Chapter 6

The reception area went back to normal after the lord left, but Luke didn't miss the worried looks that passed between many of the people present. They feared him, and he wondered what the guy had done to garner such an impressive position in the minds of all of these people.

After some time, he headed back to his room and returned the clothes to the amputee. He didn't want there to be any reason for anyone in this world to place blame on him that he didn't deserve, so he laid back on his bed like a good little soldier and waited for the nurses to return.

While he did so, he made a list of all the questions he wanted to ask Dain. After some time, the list also expanded to all of the questions he needed answered about this world, and just when he was about to begin a long conversation with the voice in his head, the door opened and both the nurses entered.

They grimaced together when they saw him, even though he kept his face as neutral as possible. The red-haired, slender one placed a hand on his brow, then poked a finger in his stomach, making him wince. The chubby one checked the room, as if she suspected him of stealing even though there was nothing to steal, and after a few seconds, they both headed to the door.

"You are free to go. And if you tell anyone about my secret, you will find out what it means to bear the wrath of the Nadero family," the kinky nurse warned, her index finger pointing at Luke threateningly, and with a humph, she made her exit along with her companion.

Luke cursed silently at their backs, thinking that they were getting revenge by making him leave in just his bloodstained pants, but a moment later, the door opened and a set of garments flew into the room.

Scrambling out of the bed, he managed to catch them before they hit the floor. They were a set of the uniform he had been wearing when he had woken up on the battlefield. A grey shirt, grey pants, and white undergarments that were all made from a coarse material that would definitely chafe on his skin were in his hands along with a pair of leather boots, and with a shrug, he wore them.

There was no belt, so he hoped that the pants wouldn't fall at the worst moment. Just as he was about to walk out of the room, though, a dilemma he hadn't thought about appeared on his mind.

"Dain, do you know where I need to go? Whoever this body belonged to before must have had a house, right?"

"Yes, sir. I know what we need to do to find the address! Below the desk in the reception, I saw a set of files that may contain information about all of the patients. If so, your address should be recorded in one of them!"

Luke nodded at Dain's answer. Once more, he was impressed. He hadn't gotten a glimpse of those files, so it looked like having someone in his head who could study each and every minute detail in what he was seeing might be helpful, after all.

How was he supposed to get the file, though? Going back into the reception area, he took a seat again, intending to study the patients. For a half-hour, this endeavor yielded no results, but his eyes lit up right at the forty-minute mark when another soldier walked up to the desk, skipping the line that was long enough by then to stretch to the door.

He nodded at Luke as he passed, and Luke returned the gesture, hoping that this wasn't someone he was familiar with. He still hadn't come up with a plan to deal with the friends, family, or acquaintances he had in this world, but that would have to come later.

"Lord Whitmore awarded me a week off. I just want to check if it has been written down. I'm Private Jordan," he said confidently, and the freckled nurse nodded, ducking down to flip through the files near her feet.

She found what she was looking for in barely a minute. As she handed the file to the soldier, the man flicked through the pages and handed it back after a few moments with a satisfied look.

He left, and Luke immediately moved to mimic his actions.

"What's my name, by the way? Did you get a chance to hear it?" he asked as he walked along the queue.

"It's Lucander Lionheart, sir. A nurse noted it down when you were admitted," Dain answered, and Luke raised his eyebrows at the cheesy last name.

'At least the actual name is similar to mine. I won't have to practice responding to something I'm not familiar with.'

Breathing in the scents of sawdust and sweat, he asked the nurse the same thing as the other soldier. In just a few seconds, she handed him a stack of cream-colored papers.

"You can flip through any book as quickly as you wish, sir. I record the contents, and they will always be available for your perusal," Dain said in his head, and Luke smiled as this was a fantastic feature.

He still took his time studying the file, though, holding up the line behind him. Another thing had become apparent after seeing that soldier: this was a society where the army was respected, so he had no qualms against using that to his advantage. Besides, flipping through the file like a robot might elicit undue notice, so he read through the contents carefully.

The first few pages detailed his achievements. Apparently, the one who this body had belonged to was a brave soldier who had single-handedly faced down roach attacks to save his fellow comrades. He had been promoted three times, but a single incident whose details he didn't find in the file had led to a demotion to the bottom level. At the bottom of this list of achievements, the reward that he'd been given by the lord had been written down. There were a few blank pages after that, supposedly for any more achievements that might need to be recorded, and after that, at the very end of the stack of crude pages, he found what he had been looking for.

