Firefinch (4)

Alex picked up a sword from a nearby rack and lifted a man's chin with the tip of the sword.

He asked amiably, "How long have you been doing this? How many people have been kidnapped? Where are they now?"

Inger looked at the kidnappers who were held by his magic chains and wiped his sweat.

[This protagonist feels more like a villain...]

However, kidnappers do not deserve sympathy.

Everyone had a broken leg and lay on the ground, gritting their teeth and sweating profusely.

Seeing that no one dared to say anything, Alex threw away the sword, held someone's hand affectionately, and folded his fingers upward.

“Ahhhhhhh…I said, I said, I said, don’t go on!”

A two-meter-tall strong man was so scared that tears came out of his eyes. He really couldn't understand why a fifteen-year-old child was as scary as a devil.

"...We just want to kidnap a few low-ranking nobles who are out for fun and ask for some money...We can't live happily here any longer! The nobles won't die if they lack such a little money, right? But we will!"

Inger also squatted down beside him, put his index and middle fingers together, put them on the side of his neck, looked straight into his eyes, and asked again: "Is what you just said true? There is nothing to hide?"

The strong man shuddered and gritted his teeth and said, "No...no more..."

Inger stood up and wiped his hands with a handkerchief: "You lied."

Alex smiled and said, "Who wants the food that was just delivered?"

Everyone's face changed.

Inger added fuel to the fire: "Just feed it to them."

"No, no, no! I said it! I said it!"

"This is the laxative!"

"No, it's poison! But it won't kill you!"

"It will only make people lose their ability to move..."

Everyone has his own opinion.

Only the girl with freckles said nothing, lying on the ground with her lips bitten.

Inger raised the bottle he found in this room, which contained some dark cyan powder. "Do you think adding more of this will kill people? Do you want to try it?"

“No no no! No no! I’ll tell you everything! This is… ahhhhhh cough cough cough”

Alex didn't wait for him to finish, and directly stuffed a piece of bread and a spoonful of flour into his mouth. Finally, he considerately gave him a glass of water to make it easier to swallow.

"It's better to see the results directly."

After eating the food, the man vomited for a while, then his eyes were blank and the corners of his mouth were cracked, as if he was crying and laughing. His hands and feet were tied, and he lay on the ground twisting and turning, as if he had seen some hallucinations, and drooling unconsciously at the corners of his mouth.

Alex had never seen symptoms like this before. "Is this poisoning? Neurotoxin?"

Inger found the symptom familiar.

Watching this man go crazy for a while, then sober up for a while, breathing hungrily, staring at the bottle in their hands.

"Give it to me! Give me some more! Please!"

[Ah… that kind…]

Inger watched with a headache as the other party suffered from abstinence symptoms and struggled desperately.

Alex's face turned grim. He looked at Inger and asked, "Do you have any idea?"

Inger thought subconsciously: "An addictive drug..."

Alex was stunned for a moment: "...What is addiction?"

Inger slapped his head and felt even more headache: [In this era, there is no concept of addiction or addiction...]

"To put it simply, people who take this poison will become dependent on it, and will not be able to overcome this dependence with reason. Over time, they will become extremely dependent on this drug both psychologically and physiologically. Taking this poison will stimulate people's nerves, giving them extreme pleasure and hallucinations, or other feelings of excitement. However, long-term use of this thing will overdraw the body and spirit, torturing people to the point where they are neither human nor ghost..."

The community where he used to live often held popular science events, so he remembered them.

Alex was confused by what he heard, but he still understood the harmfulness of the poison. "Then why did they give us this poison..." He took a breath halfway through his sentence.

Inger put the lid on the poison. "Because once people become addicted to this stuff, they need to take it regularly, so that the people who make and sell poisons will have an endless supply of money. And once you're addicted, it's impossible to stop taking it... Not to mention the pain of withdrawal, it's almost impossible to quit absolutely... So they targeted the children of foreign nobles... Ordinary people can't afford it at all..."

Alex laughed angrily and stepped on the man's hand and broke it. "This is a hundred times more disgusting than the poison that kills people..."

"The harm of this thing is much more serious than you think. If it spreads, the whole country will be finished. The source of the strain and the production base must be found."

The two men thoroughly searched the place where they were kidnapped and found all the poisons.

Some people were afraid of death and pointed out where fresh and dried strains of the virus were stored.

"... this... this we call sea lily... it came from the south... grind it into powder and it becomes green jasmine..."

This plant looked completely different from the sea lilies Inger had seen in documentaries before.

The plant is one meter long, including the root stem. It is dark blue in color, with an underdeveloped root system. It looks like an aquatic plant, but it doesn't grow in the deep sea. The leaves are thick and blue, and the shape is more like a succulent plant or a lotus with thick petals than a normal lily. The center of the petal-like leaves is wrapped with a layer of soft blue stamens and a few transparent beads, which should be the fruit.

