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The winter of the Third World is passing by.

Based on this land, it has already been over half a year since I arrived in this world.

Tomorrow, I’ll be in second year.

I won’t be changing much, but for students at the Royal Academy, big changes are coming.

Moreover, it’s not a pleasant change. A bunch of high-ranking people from other countries will be enrolling and attending classes with us.

I wonder how it feels to be in a place where even breathing is tough with such mediocre political power?

It seems like it would be quite amusing to watch.

Hmm.

With thoughts like these, I realize I have become more at ease.

In the past, I was terrified, never knowing when I might be shot out and then how long I’d have to wait at rock bottom.

But now, I exist continuously in two worlds.

If one goes wrong, that means there’s a way to survive somehow.

Right now, it’s like the season of sowing seeds and waiting in farming terms. Plus, if one field fails, there’s another one to rely on.

I have a backup.

Even better, once the seeds are sown, they can grow without needing careful tending. Of course, I need to expand them from time to time, but it is indeed easy to grow.

A tiny issue is that to harvest the fruits I desire, I will need to wait not just one or two years, but over a hundred years.

But I can wait for that.

By then, just like I felt in the First World, a warmth will flow in. The warmth of humans who consciously or unconsciously trample and kill throughout their lives will come in.

Even in my faded memories, I have never harmed a person.

However, I lived off of products gained through labor exploitation in an economic colony, eating bread from companies that refuse to take responsibility even when people get hurt in accidents.

I lived atop countless corpses.

I believe every world I meet will be like that. So, I’m making harvesting machines without any specific guidance.

Ah, of course, I need to be careful not to create too many harvesting machines and cause the world to collapse.

But compared to real farming, it’s much easier.

Of course, I have a memory of having done farming but no real experience!

I never thought having the memories of others could be so convenient.

Without this, I would have been in a much tougher situation. Especially, it would have been difficult to read emotions from people.

Even now, knowing emotions still leads to errors sometimes.

If I couldn’t know emotions…

I don’t even want to think about it.

A little later, I’ll put Bell to sleep in bed, and a day will pass, marking the start of term.

By then, I need to sort out several incidents.

First up, the harvesting machine from the Brightshin slums.

This one got a job as a transporter, heading to every corner of the country. On the way, I deal with attackers or get dealt with, distributing warmth properly.

While sorting that out, I realized one thing.

The smaller the village, the more the mechanical devices have been completely phased out. The more distant villages stayed in a transitional phase just starting to introduce mechanical devices, often rejecting them due to press coverage.

And such villages have escaped from the economic crisis currently blanketing the entire country or even the world. For example, the village where Beatrice and Morris live.

They are self-sufficient in vegetables and grains.

Meat is hunted by monster exterminators, a subspecies of hunters, based on the faded world’s standards.

Surprisingly, this world doesn’t get meat from livestock. Instead, they hunt monsters for meat.

Then comes the doubt about whether they can feed people properly, but perhaps due to the magic power in this world, many animals, despite their size, breed like rabbits.

Comparing the first world to this one, both the First World and the Third World exhibit rich wilderness and a different cycle of life.

No, rather, on average, the world I have in fading memories seems like a near-dried-up patient.

The Second World?

I don’t know it well enough for the harvesting machine to encompass it. Hence, there’s a lack of information. Daegon and the Primordial Heavenly Sovereign both know only about their immediate territories.

Ah. There’s one more thing.

Daegon’s world.

It also has magic power, and the biota grows rapidly and breeds without depletion.

Though if you squeeze a planet or a star overflowing with magic, it might get exhausted.

Daegon is an invader who completely conquered his universe and then went out to wage conquest wars in other worlds.

If I were to liken this to a civilization game in faded memories, it’s like just entering the modern era. After declaring war on a neighboring country and being soundly defeated, only one city remained, but then robots emerged from a nearby barbarian outpost, which wiped everything out just before I would have faced Daegon.

Huh?

I’ve drifted off into odd thoughts.

Anyway, productive small villages are safe.

Conversely, cities relying on trade due to a lack of productivity are in severe straits.

To be precise, accommodations appear in places where people come and go, turning into markets, and gradually, places depending on trade routes to grow into cities have broken down.

As mechanical devices were phased out, blood flow diminished, blocking the veins as resource-depleted areas turned into robbers or vanished.

Cities larger than a certain size die off without supplies from the surrounding production areas.

Using the facilities in those cities cannot fill the bellies of people inside.

As the veins got clogged, big cities, which played an important organ role, took a hit.

