The Villainess Lives Twice - Chapter 318

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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2. Spring Breeze (12)

From the perspective of the Karam, whose main diet consisted of meat, farming was work for children too young to keep up with hunting or for the elderly.

Apua was the son of a great chieftain, and had once been the vanguard leader of warriors who raced across the snowy plains.

He had been an excellent hunter. When he went hunting, he never returned empty-handed. He had even once captured a live reindeer with its calf and offered its milk to his father.

So it was only after he began living with the old man that he started making food with his own hands.

Sprinkling salt on meat and smoking it or burying it in snow to freeze it for preservation were methods the Karam also used.

However, in the past, Apua had always just brought back his prey and thrown it to those who would prepare it.

He learned for the first time that such work was just as difficult as hunting. It required far more complex skills than he had vaguely imagined.

The old man would curse at him constantly. His hands lacked delicacy but were strong, so he would often break farming tools or waste salt.

When he harvested crops from the earth for the first time, tears of emotion welled up in his eyes.

Hunger and cold were unavoidable even for the Karam ruling class. During years when severe cold struck, or sometimes during periodic hunting bans, they had fought neighboring tribes while extremely reducing their meals and starving.

But creating food with his own hands and storing it in the warehouse gave him a completely different feeling.

It was completely different from discussing food problems in tribal councils or sharing his father’s worries.

Food was no longer something prepared when he commanded the laboring class, but the fruit of his constant attention and preparation.

Apua lived alone with the old man for 15 years. Yet his world had expanded beyond imagination.

The old man was not a sage. He couldn’t read, and didn’t know much about how the human world now worked.

But Apua learned that he, who had been of the warrior class, could also live together with humans.

The old tools and techniques the old man used always amazed him.

The candles that peddlers sometimes brought, the odorless lamps made from oil pressed from plants, were as shocking as plowshares made of steel or cart wheel axles.

The old man gave him picture books and colored pencils. The old man couldn’t read. He said he had bought them to give to his grandchildren.

On days when work ended early, the old man would spread out the pictures in the picture books and tell him the names of the objects drawn there. Words were written beneath the pictures.

That was how Apua learned to read.

He had known that merchants carried around wooden boards and marked their own transaction records in their own way. There were also methods of using pictures to assist memory in orally transmitting tribal history.

But he hadn’t known that spoken words could be left on paper like this. While mixed-bloods might have learned this from their human parents, most Karam had no interest in such things.

The ruling class was the same. Merchants were looked down upon among the Karam, and mixed-bloods rarely became part of the upper class.

Becoming a warrior was the only truly valuable pursuit, and to avoid defeat, one had to constantly train the body without rest. Humans were not partners for exchange but targets to plunder and trample.

Apua was a fallen member of the Karam ruling class, and he could understand the meaning that writing possessed.

History remains, and techniques are passed down.

Failures are organized, and methods for success are conceived and recorded.

The human techniques that seemed like magic to the Karam developed this way.

What they truly needed to learn was not things like steel smelting methods or cannon manufacturing techniques that the Karam had always wanted.

Apua realized this, but there was nothing he could do. He was already cast out. If he returned, the only result would be his death.

He emerged back into the world after the old man died.

By then, Apua was already over forty years old. For a Karam, this was an unusually long life.

Most of his peers who might have been hostile to Apua would probably be dead, so he planned to return to the Iron Beak tribe.

They wouldn’t welcome a disabled old man, but they wouldn’t drive him away either. So he wanted to return and pass on what he had learned to the children.

『I didn’t know because I was living in the mountains, but by that point, the Karam had already entered the North.』

Artizea received the paper, read it slowly, and put it in the brazier.

Apua’s expression differed from what Artizea knew. The Told Gate had been breached and the North’s defenses had collapsed. So that meant the Karam had conquered Evron.

『You are mistaken. It was the lord himself who opened the fortress gates.』

“What?”

Artizea, who had been reading Apua’s writing upside down, unconsciously asked in surprise.

『After the king died, the tribes of Ka Ersa continued to fight, then split into nine factions forming a confederation. And the lord, as an Evron force, took the position of one of those factions.』

Artizea was so shocked that she stared blankly at the sentence, looked at Apua, then lowered her gaze to read the sentence again.

She had known nothing of this. Probably no one on the homeland knew either.

She had thought that Sedric was managing to maintain his knight order safely. She knew the northerners were helping, but she had wondered, ‘Would that alone be enough?’

She had thought he was receiving unofficial help after already losing his base. Since the Karam had nothing that could be called a state, it would have been entirely possible to lead a knight order and roam the empty lands.

But according to Apua, he had never once stopped being the lord of Evron.

