A few moments since the last chapter…

Tristain, Royal Capitol, Grayfield estate garden

 

A dryad was similar to a nature elemental, and like most elementals, once they gained true sentience they often took on a humanoid form. Magical plants took in the mana from the creatures that died and converted it into different forms that were beneficial to the body’s growth. A dryad could take in this excess that was produced by a magical plant to grow and in return, they could take the plant into their body and provide it a means to travel safely. A dryad could also use its energy to control the surrounding plant life and even hide in things like trees.

 

The maid he was watching was standing with her feet together on the ground and her hands together at her chest. Her dress made from colorful flower petals seemed to glisten in the sun as she raised her arms over her head and leaned her hips forward as she arched her back to stare towards the sky. She then leaned forward and almost touched the top of her head to the top of her feet as she showed incredible flexibility. Pushing on her ankles caused her back to straighten and form a triangular shape as she continued her stretching.

 

“What is she doing?” Ashton muttered.

 

“I don’t know, she does this every morning!~” Beretta chimed in his ear.

 

“She is showing her incredible assets! Look at how firm her rear is!~” His foster mother said into his other ear. “I bet you could bounce quarters off of it!~”

 

Currently, she had come out of a pushup position and was pushing against the ground with her but in the air forming an almost perfect right angle with her body posture. Then walking with her arms backward she put herself in another triangular position by grabbing her ankles and pushing against them with her back bent. She then slowly moved up with her arms in the air before she once again returned to a resting position with her hands clasped in front of her chest. Looking at it closely, it resembled the yoga classes he had taken in college.

 

“What are you doing?” He asked her, finally unable to keep his curiosity in check.

 

“I am devouring the sun.” She told him simply.

 

This caused Ashton to look up where he could see the bright morning rays bathing the hedge-filled garden. Beautiful flowers covered the various hedges that were shaped like animals and gave them various features like bright eyes and different markings. The grass seemed to curl in on itself and provided one of the softest natural carpets he had ever encountered, and various small blooms were hidden within the grass like small gems. The wooden furniture he had seen from inside was all bright and stained to keep its wooden grain showing through.

 

“Devouring the sun?” Ashton muttered in confusion.

 

“People think they can just eat plants, but we are the sun’s natural predator. We use the ground as a stepping stone so that we can eat as much of the sun as possible!” She looked proud at this utterance and pointed towards the sky with a look of disgust. “Look at it running away like a coward! It has just shown itself too! Thankfully it is slow and takes a long time to run away!”

 

“So you come out here every morning to scare it?” He asked.

 

“Of course! It is my food, and I will wait here patiently to eat as much of it as I can!” She declared with a nod.

 

“Why did it follow the same trajectory before you were born?” Ashton asked with a shaking mouth.

 

“There will always be leafys ready to eat their prey,” Deltarose announced with her hands on her hips. 

 

Ashton wasn’t sure if he should call this superstition or ignorance, but while she looked like a young lady after talking to her twice he was starting to think her mental age level was much lower than he had thought. This was also in line with what Natalay had told him, which was that she wasn’t as negatively aligned, as creatures like Kumiho. Ashton had heard that most dryads didn’t leave the forest they were born in and it was very rare for one to come about in the first place. The place needed to be healthy, with lots of natural predation occurring in monsters and an abundance of plants.

 

“And that stretching routine?” Ashton asked.

 

“It is a battle dance I created to scare the sun away even faster.” She responded.

 

“Does it work?” He asked her.

 

“I don’t know, I can’t count.” She replied after several moments of thinking it over.

 

“I have something wrong with me, I was told that you can help,” Ashton said to the green-haired maid.

 

This caused delktarose to turn her eyes onto him and he suddenly felt like the entire garden was staring at him intently. Every flowering plant and shrub seemed to have suddenly gained eyes that felt like they were boring into him. He found his rate picking up and his breathing starting to hitch when suddenly he saw someone appear in the corner of his vision. It was a tall man with glasses and a gentle smile on his face, he had dark brown hair and a tidy mustache. 

 

He could feel his vision narrow as his pupils constricted and he began to shake as he felt a deep feeling of fear from the man wearing blue jeans and a white button-down shirt. The man looked like any normal person but Ashton knew a lot about the man who was once his foster father and the husband of the woman who hadn’t left him alone. Every single man she had slept with had gone missing and disappeared after the encounters. Every single one of them had been killed painfully and disposed of in a variety of different ways, up until several of the bodies were found and it was linked to his home.

 

One day he had gotten held back in school for several hours to help clean up after he spilled a large can of paint down the front stairs of the building. That day he had finished the cleaning and gone home to find police cars surrounding the small house and medics carrying out a pair of stretchers. The man had strangled his wife over several long hours and then waited patiently for Ashton to come home from school but he didn’t make it before the police showed up. It had made news and caused him to have to change his name to avoid all of the media attention it had brought him. 

