Dion ran for twenty minutes with a bag of dead rabbits and his shoulder bag full of coins, clinging sounds of metals at each other. Breathless, he didn’t even made a stop until he reached the gates of the city.
Normally, every entries need to be inspected by the guard. However, Dion was in a bad spot since the guard captain should be the one inspecting him.
“Oh, you war dze…” Connor said as he noticed Dion’s familiar face. The smell of alcohol exited from his mouth.
“W—What am I?” Dion stuttered as cold sweats harnessed around his head.
“Aren’t ya with ja princessh? And with dze pretty royal maid?”
“What are you talking about? I’m just alone. See this? This is the quest I took,” Dion argued, showing Connor the job commission for claiming rabbit hides.
“Izz’at so? Then can you show me yar bag?”
Trembling, Dion’s shaky arms opened the rabbit hide and his shoulder bag. He tried to hide the coin purse, but the clinging metal sounds made it obvious.
Connor explored his shoulder bag; his eyes widened after seeing sparkles of yellow and white. “W—Wazzat!? Aren’t ya ricsh!?”
“T—This is mine! I have no reason to hide this because I am t—the owner! It took me years to save this.”
“I didn’t shay dzat ishn’t yours though! I’m not even shaying that ya obvioushly hiding it from me.”
“I told you, I aint!” Dion shouted, gritting his teeth in frustration.
“Fine, fine, I believe ya. But lemme tell ya a tip.”
Connor, along with his alcoholic smell, leaned at Dion’s ears and whispered. “Because if I were to steal it, I would’ve hid it alongside the rabbits. It’s a good idea, isn’t it?”
Dion froze, pausing his breathing while trying to hold the terror inside him. He felt like the guard captain was playing with him through words. His eyes dilated, unable to move a pixel.
Connor jerked his head back and exclaimed. “Ya can now passh, kid! Ya don’t have anything shushpicioush.”
Scared in the extreme, Dion ran inside the town with rapid breaths as if his nerves stopped responding from just a second. His desire to flee left his limbs trembling and unable to recover.
The coin purse in Dion’s shoulder bag was Elara’s pouch containing the necessities for her and Vena’s sudden vacation. The moment Elara dropped it earlier, he took it with no doubt.
No one noticed him running away, but it doesn’t mean that fate was in favor of him. The moment he did it, he was already tagged as a criminal. There’s no way to regain the cleanliness of his name except surrendering.
But he couldn’t do it. Morals have laws, but necessity doesn’t. He left no stone unturned to commit his crime, even if abandoning his humanity.
The choice he made was his last leg.
He continued to run directly towards the slum, straight to his home.His house is typically made up of scraps of tin sheets, tarpaulin materials, and other recycled materials.
The house is overcrowded and small, typically consisting of only one or two rooms. The walls are thin and the roof is usually leaking during rainy seasons. There is often no proper ventilation, electricity, or plumbing system.
As he entered inside the house, there is hardly any space to move around as it is often cluttered with a few essential furnishings, including a small furnace, a few chairs, and a table.
His frail mom was lying in a thin, lumpy mattress with only a single pillow to support her head. Her body looked fragile and delicate, with thin arms and bony legs sticking out from under the thin quilt that barely covered her.
Her skin was pale and translucent, revealing the network of blue veins that ran beneath the surface. Every breath she took seemed to require a great effort, and her chest rose and fell in shallow, erratic movements. Dion quickly ran beside her.
“Mom! I can now cure you! I’ve got the money to call the doctor! Look! With this, we can fill our tummies for another month too!” Dion exclaimed, pulling out the purse from his bag and showing his mother the shuffling of gold and silver.
“D—Dion… Cough! W—Where did you get—that too much money?” His mom asked. Instead of being happy about it, she drawn her eyebrows at him.
“Don’t ask about it, Mom. What’s important is that you’ll be cured soon. Wait for me. I’m going to find the doctor—” Dion said, standing up, but before he leaves, his mom gripped his hand, stopping him.
Cough! “Dion… Don’t do bad things for me… Bring the money back… I don’t want its owner to be sad…”
“I don’t wanna!” He shouted, clenching his fists, and continued.
“Doing good things won’t fill our stomach! I won’t help us… never. The more we do, the more miserable we’d get.
