“Chief!” shouted a man, rushing into the jack-of-all-trades store. “Kyne from the nearby Fifth Cultivation Village is here, looking for the Priest-sama – UWAH?!” He was suddenly thrust aside by another man who had also rushed inside, covered in scratches.

“Priest-sama!” shouted the second man. He had certainly fallen over numerous times on his way here. “Come to our village! There’s a disease, an epidemic at our village, and everyone is collapsing! Please, come quickly!”

“An epidemic?!” the shopkeeper repeated.

“How could that be! But the sun has already set,” said the priest. “Heading for the Fifth Cultivation Village from now would be…”

The road directly connected the Seventh Cultivation Village and the Fifth Cultivation Village was essentially an animal trail. It would take four hours on foot to travel this animal trail. And night was when wolves and monsters would be active. It didn’t need to be said just how dangerous an unmaintained animal trail would be.

It was possible to go to the highway to travel to the Fifth Cultivation Village, but that would take an entire day.

“Kyne, let us leave first thing in the morning. Please rest your body until then,” said the priest.

“How can you say that!” said Kyne in protest. “Then everyone in the village, my wife, my daughter!”

“Please understand, Kyne. We cannot travel a dangerous road at night. The Goblins have increased in numbers as of late, and if we are defeated before we reach the village, then it will be meaningless –”

“Ah, how… How…” Kyne’s shoulders fell as he began sobbing.

There were some who raised their hands, moved by the ordinary man who had braved the dangers in order to come here for the sake of his friends in his village, his wife and his daughter.

“Alright, we’ll be your escorts –”

“Well then, I’ll take this Kyne-san and fly there,” said Vandalieu.

There were people willing to help, but that didn’t mean that all of them could go together.

“The stars are beautiful, aren’t they?”

“HYIIIIIH!”

“The moon looks amazing tonight.”

“NOOOOOOOO!”

The only ones capable of flying in the world of Lambda are a small portion of mages, wealthy people with expensive Magic Items, those who have tamed monsters capable of flying such as dragon knights, and members of Vida’s races who have wings.

Thus, to the average person, the idea of flying through the sky is nothing more than a dream or delusional thought.

Kyne was undergoing this precious experience.

Vandalieu was using Flight to head towards the Fifth Cultivation Village, holding his luggage in his hands while carrying Kyne on his back with a safety rope securely tied between them. But Kyne was clinging to Vandalieu desperately and screaming in fear of falling, so it seemed that he didn’t have the time to enjoy this precious experience.

“By the way, it’s fine if I just go straight, isn’t it?” asked Vandalieu.

“Y-yeah! There’s a small swamp along the way; I think you can use that as a landmark!” Kyne shouted back.
“We passed the swamp a little while earlier, so I think it should be fine if we keep going this way.”

Vandalieu and Kyne were flying about thirty meters above the ground. Their speed was about that of a running horse at most, but it seemed that Kyne was too terrified to even open his eyes. But then, since Kyne didn’t have the Dark Vision skill, his eyes wouldn’t have been able to see anything even if they were open.

“We’ve already passed the swamp?!” Kyne asked.

“Yes. By the way, you’re kind of strangling me,” Vandalieu told him.

The speed of Vandalieu’s Flight was fast compared to a person running, but the fact that he could ignore terrain and fly in a straight line towards his destination was a big reason for the amount of distance that they had traveled.

They would probably reach the village within the next ten minutes.

He was expending a large amount of Mana to fly like this, however.

Thanks to my Automatic Mana Recovery skill, my Mana expenditure and its recovery cancel each other out if it’s just me and my luggage, but with Kyne-san’s body weight… I guess I still need more training. No, more importantly, let’s ask him about the disease.

“So, about the epidemic… Can you tell me what kind of disease it is one more time?” Vandalieu asked.
Vandalieu was curious about the epidemic that Kyne had spoken of. He had already heard the simple details, but he had thought that there was something very abnormal about it.

