Yugioh Card Summoner

CH.572 Crystal People

During the days the Emperor kept us waiting, we explored the Crystal city. Some parts of it at least.

Janina liked searching for high end products that used dragon scales. While doing so, she taught me a Draconic Magic technique that can be used to locate said scales. It wasn’t difficult and soon enough, I had learned it as well.

Sadly we didn’t find a single dragon scale product that was on sale. We found two that were still in showrooms of different high end boutiques, but they had already sold.

On our return trip to the castle, Janina ordered me to point out the noble manors that held something made from dragon scales, which was decent practice for me. Though it kind of ended up being in vain, as basically all of the high ranked noble manors, which you can tell by the size, had at least some. And I wasn’t good enough to tell the exact number of dragon scale items. I could get a general sense of how many there were between few, some amount and a lot, but not concrete numbers.

Janina on the other hand could tell the exact number of scales used and even which dragon each scale came from. 

I wonder if the dragons somehow leave a magical imprint onto their old scales? And that is what Janina reads/understands.

Speaking of, I think this is as good of a time as any to talk about dragons. Mainly about how dragons die. … Yeah. Kind of morbid, but whatever.

So dragons aren’t immortal, and I don’t think I need to tell you that. Outside of dying when they are killed, they can also die of old age. And technically by disease, but Janina told me it hasn’t happened since before her time.

The old age is the interesting one, as it technically has nothing to do with age. See dragons grow throughout their entire lives. But their scales take a long time to grow when they are separated from their body, outside of an evolution where dragons instantly regrow all of their scales.

See, growing scales takes a lot of energy. And dragons are … I kind of don’t want to say this, but they can be a bit lazy. 

I think it is because they are bored with nothing to do, because the dragons I know are a lot more energetic than the ones based on stories Janina tells. 

So if dragons have nothing to do, they just default to just barely meeting the requirements they have for life, and spending the rest of the time sleeping.

And while doing that, they might not gather enough energy for their next evolution. So while their body under the scales continues to grow, their scales don’t. And they end up either suffocating under their own scales, or shedding all of their scales leaving them with next to no protection against monsters they hunt for food. 

And while the second part can be fixed by having someone else hunt food for them, most dragons don’t want to give up on their pride and refuse things like that. … and usually it doesn’t end well.

But as I said earlier, it hasn’t been as big of a problem lately, because the dragons actually look forward to me visiting the coast, because apparently fighting with my monsters is entertaining. So they take better care of themselves, so they get to keep enjoying it. 

Which runs back to a statement I’ve made previously. I need to let the dragons access my Factory. That should entertain them, so that they don’t die of laziness.

Unless they become NEETs and never leave the Factory.

On one of our sightseeing trips to the city, I noticed something interesting for sale.

Carbonated sodas. That is literally what it read on the sign.

It got my interest, as that shouldn’t be a thing. It isn’t a thing in the Kingdoms, and Lawrence never told me about them, despite me asking about carbonated drinks when I was working on the blood soda.

There are carbonated drinks, but they are stuff that is naturally carbonated by a fermentation process. So beer, cider, champagne and the like. There is no carbonated drinks outside of that.

But apparently some random street stall has them. And it even uses the word ‘Soda’. Which isn’t a commonly known world in the world. Again Lawrence didn’t know the word when I asked him. And he is an experienced peddler.

So again, how does some random street stall have carbonated soda?

Janina and I went to check out the sodas, and that is when another thing blew me away. The names of the sodas.

Because the four flavors available were Cola, Green Dew, Clear-Up and Fantasm.

I ordered a single glass of every option, just so I could test them all out. But before I even drank any, I took a bit of each drink into Storage for analysis.

We then tested the drinks and they were decently close to what I’d expect them to taste. I think the best way to describe them would be saying that they taste like off-brand sodas that are purposefully made a bit off from the original.

They were still great, so I decided to ask the stall keeper if he came up with the recipe, and if the stuff could be bought in bulk.

He told me that the sodas came from the Empire's food institute and he was someone who worked for them. He had been given the job of selling the sodas to see if they could be popular.

I asked if they were, and while the shop keep said they were decently well liked, they weren’t that popular because of the high cost. 

I didn’t really care about the cost. Sure the Empire uses different currency from the Kingdoms, but I can exchange my Heroic gold coins for the Empiric gold coins. 

Yeah there is an exchange fee, but it isn’t too expensive.

