As reasonably rushed as I was to catch my prey and move on from this random obligation I felt…
Chasing after those cowards was no easy task.
For as it turned out, that girl was right.
Now even now could not find a single trace indicating those people have stopped. And with the city at the end of this part of the road growing closer and closer, her other warning was starting to make sense too.
And as time went on, my concern only grew… all the way to the point where I realized Sylvie's warning was right on the money.
"I won't get to them in time for the night's closing of the gates."
A short whiff of whine escaped from my mouth. At the very least, I was still whining rather than outright complaining…
This… messed up my plans a bit. Dealing with those people on this dangerous road would take a lot less effort and damage control than doing so in the city.
I aimed to eliminate all witnesses of my background, not to create hundreds if not thousands more of them by turning myself into a murderer pretty much the moment I arrived.
It's not like I had anything against murder, that is.
I didn't even need a serious look to tell just how much blood sank into every inch of the ground around us or the stones of the road's pavement.
This was just another world full of killers and monsters only putting on their human masks to obtain more prey through society. A world where taking a life was taken as lightly as losing one's virginity… if not less.
At this point in my life… lives? Regardless, I was at the point where I saw enough death, justified and not, purposeful and random, not to care about the act of taking life all that much. A proof that a human could adapt to absolutely every circumstance.
And while everyone else in this world was just as much of a cold-blooded killer, there was no benefit to ousting myself out in public only to then suffer whatever consequences local nobles and other important figures would try to impose upon me.
Still… Those cowards were quite some distance away from the city. And with each step, I continued to gain on them…
But I could already tell unless I heavily strained my body only to arrive in no shape to fight… I had no other choice but to give up catching up with them today.
They would reach the city about half an hour before me. And before I could do the same, the city gates would close for the night, giving them a whole new day of advantage!
And all of that didn't even account for any potential trouble I could meet at the city's gates without any identification…
Still, despite all of my perfectly rational calculations… I continued to run. And just not to waste this time, I turned my attention back to my first, big project.
That bitch-goddess voice…
Between its notifications and noise, I was quickly growing sick and tired of them. And while the benefits of my rapidly growing talents were all there for me to see…
I could do better than that.
My mind synced up with the steady movements of my relaxed run. Before I even started to think about some fundamental aspects of my new idea, I'd already started to lay down its underlying logical structure.
Bit by bit, the mana circuits in my flesh have changed.
Maybe it was some hidden boon to one of my talents that I didn't know already, but molding the pathways mana would take when flowing through my body was extremely… simple.
I barely felt any sort of resistance as I did so. Turning the erratic flow of the naturally-form mana pathways was supposed to be a challenging task of going against what some would consider a natural order of things to…
'Wait, isn't that a good idea?'
While I was doing away with the natural mana circuit… That brought my attention to an interesting solution for the idea's founding principle. After all, as much as I could reform my mana network, it would be of no use if there would be nothing to power this circuitry with!
And it just so happened, that the moment I widened my perspective, I had all three elements necessary to form something alike the natural order of things… Or, to be more precise, a mythos.
While I was doing away with the mythos of nature and how it was always right in how things should be… I abused the divinity provided by the bitch-goddess, a heroic tale of my own exploits…
And then the fervent worship both of those were bound to receive back in that shit-goddess world!
In other words, why no one in my current world would know the first thing about it, my mythos already had the potential of worship from a massive, industrial-level civilization!
'That solves the problem of power, but I still need to work a little bit more on the structure…'
By establishing and adapting a mythos, I pretty much created a faucet that I could use to drain energy from this world and transform it through said mythos into energy I was more familiar with. And as my very own memories of my past reincarnations created a mental link between the conscious races of this world and the worlds I came from, my mythos became a part of the shared consciousness big enough to influence the magic of this world!
'I wonder if this will cause any problems to the locals,' I thought, done with weaving together the divinity, heroic talent, and worship before turning my attention back towards the logical structure of things.
Rather than leaving the circuit to nature, I constructed it on the basis of ever-expanding basic logical gates.
Just like in programming, I've created a pathway that could serve as a transistor in a circuit, leading to the creation of the first two universal logic gates. Then, as I continued to weave my inner circuit into more and more of those and then arranged them into all sorts of pairs… I've created a pattern for every possible logical gate that one could think of.