“I mean, I came back from hunting and saw that everyone had collapsed,” Kyne explained. “They had fevers and nausea, they were struggling to stay conscious… and there were some guys coughing blood…”

“Are there any healthy people other than you, Kyne-san?” Vandalieu asked.

“Other than me… Ah, if I’m not mistaken, Joseph-jiisan still looked alright. Also, the babies haven’t become sick yet.”

“Who is this Joseph-san?”

“He’s an old lumberjack. He’s had a terrible cold since yesterday, and he was apparently lying in bed until I got back. Right now, he’s pushing himself to nurse everyone else in the village.”

“That person isn’t sick with the epidemic?”

“Probably not. He has a fever and running nose, but it wasn’t nausea and he wasn’t coughing blood. That’s why I asked him to look after the others. Even if he can move, I couldn’t ask an old man to run to the next village, and the babies can’t be left alone for half a day, even if they’re not sick.”

In other words, excluding Kyne-san who had left to go hunting and wasn’t in the village, everyone there collapsed in illness, showing the same symptoms, other than the old man who had been sleeping and the babies. And… Kyne-san is healthy.

From the moment Kyne had barged into the jack-of-all-trades store, Vandalieu hadn’t seen the shadow of death in him. It was difficult to imagine that he was infected with a dangerous epidemic.

Just in case, Vandalieu had used Spirit Form surreptitiously to examine Kyne’s body while he was clinging to Vandalieu in panic, but he was healthy. It seemed that he would live far longer than Ivan.

After hearing the word “epidemic,” Vandalieu had used Sterilization to kill all of the harmful bacterial and viruses in the Seventh Cultivation Village before leaving just in case, but… wasn’t this a case of poisoning rather than disease?

But this would explain things if only one or two people had fallen ill; what methods could have been used to poison the entire village? And what was the motive to do so in the first place?

“Was anything different today?” asked Vandalieu.

“No, today was normal,” replied Kyne. “The only thing was that today was the day that the traveling merchant came.”

“Traveling merchant?” Vandalieu repeated.

“Yeah, he’s a respectable fellow whose store shut down, and now he’s doing his best to make his way back up as a traveling merchant,” said Kyne. “Either way, it’s helpful that he comes to a small village like ours that’s far from the highway, but… Come to think of it, he wasn’t at the village. I hope he hasn’t collapsed after he left…”

That person is probably the culprit. Well, the motive is still unclear, though.

But saving people came before solving mysteries.

“Could that be the village?”

Vandalieu, who possessed the Dark Vision skill that let him see through the night’s darkness like it was the middle of the day, saw a number of wooden houses that had been built on open land.

“I-it probably is!” said Kyne. “Please, the sick people are –”
“Well then, I’ll cure them all at once from here,” said Vandalieu.

“Eh?”

“The village is from here to there. Well, I guess it’ll be fine if I use three thousand or so? Detoxification, Disinfect.”

What appeared to be waves of black mist spread across the village.

“HONEEEEY! You were alive!”

“Daaaaddy!”

“I’m so glad! You’re cured, I’m so glad!”

The sight before Vandalieu gave him a small sense of déjà vu, but this happy, emotionally-moving scene between Kyne and his family was happening all over the village.

The villagers’ pain, fevers and nausea that had come without warning vanished completely, and their hazy minds became clear.
At the same time, Kyne’s family had been cured of the disease as well. As they celebrated, they heard voices outside. People came to find Kyne, illuminated by a blue-white flame.

At first, the villagers had thought that Kyne’s ghost had created a miracle for them, but once this misunderstanding was cleared up, things turned into a whirlpool of emotions.

“… Phew, what a relief,” said Vandalieu.

Using Flight while holding (or being held by) an adult man had consumed a large amount of Mana. It was an inefficient spell to begin with, so it couldn’t be helped.

He had spent 70,000,000 Mana. And since it was late in the night, he was sleepy. As a healthy child, he wanted to go to sleep soon, but would he have to return to the Seventh Cultivation Village first?