"Ah... so disgusting..."

The fruit has black spots on it, and looks like tadpole eggs or eyeballs.

The dried plants look like the limbs of a mummy, blue-gray and dry.

"This...drying and burning...will produce smoke...we can't do that..." the tall man muttered softly.

"Can smoke be addictive?" Inger's anxiety grew.

This poison only requires one inhalation to cause addiction symptoms. It does not require complicated extraction and processing and can even be absorbed through the nasal mucosa.

Alex frowned and said, "The Duke of the South never mentioned this matter during his routine reports..."

Including his previous life, there had not been much trouble in the south, and he thought it was very peaceful here. Now think about it, although the south was not the main battlefield, the demons were defeated so quickly when they invaded in the previous life, and there may be other hidden reasons.

Inger looked at him, but had different ideas.

[If the nobles of this era found this kind of thing, they probably wouldn't avoid it, but would use it as a mental paralysis or entertainment... and as an emperor, Alex would naturally not pay attention to the industry of the nobles' entertainment life...]

As a person who grew up under anti-drug education, Inger psychologically finds it difficult to tolerate the rampant spread of such things in this world.

"Where does this come from? Is it grown locally or imported?"

The tall man honestly explained everything he knew: "We didn't grow this here originally... I heard that someone in the south found this in a sea cave while picking up shells on the beach... This thing is easy to grow, just throw it into a puddle, and it will grow into several plants in a few days... Later, someone discovered that it can be made into poison, and it started slowly... Some of us are from the south, and I'm a local. I followed them to do business, saying that you can make a lot of money... and it won't kill people..."

Alex couldn't help but punch him.

Inger scratched his head. "It's a problem. There are probably a lot of these plants in Harunga... They reproduce so quickly... Wait, you just said you picked them up by the sea? Are you sure they're not native to this place?"

"Um...yes...yes...no no..."

Inger searched the plant atlas in his mind and found that he had never seen any similar plants in the Western Continent.

Inger suddenly had an idea and looked at Alex in shock. They both said at the same time: "The gap in the wall of separation has been opened!"

The tall guy didn't know what the two were talking about and wanted to take the opportunity to escape, but Alex tripped him and stepped on him to the ground.

Inger and Alex were still in shock.

They both knew the history.

The Sea of ​​Repetition, there is a wall of separation in the center of the ocean.

Before the Wall of Isolation was broken, the Sea of ​​Repetition was no longer called the Sea of ​​Repetition, but the Sea of ​​Loops, and there was no such thing as a Wall of Isolation.

If you sail from the east side of Onerola, and then go east in a straight line to the end of the vast ocean, you will return to the west side of Onerola. The coast to the south is the western border of the Levi's Empire, and the coast to the north is the western coast of the Gray-topped Kingdoms.

This confirmed their theory that the world they lived in was a sphere.

The people in the Western Continent don't know this because there is a wall of separation.

The wall of isolation that the goddess built in ancient times prevents humans from the West Continent from entering the eastern waters of the Polar Ocean. Similarly, it prevents life from the East Continent from entering the waters of the West Continent.

People or ships going out to sea from the West Continent will be carried by the biological currents in the East Ocean, which will pass through the Wall of Isolation and cross the East Continent and its waters, and directly return to the other side of the West Continent. They will never be able to reach the East Continent.

A transparent, seemingly non-existent wall divides the planet into two halves. Although ocean currents and gases can pass through them normally, no living creatures can pass through them.

This is the great power of the Goddess.

The demons were imprisoned in the East Continent, and humans were locked in the West Continent, with neither of them knowing of the other's existence.

But as time passed, in the 19th century of the Western Continent, the goddess' authority declined and rumors that she had abandoned humans spread. Some people also boasted about the power of humans and no longer relied on the goddess's protection.

Although enlightenment has an extraordinary driving force for the progress of human civilization, goddesses really exist in this world.

The Wall of Isolation has protected the Western Continent for thousands of years, but it is only a powerful magical barrier that will eventually break.

In 1900, the Wall of Isolation collapsed completely. Soon after, the demons came across the sea and invaded the Onerola continent.

In fact, before that, the Wall of Isolation had already shown signs of breaking. It started as a tiny crack under the deep sea, and was later slowly eroded and expanded by ocean currents and marine life.

Based on this, we can speculate that this suddenly appearing sea lily is most likely a species from the Eastern Continent or its waters, which followed the ocean current, passed through the cracks in the Wall of Isolation under the sea, and drifted to the Western Continent.

The goddess does exist in this world, but has never appeared in the comics.

This is a story about a world abandoned by the goddess and how humans regain hope in the midst of disaster.

Alex, who has returned once again, and Inger, who knows the plot of the comics, now perceive the signs of the collapse of the wall of isolation.