Chapter 84: The Villagers’ SaintsMelina and I flew for hours after leaving End Town.

    Our task was to help people rebuild their destroyed villages that had been razed by Armaro’s monsters. However, they were all quite far from our town, so it would take us a few days to reach them, even when flying.

    As the sun set, we descended next to the dirt road and raised a small home with earth magic for us to camp, followed by a fire pit to keep us warm.

    It took us three full days of flying to get to the first destroyed village, a small deserted area with no more than ten homes and a well in the center. It was a small farming village that had lost all its crops during the attack.

    As we descended from the sky, a man spotted us and started running in a panic, thinking that we were monsters.

    ’Come on, man. We very clearly look like humans...’ I thought as we touched the ground, making the man fall on his rear.

    We took off our hoods, showing our human faces to the man, and he promptly calmed down after letting out a long sigh of relief.

    "We are here to help!" said the princess with a smile.

    "P-Princess Melina!?" the man exclaimed, recognizing Melina instantly.

    "I saw you once when you were a baby when the king made the announcement of your birth!" the villager exclaimed.

    The rest of the villagers left their homes with curiosity after hearing the man outside and gathered around the princess.

    I took that moment to check the damages to the place, seeing that they had managed to patch up some of the walls and roofs from their buildings.

    The well had a chunk of it destroyed, which looked like it covered a big part of the water supply, making it harder for the villagers to gather a single bucket.

    However, the most significant damage was to their farming fields, which were all completely burnt to the ground, and the soil was tainted with dark magic, making it almost impossible for anything to grow there again.

    After Melina talked with the villagers, she accompanied me, and I shared my findings with her.

    When it came to their homes, we wanted to not only rebuild them but also fill them with enchantments.

    In End Town, all of the homes were enchanted with magic that allowed them to stay warm or make their homes a little cooler, like an AC. However, after Vespera taught us some new enchantments that she used in our ponchos, we wondered if they would work on houses too.

    An example was the protection enchantment that made our clothes more durable than a knight’s armor. We thought that placing that enchantment on the houses would be significantly harder for a monster to take it down.

    Melina wanted to take care of the houses, so I went to fix their well.

    I jumped into the hole, casting a little mote of light to illuminate the environment, and landed on top of a rock with a small puddle of water surrounding it.

    ’With this giant rock covering more than half of the space, I can see why they can barely fill up a bucket of water...’ I thought.

    Placing my hands on the walls, I used earth magic to expand the diameter of the area. Meaning I made the well much wider than it was before.

    I heard a villager yelling from outside, asking me if I was okay since they felt the ground shaking, but I told them to step away from the well as it was going to expand a little more.

    I used gravity magic to lift the rock outside the well to make room for the water to flow more freely. I thought about simply destroying it with earth magic, but then I would also have to clean the water of its residues, and that seemed like too much work.

    Once the rock was out of the well, it started to fill up once more. Nonetheless, I noticed that the water wasn’t the cleanest. In fact, it looked quite dirty.

    Pondering about different options, I decided to go with the easiest. Casting a water enchantment that would purify the water.

    It was an enchantment I created long ago when I was first learning about them. It worked like it sounded, making all of the water in the container where the enchantment was placed to be cleansed of any impurity.

    When I climbed back out, a group of villagers stood beside the upgraded well with their mouths wide open in surprise.

    On the other side of the village, Melina was reinforcing the homes of the residents skillfully, taking down walls and rebuilding them with sturdier materials.

    As she kept working on them, I made my way to the burnt fields as a small group of villagers followed me closely.

    "What did you guys cultivate out here?" I asked.

    "L-lots of things..." a villager responded with a sad tone.

    "We had sugar flowers, kupos, and tomos..." he continued.

    ’Hmm, so I suppose sugar cane is called ’sugar flower’ here. Kupos were grapes, and tomos were tomatoes, if I remember correctly...’ I thought. Sear?h the novel(F~)ire.net website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

    "We also produce butter with the milk from our cows, but they haven’t been lactating much after the attack, and we lost a few of them to the monsters, too..." another villager said.

    From what they told me, they seemed to be one of the main providers of butter to the capital, even though their village wasn’t even the size of a district in the city.

    Placing my hands on the ground, I used nature magic to purify it and bring fertility back to the land slowly.

    As the patches of green began appearing, I could hear the villagers’ astonishment, saying they didn’t know that magic could be used that way.

    Once the farming patches were all back to their previous green state, I poured more magic into the ground so that it would increase the yield and reduce the time for their crops to grow.

    After the princess and I were done, the villagers bowed to us like we were some sort of king and queen. Some of them even kneeled on the ground with reverence.

    Honestly, I was pretty shocked. I understood it was normal to want to say thank you and to give us a gift for the trouble. But kneeling to me just felt strange.

    "Guys, stand up," I said, making them stand up obediently.

    The princess seemed almost as exasperated as me, but she composed herself and directed her words at the villagers.

    "The evil being that controlled those monsters has been vanquished. This village will know peace for a long time," she said, making the people exclaim with joy and applaud.

    "They must be the saints!" exclaimed one of the villagers.

    Hearing that comment sparked my attention, as I had heard someone say something similar in Port Town Blue when we gave potions and food to starving people.

    It’s not like their assumptions were far off. Technically, I was a demigod, and Melina was the chosen champion of Phelena.

    Whenever they referred to us as "saints," it made me believe that was the word they used to recognize Phelena’s chosen, while the devils used the term "champion."

    It took some time for the villagers to stop praising us, but eventually, we managed to take flight and keep moving on our way to the border.

    Of course, we found another village wholly razed to the ground a few hours away, so we had to stop there for the day as we fixed and upgraded their settlements.

    In the end, it took us a total of ten days to reach the border where the 7th Knights Order was located. Of course, we could have made it much sooner, but we had to stop in eight different villages and overhaul them before getting there.

    It took three days to find the first village, but after that, all of these settlements were mere hours away if we flew, taking most of our time.

    When we got closer to our destination, we spotted the massive wall that separated the border of the kingdom from whatever was on the other side.

    "Is a wall like that really needed to determine your territory?" I asked the princess as we both stopped mid-air.

    "No, not really. It’s because the Illusive Woods are on the other side..." she said.

    Melina explained that she actually didn’t know what the Illusive Woods were until a few years ago.

    It was a forest that, while it didn’t have as many dangerous monsters as End Forest, had a strange magical property that made anyone who delved into the woods experience hallucinations.

    People would get lost and lose their minds until they eventually died deep in the woods, where nobody was able to reclaim their corpses.

    The wall was not only a measure to stop whatever was in there from creeping inside the kingdom but also tall enough to alert any unlucky adventurers traversing the area, letting them know that civilization was close.