The OP Lich is a Returnee, Chapter 171

Chapter 171 – Changing Times

A year had passed since the seals on magic were undone. The changes started slow, but began moving faster day by day. Some plants and animals evolved into monsters as they took in mana, and were changed by it, but they weren’t the only creatures to change.

During the flu season that year, a new strain of the disease emerged, capable of spreading not just through the normal means, but through mana constructs (like spells) as well. The disease affected a creature’s mana, as well as their bodies, meaning that even undead creatures like myself were potentially threatened by it. Magical diseases were often like that. Thankfully, though, even magical diseases are usually susceptible to Death magic.

Oh, I had run across a couple ‘undead diseases’ in the other world, where the actual disease was caused by undead bacteria or magical viruses. The most notable was the Flayer plague, which functioned essentially like a prion disease that primarily affected the undead. Living creatures could be infected, but they typically showed little to no signs of the disease, except for heightened aggression, and perhaps a craving for raw meat, until they died, and turned into the undead. In undead, whether they were freshly raised by the disease or infected through their meals, it caused a progressive mental disorder that caused the infected to seek out living creatures, consume them, and wear their skin.

That might sound not too different from normal undead to some people, other than the wearing of skin bit, but it was more than just mindless zombies or feral ghouls doing it. Skeletons, which didn’t need to eat, and had no organs to hold what they consumed inside, did the same. Vampires, who typically only took what they needed to survive, became ravening plagues. Even a lich wasn’t immune to the Flayer plague.

Thankfully, Death Magic cleared it up, so you typically only saw it when dealing with mindless undead, who couldn’t use magic willfully, or solitary undead, who might not realize the problems until it was too late, and they had already given themselves over to madness. The vampire clans, in particular, were careful to keep watch for such things. Typically, when you heard of a village being wiped out by the undead, it ended up either being a new undead warlord raising an army, or the vampire clans wiping out a population infected with the Flayer plague.

So far, other than were-creatures and certain types of undead, the more humanoid monsters had yet to make much of an appearance. For instance, the only trolls in the world were the Troll Patriarch and his children. He already had three born to three different mothers, and six more on the way. Thankfully, having successfully bred several women slowed his instinctive need to breed. He still had a hyper-inflated libido, but it was no longer controlling him as much as it had before.

I couldn’t say for certain that there were no other ‘human-ish’ monsters out there in the world, of course. The only time you’d hear about a new monster is if someone saw it, and survived long enough to return and tell the tale. Naturally, this was easier said than done, with some creatures. The fey, especially, were good at hiding, and better at either eliminating those who saw them, or trapping them and keeping them as toys to play with.

Goblins and the like, however, were different. They typically weren’t a problem until you got enough of them together. Then, they would start raiding for food, riches, and breeding stock. While not the most intelligent creatures, they had plenty of cunning, meaning that it was unlikely that any hiker unprepared for that kind of fight, would escape them.

In Japan, things were proceeding as one might expect. The biggest monster threat in the cities were some magically enhanced rats, pigeons, cats, and dogs. Phantomline had already developed warding devices to keep the ‘mahō no nezumi’ (magic rats) from getting into buildings, but the ‘saimin hato’ (hypnosis pigeons), kageneko (shadow cats), and heruhaundo (hellhounds) were causing more and more problems as time went on.

As far as plants went, the most notable introduction was the ‘otome no sekimen’, or maiden’s blush. While classified as a pepper, it had a flavor that was more sweet than spicy, which would normally make it an interesting pick to include in different dishes. When cut up and cooked in a meal, it looked no different from any other pepper one might use to cook. However, the pepper’s skin was naturally pink, and its sweet and spicy flavor hid a potent aphrodisiac inside.

Well, I said it was potent, but it wasn’t really to the point of compulsion. It didn’t force anyone to act. Just like getting drunk didn’t force anyone to act. It would take some knowledge of alchemy and potion brewing to get to the level of mind control or ‘love potions’ with the pepper, thankfully. However, the maiden’s blush did reduce inhibitions and enflame desires, which caused more than a few awkward conversations the next morning.

Naturally, the more dangerous monsters were more common in rural areas, where there were fewer people and more animals. On Hokkaido, for instance, a creature people were calling Raida, or ‘lightning snake’ had been spotted in the mountains, using lightning to hunt prey to devour. Onedeirth agreed with me that the scaled creature would eventually evolve into draconic beings within a generation or two, if things continued as they were. They were still a long way from true dragons, of course, but it was still something to keep an eye on.

Osada Chihomi, the Seawalker who had become the contracted warlock of Dagon, bore her child, who she named Asenath, as her lord commanded her. The child looked to be a normal human, on the surface, but I could see the girl’s soul, and knew that she was something else. Something that, perhaps, would not advertise itself until later in life.

