Andric returned home. He had no business inside the town, and he didn’t work in the fields with his grandparents or mother. Besides practicing the Standing Tortoise Manual, Andric had no other pressing matters. He needed to get strong as quickly as possible, and his lack of obligations made it easy to find time to cultivate.

But, even though Andric had no reason to seek out the other townspeople, they had reasons to seek out him. That night, nothing happened. The next night, a group of townspeople from the older generation arrived outside Andric’s home. They were mostly farmers with minimal say in the town’s governance, but two were businessmen from the inner town, who happened to be relatives of Audovacar’s friends.

As soon as Andric saw the small gathering, he knew they were there to make trouble. It wasn’t unknown to him that many of the townspeople thought he had no right to be born, and the handouts Alda and him received made some townspeople jealous. In Einburg, everyone had to work for their meals except Alda. She had the favor of the town’s mayor, and he gave Alda many free benefits. The Standing Tortoise Manual was one benefit, as well as a weekly bag of grain.

In the past, Alda could defend Andric by saying he was only a child, and the mayor could defend Alda by saying her parents had worked for the town for a long time and deserved a little help in their time of need. Now that Andric had turned fifteen and was technically an adult according to Hochland law, Andric didn’t know what would happen.

If the townspeople wanted to chase him away and stop the charity Alda received, there wasn’t much of a moral reason to dispute them; after all, it had been fifteen years since Alda’s trama.

The townspeople of Einburg weren’t stupid, and they wouldn’t allow themselves to be taken advantage of for so many years without complaining. When Einburg was only a village, it wasn’t too difficult for one or two families to receive help from town hall. However, now that the village had turned into a town with several hundred residents, there needed to be regulations placed on who could receive what when.

The townspeople did not want residents becoming lazy and asking for handouts with Alda as a reference for when it had been done in the past. In the history of Einburg, nobody had gotten free bags of grain for fifteen years, and the townspeople who had to pick up the slack weren’t going to let it happen again.

“Hey, Alda, I want to talk to that boy of yours,” an adult townsperson from Alda’s generation stepped up to the door of Andric’s home and said. The walls were hardly soundproof, and it was easy to hear the man’s voice throughout the house.

Andric had known the group of townspeople were gathering for a few minutes, but he remained in his bedroom, sitting on his bed and reading the Standing Tortoise Manual. Gasto and Roza were with Alda in the sitting room. They were hesitant to confront the group of townspeople.

“That boy is nothing but trouble,” Gasto said and leaned back in his chair. He had never thought highly of Andric, but he couldn’t be happy about a group of townspeople gathering outside his home. Although he wanted Andric gone, he wanted it to be a farewell Alda was comfortable with.

“If they want to talk about him, they should talk to him. He’s an adult, he can speak for himself,” Roza added, similarly displeased at the mob outside her home.

“I’ll go see what they want,” Alda said and stood, and she walked toward the front door.

Andric knew that his grandparents didn’t want him around, and he knew that most of the townspeople around him weren’t fond of him, but he didn’t care. To him, the only person whose opinion mattered was his mother. He could put up with ridicule and abuse as long as his mother still wanted him to stay.

Staying in Einburg was merely a choice of convenience. In Einburg, Andric had a relatively safe place to practice meditation techniques and learn about the world. If he left earlier, there was no telling when he could’ve acquired a treasure like the Standing Tortoise Manual or had someone as generous as Instructor Hubert open two of his meridians. In Einburg, Andric had food, shelter, and information. He originally planned to stay in Einburg for another year, but leaving early wouldn’t cause any harm.

Andric paused his cultivation, but he stayed in his bedroom, while Alda went to talk to the townspeople outside the house. She opened the door and asked them, “What do you want to talk about?”

“I just want to ask you one question, when are you going to move on?” the townsperson asked and backed away, melding with the group of townspeople.

“What do you mean?” Alda asked.

“Listen, I’m gonna tell you that nobody is blaming you for anything. We know that having Andric wasn’t your choice. But, you can’t sit at home and let your parents and the town take care of you forever. At some point, you need to realize that nothing is going to change what happened in the past, and that kid is now an adult who should be spending his days working,” a man said, earning some words of agreement from the townspeople behind him.

Alda, standing flustered in the doorway of her home, was unable to think of a response for several seconds, in which time her parents walked up and stood behind her. Gasto said a word in her ear, then she said, “I know. I know I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get back to where I was at before, but now I’m too old to be that young girl. I think the worst thing is all the time I’ve lost. If I was stronger, I could’ve resumed my life when I was seventeen, but I’m now thirty-two and still in the same place.”

