Sage 22

“How many assassination requests have you received so far?”

“Not that many.”

“I should really meet the mercenary captain in person. I need to kill that guy.”

“Calm down, Yoo-an.”

“How can I be calm right now?”

Even though I didn’t raise him with meticulous care, I chased away all the imperial knights who came looking for him, and I even went around looking out for him, worried that he might get into trouble, even though it was out of character for me. It was all for nothing.

Since he had been in a mercenary group for five years, I thought he would be doing some illegal things, but I never imagined that assassination was one of those illegal things.

“Where did the twelve-year-old who lectured me not to kill people go?”

“Do you like that version of me?”

He probably wouldn’t. Irkus furrowed his brows slightly as he said that.

“You’re the one who told me to shed my humanity.”

“I didn’t mean for you to go around doing these kinds of jobs.”

“As you said, everyone dies.”

“…..”

“They just die a little sooner.”

I’ve raised a tiger cub. I thought I had a cat, but it was a tiger.

My mom used to say that raising children is all for naught, but I never thought I would be the one saying it.

My mouth felt bitter even though I hadn’t eaten anything wrong. It was the first time I regretted scolding the child for being harsh and telling him to shed his humanity.

The request Irkus had received was to assassinate a merchant leader in Carabel. In the Kingdom of Kaman, where commerce was highly developed, the struggles between merchant leaders were more intense than the power struggles between nobles.

Unlike positions and honors that don’t directly put food on the table, this was a matter of livelihood, so all sorts of underhanded things happened as naturally as breathing. It was common to give money to street gangs to destroy a competitor’s store, and it was also common to hire a mercenary group to kill a merchant leader like this.

That’s why merchant groups that were consistently profitable often hired mercenaries for protection so that their heads wouldn’t roll.

When you put it like that, it seems like a terrible profession. Considering how hard self-employed people had it when I was living in South Korea, it seemed that those who ran their own businesses were truly iron men. Merchants were scarier than emperors.

“It’s not like I accept every assassination request. I’m selective, so don’t make that face.”

“What kind of face am I making?”

“A face that says you’ve raised a kid wrong.”

“You can’t hide your own expression, but you’re good at reading others’.”

“I read you well because it’s you.”

Irkus reached out and pulled the hood attached to my robe. My head and face were instantly covered by the lowered hood.

The target of Irkus’s assassination was someone I already knew. It was the guy whom Adelaide had said she would kill herself someday, trembling with rage: Archbold Jenics.

A new businessman who had appeared like a comet in Carabel, Archbold Jenics dealt in medicine. He was a kind of ‘pharmacy’ operator who employed alchemists, herbalists, and mages to process plants that were raw materials, or to synthesize them through alchemy or magic, and then resell them.

Dealing in medicine itself is not bad. If the medicine being dealt with is for common over-the-counter drugs, it was actually necessary. As mentioned earlier, due to the change in the main religion, the number of priests who acted as doctors on the continent had noticeably decreased.

Ordinary doctors without divine power relied on general medical knowledge, herbs, and drugs to treat patients. So, Archbold’s pharmacy seemed like a necessary presence in a way.

The problem was that the drugs Archbold was dealing with were not over-the-counter drugs or for the treatment of ordinary diseases.

Archbold made drugs by combining cheap and readily available plants like lacrium with several chemical substances. Stimulants and sedatives sold like hotcakes as soon as they appeared.

To people who generally had no access to drugs, the drugs that Archbold released seemed like revolutionary items that relieved pain and cleared the head. In my eyes… they looked exactly like heroin or fentanyl.

Of course, even in the midst of this, many doctors and merchants insisted that people should be wary of the drugs Archbold was dealing with.

But such warnings fell on deaf ears to consumers who needed effective medicine right away. Most ordinary people found it financially burdensome to pay to visit a doctor.

So, Archbold’s drugs, which seemed to momentarily erase the pain and make the body feel lively, were selling out for months on end. This was possible because it was a commercial city with weak legal regulations, Carabel.

After a few months, as expected, hell began.

Archbold was a merchant, not a doctor, so he added addictive ingredients to all these drugs. He knew that’s how people would keep buying the drugs. In a way, he was a very clever human. You could say he made a deal with the devil, sacrificing his humanity for business acumen.