And that resulting failure spread throughout the country. Most big cities had industry, after all.

Still, this country somehow managed to patch things up.

However, it seems other countries could not. Foreigners using increasingly incomprehensible languages are gathering in the Brightshin slums.

Bern City has become almost an independent city-state and has shut itself off, leading Nantes to develop from a small port to a harbor city.

Meanwhile, Atlan Fortress City hasn’t changed that much.

In fact, it’s practically a port where a variety of goods enter from abroad, dealing with monsters attacking from the eastern sea like a daily task.

That doesn’t mean there are no changes, though.

If injured by monsters from the eastern sea, curses spread from there. So, once hurt, if lucky, it usually ends with just the amputation of a limb.

In other words, the soldier casualty rate was very high.

But as one harvesting machine could erase those curses, the situation has changed.

If curses can be erased, injuries that involve lost limbs are merely minor inconveniences.

The danger has decreased.

Thus, Atlan Fortress City celebrated the New Year differently this year than usual. It became a New Year of reunion, where the injured healed and were reunited, rather than a lonely one of sending someone off.

In short, they are doing well.

While some harvesting machines thrive, others struggle. Places where people live are varied.

I’ve summarized the situation in the Third World.

As for technology, there hasn’t been any noticeable advancement yet. Secretly, an alternative power device using human magic power is circulating around the capital, and Bern City is striving to operate mechanical devices with the technology of the Primordial Heavenly Sovereign.

However, they’re facing difficulties due to the lack of power output that’s necessary to run existing mechanical devices, even if it’s environmentally friendly energy with low pollution.

But with time, these issues will be resolved.

Someday, I hope they’ll step beyond this planet into space and, furthermore, leap into other worlds to establish colonies.

Then, my descendants from the harvesting machines will devour that world.

And then they’ll give me warmth.

Hehe.

*

The Fourth World.

In the meantime, I’ve gathered more information than I expected.

Most of it was from the memories of the harvesting machines, but still, I learned a lot.

Because I knew that once the task of putting me, whom Jeber calls “The Purple Variant,” into operation is completed, the wounds would heal and physical abilities would improve overall.

Then, I realized that when I put a middle-aged woman in, her appearance became younger, and I brought some old men to turn them into harvesting machines.

And when the old men’s appearances reverted to youth, the atmosphere changed.

I put in a chimera who wore a brass necklace that was on the brink of decay after living for 7 years or an elderly criminal who had been subjected to terrible punishments and had a ruined body, turning him into a harvesting machine.

But then a big incident occurred.

One criminal gained psychic abilities.

He used his psychic powers to bend the surrounding metals and escaped, trying to kill Jeber. But he failed, as the bomb on his neck exploded.

From that, I speculated that a captured person has an increased chance of gaining powers that could release them.

On the other hand, Jeber thought of something else entirely.

He immediately turned all available chimeras into harvesting machines.

All chimeras except the assistants or those wearing silver necklaces have become harvesting machines.

However, perhaps because there was no reason for it, no chimera gained any psychic powers. Jeber conducted an investigation looking for chimeras with special abilities, but finding none left him greatly disappointed.

Jeber gained nothing.

In contrast, I gained a great deal.

Jeber returned the chimeras to their original positions, which allowed me to always watch over him. The fact that I obtained almost all the chimeras means I can also surveil his entire household.

Thus, I learned facts that the lab chimeras could not know.

Jeber is now preparing to create more harvesting machines.

Yes.

He has posted notices outside that he is conducting reverse aging experiments.

The date is set for a month from now.

While putting out such notices, he began erecting a new building at the boundary between the mansion and the outside. I suspect that I’ll be turning whoever enters there into a harvesting machine.

That’s very nice.

After all, reverse aging is an incredibly tempting bait.

It’s hard to resist the allure of its fruit.

Moreover, if there’s no cost involved, who would refuse?

There will surely be those who will try just in case.

And once a flow is created, there will be no turning back. If others did it and are fine, then those who don’t reap that privilege will be seen as fools.

It was like that in the First World.

Just chanting a contract document once would allow one to live a much better life, and those who don’t are called fools.

What about the Fourth World collapsing?

Only those who have seen me and signed the contract will do it here.

If I try to oversee every single case, it would take me decades to produce as many harvesting machines as before. So, I’m not too worried about that.

In the First World, nearly the entire population on the continent had become harvesting machines, and…

Even if each world has different durability, I have no worries in that regard, so I will act freely.

So, please let me create harvesting machines quickly.

Quickly.