Past Reflections: Ariel (1/2)

Eat and sleep. A healthy lifestyle?

A little pre-translation note: At time of writing I suspect we’ll get a few chapters like this where it’s a particular character talking about the past. But instead of it being a real conversation, we only see what one character says. It’s unclear when this conversation took place but it was probably well before the elf village war.

Past Reflections: Ariel

What was the System like immediately after it was put into operation? What’s the point in asking about that? ……It’s not something pleasant to talk about you know? You still want to know? Hmm. Okay, just for a bit then.

Well, to describe how things were back then in a word, it was brutal. Simply that. Brutally brutal. Apparently, it was like hell all over the place. I was completely at my limit dealing with my own troubles, so I only heard about other places from rumours. But, well, I’m sure you could imagine it.

Firstly, the countries that produced most of their energy from MA Energy were in a hopeless state. Naturally, right? Just imagine what modern Japan would be like if electricity completely vanished. Then maybe include gasoline in that too. Basically that means all the usable energy is gone, right. Because those had been relied upon, it’s obvious that living standards would collapse.

In addition, because of the attacks from the dragons back then, everything had been totally wrecked. Not only had many people become refugees, the fact that it wasn’t possible to use energy on top of that was a double-punch. Reconstruction wasn’t remotely feasible. People were at their limit just surviving each day.

What was most painful for me, was food. It was a situation where it was hard just getting food each day, yet due to my constitution I had to consume much more than other people. My friends gave me priority with food distribution because of that, but it still wasn’t enough. Kids even younger than me would endure their own empty stomachs and hand their food to me. I felt so pathetic, so guilty, that I had wanted to die. Or rather, I seriously thought that several times. But, each time everyone else stopped me, saying “Sariel-sama said it, didn’t she. Please live”. I ate while crying. But it still wasn’t enough, and I still can’t forget the taste of the dirt I ate in order to deceive my hunger.

Somehow I managed to survive those times, but before long fights started to break out. The cause, was due to the System, or I guess more because there was a scramble for the few remaining resources. Like I just said, there was a serious shortage of food, right. In the scramble for that people started killing each other in various places, and basically that slowly escalated. If they had that much energy, shouldn’t they have just cooperated to break free of the situation they were in? But well, humans give priority to the present over the future, right. Anyway, they couldn’t think of anything else except to scramble for what existed now.

My friends and I in the orphanage, continued to take refuge and avoid those fights. However, there were times when no matter what we did we still got dragged into it. In those days I was just a burden, and didn’t have the slightest ability to fight. Immediately after the System was put into operation it seems there was already benefits given by the status values, but that depended upon your original abilities in the first place. As I was spending more than half the day in bed, the benefits of the status values were less than that of a normal person. There was nothing I could do.

But you know, there was one day when a really helpless situation occurred. On that day, Gob-gob went off to try to fight some men for the first time. We were the survivors of Potimas’s human experiments. However, just because we survived that didn’t necessarily mean that we could continue to live. Gob-gob only had a lifespan of several years. It should have been research to try to prolong life, but he was a kid born with green skin and a lifespan much shorter than normal humans. Well, he had obviously been treated like a failure.

「I won’t live much longer anyway.」

Saying that, he went off. So anyway, I gave him my favourite pressed flower bookmark, and told him this beforehand.

「That’s my favourite, so be sure to return it.」

In the end, after showing a vague smile, he never returned. He had always been a coward you know. But right at the very end he tried to be cool. He was an idiot, right…… Yeah, an idiot.