If you start from the northern border of Avenella and go all the way south, you will find that the further south it goes, the more gentle the mountains and the warmer the climate becomes. This peaceful and warm climate culminated in the Ekasta Plain, which was the center of the kingdom's commercial traffic.

Situated in the heart of the Acasta Plains and close to the Garriel River, the city of Ashinir has been named one of the '50 most livable cities in the world' by academic associations, and has also earned such reputations as 'the city of gold' and 'the land of eternal spring'.

When viewed from above, the scenery of this transportation hub, the lifeblood of the kingdom, and its surroundings will look like a spider's web. Well-developed mountain roads connect remote hunting towns closer to the Tambul Mountains. With them, hunters, mercenaries, adventurers, and foot traders transported the bits and pieces they had acquired to Ashneil to sell them to the large chambers of commerce stationed there.

Once every three months, the Chamber of Commerce that has gathered enough material will gather and dispatch a large convoy of combined horses. Deliver magical items from all kinds of monsters, rare medicinal and magical plants, monster cubs and eggs, products, and a variety of ores to a wider area.

The large number of people in the combined carriage of multiple chambers of commerce greatly improves the safety of the journey, so many travelers who want to go to other places will mostly choose to wait until this time to move forward with the chamber of commerce's convoy, and many chambers of commerce will also choose to bring two or three more horse-drawn carriages carrying people to collect travel expenses and earn some extra money.

On top of that, the guards necessary for this half-month-long journey are also an excellent position for many people.

The major chambers of commerce usually have their own escort teams, but after dividing the escort team into two, half staying in the local chamber of commerce and the other half escorting the convoy, the number of people is a bit stretched. However, the frequency of once every three months determines that if the number of people is increased for this purpose, it will be a large amount of extra money to feed these idlers who have nothing to do on ordinary days.

Naturally, the arithmetic merchants did not make such a mistake, so a daily salary was drawn up to pay a higher salary than the usual guard duties, and a simple food package was developed.

Although it was a simple honey toast, it was generous in portions, and it tasted much better than the brown bread that most adventurers and mercenaries ate all year round.

To use a slang phrase between a mercenary and an adventurer: black bread is a dead wooden pillow, while honey toast is a scented velvet pillow.

All in all pillows.

Having a decent pillow (crossed out) food supply and a decent salary, all that had to be done was to go up and fight when the thieves who ran away at this number in most cases occasionally had their brains pumping and decided to attack. While many of the famous mercenary groups stationed in Ashinir City became candidates for the permanent escort team, most of the scattered adventurers and mercenaries who happened to be in the local area also scrambled to get a spot.

Among them, there are countless incompetent people who want to eat together, but the people of the Chamber of Commerce are not here to do charity, they spend money for peace of mind. Even if nothing happens, you have to prove that you're good enough to join.

The simplest means of proof is the test, and the content of the test is extremely simple and crude: a wooden weapon without armor fights without damage, and if you knock down more than three opponents, you will be considered qualified.

The test is usually conducted three days before the caravan departs, and anyone can simply sign up.

The team is not small, nor is it particularly large. Well, at least in the area where our two protagonists are standing, it's probably around a hundred people.

The reason why Henry and Mira took this test was very, very simple, and very, very ordinary.

-- They don't have any money.

Yes. Shortly after the self-proclaimed sage man left the town with the young white-haired girl, they were pleasantly surprised to discover such a fact.

All that was saved was only one meal, food, lodging, and all the rest of the various expenses that had to be spent by Mira with her savings almost buried the little fear that the gray-haired girl had had in Henry to the bottom.

And Mira, who was only a maid and a child, obviously could not be a rich man with a lot of money - hence the scene we are in.

"What a terrible grown-up the Sage," said the petite girl of the Roan, looking at Henry with disdain, a phrase that had now almost become the girl's mantra. Every now and then she would take it out and say it to express her disdain for Henry—most of the time it was about money, but Mira meant something else when she said it today.

As with the bustling bustle of any bustling city, the road to the weapons test site in the northern part of Ashinir is filled with homeless people and beggars.

Most of the people who come and go are just passing by in a hurry, and even if they have good intentions, they are just throwing them away.

Only her life experience is different from that of most ordinary people, and Mira, who deeply understands this feeling of longing to be helped but has always encountered cold eyes, frequently looks sideways and clutches her shriveled little money bag tightly.

Henry, who was walking on the sidelines, naturally watched in silence, and Mira, who spent some savings to replace the maid outfit that was inconvenient for traveling, was wearing a simple girl's dress, and she deliberately bought a hooded shoulder just to cover the eye-catching white hair, but no matter how many times she wore it, it would only be taken off by Henry.