However, even if motherhood was not enough to keep Chihomi busy, her duties did not end there. The seas, too, gave rise to monsters, as mana influenced the world. Thankfully, due to Dagon’s influence, the Sea of Japan, Yellow Sea, and East China Sea were all largely devoid of monsters. As a result, shrines to Dagon began arising all along the coasts, with the most notable ones being in Fukuoka, Niigata, Chongjin, Busan, Dalian, Shanghai, and Taipei.

Of course, not everything was bright and shining happiness. Monster attacks in the open oceans were crippling trade routes. While monsters capable of attacking a commercial jet in flight had not been seen, yet, everyone knew that it was simply a matter of time. In other words, the international economy was rapidly shifting, and, with it, the tides of global power.

The East Asian Alliance was the first result of that shift. Japan, Imperial China, the Kingdom of Korea, and the Republic of Singapore were the major players, but the alliance reached from Mongolia in the north to Indonesia in the south, and all the way to Nepal in the west. The EAA was, in truth, both a military and economic alliance, combining facets of how both the European Union and NATO worked. It was for that reason that Risen Athelia was officially invited to join, as well.

Risen Athelia was a government in exile no longer. A referendum had passed the Diet, ceding the area around my home in Kamitakida to my kingdom. Sure the land grant was mostly mountain, ad was a mere sixteen square kilometers, but that was enough to ‘legitimize’ my country, in some ways. Enough that I could join the Alliance as a full member state. Sure, Risen Athelia’s economy was the smallest out of the Alliance, but my military was strong, and everyone knew it.

In Europe, NATO fell apart, mostly due to the new president in the US having campaigned on ‘America First’ and other such nonsense. They went isolationist while Europe was moving closer together, with the result being that the EU became a military alliance as well as an economic one. America was shredding its place in the global balance of power in real time, but there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.

Well, that wasn’t quite true. There were things that people could do to try and change course, but the people who valued the rule of law weren’t the types to proactively go taking ‘second amendment solutions’ to problems, while the ones who were more gun-happy tended to already be in the cult of personality surrounding the idiot. So, no one with the needed skills and equipment was willing to be the one to poke their neck out.

The US position wasn’t helped by the changing economy. As transporting bulk goods across oceans became more and more difficult, manufacturers and resource suppliers in the EAA turned their focus inwards. Without the supply of cheaper foreign goods propping up the decaying mess of their economy, the US began to head for a recession, that many believed would become a depression. They no longer had the manufacturing or infrastructure to handle the demand, leading to supply problems and inflation, while the economic downturn saw companies going broke or issuing massive layoffs.

Of course, it wasn’t like other countries didn’t have troubles, thanks to the new reality. Areas that had imported most of their food were especially hard hit. Countries that had imported over eighty percent of their food were now facing massive famines. And countries that relied on exporting oil for their lavish lifestyle quickly found that oil didn’t do you any good if you couldn’t get it to market.

The oil problem was one of the first things I’d needed to work on, when Risen Athelia joined the EAA. Most civilian vehicles in the region were hybrid gas-magic vehicles, like the seaplane I’d purchased when flying about to deal with the seals, but military craft and many industrial plants still used oil products as fuel. Working with Phantomline and Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, the largest car company in China, we developed the pure mana engine. The prototypes were only about as fast as a horse, but had substantial power behind them. Life would be slower using the mana-cars, as some called them, but the transportation industry would be self-sufficient.

Scientists in Imperial China had already been working on a ‘magic power plant’, but, once I sent some experts to liase with them, they were able to get enchantments put together that let ambient mana power entire buildings. That, combined with ‘mana wells’, which tapped into the local ley lines much like a normal well did for water, meant that, by the end of the decade, the EAA would be able to reduce our dependence on oil and other imports.

And Risen Athelia was at the center of it all. I didn’t have to push too hard to convince people that ‘black boxing’ the different enchantments and goodies on our power supplies and other advancements was necessary. People in East Asia had a long memory, and they knew well how colonialism worked. Keeping anyone outside ‘the club’ from profiting was simply a good way to protect ourselves.

Despite that colonial history, the EU and EAA were fast becoming trade giants as they began working together, at least with developing new ideas and methodologies. Physical trade was difficult, since there were a lot of countries you had to go through by land, the seas were dangerous, and there was only so much you could carry by air. However, the internet and satellites still existed, which allowed people to keep in contact.

But, where there are winners, there are losers. The two biggest losers in the new world were America and Russia. And the former and fading superpowers didn’t like people doing well without them. I expected that, sometime soon, someone was going to do something stupid, which would require me to get involved.