“Few people can claim to have spoken in person with the ruler of a nation. Fewer still can claim to have spoken with more than one such personage. In this regard, the Silver Maiden might well be the one person who had spoken to the most rulers over the past thousand years, to say the least.” - Garth Wainwrought, Scholar, circa 201 FP.

Fortunately, the nearly month-long journey back to Sabaya was uneventful. The convoy of carriages went through the well-patrolled main roads, so there was minimal danger from the wildlife through their travel. Similarly, even the most foolhardy of bandits were not stupid enough to attack a high noble’s convoy, since it was guaranteed to be well-guarded.

Over that period of time, Oleg’s subordinates also grilled the prisoners over what they knew, be it the smuggling and drug trade, or the unsanctioned experiments. Every day, what they learned would be summarized and sent to Deyos by messenger bird for Oleg’s younger brother Andery to peruse. After all, the information could help him with cleaning up the rest of the filth in the Barony, so they kept him well-informed.

What information the weaker-willed of the captives spewed out after some severe interrogation told them that while there had been a smuggling business of mostly luxuries and delicacies in the previous Baron’s reign, they never had anything to do with illicit drugs and narcotics back then. It was only after the current Baron succeeded his father that he began pursuing such things.

The change itself had not been a peaceful one. The old gang of smugglers that used to work with the old Baron also refused to do anything related to illicit drugs, and were consequently pushed out and removed by a different gang of criminals. The new gang was more than happy to do the Baron’s bidding in exchange for a cut, which led to the smuggling operation that Andery unrooted while the convoy was on their way to Sabaya, around two weeks after the incident.

That itself resulted in quite a mess, as the gang in question had grown large and powerful from the profits they earned over the past decade. Still, they found themselves powerless against the house guards that Andery mobilized straight from the Veros family’s territory. In the end, roughly fifty of the gang members perished in the fighting as they resisted capture, while another seventy or so were apprehended to be dealt with later.

As for the illegal experimentation under the manor, everyone also learned – straight from the mouth of Inge Lauda himself, who proved to be very talkative once the interrogators started working on him – that it also started during the previous Baron’s reign. The reason for the experimentation then and now were very different things, however.

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Back then, the old Baron had been very distraught by the loss of his beloved wife. He then turned to Inge – who he was sheltering due to some old friendship with the wanted scholar’s parents – who proposed a suggestion most would have found sick or revolting: To attempt to recreate someone who looked the same as the Baron’s late wife and then raise them accordingly.

The distraught Baron was too grief-stricken to deny the possibility of gaining his loved one back, and approved of the attempt. That led to the disappearances of a few women – it turned out there was another woman that was kidnapped but had been missed by the records – and one man decades ago. The victims were chosen for their similarity in looks to the late wife of the old Baron. In fact, two of the kidnapped women were distant cousins to the old Baron’s late wife.

Those people were then forced to breed under the mad scholar’s experiments in an attempt to create – or rather, to re-create – the late baron’s wife, at least physically. Out of the children that ensued from the experimentation, most were unsatisfactory, with only one of them being promising for the purpose they were created.

That child was naturally Kino.

As it turned out, the old Baron then sent away the kidnapped people to live elsewhere, with a large sum of hush money and a threat to never divulge what happened. Kino, who they kept, was raised in the manor’s basement since her birth, in a room where she lacked for nothing, other than freedom. The old Baron saw her similarity in looks to his late wife, and doted greatly on her, perhaps having forgotten his original intention.

Sadly whether that was truly the case or not, nobody would ever know as the old Baron passed away and was replaced by his son a decade ago.

The new Baron naturally caught wind of the experimentation done underneath the mansion, and he directed Inge Lauda to change their direction to attempting to mass-produce void mages instead. The value of a void mage could not be understated, given their rarity and deadliness, so the Baron probably had sinister intentions with the directive.

That led to the more recent spree of disappearances, and as the Baron himself was of the Death affinity, he favored using his own seed as the base for the experimentation. That resulted in more than one woman dying in childbirth, and several children being stillborn or miscarried, but neither the Baron nor Inge cared for that. It was all just expenditures in the pursuit of their goal, for them.

Kino was mostly ignored after the old Baron’s death, doubly so when she “failed” to awaken around the expected age. The room she was in was converted into a cell like where the others were kept, but the girl, in her naivete, failed to realize that something was wrong. Since she had been ignored over that decade, her education was naturally lacking, and she was barely given enough food to eat.

That was, until she started growing older and the new Baron was attracted by her looks. First he fed her better and even had some of his people bathe her properly, then he had her brought to his chambers, for purposes that might well be guessed. That attempt to force himself on her backfired, however, as it ended up triggering Kino’s magical awakening, one that had been pent up for a decade more than it should, resulting in the incident that injured the Baron, killed Kino on the spot, and caused part of the Baron’s manor to collapse.

The rest, as they say, was history.