While the girl who felt irritated by this action looked at him angrily, she couldn't help but have an inexplicable warm feeling in her heart.

Maybe it's because of this feeling that she finally can't help but want to go up and help a girl who looks younger than her and is begging. Henry's blocking her move is what makes Mira so angry.

"Mister Sage is such a terrible grown-up," said Mira to Henry, glaring at her dazzling blue eyes, "Did you run out of compassion the one time you helped me?"

"Obviously she, obviously she is also ......"

The white-haired girl hung her head, which was a sign when she was unhappy. What a good fellow, Henry thought, but remained silent.

It is impossible for him not to notice the begging girl on the street corner that Mila is referring to, and unlike the white-haired girl who thinks of neglect, Henry actually sees far more than she does.

But that's why he chose to stop Mira.

The boy had dirty blonde hair and tattered white clothing, his bare calves and feet were covered with scars and bloody scabs from years of walking on rough stony ground, and his slender shoulders and upper arms were faintly visible in strips of the same size beneath the dirty surface.

She was holding a wooden board with her name written on it: Lavinia. A short story was also written using the informal notations widely used by West Coast folklore.

The story touched Mira and perhaps others, because the girl begged for far more coins than the other beggars. Tragic stories can always elicit pity from others, but for the white-haired girl, it may not stop there, Henry thought to Mira who was still puffing up.

The treatment of the Loan people in society has made many children of Mila's age unusually precocious, unlike the previous generation who experienced the prosperity of the country's existence and the hardships of the Great Patriotic War. Born in the contempt and hostility of the world, they have a deep understanding of the sinister human heart, and ironically retain the most beautiful and pure side.

That's why he stopped Mira.

For Henry did not want her purity to be tarnished by reality.

He had the same point of view as hers, but in the eyes of the sage, the world that had been interpreted was very different from what the girl saw.

- The girl calls herself Lavinia, but from the beginning of her name it is an outright lie.

The suffix Nia comes from the time of the Lamanite Conquest, when the invincible Lamanites conquered lands, countries, cities, and peoples, while also depriving the conquered of their culture and traditions. In Lamani, a language rarely known on the West Coast, the conquerors from the East called themselves 'Lamani'. Ramani means 'man from the East' and Ramani can be translated as 'man from the East' or 'man from the East'.

In the patriarchal era, women did not exist independently but depended on men's 'goods', so the Lamanites usually called their women 'Lamania' - meaning the property of the Lamanite man.

These women included not only the wives and daughters of the Lamanite men, but also the female slaves they conquered and plundered.

The glory of the past after the collapse of the Lamanite Empire 1,300 years ago is gone, but the suffix Nia has survived as the name of the conquerors and conquered peoples of the time - but only within the territory of the Lamanite Empire - in other words, among the brown, brown, red, and black-haired peoples.

Blonde-haired Westerners, who had never been included in the empire's territory, or even those who drew the map, could never have taken such an orientalized name.

Even if you take a thousand steps back, the many countries that still speak Lamani, on the other side of the Tambur Mountains and across the Mobigas Inland Sea, with their strong racist and xenophobic consciousness, will not be able to accept a foreigner who seems to be very different from them as one of them.

So the name can only be snapped.

If this mere merely raised Henry's suspicions, the delicate and moving obviously could not have been the story she had written herself, and the scars on her upper body, which were enough for him to deduce the truth behind the whole thing.

Henry was familiar with scars of this shape. The long swelling is blood-crusted and has a regular distribution. If other beggars had attacked her out of jealousy, the wounds would not have been so regular, and with their special shape and distributed area, he could easily guess that these were wounds that could only be inflicted under certain circumstances with the use of certain tools.

The aim is to inflict pain that yields rather than real harm, plus the vast majority of it falls on the back that is not noticeable. The methods used by the slave owners of the past are still good today, and the girl's crockpot full of coins must have been taken away by some pot-bellied slave owner after nightfall.

'This is really a great way to make money,' thought Henry, with a little irony in his heart, and there were many children around him who were about the same as the girl, all of them girls. Combined with the number and distribution area, he roughly deduced that this was about a gang crime, and one person couldn't manage so much.

I guess they probably adopted these children from some orphanage in the name of good people, but who would have predicted such a fate that awaited them?

――There may be a lot of people, but no one cares. Henry looked at Mira.

The white-haired girl was still angry, but she suddenly stopped, let people come and go, and just stood in the middle of the road.

