Chapter 137: How Many Floors Can One Bag of Rice Last
Lucian stood where he was. The blood on his sword had half dried.
He looked down at the dozen or so beastman bodies at his feet and said nothing for a long while.
[Corruption Purifier]
He turned the class name over quietly in his mind.
In YGGDRASIL, it had been considered a fairly situational hidden high-tier special class.
In PVP against players with negative justice values, it boosted all-around stats — and the lower the opponent's justice value, the greater the power increase.
In practical terms: when facing evil, he got stronger.
But the game designers seemed to have had deliberate reservations about the class's claim to "justice," because they had built in a correspondingly harsh limitation.
Against players with positive justice values, the effect reversed entirely — the class owner was at a disadvantage instead.
Highly targeted, equally targetable. Among players who cared about offense-defense balance, almost no one touched it.
But the stat bonuses weren't what Lucian was after.
What he wanted was the core skill unlocked at max level.
[Final Judgment's Verdict]
Any enemy locked by the skill could not evade it. And as long as their justice value was below -300, their HP would drop in direct proportion to the caster's.
The critical detail: in PVP, the HP reduction was irreversible until death and revival.
It was a bet paid in blood for blood.
Against the deeply negative-justice beings in Ainz Ooal Gown's guild — if Lucian was willing to burn his own HP to zero in one shot, the target would die before they could even get a revival spell off.
And because the skill required max level to activate in YGGDRASIL, the game had placed no level cap on valid targets.
Which meant a chance to punch far above his weight.
But —
Lucian closed his eyes and took stock of himself. The hidden class's level showed no sign of movement whatsoever. He still couldn't use [Final Judgment's Verdict].
"Still nothing." He murmured.
Was Lv.5 simply out of reach?
Footsteps came from behind.
Germann walked up in long strides. That scarred face wore something close to pathological satisfaction.
His boots were still smeared with mud and blood. Several dark spatters marked the front of his coat.
"My lord." Germann stopped behind Lucian and gave a slight bow, barely containing the energy behind his eyes. "Gave those animals a proper lesson."
Lucian turned and looked at that satisfied face.
"They all ate?"
"Every last one." Germann gave a rough laugh. "Especially that little troublemaker. He ate the most enthusiastically of all."
He gestured as he spoke, as though describing a performance he was proud of.
"Some of the females and young ones tried to hold out at first — too proud to touch it. Then they watched the others eating and the hunger got to them, and it wasn't long before they all came around. Then when they found out what they'd been eating..."
Germann's mouth split wide, showing two uneven rows of faintly yellowed teeth.
"The retching was spectacular. A few just collapsed on the ground. Couldn't even cry."
Lucian listened without speaking.
Not a trace of satisfaction on his face.
"And the little one's mother," Germann continued, "tried to throw herself onto my sword and end it. I moved out of the way. Living through it is harder than dying — that's the real punishment for animals like these."
Lucian gave a slight nod.
"Good work."
"Thank you, my lord." Germann pressed his fist to his chest. "The next village?"
"Continue." Lucian slid his sword back into its sheath. The scrape of metal against the scabbard mouth was unusually clear in the still air. "Same approach."
"Yes, my lord!" Germann answered sharply, turned, and headed back toward the formation.
Lucian stood where he was. His gaze moved past the beastman bodies on the ground and out toward the grey smear of the horizon.
The light was already failing.
He raised a hand and signaled to his adjutant in the distance.
The adjutant understood immediately, beginning to call the soldiers into formation for the march to the next village.
Lucian swung up into the saddle. A slight shake of the reins — his warhorse snorted and moved forward, falling into pace at the front of the column.
The hooves pressed into blood-soaked earth, leaving prints of varying depths behind them.
His thoughts drifted somewhere else entirely.
The relationship between demi-humans and humans.
He had spent considerable time on that question after arriving in this world.
Not all demi-humans saw humans as food.
The Casanas City-State Union in the eastern reaches of the Baharuth Empire, and the Argland Council State to the north of the Kingdom, were both living examples of humans and demi-humans coexisting in peace.
Some demi-human species in those nations had no instinct toward eating humans to begin with. But plenty of the species that did have that instinct by nature were represented there too.
They had been raised from birth with the idea of peaceful coexistence with humans. Generation after generation, the correction had been made — until the desire to eat humans had been suppressed into something that simply didn't govern their behavior.
That was probably why Lakyus would stop the Sunlight Scripture from massacring demi-human villages.
He knew his sister too well.
She genuinely believed that with enough goodwill and patience, any two peoples could reach understanding.
If this were the world of a hot-blooded manga, Lucian thought he would probably let her convince him. Try meeting the other side with compassion. Talk them around with the power of words.
But it wasn't.
Lucian looked at the road winding ahead of him.
He had chosen a more direct approach.
Use guilt — the weight of having done something that violates every instinct of decency — to make beastmen sick of the taste of human flesh.
Use the pain of losing someone to make beastmen understand what war and raiding actually cost.
The idea came from something a transmigrant had done two hundred years ago.
The Minotaur Sage.
The Player known as "the Sage Who Could Only Talk" had proposed a string of concepts far ahead of his time — refrigerators, electric fans, running water — but had been completely unable to explain how any of them worked or build a single one himself.
The one exception was the "spring-fed tap," which someone else later realized. It became a magic item capable of producing two hundred liters of clean water per day.
That was how he earned the name "the Sage Who Could Only Talk."
But the record that had actually caught Lucian's attention was something else.
The Minotaur Sage had once tasted human flesh at a farm. It was extraordinarily good.
From that day on, he never ate it again. For the rest of his life.
And he persuaded the minotaur nation to reclassify humans — elevating their status from livestock to laboring serfs, which significantly improved how humans were treated within its borders.
A Player who instinctively found human flesh delicious had chosen, for the rest of his life, to refuse it. And had persuaded an entire nation to change the way it treated humans. And the nation had actually done it.
That proved one thing.
The beastman desire to eat humans was not uncontrollable. They simply had never chosen to control it.
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