When the drugs were discontinued, painful side effects followed, so people who had taken the drugs once bought them again from Archbold’s company.

As the drugs sold like hotcakes, Archbold gradually increased the price of the drugs. At first, the drugs were cheap, but they became expensive, and people began to squander their assets.

And they didn’t just lose money. Like lacrium, most plants with stimulant effects were poisonous. As these poisonous plants were taken long-term, parts of the body naturally rotted or some functions were destroyed.

The rapid increase in the number of vagrants in the back alleys and streets of Carabel also began after Archbold appeared. The security of Carabel, which was unbelievable for the capital of a kingdom, gradually deteriorated, and only then did the kingdom try to stop Archbold, but it was already too late.

Archbold had become a magnate who had amassed so much wealth that he could not be punished by law, and the people who were addicted to the drugs he dealt with had reached a point where they could not live without the drugs he sold, so they claimed Archbold was innocent. It was a vicious cycle.

“Who’s the client?”

“Someone who lost their son because of this person.”

“This is driving me crazy.”

To put it coldly, Archbold was a bastard who deserved to die. Many people had their lives ruined and lost their lives because of the drugs Archbold sold, so he needed to receive a just verdict.

But sometimes, the law was powerless in these matters.

In the Kingdom of Kaman, which didn’t impose huge fines or coolly execute people like the Empire, people didn’t even go to jail if they paid a certain amount of bail.

So, people often sought extreme methods instead of relying on the law. They realized that a murder request was more efficient than reporting.

“Killing Archbold won’t solve this problem. The drugs have already spread far and wide, and it’s hard for people who have been ruined once to go back to how they were before.”

“But at least they can get revenge.”

“Assassination isn’t a fundamental solution.”

“Then what is the fundamental solution?”

I don’t know that either.

Even I, who had the experience of living in a country with the rule of law, sometimes thought that serious criminals should be executed. There is no right answer to these problems. It was a problem where not everyone could reach a conclusion that was considered ‘right’.

“I didn’t want you to… kill people.”

The word humanity is very ambiguous. What exactly is a human? If interpreted positively, humanity would be the heart that cares for and cherishes others, but if interpreted negatively, humanity would be selfish and violent in nature.

Humans were creatures with multifaceted aspects. There was no law that said a good person couldn’t be mean, and there was no law that said an evil person was completely evil.

Even Archbold was like that. He was an evil person who ruined the lives of others and took advantage of them, but to someone, Archbold would be a respectable businessman. The existence of a human was too three-dimensional to be defined by the single word ‘human’.

“I didn’t want you to always be righteous. But I also didn’t want you to become numb to things like… assassination.”

“Yoo-an.”

“I just… Even if you don’t do this, I have enough ability to make you emperor. I just wanted you to be strong enough to live in the imperial palace even without me. I just didn’t want you to get hurt after I died…”

What are the chances that Irkus, the protagonist of this world, will turn out to be an evil person like Archbold? Probably a low chance. Irkus is innately good. As a protagonist who has to elicit sympathy from readers, he won’t grow up to be bad. If he becomes emperor, he will be a wise ruler rather than a tyrant. That’s the destiny of a protagonist.

But that was just my hope. Irkus had an unprecedented variable, me, and I was a Great Sage on the border between human and non-human.

I wanted to be a good guardian, but I didn’t know how to raise a child well, and I had the potential to ruin the good Irkus.

“I’m afraid you’ll become like me.”

The truth burst out of my mouth.

Is it ‘human’ not to feel guilty about killing someone who deserves to die? Even if I’m a Great Sage, I couldn’t give a definite answer to this question.

“But from the moment we first met, you asked me to kill you.”

“……”

“And you said you didn’t want me to kill people. Isn’t that too contradictory?”

It was a cutting remark. I looked at my charge, who had grown up so much, without a word.

“You’re my benefactor, but at the same time, you’re the biggest villain in my life.”

I read the emotion beyond affection in Irkus’s gaze. A faint resentment towards a teacher who wouldn’t return his affection no matter what he did.

Irkus must have read the fear disguised as indifference in my gaze as well. We had become unnecessarily adept at reading each other’s expressions.