Artizea lowered her eyes and recalled her memories of that time.

Information had been lacking. From the beginning, Artizea had failed to create a useful intelligence organization within Evron, and at that point she was even disbanding her intelligence network.

During negotiations with Apua, she had been led to believe the North was fighting the Karam. Making it known that they had been defeated seemed entirely possible.

『Then you’re saying the Told Gate was never breached?』

Artizea asked. Apua looked somewhat bewildered to learn she truly knew nothing, but wrote his answer without hesitation.

『I didn’t experience it directly, but it’s true that things became precarious. The humans resented that if they hadn’t lost the woman who held light, so many wouldn’t have died.』

The Karam had breached the Told Gate.

It was a severe cold period that might come once every few decades. The Karam were also desperate, and the North’s situation, isolated without receiving supplies, was already at its worst.

First the military rations ran out, then the gunpowder was exhausted. The reduced forces had no hope of reinforcement. The city walls that couldn’t be repaired finally collapsed.

At that time, the Karam didn’t have a central figure like the current king, and they were coming down to survive.

What Sedric could rely on even then was only his own martial prowess.

He opened the gates of Told Gate and went out. Then he fought and defeated a Karam great warrior in single combat before proposing negotiations.

『The Karam respect great warriors. In fact, a warrior who killed the king would already have been a legendary figure.』

For the Karam, a generation had already passed since then.

When Apua emerged into the world, the Karam were in ecstasy over the fact that the legendary figure of the previous generation was alive and had once again defeated a great warrior.

Thus the negotiations were established. The Karam had also paid enormous sacrifices.

If they could stop shedding blood, go south, claim suitable land and obtain food, that would be better.

One of the nine factions forming the confederation was essentially human.

Given Karam customs, raiding couldn’t be completely prevented. Sedric’s influence was only 1/9.

However, humans did not become slaves.

Coexistence began for the first time, and large-scale trade occurred. They exchanged foods they were encountering for the first time. The Karam learned chimney construction methods and fertilization techniques.

The North was rich and warm land for the Karam. Raiding and fighting decreased. Lands where the laboring class engaged in large-scale cultivation also emerged.

As a result, lifespans increased. When Apua was young, there were almost no elderly who had lived that long.

But now he could see quite a few elderly of the laboring class participating in cultivation while remaining healthy.

Even while living in hiding, Apua had often thought about how to achieve coexistence and acceptance of human civilization.

It was pointless to think about. He could never again become a warrior of the Iron Beak tribe.

Still, he continued to ponder this because the heart from when he was the chieftain’s son of the Iron Beak clan still remained.

But what he had only pondered was already being realized.

He spent the end of his life observing the changes in the North. No one thought that the peddler carrying bundles of soap and candles was a Karam who had once been the son of a great warrior and a great warrior himself.

He should have closed his eyes like that, but one day when he opened them, he had returned to a young moment.

He now knew the path the Karam should take.

He couldn’t think of the method. In any case, without crossing the Told Gate and making direct contact with humans, change would not begin.

“So, the war…”

When the king was alive, the Karam had crossed the Told Gate.

With Apua here now, it would be possible not to lose their central figure this time.

However, there was no meaning in achieving unilateral victory and conquest. If they plundered and enslaved to rule, they couldn’t exchange as equals like when humans were one of the nine factions.

Accepting civilization would be even more difficult.

So Apua decided to knock on the door first.

The siege weapons made with crude knowledge from books were clumsy, and making them understand the concept of guerrilla warfare was even more difficult.

But if there was someone on the other side who had experienced the future like Apua, there would surely be a response.

The Duke of Evron must have been thinking about exchange from much earlier than Apua.

If they could just meet, he thought a path would somehow open.

『I thought of it as an adventure.』

Apua’s face held a smile as he handed over the last paper.

Artizea’s mind became complicated with various thoughts. Most of them were meaningless to think about now, but she found herself wanting to see Sedric’s face.

She put the last paper in the brazier and scattered the ashes. After completely destroying every last bit, Artizea bowed her head to Apua.

“Thank you for telling me. You must already know who I am.”

〘I don’t know you. I’ve heard rumors, but I haven’t experienced it myself. And there are plenty of things in the world you can’t know without confirming directly.〙

Apua spoke like an old man.

Kesa looked at the two of them with puzzlement. Though he understood speech, he couldn’t read, so even sitting beside Apua, he didn’t know what had been exchanged in writing.

“The rumors you heard probably aren’t everything. In some ways, rather than that everything…”

Artizea muttered as if trying to make an excuse.

It was then.

“Your Majesty the Empress, the Archbishop has arrived.”

A knight who had been waiting outside the fence came in and reported.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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