 

“You shouldn’t keep someone waiting, time is very valuable.” The man replied calmly as he began to walk slowly over the grass towards Ashton. “You read my manuscript, right? Only the big names like Doctor Death and H.H. Holmes managed to beat me! One hundred and eighty-one! Two full school buses of people over six months!” 

 

“He is stinky, it smells like a curse,” Deltarose said after several moments causing some of the pressure to lift from Ashton.

 

“A curse? What kind?~” Beretta asked Deltarose from his shadow.

 

“I don’t know…” Deltrarose said with a shake of her head.

 

“It looks bad, he is pale and isn’t responding!~” Beretta commented. “So… how much fertilizer would it take to remove it from him?~”

 

“I don’t know, should I help a hairy?” Deltarose seemed to ask herself and looked towards the sky with a blank look. “Hairys did trick me! He also looks like my owner, but he doesn’t talk the same!”

 

This statement caused Ashton to fall out of his stupor as he turned his attention towards the combat maid with both shock and wonder. He completely forgot about the man who was smiling at him as he forced his attention on the dryad.

 

“That’s right, I am his brother!” Ashton insisted as he patted her on the shoulder. 

 

She watched this motion with caution, but he decided to push further since he had seen a good opportunity for himself. While this might come back to bite him later, from what he had observed of her, he felt like he could play this off.

 

“My name is Ashton Grayfield, I am the hidden twin brother of Ashe Grayfield.” He told her this seriously. “What I am about to tell you is a secret, okay?”

 

Motioning towards her to come closer, he did everything he could to avoid looking in the direction where he knew the man was standing. He felt like his mental endurance was being tested just like when he was having the conversation yesterday with Natalay, but the difficulty had been ratcheted up several folds. The realization that the hallucinations got worse the more attention he had paid them also appeared in his mind, but he found that it just didn’t seem to be the case. It only took her a few moments to come towards him but her suspicion seemed to have increased.

 

Leaning forwards slightly, he began to whisper in her ear. “I secretly admire leafys, I think they are all incredible. I will secretly help you if you are willing to help me.”

 

“How could you help me?” She responded with even more caution and seemed to tense up.

 

“Did you like that fertilizer yesterday? I helped get it and you were the first person I thought of.” He put on a slightly hurt expression as he faced her with a pitiful look. “Was that not what you wanted?” 

 

“No! I did appreciate it! I spread it all over myself and I was very happy with it!” She told him and took his hand in hers. “I didn’t know you put so much effort into mashing up that man for me!”

 

The image of her using these hands to spread gore all over herself appeared in his mind before he realized that she must have been talking about the plant. Then he pushed the image out of his mind as he had more pressing matters to attend to. 

 

“I can keep helping you too, I want to bring you even more!” He told her seriously. “But this curse is causing me problems…”

 

“Why would you want to help me?” She asked with genuine curiosity, this time she leaned in and whispered in his ear after glancing around the garden suspiciously. “Your brother seems obsessed with my genitals! He keeps cutting them off to make his home smell better.”

 

“I can have that stopped, you won’t have to endure that anymore.” He told her seriously. “We will trick him and buy other flowers from the local flower store.”

 

“And you are sure he will fall for this?” She asked him with some skepticism.

 

“I am certain of it! He will never know!” He assured her.

 

The way she began to look at him was the same way that someone who had long given up would if they were suddenly given hope. The hands she was using to clasp onto his suddenly tightened and she started to seriously look him over for the first time.

 

“To me, all of the hairys look the same, but I will be sure to remember you!” She took a deep breath as she kneeled and pressed a small finger into the ground and then retracted it after a short moment. “It will take several moons and even more fertilizer to remove the curse, but this leafy can stop it from getting worse.” 

 

“The mine I worked at was the best place to dispose of the bodies.” His foster father told him calmly from a few steps away. “We used sulfuric acid in the copper mine and just like it could eat away the impurities in the ore, it could also wash away your mother’s crimes.”

 

The one thing that scared him the most was that this man had been the most insistent of any of his foster families for him to call the man his dad. Since he was sterile after an accident in his youth, he had always seen it as a place of weakness and it caused friction between him and his wife. They hadn’t discovered the cause of his problem until they had failed many, many times to produce a child. They had then moved into foster care as a solution to their problem but they weren’t prepared to deal with a self-sufficient child.

 

Ashton felt like he was smothered at first, they had tried to take him everywhere and even though he was in elementary school it had caused him to shy away from them. This then caused the fights the two had to increase in intensity until his foster mother began to sleep around and discovered a new side of herself. What she didn’t know was that her husband had discovered a new side of himself as well when he killed the delivery driver that she had committed her infidelity. Then the two seemed to enter a peaceful period that lasted half a year until it all came crashing down one day.

