Sikum’s Pier looked to me, then to the entrance, and then to the changing area. They were clearly up to the task, so...

“Then, let’s finish up by cutting down the bamboo by the bath to restore that view,” I proposed.

“You’d do that? I mean, I don’t wish to put pressure on you,” Lord Fatoma clarified. “But are you sure about this?”

“Of course. I’d be happy to do it for ten small gold coins, or even for free. Plus, those five seem up to the task themselves.”

“Wha—”

“Hey!”

The Pier was obviously startled as we turned to them. They didn’t have to sneak around like that. Plus, considering that reaction... As if to prove my point, the lord approached them, making them completely tense up with bashfulness. I decided to prepare for the task in the meantime.

I produced a wire slime and a stick from the Dimension Home, and a sturdy wire to help me safely climb down.

“A little heads-up would’ve been nice, Ryoma!”

“Not everybody’s got the social skills to handle nobles like you do...”

Kei and Kai put their arms around my shoulder.

“Lord Fatoma seems pretty down to earth. Just act natural and you should be fine.”

“You’re pretty ballsy for a kid...”

“And here I thought we were at fault for being hicks. Clearly, he’s the problem.”

I resent that. You think I don’t get butterflies in my stomach having to deal with people above me? Especially when I’ve never met them before?

I decided to put the matter aside and move on to business—not that we were doing anything too technical. “The slime and I will chop down most of it. Speed over accuracy and all. We’ll probably miss some spots here and there, so I would like you all to cut those. It’s quite steep over there, so use this safety rope, please.”

That was all it took. They already trusted my slimes thanks to the work we’d done so far. The team quickly got ready as I headed over to the edge of the outdoor bath. I climbed over the middle of the fence line I set up for safety and lowered myself down.

“I’m counting on you.”

The wire slime quickly and enthusiastically stretched its body into a long jigsaw blade. It could stretch as much as forty meters, but I asked it to make two strands in either direction, each a bit shorter than twenty meters. Once I saw that it was stretched out long enough along the ground, I had it connect both ends to form a large hoop. Then, the core of the slime outstretched a sliver of itself to hold onto my stick, through which I sent in energy to enhance the blade.

“Try to stay as close and flat to the ground as you can. Let’s do this!”

The wire slime began tightening the hoop until the blade dug into the bamboo trees, then it started moving the blade left and right as it contracted the hoop some more. The enhanced blade was sharp, allowing it to quickly chop down the bamboo on the exterior and contract towards the next batch.

All in all, it barely even took ten seconds to chop down all the bamboo and vegetation within the area I specified.

“I thought about this during the experiments after its evolution, but it’s rather like a chainsaw. It’s kind of scary what they can do... Oh?” A shadow was cast on the ground, and I looked up to find Lord Fatoma’s surprised expression.

“Have you ever seen a slime do that?” he asked the team.

“Uh, I think Ryoma’s slimes are special.”

“Just the other day, he felled a bunch of trees around the village as an ‘experiment.’”

“Yeah, the old folks of the village said they wanted one of those slimes. It’d save them a lot of time gathering firewood.”

The wire slime did have impressive cutting power. Heck, I was using a stick to make sure I wouldn’t accidentally touch the blade.

“I’m going to keep chopping them down like this,” I called up to the five, who had entered a kind of spectator mode. “Go ahead and come down after a couple of cycles!”

I turned around and chopped down a twenty-meter patch of bamboo, before lowering myself down another meter and chopping down twenty meters in either direction. I repeated the process, creating a forty-meter clearing down the slope.

The copious amounts of bamboo kept falling towards the bottom of the mountain, much of it being held up by the still-standing bamboo trees and their leaves. Soon, it seemed to be approaching critical mass; I needed to be careful and not let them crush me as they fell.

I remembered how a lot of fictional characters fought using wires or strings and wondered if I could do the same with the wire slime. Not that the current method seemed conducive to combat, but the slime was able to cut through bamboo quite easily.

I could get used to this method of transportation...

I was thinking of a zipline, and how it took some time to climb down the abandoned mines. Maybe I would try to set one up, at least one way. On the thought of more applications for the wire slime, I returned to contemplating fictional “string users.” Not that it mattered, but I felt like all string-wielding characters were pretty powerful, whether friend or foe. In fact, I couldn’t recall a single string user who couldn’t fight. With the abundance of protagonists who stuck to commentary in battle-oriented series, I would have expected one to come to mind...

“Whoops.” After briefly being lost in useless thoughts, a view opened up below me. I was nearing the precipice of woods composed of non-bamboo trees. With how open my view was, I expected that they could see much farther from the bath above, so it seemed I had chopped enough bamboo, but I had a strange feeling about the view, which I kept my eye on as I climbed back up to the bath.

When I reached the top, I realized why.

“Oh.”

It had to do with the direction I was facing. Outdoor baths were traditionally built to overlook the best view possible, and the bath above had been made with an open view over this slope. Subconsciously, I had expected to overlook the beautiful Lake Latoin once the bamboo was cleared. But the bath overlooked the direction opposite the lake, over an area of swamp and trees. My compass had been put off through the winding hike, and I must have nearly realized that when I saw that map. Not that I had paid much mind to direction during the hike, since we had Pigu as our guide, and I could have sent my limour birds to scout for the town if he had gotten lost—note to self, room for improvement there—but I was still curious as to why the bath opened in this direction. Not that the view was bad, but it was a familiar one in this land. Perhaps it had to do with the location of the hot spring source.

I returned to the bath, and to Lord Fatoma’s approval of the bamboo clearing. I asked where the source was, and he told me that it was actually closer to the side of the mountain that overlooked the lake, and his father had drawn the water all the way here. That meant there was a good reason for building the bath this way.

I couldn’t get the thought out of my head, so I asked the Sikum’s Pier crew to pack up a few things that were left and went to think on the matter as I took in the view.

“The materials...and the construction...”

A possibility entered my mind about what kind of person the previous lord was. I made some guesses based on my hunch and reached a hypothesis.

“Pigu, sir,” I called.

“Yes?”

“You told me earlier that the grave of the previous lord is at the summit, right?”

“I did. Is something the matter?”

I asked him a question to test my hypothesis, and it seemed like it was a hit.

Pigu looked astounded. “How did you know? There is almost nothing surrounding the grave. We felt bad about leaving the ground so bare... But we had been left detailed instructions in his will, on everything from the location of the burial ground to how to maintain the trees.”

“Thank you, sir. I think I’ve found a way of meeting the lord’s other request.”

“I’m glad I could be of help,” Pigu said, looking like he still wanted to ask questions.

But I was more worried about putting my newfound clue into action.