“You’re not surprised at all. Let me guess, this is all according to your plan?”
“Well, I won’t say that everything is going according to my plan. But you might say that things are going according to schedule.”
Adelia could hardly hide her annoyance as she asked him. And Qudels did not exactly deny it.
“You also interfered when I was summoning a god at the alter, didn’t you? I am well aware that I could never summon such a high ranking god, no matter how much I might have wanted to.”
“I don’t deny it.”
Qudels acted shamelessly innocent as if he wasn’t the very root of all evil.
Darten observed this steely skin and strong heart and frowned silently as he stood next to Adelia.
“In other words, everything that I’ve done, it was all in the palm of your hand. Is that right?”
Adelia might have seemed strongly incensed as she hurled these words at him, but she wasn’t really.
She knew that Qudels was not doing it out of malice. If she was being manipulated all this time, it was due to her own lack of experience.
Perhaps Qudels understood what she was feeling because he shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh, it was nothing so elaborate as that. As for me, as long as the magistrate came to this village, I really didn’t care what the reason was.”
“…What are you trying to accomplish by having him come here?”
Adelia’s voice became a little shrill. She had a bad feeling about this.
The hatred the villagers bore against the magistrate was quite real.
If the magistrate was called under such circumstances, it would result in a rain of blood.
However, she could not understand why Qudels would go out of his way to create this situation.
There was no point in it. And there was no merit to it for him personally.
Both of them furrowed their eyebrows with dissatisfaction. And then Qudels made an unexpected suggestion.
“Well, why don’t you think about it yourself? You must be bored, seeing as how your work has been going so smoothly recently. After all, I am the leader. I can take care of things while you go off and play detective.”
—He was toying with them.
Adelia and Darten understood it immediately.
He was clearly just making this suggestion because he was confident that they would not be able to find the truth.
However, as they were involved in it without a doubt, the two could not stand the idea of not knowing anything at all.
“Well, it might result in the ruining of your plans, you know?”
“Oh, that would be most entertaining. I would love to see you do it.”
Adelia had said it with as much irony as she could muster, but Qudels just smiled.
Perhaps that is what offended them.
Adelia and Darten’s expressions turned angry.
“Don’t blame me when this ends in tears for you!”
“You’re gonna regret not telling us about it!!”
They said. Adelia and Darten did little to hide their displeasure as they stormed back to the temporary housing in the village.
Qudels watched them leave and shrugged.
“Some times its better to know nothing at all… What hopeless children. Do they think that I’m going to kill the magistrate? I have no interest in someone so insignificant.”
What Qudels was muttering would have only made them more confused if they could hear. And with that, he prepared to cook the sweet potato he had just harvested.
It was with some excitement that he set fire to a pile of dead leaves that he had gathered. And then Qudels wrapped the potato in a wet leaf and threw it into the fire.
It slowly roasted in the low heat. Qudels watched and then muttered as if he had just remembered something.
“Well, the magistrate will likely die. I doubt they can stop it.”
It would be three hours later that he remembered that in order to eat this potato at its best, he would have to wait and let it ripen for a month.
And so Qudels would excitedly eat the sweet potato alone, and be very disappointed that it wasn’t sweet at all.