 

In the end, he had to go to a therapist and a psychiatrist, the trauma had affected him deeply as a child and he wasn’t able to have a normal relationship anymore. After that, he had become suspicious of his foster parents and it had reinforced the behavior of being solitary. With wealth comes stability and while he didn’t have any grand aspirations he had worked endlessly to grind his way up the ladder after college. He also began to study psychology as it gave him the best method to tell what kind of people he was dealing with. 

 

“Sodium cyanide was something we used to leech the gold out of our tailings, it was the perfect tool to kill.” His foster father told him confidently. “Only a few milligrams is all it takes to be lethal, and it doesn’t have any taste or smell. I grabbed a few pellets and dissolved them into the water before I found the men who defiled her and mixed it into the food at their homes. My past job as a locksmith made it easy for me to break into their houses, but every time I did it I felt more confident in myself.” 

 

Ashton shook his head to clear his thoughts and forced himself to focus on the dryad who was crouched in front of the hole she had poked into the ground. A small shoot with a couple of tiny leaves sprung up from the ground and more leaves began to sprout all around it. The leaves were so dark they seemed to be almost black near the stem, but it spouted leaf after leaf from the short plant as it began to resemble a potato plant. Seeming satisfied with the growth of it, she placed her hand around the stock and gave it a light tub causing the grass around it to move out of the way and loosen the soil. 

 

“AAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!’ A loud shriek filled the air that caused the windows that were a few feet away to start shaking from the sound waves.

 

What Deltarose held in her hand was a small human-shaped root that was shrieking at an incredible volume. She held it up and pointed it right towards Ashton, and the moment he looked into its small beady black eyes, he felt himself lock up in place. The vibrations from the scream seemed to move from just a physical sensation and start causing a vibration that he felt deep inside his soul. He wasn’t sure how long he was stuck in place, but soon the creature closed its eyes and curled up its root-like limbs to its body. 

 

Ashton fell to his knees as the force that was holding him in place released him suddenly and he began sucking in lungfuls of air. Feeling a weight on his head, he looked up and saw the root-like creature curl up in his hair and its small hands clasp tiny handfuls. The feeling was odd and he wanted to reach up and pluck it off until he heard Deltarose’s next words.

 

“Now as long as you don’t become separated it won’t steal your soul and the curse won’t be able to affect you!” She said proudly as if only the second part mattered.

 

“Steal my soul?!” He uttered in shock.

 

“That’s right, but now you can look just like a leafy! This will make it easier for me to recognize you.” She told him seriously as if this was a major problem for her. “Just don’t let it get out of arm’s reach.”

 

Did my problem just get worse? Looking at the man who was once his foster father, he seemed to be kept at a distance that was just outside of what he could touch if he took several steps forward. He felt like the closer that image could get to him the worse it was overall and he didn’t want to know what would happen if it could fully reach him.

 

“I just need to keep this with me while I bring you more fertilizer?” I have more businesses that I am sure need cleaning! “How much do you need?”

 

“I need two and a half portions. “ She told him seriously.

 

I am not going to think about how I achieve half a portion, I will just find extra… Why are my morals constantly under challenge?! He had already killed one of the brothel owners, and he knew that he was probably going to have to do it again anyway. He had so many different loopholes in the law that he could point to that charging him would be nearly impossible under the current system. It was very legal for a noble to punish anyone under their employ for damaging their business or reputation, which led to them having a bloated image. 

 

“I can get them for you, I will start today,” Ashton promised. 

 

“Then I will plant the seed and start growing it in the garden, but it will need to be fed within two moons.” She told him seriously.

 

“Then I will leave immediately,” Ashton announced as he held the plant to his head and stood and began walking towards the mansion.

 

Now that his business model was complete, it was time to start implementing it in all of the brothels. This would also give him a larger area to try to dig out talented individuals among the commoners to teach his workers. Women were cheaper on the slave trade since they rarely had the same physical strength as men before they began training, so it was a larger investment to find powerful ones. This was not to say that women couldn’t become as strong as men, since the Empress of Galvos had proven the opposite many times in the past.

 

“You are not going to tell her the truth?~” Beretta asked curiously.

 

“There isn’t much of a point, she wouldn’t understand it anyway,” Ashton explained.

 

“She is as strong as Kumiho, are you sure you don’t want her at your side?~” Beretta asked him with a laugh.

 

“Maybe in time, there is still Wenn to deal with as well, and no one seems to know much of anything about her,” Ashton commented. “No one has ever seen her since the day I got here. Born in the freezing brine of Arborea, she is the strongest of the four and no one knows what happened to her? I feel like I am surrounded by an ocean of conspiracy and only by fighting back can I start to get myself out of it.”

 

“Kumiho might be able to sniff out where you picked up the curse if you ask her. The nine-tailed fox has a strong immunity to negative energies, so she will have no problem dealing with it herself!~” Beretta told him after a moment.

