Chương 358: Heroes Revealed (2)

The next few days were quiet. Our parents fussed over Anise and I even more than before, as if they were trying to reassure us that our status as heroes hadn't changed anything about our family. For our part, Anise and I did our best to keep things normal as well. We spent time in the kitchen with our parents, especially when they were baking bread, and spent time around the shop when customers were nearby. The only thing that directly changed was medical services.

According to my father, while the city had access to healing magic, it was from one of the incomplete magic systems. People had done their best to put together a new and improved version of the old healing magic system… but with essence being so valuable, it was hard for research to lead anywhere meaningful. After all, the city was barely holding on as it was. Research took time and resources, and while people of this world had an abundance of time, the city never produced enough essence.

With my permission, my parents started getting a few acquaintances with old injuries into the bakery for me to heal. Smaller permanent injuries in the city usually weren't dealt with, unless they created serious problems. However, I didn't have to worry about wasting essence, so I was more than happy to heal some people for a bit of money and Achievement. Influence: Heal ten permanent, debilitating injuries.

Achievement +400 Apart from that, I also finally got my rewards for helping to defend the city against the eldritch leviathan. Influence: Play a moderate role in keeping one of the sky islands safe against a threatening incursion. Achievement + 2, 500 I was quite happy with my Achievement reward, especially the 'moderate' reward for defending the island. Truthfully, I felt that I had gotten a far bigger reward than I deserved.

After all, the city obviously had ways to deal with the sky whale - they just hadn't wanted to use it because it was expensive. Thus, my role in the entire battle was far less meaningful than it appeared. Still, even if I felt like I had gotten a bigger reward than I deserved, I was more than happy to get more Achievement. These two rewards pushed me from 22, 981 Achievement to 25, 881 Achievement. It was far from a bad haul.

The only other thing Anise and I did was to try to ascend the staircase at the base of the tree, to see what power-up the corporation of this world had left behind for us. Unfortunately, after walking partway up the staircase, we had received a rather unusual warning. Message from #*&#$*#_Erro)r corporation The staircase of heroes may only be ascended once, and its influence on the body is weaker if you are not fully mature yet.

(Please note that ALL staircases of heroes are the same in this dimension - all of them lead to the same place and give the same reward). Are you sure you want to proceed? You will get much better results if you wait until you fully mature (On your fiftieth birthday is the best time to walk the staircase). Seeing that, Anise and I both let Sallia and Felix know what we had seen, then we walked away. At least right now, we weren't in a hurry.

If we could get better results by waiting, there was no need to settle for bad results right now. We would need every drop of power we could muster if we ever wanted to break this world's reliance on heroes. Walking up the staircase did, however, do something else. There were multiple people in the green strip while Anise and I walked up the staircase. When we met our parents again at the bottom of the stairs, a lot of the people around us seemed torn between excitement and curiosity.

For a moment, I thought they would mob us when we returned to the ground, but luckily, people here were a lot more polite. When mother asked them to leave us be for now, they did as requested and let us return to the bakery unmolested. On the fourth day after our existence had been revealed, something interesting happened in Felix's house. We had been expecting some people to appear in front of our bakery, but instead, several people overflowing with mana appeared inside of Felix's house.

Felix's father greeted each of them warmly, before they all moved deeper into the house. It was obvious that they didn't want their conversation to be overheard or disturbed… however, most people weren't on-guard against the intrusion of a young child. Combined with Felix's Grade 8 Perception, he was able to eavesdrop on the conversation with little difficulty.

After the twelve people in the meeting room greeted each other, prepared a quick meal, and spent a few minutes chatting, they started to get down to business. Just as Felix had suspected, the topic of their meeting was Anise and I.

"Well, it looks like the report from Larissa was correct. Those two little girls walked up an invisible staircase right in the middle of the city a few days ago," said a female voice.

"With that, I think we can state with certainty that they're heroes."

"Why was there such a long pause between the last batch of heroes and this one?" asked a male voice.

