Question: What would the childhood of a Transmigrator with memories of a previous life be like?
Could he be adorable from the moment he was weaned, winning over his great-grandparents with a single sweet smile, then becoming the whole family's darling, with one, two, three, four, five overprotective older brothers? Would everyone love him wherever he went, and flowers bloom wherever he walked, as if he were the center of the world?
Or would he be able to speak from birth, write poems at three and essays at five, and invent something world-changing by the age of seven? Would he already have the bearing of an emperor before coming of age, looking like he was destined for an everlasting legacy?
Angell: Bah!
Anyway, there was no way he was going to act cute. A socially anxious person would sooner die than try that.
And he had no imperial bearing either. Leaving aside the fact that programmers had already been voted the "most useless profession to have after transmigrating," Angell didn't even have a cheat ability. And what annoyed him most was that adults simply refused to listen to children (at least, the ones they considered children)!
They wouldn't listen when you made sense, and they really wouldn't listen when you didn't. If he tried to help them improve their efficiency by jumping in and doing the work himself, then if he failed, fine. But if he succeeded, the most likely outcome was that they'd be so embarrassed and angry they'd grab him and give him a beating.
On the other hand, they were very tolerant of children.
As long as children didn't cause them trouble, adults would almost ignore anything they did.
Especially in an era without even compulsory education, children from commoner families were practically left to run wild.
Angell was technically the young master of a workshop family, but the Cecilia Family had always favored educating their children like commoners. So Angell wasn't kept on a tight leash. Instead, he had the entire workshop's warehouse backing him up. And since he had actual adult experience and knew how to avoid pushing adults' buttons, it was easy for him to earn the respect of the children who were his age on the outside.
Angell went completely wild.
Today he'd blow up the Sewer, tomorrow he'd capture Blood Elves, and the day after that he'd lead all the kids on the street into an abandoned Evil Spirit Mansion and set up his own base.
The worst incident came when Angell tried to observe how Demonic Energy from the Abyss contaminated things. He'd already tried stones, branches, mice, human blood and hair, and Blood Elf blood and hair, but it still wasn't enough. While Mithril was asleep, he shaved off a big patch of fur from its back. Mithril was so furious that it transformed into its true form and swiped at him with a claw.
That was when Angell first realized he'd gone too far. After reflecting on what he'd done, he decided to go to the Mage Tower for a proper magical education.
Mithril forgave Angell... as if!
As the Alchemy Workshop's hereditary pet, Mithril had had hundreds of masters over the years. If it had to remember each master's children, relatives, friends, and enemies, its little head would explode even if it turned into black mist. So Mithril usually remembered people according to their place in their master's family line. Someone like Angell, who hadn't inherited the workshop and wasn't worth remembering, but couldn't be killed either, had naturally been tossed aside. Who could've guessed that, after going full circle, Angell would return a hundred years later to inherit the Alchemy Workshop?!
And as a completely different person, too!
So Mithril hadn't connected him to that brat at all.
That only made Mithril bristle even more. It felt like its feelings had been betrayed.
Angell reached out to pet the black ball, but it dodged him.
"I'm afraid of children because I know how terrifying an unsupervised brat can be!" Angell protested aggrievedly. "Besides, I wasn't like that when I was really little..."
Right, his childhood in his previous life was his real childhood.
Angell remembered that back then, all he'd done was pet the neighbor's cat until it was bald, claim the biggest banyan tree on the street, and lead his underlings into fights with kids from other classes...
Wait, how was that any different?
Angell thought about it for half a minute, then gave up.
He coughed softly twice and put on a serious expression.
"Let's talk about the past another time. We should discuss business!"
Mithril still looked at him with distrust.
Thornmoon, however, put on a serious expression.
That was what Angell had always liked about Thornmoon: he was easy to lead by the nose and incredibly easy to coax.
"What happened with the Adventurer's Guild?" Angell asked Thornmoon seriously.
This was what you meant by "business"?
Mithril stared at him, thinking that, but remembered it was still angry at Angell and kept quiet.
Angell genuinely thought the problem with the Adventurer's Guild was more important. He'd just been unable to find any leads before. "How did the Adventurer's Guild turn into a Monster nest?"
"How did you..." Thornmoon hadn't expected Angell to ask that. He froze for a moment, then realized what was going on. "I see. I was wondering why the smell of Monsters over there had disappeared. So you did that?"
The Blood Elf looked at Mithril too, and suddenly understood.
"Then the cats in the workshop were all—"
"Children who'd been sacrificed." Angell lowered his eyes.
The thought put him in a bad mood. "I don't know how many she ate. The only thing worth being glad about(?) is that the Monster wasn't the flesh-eating type, but the kind that spreads contamination through Demonic Energy. She was basically like a Slime: she assimilated whatever she ate into herself, then split off copies, and the group hunted together."
