Sovereign of the Ashes

Specific problems required specific solutions.

If Sein had simply offered money to buy Maya, Sir Thomas probably would not have been tempted.

But the moment Sein pulled out that vial of demon blood essence, Thomas’ interest was piqued.

While it might not have been worth as much as a living demigod-level slave, it was special enough to make the paladin agree to the trade.

“Bro, where did you even get this Moltensteel Demon Lord’s blood essence? As far as I know, demons like that are already rare in the Magus Alliance, let alone an actual demon lord.”

Whatever impatience Thomas had shown before was gone. After the transaction, he shamelessly tried to sound friendly.

By that time, Luna had already rushed over to the hot spring and rescued her grandmother.

The mana chains created by the Magus Civilization for enslaving creatures were insanely powerful.

Even a demigod-level being like Maya could be restrained by them. That alone spoke volumes about how far the Magus Civilization had come in magic artifact crafting.

Then again, it was not that shocking. Sein had seen even Rank Four beings caged and sold before.

In response to Thomas’ question, Sein chuckled and said, “I once happened to befriend a group of demons. This blood essence came from a deal I made with them back then.”

Anyone who could make friends with demon lords was clearly not ordinary, but to actually get their blood essence was on another level altogether.

After hearing that, the look in Thomas’ eyes changed. He now saw Sein in a very different light.

***

After securing both Luna and Maya from the auction, Sein had no interest in sticking around.

Saving these two old acquaintances had been pure coincidence. He could not help but wonder what their fate would have been if he had not shown up today.

Once they were out of the knightly order, Sein found a place to settle them down.

Both Maya and Luna were seriously injured and extremely weak.

It was only after drinking the recovery potions Sein had prepared that their complexion started to look slightly better.

Between the two of them, Maya, being a demigod, clearly knew more than Luna.

Through Maya’s explanations, Sein finally pieced together what had actually happened to the Maya Tribe and to Hephaes, the Rank Four centaur god, over the past few years.

It turned out that ever since Hephaes aligned himself with the Divine Tower of Verdant Spring, the other centaur gods of Centaurworld had started turning against him.

They resented this newly ascended Rank Four god for his arrogance and disregard for social hierarchy.

Centaurworld, much like Beastmen World, was an impoverished allied plane where food was always in short supply, and most of its dominant races had massive appetites.

Although the minotaurlings could break down and absorb nutrients from the soil, they could not possibly eat dirt every day.

Too much of it would eventually kill them.

By affiliating with the Divine Tower of Verdant Spring and reaping the spoils from the last war in Wild Gorilla World, Hephaes managed to bring in a large haul of plant-based food as compensation.

After that war, he began recruiting aggressively and expanded his influence across Centaurworld with growing confidence.

Even though Centaurworld technically relied on the Western Archipelago and had nearly twenty native gods, its development was wildly uneven.

Most of the resources were concentrated in the hands of the Rank Six Centaur King and a handful of centaur gods.

The rest were left in a far worse state.

As a newly ascended god, Hephaes naturally found himself at the bottom of Centaurworld’s social hierarchy.

He was not alone, though. Four other centaur gods shared a similar status.

The ones who set him up and brought him down were three of those very same bottom-tier gods.

Only one among them had held back—whether out of loyalty or sensing something was wrong, he refused to join the two knightly orders that had invited them to invade a foreign plane.

In the end, Hephaes’ fall came down to jealousy.

The real issue of this world had never been scarcity. It was inequality.

Back when all the centaur gods were struggling, Hephaes could at least get along with the rest of them.

But once he got a boost and started living better, the others turned on him.

The three centaur gods who had teamed up to take down Hephaes were not too bright, though.

The safest way to deal with centaurs like Maya and Luna, who were closely tied to Hephaes, would have been to kill them outright.

After all, the dead do not talk.

But instead of finishing them off, those three actually sold the two female centaurs as slaves to the knightly orders they were on good terms with.

Given the circumstances, it was not hard to see why they went that route—Luna and Maya could be sold for a respectable sum.

Hephaes’ fortune might have looked substantial at first, but once it was split three ways, there was not much left.

To make matters worse, a portion of the compensation from the Magus Alliance, granted after Hephaes’ downfall, had to be handed over to the Rank Six Centaur King.

These gods had always lived with little. For them, money was hard to ignore.

Of course, if Sein hoped to expose those gods using Maya and Luna, it was nothing more than wishful thinking.

Even if the gods were idiots, any evidence tying them to Hephaes’ fall had likely been erased by now.

Cleaning up this mess and rebuilding the Maya Tribe would take time.

“Why didn’t you ask my mentor for help?” Sein asked.

“We didn’t think they would actually dare to do something like that. And Master Lorianne seemed busy with something back then... so we didn’t dare bother her. By the time we realized what was going on, it was already too late,” Maya answered softly.

That lined up with Sein’s last communication with his mentor. Around the time of Hephaes’ downfall, Lorianne had indeed been working with several other divine towers from her faction on an interplanar war effort.

In truth, Lorianne might not have cared much for the centaurs.

As a Dendromancer, she had a gift for cultivating seeds. The “world laboratory” she had created was still a marvel to Sein.

With everything she had built up, Lorianne had already passed the hardest stage of establishing her Divine Tower.

When the time came to launch another interplanar war, she would not need to rely on buying enslaved creatures from external parties.

Just growing her own Viridescent Seeds and plant giants was already enough to keep her forces supplied.

And with several vassal planes under her control, she could also easily conscript enslaved creatures from those worlds to serve as cannon fodder.

Looking at Maya and Luna in front of him, Sein said, “You two will stay with me for now. As for your tribe’s affairs, I’ll speak to my mentor once we’re back at the Divine Tower of Verdant Spring.”