Our host has (The Emperor) also given us some money to spend around town, so that is even more of a reason for me to not really care about the cost.

But yeah. Admittedly when the cost for a glass of soda is the same as a medium-high class meal, it can be a bit expensive. And while the taste is good, nobles would probably prefer something ‘higher class’.

Though then again, since sodas are a new thing, they might be seen as something novel.

I thanked the stall keeper for the info, gave him my personal feedback on the sodas, and we went on our way. Now that I have the sodas in Storage and analyzed, I can recreate them with HomeBase. 

By the way, I tried to synthesize the stuff myself, but it never tasted quite right. Well, neither does this stuff, but it is closer than what I made.

I’ll ask about the food institute when I meet with someone from the Empire. Because sure I can just produce the soda myself, but I can also just support their business. No need to steal the recipe when money is barely an object.

Eventually the day we met with the Emperor came. I was fully expecting a meeting in the throne room, but instead, they took us, myself, Janina and Elias, to a more casual looking parlor room.

At first I assumed this was just a room they had us waiting for the actual meeting time, but soon enough, two people who definitely weren’t servants in the castle walked in.

That is because their bodies were made entirely from a light-blue crystal. And from what I know, there aren’t that many of these ‘Crystal people’ in the world. And all who do exist are members of the Empire’s Royal family.

After I learned that the Crystal Empire’s Royal family were actually Crystal people, I asked Laura if she had any information on the race. And while some of it is usually locked to anyone who doesn’t have a perfect System Support, apparently they decided to give me access to all the info.

And as I read the info, I understood why.

The Crystal people were a race made by the System to act as Dungeon Founders/Masters for the Chaos God Dungeons. This was way back in the day before the System could self-manage the dungeons. The reason they gave for not being able to manage the dungeons was because back then, they didn’t have as many System Agents. 

So instead, they made a race that can live in any environment, without needing food or drinks. They just consume some mana and miasma.

But eventually, as the System got more System Agents, from System Support holders passing and their Supports taken back by the System, the Crystal people became unnecessary. 

So the System … released them from their jobs. Wiped their memories and added their race as a regular race in the System. No, they weren't before. They were more like dragons. Beings outside the System, but unlike dragons, they were made by the System.

And naturally, considering there were all of twenty or so of these Crystal people back then, and the fact that they were all placed into this world as a single group, it kind of makes sense that they’d all stay in one family.

As for why there are so few of them. The Crystal people can only have so many children during their life. They reproduce using crystal cores.

See, the Crystal people have these red crystal cores inside their blue crystal bodies. Unlike the main body, the red cores aren’t transparent, so you can clearly see them.

To reproduce, a Crystal person separates one of those cores, and then a different Crystal person fuses one of their cores with that one, and those two cores become the new central core for a new Crystal person. 

And crystal people only have five cores, and they don’t grow more of them during their lives than what they have after reaching adulthood.

As I said, a Crystal person is born from two fused cores, which make up their central core. During their childhood and adolescence, they grow their other four cores. And when all of them are fully developed, they become adults.

But as the Crystal people give up these cores, they become weaker. So they don’t always want to give birth to new Crystal people as soon as possible. Sometimes they instead want to level up, and with that, comes the risk of dying. And with as few of them as there were when they began to populate the area they were ‘born’ in, losing just a few people before they could reproduce takes a big hit on the populace.

But enough about them as a race. Let’s focus on the two that just walked in. 

One was an adult, and male looking. Crystal people don’t have genders, so calling him a male is technically wrong. But his appearance is masculine, so I’ll call him a man. Or maybe I should call him the Emperor, because that is who he is.

He was dressed in clothes made out of the same blue crystal as his body. Yeah, the Crystal people can make clothes from the same material as their body. It is their version of Body Modification, a skill called Crystal Body.

He had three of the red cores inside his body, so he has had two children by now.

One of them is likely the child sized Crystal person who came in with him. He was probably eight or nine, based on his height. Inside his body, he had two fully developed red crystals, his central one and one in his head. He also had three more still developing. One looked like it was almost complete, it was located in his stomach, but the two near his shoulders were just tiny red cores that still had a long way to go before they’d be complete.

I was about to get up from the couch I was sitting on, but before I could, the Crystal kid ran to me and practically jumped on me.

“You! You are the one with the Yugioh cards!” He called out. “Would you give me some!? Please!”