Lance Taught Me A New Thing

"But, surely General Spring must disagree. Because look at this." He brandished his hand in the general direction.

Lance Hua showed the calculation on his device. A simulation showed a plot of land with two pictures above it: one was a slice of meat, another was a plate of vegetables. Next to each image there was a number indicating the calories.

". . .And what Lord Hua means is?"

"The Northerners under my administration don't eat meat and animal products from the cattle and poultry. The arable land used for producing feeds can be used to cultivate food crops for feeding humans directly, don't you think?"

"Are you saying that the way we have our culture here is wrong? Because, to be quite honest with you, Lord Hua, I indeed never see you eat meat or eggs. The dishes we serve you, if they contain those, you always skip them. But many people in the Council's jurisdiction still eat meat."

"I don't see it as my problem," he said, cocking his left eyebrow.

"But it is a problem. Asking people to cut down on meat and animal products is difficult because you ask them to abandon a food group, an inseparable part of our culture. This campaign might not work; you touch a sensitive subject."

"Are our resources infinite?"

"No, they are finite."

"So with the finite arable land, you choose to grow food crops for your animals and then kill them, and eat their meat, milk, or eggs to finally fulfil your hunger?"

"Yes."

". . . Have you . . .," Lance Hua scowled, massaging his temples with a frustrated expression, "heard about energy conversion efficiency?"

"Yes."

"Do you know what that is?"

"Of course, it's been taught at the academy." Or her high school in the original world, to be politically correct. "A drop in energy level resulting from the conversion from one medium to the next. The conversion would never be a hundred per cent. That's the same principle as in our crystal garnering."

Lance Hua's mouth formed an imperfect 'O'. "How so?"

"The crystal energy has to be garnered by one person and used directly. If, say, I garner the crystal electromagnetic field and absorb it to my body, and then I do the energy transfer to you through physical contact, but you don't use it right away, and transfer it to someone else, instead. And this third person is the final user who will do some tasks with the crystal energy, this third person's crystal energy is lower than what I pass to you."

"I see. So, similarly, the initial dormant energy contained in the crystal is never transferred as a whole to you. Is my understanding correct? To summarise it, the more middlemen in the energy transfer process, the lower the energy level received by the final state."

"Exactly!" Chiaki snapped her fingers.

Lance raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth, coaxing Chiaki to continue her logic.

"C'mon, General Spring! If you're like this, I'll bring all the generals down in the next Council meeting."

"What's wrong with me?"

"You avoid a simple logic being presented to you just because you don't want to hear it."

"What don't I want to hear?"

"That the energy contained in plants is absorbed by your cattle first. If you subsequently kill the cattle to eat their meat, won't the energy level continue dropping? It's the same explanation as in your crystal garnering. You eat food to harness energy. The chemical process in your body converts the mass of meat or plant into energy, the same goal as your daily job in the Crystal Garden. Only, you eat for maintaining your physical body, and you garner crystal energy to convert it into protective beams that strengthen the barrier upwards."

Chiaki's gaze avoided his enthusiastic face. "So, the point of my lord is . . . It's more energy-efficient if our bodies absorb it directly from plants."

"Bob's your uncle!" His eyes twinkled with mirth. Chiaki found herself drawn to the magnetic smirk on his lips.

"I- I rarely eat meat, only fish. But, no!" Chiaki shook her head rigorously Lance was afraid the neck might pop out.

"The Council wouldn't allow it. They keep the tradition."

"So, you're telling me that in the danger of famine and faced with the simple maths of energy conversion, you still choose the good old harmful tradition over human life?"

"You can't have this." Chiaki sighed. "We can't have this."

Deep in her heart, she knew that the designers of the Dome took the reset literally; they radicalised the inhabitants' way of thinking about their agriculture and, most importantly, food.

~*~

Chiaki called the menu to check her total coins. It had been a month of full thirty one days. Because she only used a hundred coins to purchase the cheat she had during the lightning anomaly, she had three thousand coins in her System purse by the end of the month.

