Chapter 180

I poked Celeste until she woke. She seemed slightly shy around me upon waking up, but she did finally agree to join us. We walked through the city. There were more people here than before. I was noticing some new faces. It was becoming quite lively around the block I reclaimed first. I could hear the sounds of a blacksmith’s anvil among other commerce. It looked like the businesses had finally set up too. Old Chalm was becoming a legitimate city.

We approached the edge of town, and there were the ruins that used to be the mansion. To the townsfolks credit, they really wasted no time. Since they got up this morning, a crew already took the initiative to start sifting through the ruins. Admittedly, some were probably looking for treasures to pocket in the wreckage, but the vast majority seemed to genuinely want to support me for helping them remove their dungeon problem.

We ended up heading to an area in the yard that seemed to be set up for sifting through materials. This wasn’t like my age where everything went into the dumpster and then we just got more wood from the local store. They would probably recycle or reuse anything they could in the pursuit of saving resources. The city may have upgraded from the small town, but we were currently outside the border of any country and truly in the wildlands. There could be monster attacks or worse.

“Why have you brought us out here?” I finally decided to ask the Guild Master.

“Well, considering you left and came back with a fairy slave, I thought this might be of interest to you. We found this little one wondering lost through the street last night. We didn’t know what to do with her. Since you’re taking on fairy slaves, we thought she might make a good house fairy for you.”

The fairy was in a small birdcage. It fluttered around back and forth, but no one seemed to be giving it any mind. It seemed like the people of this town had an opinion not too far from Karr’s. To them, fairies were more like dogs than people. Therefore, adding one as a slave to my household seemed fine. In fact, from a certain point of view, it was righteous. After all, this fairy so close to a human city probably had no fairy queen or fairy spring. In that way, it was like taking in a stray dog, who might be injured or preyed upon in the wild.

The real question is where did this fairy come from? Did another survive when the fairy queen made her dungeon? It was possible. The dungeon was massive and I didn’t thoroughly manage to search every floor. This fairy was much smaller than Celeste. It was only about six inches, and it had a tendency to shimmer as it moved. Wait… didn’t those features look somewhat familiar? I was pretty sure that I recognized them.

“M-mother!” Celeste shouted, and then floated to the cage

The fairy looked at Celeste and smiled excitedly, buzzing around the cage, but otherwise not saying anything.

“Wait… your mother reverted to a fairy? No, rather, she’s alive?” I spoke in disbelief until a sudden thought hit me. “Wait… is this that gift Karr was speaking about? Oh… that bastard!”

His last words suddenly became crystal clear to me. He said he prepared a surprise, a skill he learned thanks to Astria’s fairy dust. I thought he was talking about the blessing, but when I thought about it, I hadn’t received a skill at all. He wasn’t giving me a skill at all, he was using a skill. He said he hadn’t fought alongside the hero without picking up a trick or two. It must have been something like fairy dust mixed with “give life”. Wouldn’t the next level be something like “give soul”? If he used some kind of self-sacrificing spell just as he died, he could have broken Astria’s curse and brought her back.

This was Karr’s last gift. He had destroyed Astria’s life and left his daughter with nothing. His final act was one of redemption. He managed to reincarnate the beloved Fairy Queen. However, he probably didn’t predict she’d come back as a somewhat simple fairy.

“The fairy also had this.” The Guild Master pulled out a small vial. “Since it’s the fairies, I figured you should take it.”

I grabbed the item he held out and realized it was a small vial of fairy dust. Compared to what I received as compensation for defeating that boss, this was barely anything, but it was enough for at least ten castings.

“Master… what are you thinking?” Celeste asked, looking between the vial, my expression, and her mother.

“I think I know what I want to build first as part of my new mansion. It’s something I want to put in the backyard. Perhaps surrounded by trees and protected by tall walls.”

“Wh-what is that?” She asked nervously.

“Men! Start digging a hole! I want a section of my backyard closed off. I’ve decided to build a grove.”

“A-a grove?”

“A home for your mother,” I said smiling.

And right in the center, our very own fairy spring.