"I could only cut out the parts she hadn't fully digested. But they were so badly contaminated that they couldn't be purified back into their original forms, so I had to use the same Alchemy that created Mithril to turn them into cats."
Angell thought it was a depressing story.
In the end, he hadn't saved anyone.
The children who'd been eaten had, in the end, been eaten. They couldn't become human again.
Angell glumly looked at Thornmoon. "So what exactly happened? You knew there was a Monster in there and did nothing?"
"What was I supposed to do?" Thornmoon countered. "That place was an Orphanage personally appointed by The King, and it was tangled up with nobles and merchants. I'm just the leader of the street gang. If I'd made a move against it, someone would've come to wipe us out!"
"Besides, do you think that was the only place with Monsters? Once those factories start roaring, who knows how many souls they swallow? Cecilia is already doing well by comparison. But in other cities, how many homeless people have lost their families? How many children have lost their parents?"
Thornmoon paused.
It was as if he'd just remembered who he was talking to. His tone fell. "Of course, I was careless too... I thought that since it was an official Orphanage, they wouldn't make things look too ugly, at least on the surface. I didn't expect it to become like that..."
Thornmoon's underlings hurried to comfort him.
"No, boss, you've done great!"
"That's right! Aren't all the orphans in town under your protection now?"
But Angell had no interest in hearing Thornmoon reflect on his mistakes.
"...True. What improves the lives of commoners isn't technology, and it isn't the conscience of capitalists..."
Even on the Blue Star, the Industrial Revolution hadn't improved life for the lower and middle classes.
"Why hasn't the Red Ghost appeared yet, with them carrying on like this?" Angell murmured. Only when that Ghost swept across the world would it make the colossal man-eating monster feel fear and back down.
"Ghost?" Thornmoon's long ears twitched. He hadn't understood Angell's words and only thought his ideas were a little strange. "Can't you deal with a Ghost using White Magic? Why would they be afraid of one?"
"...!" Right. That was exactly what they feared most!
Angell sprang to his feet.
Angell didn't think he was capable of unleashing and controlling that Red Ghost. To be honest, he'd already forgotten everything he'd learned in his introductory Marxism class. But he was happy to see it happen.
If someone had released the monster called industry, then naturally the Red Ghost would deal with them.
But could that Ghost really emerge in this world?
After seeing what was going on at the Adventurer's Guild—the Orphanage—Angell had felt that something was off. Now Thornmoon's words had reminded him:
Part of this world was, damn it, governed by belief!
As a good young man raised in a materialist world, Angell had initially considered analyzing magic scientifically. But he quickly realized that his scientific knowledge wasn't enough to do that. The matter in this world wasn't stable. It could even be affected by living creatures' emotions and thoughts. The recipes for Alchemy Potions were one example: a certain state of mind could even turn poison into medicine.
And the clearest effect of this idealist magic was Monsters.
When humans fell into negative emotions, they easily attracted Monsters. Some Mages had even studied the matter and concluded that Monsters were the by-products of human emotions.
So there was a very real chance that, before the people could turn into the Red Ghost, they would be swallowed by the Monsters drawn to their despair and pain.
Besides, industry hadn't developed naturally in this world either. Who knew whether it might run rampant like the Australian Rabbits and become a disaster even more terrifying than a Magic Disaster?!
Seen in that light, what had happened at the Adventurer's Guild was practically inevitable.
Given Enlise's emotional state that day, it was only a matter of time before the Monsters targeted her, even if nobody had interfered.
So first, they needed enough happiness to stop the Monsters from multiplying—
"Let's talk business, shall we?" Angell suddenly slumped back into his chair as if all the strength had left him. He asked lazily, "Little Blood, do you want to buy a Game Table?"
"Huh?" The Blood Elf didn't understand at first.
Thornmoon remembered that half a minute ago, they'd been discussing orphans and Monsters. Why had the topic suddenly changed?
Angell had no intention of continuing that unpleasant discussion. He tapped the table. "You didn't come all the way here just to reminisce with me, did you?"
"No, as if I want to reminisce with you!" Thornmoon cried.
If he'd known the workshop's owner was Angell, he'd have run as far away as possible.
But when the Game Table came up, Thornmoon's eyes began darting around. "I do want to buy one, but..."
"Hmm?"
Thornmoon heaved a long sigh, then made up his mind. "It's just that someone else sent me to buy it. They probably wanted to screw you over!"
"Who?" Angell asked.
The second young master of the Peige Family. But the fellow was probably just a pawn someone had egged on." Thornmoon spilled everything without holding anything back. "Several families had their eyes on your workshop before. Augustus from the Magic Crystal Mine, Locke from the Royal Capital, Hurst from the Trade City, for example. It seems the Royal Family and the Mage Tower got involved too. I know you don't know who these people are, so just understand that the situation is complicated. We've received several commissions already. This time, on the fourth day after you opened, someone sent us to snoop around and buy your new product."