Alda’s words were filled with deep shame. She thought every day about where she might be if she hadn’t encountered Andric’s father, if she had aborted Andric when he was still inside her, or if she had allowed her parents to sell him to slavers. There wasn’t a day that passed without her wondering where her life could’ve gone. She learned to pretend that it didn’t bother her, but she couldn’t forget.

Many of the townspeople who gathered around Alda’s home knew her when she was a child, and some of them had grown up next to her. They sympathised with her, but even so, they had a limit to what they could excuse. In many of their minds, Alda had wasted the latter half of her life. More than they wanted Andric to stop receiving the charity of the town, they wanted Alda to move on with her life. She had lived thirty-two years, and she could easily have another thirty years afterward. The townspeople of Einburg didn’t want Alda’s entire life to be weighed down by Andric.

The younger generation of Einburg came to Alda’s home because they hated Andric, but the older generation came because they were worried about Alda. Her refusal to abort Andric as a fetus had made some townspeople annoyed with her, but they could never blame or despise her.

“Alda, whatever you need, we’re here for you. But, we aren’t here to help that bastard child. You need to decide: either the two of you start working, or he leaves with the next merchant caravan,” the man said, giving Alda only two choices. “We didn’t want to do this, but it’s the only way to help you move on.”

Forcing Alda to move on with her life was no simple task. She had stayed at home and worked only occasionally for the past fifteen years, and her routine had changed very little. For the first few years, Alda didn’t leave her house or talk to anyone. When she did go outside, she wouldn’t walk more than ten steps away. Only when Andric had gone missing did she finally leave the area around her house. Andric couldn’t be carried away like he could when he was just an infant, but something similar needed to happen.

Merchant caravans came to Einburg every few months. They usually had between twenty and one hundred people in them, including merchants, guards, and travelers moving to new cities. Whenever a merchant caravan came to Einburg, the merchants restocked on grain and water, and the townspeople bought the things they could make themselves. The price to tag along with the caravan was zero, but the cost to join one of their wagons was measured in silver coins. The cost couldn’t be bared by Alda and her parents, but it was a small price for the town to have Andric gone.

Alda’s parents would be happy to send Andric away. If possible, they would like to send him to one of the border regions, where he could join the military and die on a battlefield. Then, they would earn a silver coin for each month he had served. That way, they would get something back from having raised Andric for fifteen years. Anywhere he went, they would at least get him out of Alda’s life.

For the last sixteen years, Andric had weighed Alda down like a ball and chain. Even with the ball attached to her, she could still move slowly. If she encountered something that made her want to run away, she wouldn’t be able to return to where she started from. Without the ball and chain, she could go much farther, but she could also retreat deeper.

As long as Andric was with her, Alda’s life was stable. The townspeople knew they needed to interrupt her peacefulness, but they were restricted in their methods. They would never harm Alda, so their only option was to harm Andric. Exiling Andric would undoubtedly change Alda’s routine, so much so that she might find a job on her own accord.

Alda thought for a while, then meekly asked, “Can you help him get to Mahtzig?”

“He can go wherever the next merchant caravan is headed. If they’re going to the capital, we’ll pay for his trip,” the townsperson replied reassuringly. The mood among the crowd lightened after Alda asked her question, because it sounded like she was going to agree to sending Andric away.

“If you can do that, I won’t have to worry,” Alda said, and relief washed over the crowd. Finally, after fifteen years, they had succeeded in convincing Alda to let go of Andric.

Alda didn’t believe she could force Andric to leave the town, but she knew she didn’t need to. In the past ten years, there hadn’t been a single instance where Andric refused something Alda asked from him. If she asked him to leave, she knew he would do so. Although Andric was quite reserved as a child, he was talented in many aspects, and he had no issue adapting to change.

Of course, Alda wouldn’t be willing to send Andric away if it meant never seeing him again. Mahtzig was a safe city at the heart of the kingdom, far from any battlefields. For someone like Andric, there would be plenty of work. Many townspeople of Einburg had heard about how marvelous the capital was, and a fair portion of the town’s younger generation moved there when they became adults.

Alda had a brother in Mahtzig, which she hoped could help Andric if Andric got into trouble. It was a long stretch, seeing how none of Alda’s family treated Andric like a member of the family, but it was better than sending Andric to a random city where she had no connections.