"If heroes had appeared anytime before we were forced to flee to the sanctuaries… maybe we wouldn't be trapped on these flying islands."

"Who knows? Maybe even the heroes themselves don't know," said the female voice.

"We can't do anything about it, and these two aren't to blame. Let's not worry about it."

"I agree with Mina. We can ask them if they know anything about the lack of heroes later. That's not the point of this meeting," said another male.

"What matters the most is what to do. We have two heroes for the first time in thousands of years. How do we handle them?"

"Is there a reason to do anything at all?" asked another female voice, after nearly a minute of silence.

"If we put it bluntly, the value of heroes is far weaker than it would have been thousands of years ago. The biggest reason that heroes were so important was because they didn't need supply lines to keep their magic going, which was incredibly important when venturing into the otherworld to kill hive mothers and collect beacon materials. But… neither of those things matter very much anymore."

"If these two can pull off the same feats as their predecessors, it would be very meaningful, wouldn't it? We could return to the continent again! All of you might be happy living in the sanctuaries, where we have to scrape together the slimmest scraps of essence and always have to worry about monsters killing the tree and sending us all plummeting to our deaths. But I'm certainly not happy with that kind of life if we have any other choice! I want my children to live in a better world," said another male voice.

He sounded far more aggravated. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"I don't think that's what miss Eladora is talking about," said another male voice. To my surprise, I realized Felix's father was speaking. I was now pretty sure that some of the people in that meeting room were the big decision-makers of the city. If Felix's father was rubbing elbows with them and speaking up in their meeting, he must be more important than we had thought. Though, now that I thought about it, that was obvious.

My grandfather was also an incredibly competent mage who had spent his life studying different types of mana, but he still didn't live in a mansion with several servants.

"The biggest problem is practicality," continued Felix's father.

"While rare, our history books still agree that heroes sometimes failed. The state of the continent is also much different than it was in the past. Previously, those heroes had entire kingdoms pouring their treasuries into the growth of each hero. Then, the hero didn't need to fight their way through the continent. They would be escorted by an army of soldiers right up to an entrance to the otherworld, where their mission started.

Even then, soldiers would usually help them fight through the early parts of the otherworld. We can't offer that level of support anymore. Even if all of the sanctuaries band together, we wouldn't even be able to escort them to the continent below. We lack the military power needed for that. Besides, how would we maintain any kind of supply line for our troops? The heroes might not need food to regenerate their essence, but we do.

Trying to get supplies to the ground would either require that we request the try fly back towards the ground - thus putting the whole island at risk if anything goes wrong - or that we use our strongest soldiers as baggage carriers. If they do that, who is supposed to escort the heroes to an entrance?" Felix's father snorted.

"The days where the continent could be recovered are long past. We need to focus on what we can actually accomplish, not long-lost dreams of returning to the continent."

"I suppose," said the aggravated voice, although he still sounded reluctant to give up. I breathed a sigh of relief. I had no idea what power up the corporation had left behind for us, but I suspected we were way weaker than heroes were 'supposed' to be. A monster with Grade 20-25 Fortitude wasn't even considered the greatest type of threat the city had faced in the last century. There had been three eight-bell raids in the past hundred years.

How much worse would the continent be, when monsters didn't need to fly up to us first? I doubted we could win against the hive mind that had taken over the continent - that was probably a suicide mission. Unless the power-boost left behind by the corporation was enough to make us powerhouses on its own, there was no way we could win if we tried returning to the mainland.

"They might not be able to retake the continent… but they could be huge aids in building a new sanctuary, right?" said a different woman.

"One of the biggest problems we've had is the fall of other sanctuaries. There used to be nearly fifty sanctuaries, so the number of monster raids we faced every year was much lower. But as more sanctuaries have fallen, the remaining ones have been forced to endure more pressure. If we could create some new sanctuaries, we might be able drastically improve how much essence is generated each year - and split the pressure each sanctuary endures.