...That was way too much detail!
Mithril's eyes widened. It almost felt sorry for Thornmoon's employer, who'd been sold out so completely in an instant.
"Boss?" one of Thornmoon's underlings called out worriedly too.
They were starting to wonder if their boss had been hit by some kind of mind-control spell from a Black Mage.
But Thornmoon raised a hand to stop his men from speaking.
Thornmoon didn't seem to be under a mind-control spell. His words were quite coherent. "Honestly, if we'd known our opponent was a Black Mage, we never would've taken this commission for so little money. It's too risky."
Especially when the Black Mage in question was Angell.
Thornmoon shuddered.
He was actually more afraid of Angell than anyone realized.
Angell was practically his childhood nightmare.
Even Mithril, despite having its fur shaved off, had only thought of Angell as "that wicked brat."
But Thornmoon had been Angell's underling back then. And as a genuine "fantastical creature," he'd been especially "favored" by Angell. Angell had made him help out with all sorts of things, so Thornmoon knew better than anyone what Angell had been like as a child.
Could you imagine a boy testing an Evil Spirit's strength in stages, while getting all the kids on the street to gather clues about an abandoned mansion, then driving the Evil Spirit out, faking the ownership documents, and secretly transferring the haunted house into his own name—only to carry out all kinds of evil plans inside?
Could you imagine a child methodically pulling apart little Demons and conducting experiments, recording every step before awakening his own Mana, then cleaning up the scene and destroying the evidence without letting the adults find out? And then acting all innocent, like, "Wow, my Mana awakened so early. Aren't I amazing?"
When Thornmoon was a child, he'd never thought there was anything strange about it. He'd just thought, "Big brother Angell is amazing."
But the older he got, the more wrong it seemed.
What kind of child's childhood was that?!
What had he been dealing with?!
And now that very "thing" had crawled back from the Mage Tower! It had become a Black Robe! And for some mysterious reason, it hadn't aged in over a hundred years. It looked even more lively than Thornmoon, a member of a Long-lived Race!
Thornmoon felt like he'd just watched a horror movie.
In any case, for every possible reason, Thornmoon didn't want to make an enemy of whatever was hiding inside that body.
So Thornmoon made his position clear. "Let's just pretend the whole Game Table thing never happened!"
"Emmmmmm," Angell said, staring at Thornmoon with a strange humming sound. After studying the Blood Elf long enough to make him uncomfortable, Angell suddenly said, "Little Blood, you're actually pretty poor, aren't you?"
"Huh? Ah!" Thornmoon was horrified.
He looked at Angell nervously. "Y-you're talking nonsense! What makes you think I'm poor?"
"Even if you don't plan on being anyone's spy, have you never thought of buying a couple of Game Tables for yourself?" Angell asked. "You and your men looked like you were having a lot of fun earlier, even competing on the leaderboard... Come to think of it, who paid for your leaderboard score?"
"That dim-witted young master of the Peige Family. He said he had to come first... No! I'm not poor!" Thornmoon protested. "I just think that Magic Toys and our organization don't go together at all!"
Thornmoon's underlings chimed in too.
"That's right, we're not poor!"
"Our little brats can eat their fill without having to steal or rob. Old John from the neighboring district even said we've got plenty of money!"
"We can get by without doing anything that weighs on our conscience!"
"Yeah, why waste money buying toys? If you want to play, just come to the workshop."
You really were a genuine Street Volunteer Committee!
Angell smiled wryly and shook his head.
Still, he was happy to see that, after more than a hundred years, the Blood Elf didn't seem to have changed much.
Perhaps that was one of the benefits of being a Long-lived Race. They changed far less than humans, and their stubbornness was reassuring.
But that kind of innocence would make life very difficult in this era.
"Don't worry! I never planned to sell the Game Tables in the first place," Angell said.
Thornmoon breathed a sigh of relief.
He'd really been afraid Angell would force him to buy one.
He might not be poor, but Magic Items were really expensive. And ones that ordinary people could use were even more expensive to make, since they consumed more Mana. A Game Table like this probably cost dozens of gold coins. It was no toy an ordinary person could afford.
But after thinking about it, Thornmoon found it strange. "If you don't sell them, how are you going to make money?"
"The Game Tables aren't for sale, but you can rent them!"
"Rent them?"