"Father, mother, and sister were declared missing during an excursion into bloodseed caves. Presumed dead. Family address: House 16, Affleck Street, Old Crodale, Crodale City."

'So, I'm an orphan in this world?'

He didn't know how he felt about that, and this wasn't the time to dwell on it. A few were already grumbling behind him, so he nodded his thanks and started to walk out the door.

The moment he stepped outside, bright sunlight fell on his face, making him squint and shadow his eyes. Seeing a shaded spot to his left, he walked to it and waited for his eyes to adjust.

He was standing on a cobbled path in front of a bustling town square. Opposite him, a road led to a massive iron gate that was closed. There were ten large wooden buildings on either side of the road between the town square where the hospital stood and the gate, and all of them had soldiers going in and out of them, carrying papers or those strange metallic tubes that the guy who had saved him had used against that monstrous cockroach.

To his left, rows of small houses stretched off into the distance, some of them having enough space between them for small alleyways. To his right, men and women sitting on the ground were hawking wares in what he assumed was a makeshift street market. There were more houses beyond them, but they looked derelict, unlike the ones on the left that were all well maintained.

Suddenly feeling curious, he walked up to one of the hawkers where a tall man wearing a black coat was in the middle of bargaining for three apples he was holding in his hand. The seller was an old woman wearing a loose shirt and torn pants. Beside the pile of red apples arranged on a large blanket in front of her, a small stack of black, grape-like objects was present.

The bargaining ceased just a few moments after he reached them. Both of them looked unhappy with the price they had come up with, but when the tall man wasn't looking, the old lady smiled to herself, clearly having gotten the upper hand.

Putting away the apples inside his coat, the man put a hand in his pocket and drew out another one of those grape-like things. He held it out, and the old lady hastily picked up one on the ground and placed it right below his. The man squeezed twice, and as Luke looked on with wide eyes, two spurts of blood flew out of whatever was in his hand into the inky black ball the woman was holding.

'Their economy is based on blood? How interesting! Is it because they use blood, somehow, as a weapon? And what are those little things?'

He could tell that the shade of those little balls had changed after the transaction. The one the old lady had picked up hadn't been as deep a black as the tall man's, before. After the blood had been transferred, both of them were the same shade.

The old lady grinned as the man walked away, muttering under his breath about how she always insisted on looking wretched even though she was definitely rich enough to afford the best clothes in the town.

If what he was saying was true, then Luke had to applaud the old lady's way of business. Looking at the apples made his stomach rumble, but he walked away because he had nothing he could use to buy them.

"They are bloodseeds, sir, in case you were wondering. In my limited observation, it seems that they are used to store five thimble-full measures of blood. On the battlefield, soldiers were using them in combat. Squeezing them fully expels all the blood at once. They seem to be the main currency, here," Dain lectured, and Luke drank in the information.

While he walked down winding streets following the directions painted on wooden signboards, his head roiled with so many questions that he didn't know what to ask first.

"How does magic work?" he asked finally, feeling like a little kid walking up to a street magician with wide-open eyes and a loose jaw.

"Apologies, but I have not gathered enough information to give you an accurate answer, sir. I do have some preliminary conclusions. Magic is almost certainly the art of transforming one's blood into an element, or a sub-form of the four common elements. By doing so, an individual can also use this transformed element to influence instances of that same element in nature. Earlier, you were operated on by a doctor who transformed his blood into water and influenced the water content of the injured cells in your body to facilitate healing. I have run simulations to ascertain whether this is possible if we assume that he was manipulating your cells in some manner, but they failed. Hence, it is possible that elements also have added characteristics that I am not aware of, such as a healing characteristic for water."

He hung onto each word, and when Dain stopped talking, Luke couldn't help but let out a low whistle. Just the thought that he might be capable of something so glorious got his blood pumping, and all he wanted to do was sit down and try to figure out how he could make that happen.

Too absorbed in the information dump, Luke passed the house he had been heading for. He stopped and moved back when he realized that he had reached house seventeen. The houses on both sides of the street he was in were run-down, and over half of them looked abandoned. The cobbled path was in a state of ruin, and as for his own house, it had holes everywhere and mold was even eating into the place on one side. It was jammed between two caved-in, abandoned houses that looked like nothing more than haphazard stacks of wooden planks.

Folding his hands, he shook his head, wondering whether he was starting with nothing in this world, too. Just as he was about to step forward to find out whether he was right, though, a loud voice shattered the silence that hung over the street.

"Lucander Lionheart! You've run out of time! The Moneylender's Guild is here to collect! Do not resist while we drain your blood, or you'll regret it!"