Even better, if there were a few hundred sanctuaries, it could become a self-sustaining cycle. With fifty sanctuaries, it was never possible to spare enough essence for investing in the future - every island barely had enough essence to defend itself. Growing a tree and singing enough dirt into existence for a new sanctuary was impractical because the island would die before it got anywhere near completion. Even if all the sanctuaries pooled their resources, they would still fail.

But if we hit a critical mass of sanctuaries… we might be able to stave off the end of our people forever."

"That… is a much more practical idea. It depends on how much essence the heroes can generate per day, but we can always hope. If they can take pressure off of our defenders for long enough, we might be able to get away with that plan," said Felix's father.

"We'll keep it in mind for the future."

"The bigger question is how to train them to maximize their potential," said the original female voice.

"I don't think our regular education system is correct for their needs. Instead of receiving generic education, we should get competent spellcasters from each system to directly train them in a one-on-one student and mentor relationship. We should also make sure that the spellcasters are flexible in how they understand magic - after all, if legends are to be believed, each hero uses a totally different magic system. They can also use the standard magic systems - but sometimes they don't.

It's hard to say which legends are accurate and which ones are nonsense, but we will need to keep in mind that all of the legends are potentially true."

"It's hard to say what the heroes will need, because we just don't know enough yet," said an authoritative sounding man.

"I think the first thing we need to do is ask the heroes what they're capable of. Then, we can arrange for education for them. In addition, I think it would make sense to arrange some sort of guard for them, at least while they're still young and developing."

"Is there a need for guards? The tree should have already taken notice of them the moment they stepped onto the hero's staircase, right? Even if it hasn't, they're heroes. I imagine they can handle weaker threats that appear nearby during air raids. Any social issues they might face would be dealt with by the tree itself. Why bother?" asked another woman.

"The tree is powerful, but we should avoid draining its essence on trivial matters. If we can protect the heroes before they grow up, we should do so. After all, if the tree overdraws its essence, it might mess up crop production - and that would be a problem for the entire city," said the authoritative sounding man. <The tree is powerful? > said Sallia. <Wait… Felix, you mentioned earlier that you thought people of this world were 'too nice,' right? What did you mean, exactly? > <Well… mostly crime rate.

There are occasional mentions of crime, but they're ridiculously low, > said Felix. <I thought it was really weird. > <Maybe the tree itself is aware of the people below, and does law enforcement of some sort? > said Sallia. <If there's some sort of impartial law-enforcement that is nearly omniscient on the island, it would make sense for crime rates to be lower. Especially if that was mixed with some sort of genetic modification from the corporation that ran this world.

I imagine most customers for this world would have complained if they got betrayed by allies and such, so the corporation would have wanted to make that unlikely. Active monitoring from impartial, demigod-like trees, mixed with making the people of this world more cooperative by tweaking their genetic code would probably account for that. > <I suppose. I'll look into the tree more later on, and see if it's really sapient, > said Felix.

While Sallia and Felix debated the nature of this world's oddly low crime rate, the people in the meeting room continuously debated how to tweak our education and what they might need to be prepared for. A lot of it was based off of rumours they weren't sure about the veracity of, but I didn't hear anything that would pose a real problem for us. The four of us were hoping to break this world's reliance on heroes and make it capable of sustaining itself, and the people of this meeting seemed to want the same thing.

They sounded cautious about our presence… but more than that, it sounded like they were optimistic. As if they had found a ray of hope in a dire situation. Finally, the meeting concluded on a positive note. The authoritative-sounding man said that he would send someone else to meet with us the next day, and get a better idea what we were capable of. They would make more final decisions after they had more information. Felix snuck away from the meeting, while Anise and I smiled.

The city's response to the first heroes in millennia was optimistic. There were still a lot of things we needed to work out, like figuring out how to make this world capable of sustaining itself. But it sounded like the city would be more than willing to help us if we told them about our goals. We would need to remain alert for any underlying threats… but things were heading in a good direction.