The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 315: City of Wonders

Chapter 315: City of Wonders

The city Kir and Kordia walked out into was not much different from the one Kir first saw three years ago... that is until one looked to the distance of the outer districts.

Where once a virtual shantytown stood, now there were rows of wide streets, thanks to the massive apartment blocks that dominated the sky, each one ten stories and crowned with gardens that provided free vegetables to their blocks. Their sides were finished in a style Kir knew as Art Nouveau, but which the city had decided to call the "Norneau School." His hope was that Norneau would not lose sight of nature as it expanded.

Kordia was the pioneer of the style once Kir got the core concepts across to her. Because she still had school to attend and wanted a life besides, she’d left the actual creations up to the Creations Guild, and they’d quickly raised up their own artists to copy the style once Lumin and the Mayor weighed in.

The apartments provided much-needed housing, as the Heavenswar raged, and they still weren’t entirely full. But that wouldn’t last as word spread that Norneau was not only surviving, it was thriving.

Between Kiryu and Kir, enough extra additions had been made to make moving in and out far easier than most Earthly apartments had ever been. External utility elevators, fire escape stairwells, and large central stairwells were all features that had been designed into them from the start, allowing Norneau to skip over centuries of trial and error when it came to safety and mobility.

And thanks to the sheer concentration of magical talent and new students in the city, there was no shortage of druids, witches, and mages who could perform the essentials of growing food, healing the injured, and doing the most difficult tasks of construction.

In the case of the latter, however, it made mechanizing society at large difficult. People were more content to wait for mages to do construct all at once than to watch homes and businesses go up piecemeal. It was mostly thanks to Lumin and the Mayor’s desires for the 4th District, and now the 5th, to not-look like a complete slum that Kir had an in for his industrialization plans...

The fruits of those plans rolled past on a cart as he and Kordia made their way from the 2nd District towards the 4th. Norneau was designed in concentric arcs, centered around the Academy, which also maintained the city’s anti-magic shields along with the first three walls. On the cart were bags of finely-woven cloth that even the most talented weavers would struggle to make in quantity, but which his water-operated mills did so with ease.

Well, his design. The mills were the property of the city, and they produced bottom-price cloth for the city’s clothiers to ensure that everyone had adequate clothing. But now there was so much cloth that Norneau had switched from importing to exporting. People also started to innovate with how to use the surplus, and there was now a proliferation of banners, balcony murals, flags, quilts, and kites wherever one looked.

It truly showed that Norneau was putting its money into the promise that ’All shall have their basic needs fulfilled’, as was said in its new charter. The mayor had taken the excuse of finishing the 4th District wall to start a tradition that it would vote on a new charter whenever the city added a new district. With the ravages of the Heavenswar ever present in the minds of all, the new charter was passed with only token resistance from the wealthiest members of Norneau society.

And standing as a reminder of things to come, a single tower dominated the sky in the Fifth District, rising on steel encased in concrete, without a drop of magic before the top, was the city’s glideway tower. It alone had made Norneau into an exporting powerhouse, by using carefully programmed magical flight constructs designed to launch either cargo or passengers up to six thousand meters and dissipate on landing, they could overfly the majority of obstacles to trade with the outside world. Though he did cheat a bit with lifting spells integrated into the anti-turbulence ones, he’d decided to stick mostly to unpowered flight, hence the name "glideway" as a test to see how Heaven would respond. So far, the Emissary seemed to consider it "quaint, but not real flight."

Getting back was still a big problem, but already there was one glideway being built in a place called Mesa Zai, and anticipation of its activation had merchants salivating for goods from the south, especially iron.

"Want to see that new restaurant Moshui was raving about?" Kir asked.

"I’m not sure I could eat that much," Kordia said as they stopped at a bus stop to wait.

As soon as the bus arrived, Kir dropped in coppers for the both of them and made his way to the rooftop seating with Kordia.

Since they were alone there this morning, they took the chance to share a brief kiss through Kir’s illusion.

"I’ll finish for you then." He brushed under her chin with a finger.

Kordia shifted away. "I know you’re feeling all lovey-dovey right now, but I’m still a bit worried..." Before Kir could ask why, she continued. "Letting that assassin go..."

"I didn’t think it was such a big deal-"

"No, you didn’t think. Lapins and I are dating, and you just... let him go..." She shook her head. "Would you do the same if someone were to hurt me? Or Stella? Or Rain?"

Kir flinched. He thought for a long moment before saying, "I’m sorry... I was thinking too much about the big picture and I failed to think about what was right by you..." He brushed a hand through his hair. "If anyone ever hurt you... I’d kill them."

"I didn’t mean you should kill him..." she muttered before her voice returned to normal. "I just meant... you should care a little more about who I care about. Even if she is a princess..."

Kir reached out, offering his hand to her. "I promise I’ll do better," he said.

Kordia put her hand in his. "Thank you..."