She repeated several deep breaths, then deep breaths.

Henry could probably guess what was going on in her heart. As mentioned earlier, this child is very easy to understand, because she basically writes everything she thinks on her face and body language.

- And he did guess correctly, Mira, who was standing in the middle of the road and trying to take a deep breath, was entangled with a tangled emotion in her heart.

She followed Henry, just because she had nowhere else to go, no one else to follow—and perhaps a hint of inexplicable affection, because the other party had 'rescued' a week earlier—and Mira couldn't help but roll her eyes at the thought of this, which, to be honest, was more of a pit to her than a pit - her own incident made her more or less feel that this man who claimed to be a sage might really be a very special person.

Well, while he could be special in many things, such as being particularly poor and the like, Mira wasn't referring to those.

Even at the age of only eleven, the people she had seen were not rare.

Even though most people like to boast that they are unique, in Mira's eyes, the vast majority of people have the same face.

The only emotion on his face is indifference.

And she thought that the man in front of her was special, but today all this made the girl waver. She began to wonder if she was going to follow him on her travels or find a job nearby.

Ashinir is a big city, and unlike the small town, the people here may not be considered to have anything to do with a murder that killed several people.

She thought so, while Henry waited quietly for the girl to make her own decision.

He wouldn't open his mouth to interfere with her thoughts, just as he knew the facts behind the beggar girl, but he wouldn't tell it all in front of Mira in the first place.

Henry was not one of those who would talk so much about knowledge, and he knew very well that for Mira, the cruel truth would make her even more uneasy.

Only those who know a little bit of rudimentary knowledge and want to gain the attention of others by selling them will babble on every blind spot that they have discovered or think they have discovered, and such people usually only lead to disgust with the object they want to impress—and our masters in the name of sages are not so naïve.

- Even he couldn't explain why he was so interested in a girl who had only been around for a few days.

...... Henry waited like this, but Mira, who had been wrestling with it for a long time, opened her mouth to say something that he did not expect—again.

"Mr. Sage is the worst of adults, I must not be an adult like you!" said Mira, who was called by the maid's usual honorific but said something rather rude, raising her little face and staring straight at Henry, word by word.

"So please teach me how to fight!"

She said in such a loud voice that some passers-by turned their heads.

Henry froze in place, the logical relationship between the two sentences was so confusing that his brain crashed so ...... A second or two.

"Poof"

"Puff hahahahaha

The self-proclaimed sage man with no manners of manners stood in place two seconds later with his stomach clutched and laughed exaggeratedly, his laughter attracting more onlookers than before, and even the girls who were begging on the street corner raised their faces to look at the man.

The "madman" didn't stop laughing until the passers-by lost interest and shook their heads and walked away.

He reverted to his original calm and ordinary expression as if he could change his face, and then stared at Mira, who was blushing to the base of his neck from what he had just done, and spoke slowly.

"I kind of understand something......"

“...... What's the matter, why do I think you're thinking about something very rude" Mira, who suspected that she was being treated like a fool, once again looked at him with a disdainful look of 'Mr. Sage is such a bad adult', and Henry just waved his hand: "Don't care, don't care, compared to that ......"

"Come with me, if you have such an awareness, there may be some things that you should see with your own eyes."

"But before I do that, allow me to apologize to you," he said, and Mira gave a bewildered "huh?". Henry continued.

"It's my fault, I've applied my habitual thinking to you, treating you like someone else everywhere. ”

"This is obviously a big mistake, you are a man who deserves to be taken seriously, Mira," he said, and the white-haired girl froze, and then a clear disdain appeared in her eyes.

"So you like young girls, Mr. Sage is the worst of adults," she patted herself on the shoulder as if there was something dirty on it, and took a few steps back away from Henry.

"......" the sage smiled back, and as we said before, Mira was a very good child, and he could see that she was just shy.

Then he looked at the begging girls, many of whom looked at him and Mira with hope and envy in their eyes, and he glanced at them, and his gray-blue eyes looked farther away.

"Let's go"

"Where's the test?" Mira looked a little confused, and Henry turned his head and took her hand.

"Don't you want me to teach you how to fight?"

His other free hand gripped the great sword behind his back, as if to confirm that it could be drawn at any time.

"Don't you want to help her?"

He gestured to the blonde girl with his chin.

"Congratulations, you now have a chance to get the best of both worlds"

The sage with the sword on his back said.

R: I'm sorry for the confusion before, because of the "empathetic and gentle cutie" at the beginning, I had to upload the first chapter and then the prologue, and now it's been corrected.