[Lost Era Year 1001, August 22nd, Wind Sand Islet, clear.]
The first day after defending the city.
The fighting had continued until dawn. Exhaustion had sent the vast majority of people into a day and night of sleep, myself included.
When I woke and looked over the city again, postwar reconstruction was already proceeding in an orderly fashion. The civilians who had been sheltered deeper inside the city emerged one by one from their crowded homes, voluntarily carrying bricks mixed with Spice and stacking them into brand-new walls. It was the only thing they could do.
Many wounded lay scattered across the streets. Food was hardly abundant, but medical supplies had rarely been lacking, so aside from a few injured soldiers battling fever and nightmares from inflammation, most of them still maintained good spirits.
Peace alone was enough to make people relax.
The corpses from that single night had nearly piled into mountains. Surprisingly, there were fewer Beastfolk than expected. Digging a massive pit to bury everyone was clearly unrealistic. I heard Uha had taken the lead in transporting tens of thousands of corpses into the sea of sand.
Then Kandelian blasted a huge pit among them, and the hill-like piles of bodies vanished beneath the shifting sands—just as though those lives had never existed.
But the disappearance of a soul did not mean true death, did it? Only when every trace of their existence had been forgotten could they be said to have truly vanished.
I heard that countless names were carved into the walls of the Southern Great Wall. It was so long that people who saw those names would never be willing to study them closely, but for the departed souls, it could at least be called a comfort.
Other than the Stone of Oblivion, it was