I head home with fresh-baked bread and butter from Carlton.
It’s paler and softer than the bread back in Lang Village.
Still pretty dense, though. Not exactly fluffy, but you know.
We grow wheat around the cottage, but we don’t bake bread. Too much hassle.
Mostly, we just crack the grains and make porridge. The chickens get whatever I can’t finish.
And when I feed them porridge, I swear their eggs get bigger!
Dinner tonight is bread with butter and honey spread on top, plus soup and leftover herb-roasted Pyrebird from yesterday.
I go hunting about once every three days, so my storage is packed full of magic stones, pelts, and feathers. I really need to turn those into cash soon.
I’ll be using some of the magic stones to keep the barrier going, but even so, they keep piling up.
“Hey, Selina. Since the Great Forest keeps spreading, most of the guild requests are related to that, right?”
Selina, halfway through a bite of her favorite herb-roasted Pyrebird, grimaces.
“That’s not a proper dinner topic.”
Oops. She’s right. And the fresh bread and butter are delicious too… no need to ruin the mood.
Still, she seems curious despite herself.
“Lang Village seems to be doing its best with the logging...”
Carlton’s made forest work a permanent guild posting, so they’re clearly taking it seriously.
In Lang Village, Maggie’s father leads nearly all the men into the forest during the off-season to cut trees.
Though I bet Hannah’s husband from the tailor shop skips out whenever he can.
“Bet it’s the root removal that’s really hard,” I say.
When I first started going to Lang Village, the path right outside the Great Forest was filled with old stumps, and they made walking a real chore.
And if you leave the roots, the trees grow back super fast.
Is that normal? I wouldn’t know. I’ve only ever lived near these woods.
“It might be smart to quietly remove roots from places no one’s watching,” I mumble. “Once the snow piles up, no one’ll notice if a few stumps go missing. Not that it’s a real solution…”
Selina mutters something similar as she drains the last of her soup.
I really should stop bringing up complicated topics during meals. It’s such a waste when it spoils the food I worked so hard on.
But still, it’s not like that fixes anything.
“This cottage used to get the occasional adventurer dropping by, you know. Which means it used to be on the outskirts of Schwarzwald. Now? No one comes. Which is fine, as I’d rather not get robbed.”
“When you say ‘not too long ago,’ how long is that exactly?”
I’ve only been alive ten years, so Selina’s idea of “recent” is always way off from mine.
At least, I’ve never seen another soul near the cottage.
“Let’s see… about fifty years ago? When I first moved in, ruffians used to drop by now and then.”
Yeah, I’d like to avoid that too.
“You said this was once a pioneer village, right? So the forest was smaller back then?”
Selina lets out a heavy sigh.
“Zoe, haven’t you read your general education textbook? Not that it matters… the map in that book is a joke. Schwarzwald’s expanded so much since then that it’s all out of date.”
I did skim through the textbook from the Sarina Kingdom, but without a teacher, none of it really stuck.
I run off to fetch it and flip to the map page.
It’s rough, but the Great Forest is definitely big.
“Can you tell where this cottage is?” Selina asks.
The continent’s all drawn out, with the Sarina Kingdom outlined in red. The Great Forest sits in the middle, and the Unia Kingdom—where we live—is to the east.
“It’s on the Unia Kingdom side, so… around here?” I point to a spot near the edge, just a little way into the forest. Seems about right.
“Wrong!” Selina snatches her pen and draws a new line around the Great Forest.
“This is where the forest reaches now.”
“Whoa! It’s that big?”
“There used to be villages even closer than Lang Village. Pioneer settlements too. They’ve all been swallowed up.”
She marks our cottage with an X. It’s right on the edge—but still clearly within the Great Forest’s current borders.
Then she draws a star deep in the forest’s center.
“That’s where the imperial capital of the old Shazane Empire, Florian, is said to have stood. No one knows what made that empire fall, or where Schwarzwald came from.”
She looks at me, green eyes suddenly serious.
I ask, “Do you think it has something to do with me?”
When I was seven, learning storage magic, I had that pendant with the Shazane Empire’s crest.
I still have no idea where it came from. Or why I had it in the first place.
“The Shazane Empire is where Troubadours were said to live. Zoe, you have the gift of a Troubadour. I’ve always wondered if that meant something.”
“Eeeeh… so the Great Forest is our fault? Did a Troubadour destroy the empire too?!”
That’s terrifying!
And though I’ve been avoiding the thought, I can’t shake the idea that the Great Forest is growing because of some magic harp that’s playing on its own.
“Who knows? But I doubt a Troubadour destroyed the empire. From the scraps of legend that remain, they seem better known for healing than attacking. Well… maybe a few dabbled in some nasty magic.”
That’s probably true of all magic users, not just Troubadours.
“Records show the Shazane Empire had magical tools powerful enough to conquer entire nations. The Sarina Kingdom and Unia Kingdom both tried to get their hands on them… but Schwarzwald now stands in the way.”
“So… would it be safer if the Great forest kept expanding?”
I mean, magical tools that can destroy countries? Hard pass!
“The problem is, it’s gotten too big. At this rate, not just Lang Village but Carlton and even Raymond City are at risk. If we don’t put a stop to it somewhere, it’ll swallow everything.”
The textbook map shows the Great Forest covering about a fifth of the continent.
But with Selina’s new line, it’s closer to a fourth.
“Isn’t there any way to stop it?”
Selina and I can manage inside the Great Forest. We’ve got the barrier.
But most people wouldn’t last long—not with all the monsters. And no way to farm or keep animals.
“It’s tricky. And I’m not sure it’d be good to shrink Schwarzwald either. Human greed is terrifying.”
If some kingdom got their hands on those magical tools, would they really resist using them?
Even if they didn’t, just having them would spread fear.
“But still, letting it grow further would be bad.”
We sit there, stumped.
“Selina… what if there’s a harp playing the expansion song on its own, way off in the ruined capital?”
The memory of the rain-calling song playing nonstop sends a chill down my spine.
“It’s possible. But to stop it, we’d have to go to Florian. And I’m not risking my life on a hunch.”
Fair enough. The capital’s incredibly far from our cottage. Even though Selina can teleport all the way back to the Sarina Kingdom.
“You’ve never been to the capital?”
“When I left the Sarina Kingdom for Unia, I didn’t pass through the center of Schwarzwald. I teleported along the coast. Back then, the forest hadn’t reached that far. Now? You can’t even get through by sea.”
She runs her finger along the coastline on the map.
“Let me make one thing clear. The deeper you go into Schwarzwald, the stronger the monsters get. There are even rumors of dragons. You absolutely must not go there!”
Dragons! Yeah, no thanks.
“When the snow starts falling, I’ll go around collecting stumps.”
And maybe I’ll secretly do some logging near the forest’s edge.
If I scoop up the roots too, no one will even know the trees were cut down.