System, can I use my coins to buy a cheat?

[What cheat do you want?]

I want to ask about Lord Hua's past. From Gin, I learned that he's an uncharged suspect from a battle strategy that killed his parents. From Grand Elder Marion, Lord Hua exists like a thorn in her side. And from my yet unproven observation, he might have something to do with the anomalies. Otherwise, why did the light swirling pattern from his body match the lightning strikes?

[There is no such cheat to achieve your goal with this low price.]

Eh? How much does it cost?

[A variety of bonus side quests require at least a hundred thousand coins.]

A hundred thousand?? Even if I don't use anything from my balance, it takes more than thirty months or almost three years! Do you want me to live together with Lance Hua for that long?

[Path of Indifference does not have the past, present, and future.]

This illogical answer again!

Irritated, Chiaki closed the dialogue box and went about her day in the Crystal Garden monitoring room. Lance Hua didn't show any signs of wanting to return to his territories anytime soon, his presence lingered in her office, meditation room, practice room, lounge, and courtyard. He spent time interrogating inner officers who he saw didn't do their work. Just like this morning, he scolded a practising novice for forgetting to adjust the pyramid's upward beam parameter.

"You terrorised my staff," Chiaki sighed as she inspected the state of her machines. All good.

"You've been so lenient to them. Is it because, just like the saying about the people in the south: full of diplomacy and beating around the bush? Because it suits your style of combat: crystals? Being pretty things and delicate, a hall of uselessness. We the Northerners hate that style of speaking."

"There's a large, a world difference between being straightforward and being an asshole."

"Attacking our fighting style doesn't need to insult the southern culture, okay?"

"Chiaki stresses importance on the politeness. But look at your spoilt nephew, what a disgrace to the Spring family."

Subduing her irritation by reciting the passage from the handbook, she growled, "Enough, Lord Hua. Please have mercy to us; refrain yourself from speaking about the Springs."

Lance Hua sneered, making a gesture of zipping his mouth and throwing the key away.

Chiaki couldn't stand to be in the same room any longer with him lest one of them became a murderer. She rose from her seat after locking the displays and left the monitoring room, shoulder almost brushing his, but her eyes refused to make contact with those dark pools of his eyes.

She entered her private study room, a library of only ten shelves stacked neatly in one wing of the hall. The old Chiaki Spring was in the middle of digitising the physical assets that were recovered from the wars against anomalies, so Chiaki now also continued the project. Many other books were stored in the Council's national library.

Moving autonomously, her hand extracted a book on interrogation and torture methods. This was probably her last resort if Lance Hua didn't answer what happened with Chiaki's foster sister and her husband. She had an inkling that the elders knew something about it, especially with the way Grand Elder Marion approved of her proposal to investigate but married her off in the beginning, nonetheless.

Did the grand elder know something that she didn't? Should she follow her instructions or interrogate on her own?

How did people do this in her original world? Poisoning each other? Hiring a mercenary?

But her body jerked at the thoughts. She wanted a new life, an open leaf ready to be written on with hope and purposes, not a convoluted marriage story.

Nevertheless, she opened a random page, and her eyes almost popped out of their sockets.

The Pegs of Lashes, invented by General Azure Ao.

How old is Azure Ao to have been already documented in this know-how book? Maybe he's a genius from birth.

The torture method was based on a mathematical game that involved pegs and disks. Three pegs were erected on a table or any flat surface before the investigator. On one of the pegs, a stack of disks was laid. The disks on the peg had different circumferences; the largest at the bottom and the smallest at the top.

She read further, but there was no explanation of the actual problem to be solved by the disks and the pegs. It only mentioned that for each step suggested by the prisoner, they would receive one lash.

Chiaki could only draw similarities between Azure's torture method with the puzzle she solved before her transmigration.

She imagined if, for every wrong step, she would have one extra task to shoulder in this realm, how bad it would be if the extra task had been replaced by a lash.

Shuddering, she closed the book, completely missing the rest of the methods that had more horrible imageries.