Labyrinth Restaurant

Divergent Overdo ③

Vampire hideouts are approximately eighty km in a straight line distance from the labyrinth city. It is located in a basin surrounded by mountains on all sides. Although history is long, there is no particularly defined name, and the inhabitants merely called it "our village".

I would say hiding, but technically that's not accurate. Although I keep it a secret to be a vampire, I interact on a small scale with neighboring rural areas, selling village products to earn cash or, conversely, buying what I need.

The main industries in the village are agriculture and livestock.

Often we go into the mountains and hunt.

There are rivers in the village where fish are caught, but not so much in aquaculture. To what extent do some people enjoy fishing in a hobby?

When it comes to the food produced, it is basically consumed in the village alone, and if surplus occurs, it is processed and stored or sold to other villages.

However, the main means of obtaining money is the sale of firewood and lumber obtained by forestry, charcoal that has burned them and stone cut out in nearby mountains, and the sale of food is only a secondary treatment.

The population of the village today is about three hundred.

All of them draw the blood of vampires, but the life cycle is roughly divided between those who are relatively thin in blood that can also be activated during the day and those who can only be activated at night because they are life-threatening when exposed to sunlight.

It is common for us all to be in better shape at night, but we need a division of roles because some types of work can only be done during the day to take care of crops and livestock.

Nevertheless, the degree of weakness and strength of your abilities as a vampire is basically proportionate, so those who can only work at night are extra active in areas such as force work, so as not to create as much injustice as possible.

With a large number of people capable of exerting the power of large heavy machine-like, it is also easy to do a lot of work and pioneering when it comes to the countryside behind the mountains, and the area of fields and grazing land is quite large relative to the population.

There has never been a year of inactivity, but overall, we can say that it is a fairly rich category for the countryside in the back of the mountain.

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"And even so, I have a lot of problems."

"Well, that's interesting. If there's no obstacle, can you tell me?

Hendrick reacted to the murmur of Bram, the village chief.

By the way, why Hendrick is here, but after hearing about this village from the Demon King, he has somehow expressed a strong interest and offered to accompany him.

Currently they are acting separately from the Demon Kings in Hendrick's hope. When he was first introduced, Bram, the village chief, who found out he was a key figure in the prime minister's position, was the guide, touring the village.

And about Hendrick's question, isn't it particularly like hiding it, Bram answered as he looked at the faces of the villagers gathered in the square.

"Can you see those two, the kids talking by the well?

"Yeah, what are those two?

At the end of his gaze, he looked like a man in his thirties or so and an old woman who would be over seventy at least.

"Those two, they're parents and kids, right?"

"Well, that's what... no, I get it. Is that what you mean?"

Hendrick seems to have noticed what Bram calls a "problem" before putting the question to the end. That must have come to me that it's the same "challenge" I assume.

"Reversal of appearance and real age, is it"

"That's the way it is."

Yes, a younger looking man is more of a father, and he's more of a daughter looking like an old woman.

The inhabitants of this village, with its thick demonic blood, live far longer than the average human being. But its old speed is not constant. For this reason, this kind of reversal often occurs.

This is a phenomenon that is not often seen in both the human and demonic worlds.

As long as we connect human beings and demons with each other, their descendants have more or less the same lifespan. So I can say that this is a new social problem, because the original life span was too different between races to be blood related to each other (rarely do some humans marry long-lived species like elves and dwarves, but so far there have been too few analogies and they have been cleaned up as only individual problems, not entire societies).

"Well, all the kids in this village are going to embrace each other. But I still can't get used to my wife and offspring dying earlier than I do, no matter how many times I repeat myself."

"I guess in my heart...... you can't say. But."

What that mood is about will be the kind of thing that only the parties can get a real feel for. Hendrick did not show sympathy cheaply, but went on to say the words.

"But I think this village is the thumbnail of two worlds to come."

Interaction between the demonic and human worlds began, more than a year earlier.

Until now, the flow of things and money has dominated, but the time will eventually come when the main purpose of the exchange will turn into human flow and exit. Maybe "soon" instead of "eventually".

In that case, love will grow beyond the walls of the race on both sides of the world, and it is not hard to imagine that eventually phenomena like this village will occur everywhere.

"This is how I tried to disturb you, hoping that you might refer to me"

That's why Hendrick was interested when he asked the Demon King about this village, and this is how he actually came to see it. It may be a bad way to put it, because we can also say that this village itself is a huge experimental site built over five hundred years.

Actually, if I saw it, I was wondering if there would be some good solution that would flash.

"... oh man, we have to work on this temperament"

Yeah, yeah. Umai, I'm not rolling the story. The only harvest that seemed to stretch far was to reaffirm the difficulty of the challenge.

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"Whoa, it's time for us to go back."

"Yes, the Demon Kings are about to finish their conversation with the Elders."

It's already late at night when the date has changed, but this village is the most vibrant time from here. The feast at the Presbyterian Hall, in which the Demon Kings are taking part, will also be in a rush.