And then, whenever I took a step in my run, I made it to multiply their number, over and over again.
A network of mana could be as big or as small as one imagined it to be. And while both extremes came with their own benefit, right now, I had no use for the massive outputs or great conductivity.
For as long as the mana could flow through those logic gates flawlessly, only a sliver of mana passing through would suffice.
Step by step, I ran up the road while conscious of both the sun quickly starting to set and how I could see my targets nearing not even the city gates… But a patrol of five soldiers riding down to inspect the state and safety of the road before the closing of the city's gates.
And so, step by step, I continued to multiply the logic gates within my circuit, over and over again, hardly paying any mind to the process.
After learning this trick back in my second lifetime, I made it a point to develop it as soon as possible whenever I reincarnated. And now, rather than a complicated procedure requiring a constant and absolute focus, it was something I could do on the go while barely thinking about it.
Plus, as I continued to run, I must've entered some sort of a semi-meditation state, with no other thoughts blemishing my mind as it dedicated itself solely to the task of multiplying this logic-gate structure.
I encountered the patrol pretty much at the same time as the adventurers made their way into the city. That's where, regretfully, my ability to track their movement came to an end.
Whatever this ability of mine to peer down this ancient road was, it didn't extend inside any of the cities located on the plateau.
After exchanging a bit of small talk and confirming they saw the adventures I was chasing, I continued to run up to the city, getting as close as merely fifteen minutes away… When I saw its gates close, marking the end of my prolonged chase.
At the very least, while the massive gate to the city surely closed and its walls were both well-built and equally as well patrolled… By the time the gates closed, I'd pretty much entered the suburb already!
'That means, I won't have to sleep out in the field,' I thought, strolling through the still wide and relatively empty streets of the suburb outskirts.
Around fifteen minutes of slow run away from the city's wall, there were only farming houses and manors around, all focused on the task of feeding the massive city nearby. Like a flower field around the stone tower, those fields surrounded the city from every direction, smoothly transforming into the much more populated yet much poorer part of the town.
There, all sorts of small merchants, beggars, or artisans both made their living and found a place to live themselves. And as I slowed down to a lazy step and walked through those streets, I could see most of the buildings followed this rule.
Most of the buildings consisted of a workshop of some sort in their basement, with windows just high enough to provide the craftsmen with enough light for them to work. Above that, on the first floor, the building would turn much more open, becoming a business avenue for the craftsmen family to sell their produce. It was only on the second and, in clearly better-off buildings, the third floor where the entire family would find refugee and their living quarters.
'This place…'
Strolling through the street, I couldn't help but feel actually amazed.
This kind of architecture spoke a lot about the spirit of this town… especially when it was pretty much the only type of building around, no matter where I looked.
There sure were other types… but this was the only one that I could see in every part of the town.
'Is this place some sort of meritocracy or something? Maybe a money-crazed society?'
This pull towards commerce… was something rare in a society that clearly had yet to develop advanced tools and sources of power. And yet…
'Well, that means I will have something to think about while I sleep,' I thought, turning my eyes to one of the few different buildings in the area.
An inn. A warehouse-like building that took space enough to build at least ten if not more of the multi-story shop-homes. Only about a third of its length was lit, suggesting the location for the open bar and tavern area from the quarters for the weary guests off the road.
'It's time to get a good night of sleep and investigate,' I thought, already guessing what was likely the qualification I needed to get into the city as per the words of that strange, weirdly innocent girl from before.
And investigate I would, because, by the time I've turned for the inn, the first rendition of my magic processor already came active.
It was merely the alpha-build, with extremely limited features and precision…
But it was a magical processor nonetheless, a computer-like entity that ran exclusively on some spare mana while pretty much adding a server directly connected to my brain.
A core of the logic-gate structure that finally allowed me to shut that bitch-goddess voice off, remove all of the notifications from her gift, and then shove them all down into a single, nicely formatted spreadsheet-like file that revealed all the information in neatly-organized rows and columns.
As my steps carried me past the tavern's door and into its warm, loud, and welcoming bellows, I pushed this newly developed processor of mine… To calculate and implement the necessary changes to evolve it from its current, crude form to a much more advanced form of a proper, mental computer…
Or as I liked to call it myself, a me-made system!