“You’re the kindest mother I’ve ever met, yet… yet no one helped us when we needed them the most. All they did was to watch us suffer. It’s unfair that we’re the only ones that’s suffering.
“Your condition ended up worse because of them. If I’m not weak… If I could just become an adult already, I wouldn’t need of doing regrettable decisions like this.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I’m tired of continuously climbing and falling from a pit with no ladder. I’ll soon be back, and we’ll live happily again… with no regrets.
“So, please, wait for me.”
Dion released his mother’s grip and walked out of the room. He held every feeling of pity and regret that bugged his mind.
I will soon claim the life I wished. He thought.
On the other hand, his mom remained still in bed with her weak-willed limbs. Because her head wasn’t sitting on a pillow, her tears fell directly on the bed as she muttered,
“If not for me… you wouldn’t have suffered this much.”
The purse Dion had thirty gold coins and fifty silver coins. A gold coin is equivalent to 8,500 yen, which can buy the cheapest original shoes in the market, while the silver coin is the twentieth of gold’s value. A copper coin is tenth of the silver’s value.
Since the economic crisis a year ago, the prices of goods arose. A loaf of bread became four copper coins from one. Only basing from food and shelter, the average needed for daily necessities is ten gold coins a month.
For an official light mages’ checkup, it can range up to a minimum of fifty gold coins. They’re officially marked by the church as those with high-affinity of light magic that can analyze and cure various diseases.
For the poor people, it’s anti-poor, but there’s another alternative: underground doctors. These doctors weren’t official and untrained professionally, but has broader knowledge in medical terms. They aren’t magicians.
They use various tools to diagnose a patient, even thought it wasn’t recommended by the church. If one was caught doing these things, they’re punished for lifetime imprisonment for modifying the natural state of the body.
Luckily, Dion knew an underground doctor from a connection in the slums… or is he really lucky?
He remembered the location well: a house in the downslope of the slums where it had a dome-like roof made of bricks. He knocked at the door without a second thought.
“Hello? Is anybody in here?”
“Wait!” A voice behind the door shouted. A man with a long black hair welcomed Dion with furrowed eyebrows. “What’s your business with me?”
“Will you cure my mother?”
“You got the wrong person, kid. I’m not a God or some greater stupid to be preached and bless you,” the man replied as he gazed at Dion’s appearance. “Blame life for your rebirth in poverty.”
The man planned on closing the door, but Dion countered it by pulling on the opposite side. Dion’s free hand opened his shoulder bag to show to the doctor his purse.
“I’m willing to pay for it, so, please…”
The man lose his grip and let Dion open the door. After wandering his eyes around outside, he pulled Dion inside his house and closed the door. He walked towards a room full of equipment and spoke.
“If you’re not a kid, I would’ve cut your head already. No one just barges into my door and screams ‘Hey, doctor’ in my face.”
“I’m sorry…” Dion apologized as he followed the doctor.
The doctor sat on his chair behind his desk containing log books and personal documents that aren’t his. “How’s your mother?”
“She’s always coughing… and her voice was already cracking. She always feel tired easily, and she says to me that her head is always hurting her. If she took too much food, she vomits. What would be her situation be like, doctor?”
“Does your mother feel chest pain easily? What about difficulty in breathing?”
“Yes! She’s also experiencing those.”
The doctor leaned back and sighed. “… An orthomyxoviridae variant. With the current medical knowledge of the books, it may be hard finding a cure for those. You should consider checking up the church if possible.”
“But I can’t afford it. I don’t have any money anymore.”
“It’s never my fault.”
“My mom’s condition is critical! She’ll die soon!”
The doctor stood up and held Dion’s arms. Dion tried to escape, screaming “Let me go,” and “Please help me,” but the doctor was ignorant of it.
The doctor opened the door and pushed Dion out of his house, lying on the floor. As he looked up, he soon realized that his house was surrounded by town guards.
“Hey, hey! What’s the deal here!?” The doctor exclaimed. “You got some dirty mouth dragging peeps here, kid.”
“N—No! I’m not the one who called them!” Dion exclaimed.
“You’re already a pain in the ass, yet you brought some more. What a joke! You poor people shouldn’t have been born!”
The guards held the doctor captive as they raided the house full of equipments. They also took Dion because the whole intention of their existence was the investigation of him stealing the princess’s coin purse.
Both of them were put to jail.
