Ignoring the threat of the rebels and the sincere olive branch sent by the imperial envoy, the cunning Earl Xueman still did not fall to either side in the face of the imbalance between the power of the empire and the rebels, but only buried himself in sorting out his armaments and started to raise the walls again. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

As he said, no one dares to risk attacking Xueman first. After the threat was ineffective, the rebels gradually stopped crossing the border against the Snowman. They began to bypass the snow, and in three days they broke out into skirmishes with the Empire's Morning Star Territory in the north.

The slightly tense situation eased again, and the snowman people, who had no sense of crisis about the war, just buried themselves in rebuilding their homes.

Mia wandered the streets that were gradually regaining life, homeless and huddled in the ruins for two nights in a row, and she didn't find anyone familiar.

The people who are in a hurry on the streets don't care about a skinny little girl, and they don't even have time to stop and listen to her talk about her bad life, which is not complicated.

Although the forest was a dozen kilometers away from the city and there was abundant food, she was as weak as she could not afford to go to the forest alone - there were two possible outcomes: either she would be killed by passing beasts, or she would be taken captive by groups of robbers.

The rich could not see her, and the poor and weak who were as poor as her were accustomed to pretend not to see her, and no one would stop and give some unseen little girl a few raspberries or a small piece of brown bread for no reason.

After a short period of well-fed days in the church, the hunger to which he had been accustomed began to become unbearable.

Maybe I should return the umbrella, Mia thought, gently touching the crochet on the delicate fabric of the parasol.

Several times she almost couldn't resist using the umbrella to exchange it for some food, but she never did anything - perhaps out of kindness, or perhaps she knew in her heart that the value of the umbrella was much more than a full meal.

Leaving the ruins, she covered her parasol with her clothes and walked towards the east of the city.

……

Aside from the scary horror of the strange girl in the basement who was chained to a new chain, always staring at her neck and grinding her teeth, Mia was very happy with her new job. Her job was to clean the basement once around noon and spend the rest of the time helping Kana with groceries in the infirmary.

And she was paid no longer to worry about food and lodging, and a small salary that was quite generous for her.

Luck can also befall her, she always can't believe that she will have such good luck, so she is grateful for the work of Loria.

But she was still a little afraid of Loria, and she had always felt some kind of indescribable pressure in front of the latter - but fortunately, the eldest lady of the Holy Light Church had always lived a life of day and night, and rarely saw her several times a day.

At noon, Mia, holding all kinds of cleaning tools, gently pushed open the door to the basement of the church.

"Cactus ~ Cactus ~ Spherical Cactus ~"

She heard someone humming softly to the usual tavern tune of 'Dragonborn Returns', but the lyrics had been changed.

The owner of the song is the terrible girl who is chained.,I don't know if it's called 'Nomi' or 'Shoumei'.。

She didn't even sleep!

Mia became nervous, she once met Nomi who was not tied up in the evening, and when the other party saw her, he immediately opened his mouth to pounce on her and tried to bite her - fortunately, Loria, who had just gotten up, grabbed the chain in time, and Mia was not injured.

But it's noon, and the eldest lady of the church is probably asleep...... Afraid of being bitten, Mia wants to escape, but after only a few days of work, she is also afraid of being fired for her poor performance.

After hesitating for a moment at the entrance to the underground, she finally mustered up the courage to go down cautiously.

"Thorny~prickly~ so comfortable to the touch~"

Nomi hummed the tune of 'belligerent years' again, and the lyrics were still tampered with by her.

It sounds like the other party is in a good mood.

Thinking like this, Mia poked her head out and looked in the direction where the voice came from, only to see Neng Mei lying on the mat in the corner of the wall like a cat guarding food, holding a small pot of strange plants on the ground that she had never seen before.

Nomi was keenly aware of Mia's eyes, one moment her eyes were full of joy and affection, and the next moment she glared at Mia with her teeth and let out a low whine from her throat similar to that of a beast threatening humans.

In Mia's eyes, the tethered weirdo threatened him for a while, then turned his back to him, blocking his view of the strange plant with his body.

Nomi glared back again, conveying the meaning of 'not showing you' - Mia was very helpless about this, although she was indeed curious about plants she had never seen, but not to the extent that she wanted to go out of her way to see them...... In short, it's great that that horrible weirdo who loves to bite people can not interfere with his work.

Although Nomi fell asleep on the mat soon after, Mia carefully avoided Nomi's possible range of motion and cleaned up.

As she wiped down Loria's bench, she was drawn to what was on the table: a large pile of scribbled manuscripts and five test tubes filled with red liquid.

Although Mia, who only knew the alphabet, was illiterate, it didn't prevent her from distinguishing between beautiful handwriting and non-Loria's crooked handwriting was obviously not pretty, and Mia looked up and looked around, then looked down and flipped through the manuscript.

The text didn't allow her to linger at all, she just focused on the strange drawings interspersed in the manuscript.

"What is this?"

Intrigued by a painting with a large number of strange letters, she muttered to herself—unlike other manuscripts, Mia recognized that the letters that made up the text were not lingua franca.

After a while, Mia, who didn't recognize anything but a large row of wheels and smoke from a pipe spew, lost interest and continued to look down.

I couldn't read it, but I thought it was very good...... It's a good drawing, so why don't you draw some small flowers and animals?

Thinking like this, Mia no longer looked at the manuscript, but studied the test tube on the table.

Is this blood? She covered her mouth in surprise, but watched with more curiosity.

“N－O－M－I…… Q-I-A-N-Q-I-A-N" She spelled out the label on the test tube, letter by letter.

"Looks like a human name?" She muttered quietly as she looked at the third tube.

……

"Ahh

Suddenly, Mia was pushed away.

The person pushing her away was a girl about her height, glaring at her with an angry expression.

Tiger people?

Mia looked at the other party in surprise, and then denied the first guess.

It's not a tiger man who looks completely different from a human...... It's better to be a human at all.

It's just that this girl with pure white long hair has two big white triangular ears on her head...... Behind him, a big fluffy white tail was sweeping around.

"Ahh

The strange girl whined, raised her hand and gestured to move away, motioning for Mia to go away.