Wind Chimes

[Codename] Wind Chimes

[Gender] Female

[Combat Experience] None

[Place of Birth] Yan

[Date of Birth] Apr 7

[Race] Forte

[Height] 175cm

[Infection Status]

[Infection Status] Confirmed Infected by medical examination.

[Physical Strength] Standard

[Mobility] Standard

[Physical Resilience] Excellent

[Tactical Acumen] Normal

[Combat Skill] Standard

[Originium Arts Assimilation] Standard

Wind Chimes, a Messenger who travels around northwestern Yan, allowing remote villages to communicate with each other. She came to Rhodes Island for Oripathy treatment and now works part-time as a Messenger for Rhodes Island.

Imaging tests show the indistinct outlines of internal organs, obscured by abnormal shadows. Originium granules detected in the circulatory system. The subject is confirmed to be infected with Oripathy.

[Cell-Originium Assimilation] 7%

Crystal distribution clearly visible on the abdomen.

[Blood Originium-Crystal Density] 0.19u/L

Considering the location of the Oripathy lesions, the patient should refrain from heavy lifting or work that requires the use of her core muscles.

—Sussurro

Yeah, no way that's happening.

—Wind Chimes

A Messenger from a mountain village in the northwestern region of Yan. Travel-worn, but still friendly to everyone she meets.

The northwestern region is full of mountains with villages big and small sparsely scattered all over, unable to communicate effectively with each other unlike the villages in Jiangnan with their waterways. Even land transportation is extremely inconvenient, and Wind Chimes was born in one of those villages.

With her good grades, the steadfast Wind Chimes was admitted to a school in a nomadic city. However, after studying for a few years she gave up her chance of further education and returned to her hometown to work as the village's Messenger.

Young and strong, she trekked the mountain paths to figure out a way to make travelling between the nearby villages easier. On top of that, she also tried to open an agricultural trade route between the villages and nomadic cities, but it did not work out.

She had been recounting her experience in her usual frank manner up till this point where she fell silent. We assumed that high logistics costs were the main reason she had failed to achieve her goal, but that was just the most direct, yet least important reason for her plans going awry.

'I promised the official in charge of commerce and trade that a village representative would come to the city for discussion. Then I excitedly returned to the village, but was greeted with the sight of several factory recruitment notices and a whole stack of signed recruitment contracts at the village headman's place. I looked at the signatures and they were all dated within a few days of my departure.'

As a child, Wind Chimes was fond of the Messengers coming to and from the village, and even learned to read from the words on the envelopes. To her, it was the letters, or more precisely, the greetings, news, and emotions in them that connected those who had traveled far from their villages to their homes.

With such experiences and a steadfast and kindhearted personality, her setback only set her sights on a much broader and rugged place—she tried to become the regional Messenger of the entire mountainous region around her hometown.

After a testing period, she quickly attained the position in an official capacity, and held a year-long record of zero missed deliveries until it was broken by a pack of hungry tuskbeasts.

After returning to the city, Wind Chimes asked her colleagues for advice on how to avoid the beasts. However, before she could break her own record again, another incident happened.

She ran into a group of bandits.

'I was blindfolded, and yelling at them till my voice was hoarse to leave the letters alone. The goods could be replaced, but if the letters were destroyed, the words within could never be replaced.

'No, the bandit chief didn't laugh like the ones you see on television. He even told me somewhat sincerely that it was not possible. He didn't kill the official, but didn't leave the officers even a scrap of information, because in his line of work, he could easily lose his head from a little carelessness.'

'I heard the sound of paper going up in flames, and I knew right then that it was time for me to buy a sword.'

Since then, her colleagues would occasionally see fresh wounds on her, but the goods and letters she carried were never lost again.

In order to ensure the safety and communication between the nomadic cities in Yan, maintenance and construction work on Chidao both old and new is a never ending project, from which countless business opportunities and life-changing chances emerge. For those especially who do not live in a nomadic city, the compensation for helping out with the Chidao is often enough to make a considerable leap in their standard of living. Though after such a change, there comes the question on how to maintain the new status quo.