 

“That would be great, she doesn’t like it when I wake her up,” Ashton said with a sigh.

 

The plant creature on his head was as heavy as a potato was, and while it wasn’t heavy it was inconvenient. Several strategies appeared in his mind of how to carry the creature with him but he finally settled on one after considering Ashe’s image carefully. Fortunately, he already knew an experienced tailor and he was sure he could have an order finished for him in a day with a little bit of work. In the meantime, he could move from brothel to brothel as he cleaned them out one at a time.

 

“Alright, I will go get her!~” Beretta said as he entered the mansion.

 

Ashton sighed as he began making his way through the foyer and up the stairs into his quarters, not seeing his target in the hallway, he pushed open the door to the study and saw the cat-like maid. She was sitting on a chair in the corner as she read over one of the books from one of the shelves. Her ears were turned in his direction but her eyes were still focused on the pages.

 

“I can see from the smell that you managed to win her over,” Natalay commented.

 

The smell of the plant was similar to ginger, it was sharp, pungent, and warm with a hint of lemon. It was a nice change from the sweet fragrances that seemed to dominate the mansion from the various trimmings in their vases. Ashton was beginning to question if he could ever look at a flower the same way again after his conversations with Deltarose. 

 

I wonder if incense would sell well here? Flowers are everywhere and the waste just gets dumped in the river. I haven’t seen anyone burning them anywhere, even in the temples or the churches. What they used was similar to smudge sticks made from a bundle of sages and herbs that was common in the southern deserts. But stick incense was nowhere to be seen and he had already noticed that things that could scent a home were incredibly popular. 

 

“You just gave me a good idea, but yes I did,” Ashton told her. “She said it is going to take a few days to lift the curse, but this thing on my head can keep it from getting any worse.”

 

“Is that why you look more confident than before?” She asked him.

 

“It is much easier to deal with something once you have taken the first steps, now that I have a plan I can breathe much easier.” He explained as he sat across the room from her on the couch.

 

“When should I go to the second prince?” She asked him.

 

“I don’t need to appear before the king for three days, so I plan to have you go the day before my appearance. First, though, we need to do some prep work.” Ashton explained.

 

“Prep work?” She asked him.

 

“If you just drop a pan on your foot, that is just an inconvenience. You must first get it hot and fill it with grease, then make sure that nails are placed strategically around the floor.” Ashton responded. 

 

“That sounds evil, why would you go so far?” Natalay asked.

 

“I have met a few different people who are similar to the second prince and the one thing they all had in common was that they never stopped taking ground once they saw an opening,” Ashton explained. “That man might also wind up with a crown on his head if things keep going in their current direction.”

 

“Then wouldn’t you want to be friends with him instead?” She asked.

 

“They don’t have friends, just people they use. You don’t want to be friends with people like that and it is better if they are afraid of you.” Ashton said confidently. “While fear doesn’t equal respect, in some cases it is the best first step.”

 

“Are you going to side with the first prince?” Natalay asked.

 

“No, he is a warmonger. That is counter to my interests as a businessman.” Ashton said with a firm shake of his head. “War will close borders and make it harder to sell products, that is the opposite of what I want.”

 

“But most merchants say that war is where all of the profit is made and aren’t you going into the arms trade?” She asked with confusion on her face.

 

“The difference is scale, and you are forgetting something important,” Ashton remarked with a smile.

 

“And what is that?” She asked with confusion.

 

“A soldier gets a weapon and armor, then he goes through training. Unless he is using a bow that requires ammunition, the only expense on their gear is maintenance. How much money are you going to spend on a soldier?” Ashton asked her confidently. “We have an entire sea of murderous psychopaths out there who will pay anything if they think it will help them kill their enemies faster. They will happily throw their old weapons away and spend countless coins on buying the latest models, and they are almost always the first ones drafted into any war. Then they can no longer use their special armors and weapons then that entire market dries up as a result.”

 

Let’s also not get into the fact that the military only sources their muskets from the Armstrong family, even if I start making guns I have to go through the hoops of wresting the contract from them… Just because you can make a better product doesn’t mean you can automatically outsell your opponent. In many cases, if you are too far ahead of the curve people will be too skeptical to give it a try and your idea might get buried in the dust. 

 

Natalay sighed as this conversation was already in a direction that she didn’t appreciate. To her, adventurers were the real monsters and she had witnessed how quickly they could turn on one another. If the profits were high enough then a party would crumble and everyone would start killing each other. Sometimes finding a valuable magical relic could spell the death of everyone, and then the item never leaves its resting spot.

 

“That doesn’t concern me anyway, I don’t know why you would spend time on that.” She muttered.

 

“Let’s just say I have some ideas in regards to the adventurers.” He said confidently.

 

Next Chapter: Exploring the City