Chapter 49 : Chapter 49
Chapter 49. Kindness
After successfully planting the Listening Rune on Helena, Logaris was in a fairly good mood.
With his hands tucked in his pockets, he slowly turned onto another street.
Since he was already out, he decided to make a detour and inspect his real “long-term investment” along the way.
The Northern Territory Enlightenment School.
He wanted to see whether the first batch of “seeds” he had nurtured with money had grown crooked.
The school had been set up inside a confiscated noble estate, so there was more than enough space.
Before Logaris even stepped into the courtyard, he could already hear the sound of reading coming from inside.
He silently walked to the window of a classroom and looked in.
The chaos and uproar he had expected did not appear.
A middle-aged man who was clearly not a trained teacher stood at the front with a wooden stick, explaining basic arithmetic on the blackboard in a rough but extremely earnest manner.
And below him, dozens of children in patched clothes of all kinds sat with their backs perfectly straight.
Their eyes did not look like those of students listening to a lesson.
They looked more like wild wolves staring at prey, focused and hungry, terrified of missing even a single number that came out of the teacher’s mouth.
Logaris' gaze swept across the children’s intent faces and finally landed on the back wall of the classroom.
There, painted in glaring red letters, was a huge slogan.
“The top one hundred students in final overall scores will each receive five Golden Lion Coins!”
Five Golden Lion Coins.
That was enough for a poor family at the bottom of society to survive for an entire year without eating or drinking anything extra.
The corner of Logaris' mouth curled slightly beneath his lenses.
The driving force of money was far more useful than any sermon.
This passion for learning, born from pure desire, was even stronger than that of the noble children in the royal capital who had received elite education since childhood.
Logaris was extremely satisfied with his design.
At that moment, the bell for the end of class rang out.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
The children, who had been sitting as still as statues just a second earlier, were instantly released from their tense state.
They burst into cheers and flooded out of the classroom like a rising tide.
The entire courtyard immediately filled with noisy, lively energy.
Logaris was just about to turn and leave when he spotted two familiar figures in a corner of the yard.
Alice was surrounded by a group of half-grown children.
With a wave of her small hand, a gentle flame appeared at her fingertips, its temperature precisely controlled.
The flame leaped and changed shape in midair before finally turning into a lively little rabbit made of fire that hopped around the children, drawing cries of amazement from them again and again.
And Alectos Huiyin, the prince of the Demi-Human Empire, was crouching nearby, watching everything with a face full of wonder.
There was no princely majesty left in his eyes.
There was only the purest longing and curiosity for this kind of ordinary common life.
Logaris found the scene somewhat amusing.
He had just been about to greet them when Alectos Huiyin noticed him first.
“Mr. Logaris!”
The prince’s eyes lit up, and he immediately stood and quickly walked over.
The way he looked at Logaris was filled with indescribable admiration, though he still tried to maintain the bearing of a prince, keeping his tone elegant and composed.
“Only today did I learn that you actually gave up your esteemed position as a professor at Saint Arcadia Academy and came to this barren Northern Territory to personally establish a school for these commoners’ children.”
Alectos Huiyin’s voice carried a trace of excitement.
“Though I have already received your kindness before, I never imagined that you were actually such a... such a noble soul, a living saint!”
The corner of Logaris' mouth twitched as he listened.
A saint?
He very much wanted to correct him.
At the beginning, he had only done it to save Sylvia, and setting up the school had purely been for training future cheap laborers and technicians.
But that explanation somehow seemed even harder to say out loud.
Alectos Huiyin’s voice was not quiet.
The children who had just been released from class and were playing around nearby all heard him.
The way they looked at Logaris instantly changed.
Simple curiosity and respect quickly fermented into a kind of fanatical admiration and gratitude.
A frail little girl who looked thin as a bean sprout burst into tears with a wail.
“I heard from my father that Saint Arcadia Academy... is a place even those noble lords desperately want to attend...”
Another little boy with a few freckles on his face had already gone red around the eyes and choked up as he spoke.
“Mr. Logaris... you actually left a place like that just to come help us...”
“Waaah... Mr. Loga is a good person!”
“We will never be able to repay Mr. Loga’s kindness for our whole lives!”
Voices rose one after another, gathering into a warm, sticky tide of emotion that washed straight over Logaris.
His whole body stiffened.
He felt unbearably uncomfortable, as if countless ants were crawling all over him.
As a top-tier archmage, he could calmly dissect the most grotesque monsters without changing expression.
He could also coolly calculate spell models powerful enough to destroy an entire city.
But what he was worst at dealing with was precisely this kind of sincere and burning scene.
It was too awkward.
He stiffly pushed up his rimless glasses and felt as though even the muscles in his face had forgotten how to move.
After a long pause, he finally squeezed out one dry sentence through clenched teeth.
“I... I still have an urgent alchemical experiment that I need to handle.”
As soon as he finished speaking, under the children’s incomparably reverent gazes, Logaris all but fled in panic.
That retreating figure was full of haste and embarrassment.
Watching Logaris' “escape,” the admiration in Alectos Huiyin’s eyes only deepened.
He sincerely sighed to Alice beside him.
“You see, Mr. Logaris is exactly this kind of person.”
“He does earth-shaking good deeds, yet never claims credit for them, and he does not even wish to accept the gratitude of others.”
“He is truly a pure person!”
Alice curled her lips, folded her arms, and muttered under her breath with ruthless accuracy,
“Pure my foot.”
“I think his social anxiety kicked in, and he ran away on the spot from sheer awkwardness.”
...
After leaving the school, Alectos Huiyin and Alice walked through the streets of Winter City.
Head-on, they encountered a squad of temple knights clad in silver-white full plate armor, their presence grim and imposing.
At the head of the group was that stunning red-haired, green-eyed female knight, Helena.
At the moment they passed by one another.
Both Alice and Helena slowed their steps at the same time.
Their gazes met in the air.
No words were exchanged.
There was not even any obvious magical fluctuation.
And yet, the temperature of the air around the place where their eyes met seemed to drop by several degrees in an instant.
A trace of extreme displeasure flashed through Alice’s beautiful crimson eyes.
It was a physiological disgust, a revulsion that seemed to rise from the very depths of her soul.
On the other side, in Helena’s emerald eyes, which were always as cold as ice, there also appeared a clear and undisguised rejection.
This feeling did not come from their positions.
Nor was it born of hatred.
It was more like a fundamental, pure mutual aversion.
Almost at the same moment, both of them looked away, as though even one more glance at the other would have been torture, and continued on their separate paths.
“What is it?”
Alectos Huiyin sensed the strange tension and asked curiously.
Alice coldly spat out four words.
“Nothing. She just annoys me.”
On the other side, one of the temple knights also quietly asked Helena the same question.
Helena did not answer.
She only found it strange in her heart.
That intense, groundless feeling of disgust from just now had even startled her.
In the end, she could only forcibly attribute it to the fact that the girl, just like Logaris, also had that hateful black hair.