"Yeah! Selling them wouldn't be worth it!" Angell said without batting an eye. "The Game Table's casing alone requires a professional item maker. The design cost me dozens of gold coins. (Lie.) The tables themselves were made by the Item Shop. (True.) The Rune Core is even more expensive. You need a professional Rune Master. (Lie.) Their salary is probably hundreds of gold coins a month. (Lie.) And that's not even counting the team of apprentice assistants I hired for them. (Lie.) Paying dozens of children costs dozens of gold coins too. (True.) A Game Table also consumes a massive amount of Mana. (Lie.) With the current number of customers, you couldn't keep it running without at least ten Magic Crystals. (Lie.) If it weren't for the stock hidden in the very back of the workshop's warehouse that only I know about, it wouldn't be sustainable. (Lie.) Game Tables made this way don't last long, either. You've already hit the top of the leaderboard in a month. It wouldn't be worth buying one for your home. So wouldn't it be more profitable to put them in public places with lots of foot traffic? (True.)"
As Mithril listened to Angell, its eyes grew wider and wider, its pupils narrowing into slits.
Angell had originally planned for Mithril to deliver that spiel. But now that Angell was conning someone he knew, he was incredibly smooth.
Thornmoon was practically dazed by it. He stared blankly and said, "Ah, that makes sense!"
Angell changed tack and fixed his gaze on Thornmoon. "So, are you interested in being my agent?"
"An agent?" Thornmoon repeated like a parrot.
"Actually, I'd been fretting about this before you showed up," Angell said. "If I rent them out, it'll be best to spread them across the whole city. I need to find suitable locations on busy streets, in shops, and in public places, then regularly replace the Mana devices in the cores. For a Mage like me, who spent over a hundred years shut away in the Mage Tower, that's a lot of work. And without enough influence, people will give me trouble too, right? So I need an agent."
That was true.
Speaking of Arcade Machines, when they first started appearing, they hadn't immediately been sold to households, nor had dedicated arcades been built right away. Instead, they were placed in various bars as rentals. All the bar owner had to do was pay a certain amount in rent and share a cut of the profits. The agent took care of the Arcade Machines themselves and assumed all the costs and risks. Of course, some bar owners also bought their own machines.
It was much like the drink machines you saw in public places.
But the Alchemy Workshop had fallen so far that all its old distribution channels had disappeared. There wasn't a suitable agent either, so Angell had put the matter off.
His original plan had been to do things the hard way: negotiate with interested customers one by one and set up rental agreements. But Thornmoon's appearance had solved the problem!
Could there be a better agent than the Street Volunteer Committee? Of course not!
They were the local power in Cecilia, familiar with all the streets, bars, and other commercial venues. They could tell which places had the most foot traffic and would be suitable for setting up Game Tables. They had enough people, and, most importantly, they were strong enough to handle any trouble. With them around, Angell wouldn't have to worry about the machines getting damaged, and they could keep others from coveting them too.
That was why Angell had been so delighted to see Thornmoon.
It felt like a pie had fallen right out of the sky!
The Luck Potion he'd been taking every morning had really paid off!
Thornmoon felt creeped out by Angell's enthusiastic gaze.
He hadn't planned to get involved with Angell again, but after carefully considering what Angell had said and thinking about how busy the workshop had been lately, he felt it was a great business opportunity.
Besides, if he didn't make an enemy of Angell and worked with him instead (X)—if he became Angell's underling, really—it would be pretty comfortable.
After all, Angell was a powerful man who could dissect Demons and exploit Evil Spirits.
Because the Blood Elf's bloodline was connected to the Demon Race, Thornmoon had suffered all kinds of discrimination since childhood. But looking back, the time he'd spent with Angell had been the most peaceful, and the haunted house Angell had left behind had given him a place to stay.
(But the psychological scars were very real.)
Thornmoon had no objection to working for Angell.
But...
"Are you really not bothered that I accepted a contract to bring down your Workshop?" Thornmoon asked worriedly.
That was why Thornmoon had seen Angell turn around and try to run.
Thornmoon considered his ties to be with Angell, not with the Magic Gear. Besides, the Workshop's former owner had been a real piece of work. Thornmoon had absolutely no qualms about taking him down.
Who would've thought Angell would come crawling back?
"If I cared, do you think you'd still be alive to talk to me?" Angell said with a smile.
His smile sent a chill through everyone.
But Angell continued, "Besides, I don't think you need to turn down that contract! It's not your fault if I refuse to sell, so you can persuade him to become the first customer to rent one of our Game Tables. Judging by how much he spends on the rankings, he's a good customer!"
"Are you stupid?" Thornmoon said. "He wants the Game Table so he can figure out how it works and make his own!"
"That's if he buys the Game Table," Angell said bluntly. "But I've already explained how much it would cost to develop one from scratch. Renting one wouldn't cost much. If he can rent one, why build his own? Then I won't need to lift a finger. They'll end up divided among themselves."
Everyone shuddered.
This guy really hadn't changed at all!
"I'm willing to be your agent."
Thornmoon took a deep breath, sat up straight, and adopted a negotiating stance.
After all, he was no longer simply Angell's underling. He was the leader of an organization now, with all those people depending on him to make a living!
"So, how would this agency work, Big Brother Angell?"