Most settled communities often want long-term contracts with the Chidao maintenance agency, but such opportunities are rare.

For the more proactive people, getting a glimpse of the Chidao and the fragments of the nomadic cities they bring renders them unable to hold back their aspirations. Many young people and even those older follow the Chidao on their journey to the nomadic cities. An entire village moving to a city like in Wind Chime's case is certainly a bit extreme, but it is by no means unheard of.

Wind Chimes gets dejected at the sight of one deserted village after another, but she also understands that those people have the right to pursue a better life.

What she could do, then, was to send back wanders's money and letters together to their parents, and then deliver their words as well as letters from others with huge bags of dried meat back to the city.

An old man was calculating his money under the light of an oil lamp, pondering over what farming equipment to purchase, what crops to grow, if he should use an entire barrel of soy sauce to pickle meat, and eventually decided to use a majority of the funds to rear some livestock; a young person was lying in bed exhausted, watching a beautiful life depicted on the television screen, subconsciously going through an entire packet of dried meat while talking to themselves with a few hints of their rusty native tongue.

At that moment, Wind Chimes was out in the wilderness travelling between cities. The twin moons shone overhead, the mountains stretched in all directions, and the night breeze blew through the thin clothing she had chosen to keep her journey lighter.

There is a Moushan Village in the area that Wind Chimes works. When she was there to deliver a huge sum of money, the village was in chaos. However, the uproar did not concern her much and she quickly moved on after dropping off the money, for there were many more deliveries to make.

Only later did she learn that there was a cruel connection between the teenager she had parted on bad terms with and the baffling commotion in the village.

She spent an entire day watching the footage in the young man's camera: the scenery, the monologue, the interview, the little stunt of pretending the camera was off while leaving the microphone on, and the 'apology letter.'

After that, Wind Chimes started bringing the camera everywhere.

At first, her experience was limited to filming deliveries. She is not a film enthusiast, so it was not surprising for her to assume the camera was broken because the lens cap was not on. But still, she persevered with the same tenacity she traversed the mountains with, and went from filming goods, to people, and then the roads she traveled, and the memory card soon ran out of space.

The more videos she shot, the more she regretted her actions back then. Naivety is not arrogance, but willful ignorance is.

However, when she was asked if she wanted to sell the rights of her footage to companies, she merely laughed at the thought.

She knew that her work was shining a spotlight on the daily isolation and poverty of the villages, as well as the foundations of her nostalgia. She would not cut herself any slack, but did not want to publicize it either. These images were ruthless, but also extremely valuable to her.

As for that disturbance, none of the Rhodes Island operators involved in the incident have spoken much about it. We only found out her opinion on the matter when Wind Chimes talked about it in a conversation with others.

'I remember it all, I'll never forget it. But that person's death... was purely an accident.'

'If I didn't deliver the money, what else could they have done?'

'I can't think of anything else.'

When Wind Chimes first started working the camera, the file names were way too long. For the sake of brevity, we have helped to rename her files stored on Rhodes Island in a numerical fashion with her original file names in the videos' metadata.

0007: The 'tractor' put together by two mischievous people in Moushan Village. I'm a little afraid they'll actually try to drive that thing on the mountain roads, it's too dangerous.

0008: There was a small flower on the side of the mountain path. I wanted to film the flower blooming just like I'd seen in another video, but it took too long. I held the camera up till my arms ached and it didn't even change a bit.

0009: A fowlbeast suddenly leapt over my head. I didn't get it on video, but managed to record its cry. It's a nice sound.

0010: I went to have a second look, and the flower had already withered... so fast?

0011: Someone walking on the mountain road. Had a few words with him. He said he was heading to town to procure some farming equipment for his village, like a planter or weeder or something else he didn't know the name of. We debated over the name for half a day and still didn't manage to figure it out.

0012: Road

[Classified Log]

'I'm sorry, Wind Chimes, you're not here right now, but the name of this video is really different than the usual, so I really can't help but be curious... Besides, back then when I asked you about it, you just said 'it's all scenery, but you can look if you really want to', right?'

'What the... it's just a barren forest? But why does she keep her camera's focus on the traces of that campsite?'