Be kind ya'll🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸

and then, he gets his new outfit from settling in at the mansion.

the chapter serves as rin’s rough introduction to being a person and shows little quirks about how he’s been living (his diet, his routine, his relationship to the locals, etc.).

chapter 18 (edmond): soooo the knights and nobles no longer trust the grand sorcerer because of all the recent catastrophes. edmond is hard at work directing all the troops into relief efforts while also enduring the comments of his family (excluding his mom) about the common rabble taking valuable aid from those who deserve it (aka nobles).

in order to repair the reputation of the grand sorcerer (and make things hopefully a little easier on edmond), eiden volunteers to help him (and ends up being a secretary, helping him organize and schedule things and also advocate for himself + rest). some of the snootier knights get upstaged by eiden because he’s willing to get down and dirty with ‘lowlier’ activities like cleaning up rubble.

the chapter serves to show edmond that him binding himself to eiden (and standing by that connection, even when the king questions) was not a one-way street. eiden is there for edmond too and he’ll do his best to help, even when it gets rough. also, i think it would be cool if the captain got a formal introduction here.

chapter 19 (yakumo): the chapter picks up with eiden helping yakumo. theyre doing a little work to help fix up damage done to his village during the catastrophes, but clean up efforts are mostly done.

during their clean up, animals keep approaching yakumo, disney princess style. it turns out, it’s a lot of sentient animals (think topper or father) who have come to yakumo for help in the forest. they’re seeking the great serpent’s aid because the wood territory is in such dire straits.

even though he’s reluctant to go, eiden encourages him, but still gives him space to back out. yakumo ends up going to the wood territory and like. yikes, it’s bad. all mass animal and plant deaths really did a number.

yakumo and eiden manage to find a small shrine. with some effort and his farmboy + medical magic knowledge, yakumo is able to alleviate the struggles of the wood territory ecosystem. also, he gets a little snakey while accessing his epic knowledge.

his ssr is him being extra snaky…

the chapter makes him a little more comfortable with his yokai heritage. i think it would be fun if there was an old yokai who tells yakumo a hint about the great serpent actually being a softie and giving him a new perspective on his ancestor.

chapter 20 (olivine): you would think kuya or quincy, but neither are around during yakumo and eiden’s wood territory exploration… very ominous.

olivine is experiencing… a lot of stress. very serenely. surprisingly serenely. people keep shouting at him, people come up to him on the streets. even though the flood repairs are swiftly underway, everyone is looking for a bit of security and hope.

eiden comes over with a shipment of aid supplies and offers to help. but, olivine refuses.

as it happens, there are a lot of upper level clergy in the water temple and the atmosphere is tense to say the least. everything has to be up to code and proper. if eiden helped or was seen helping… well, it might do more harm than good, especially with so many doubts surrounding the grand sorcerer.

the chapter teaches us more about the stresses and responsibilities olivine faces.

i think for the conflict: there’s been donations missing. the amount has slowly been increasing. accusations are immediately cast at the common people, but olivine is extremely familiar with basically all the people he has helped. he considers it part of his duty in providing honest hope and being a pillar in the community.

and it turns out, after some sleuthing by eiden and olivine, one of the stricter members of the clergy was responsible for stealing the donations.

olivine then has a speech about what it truly means to serve the people and extole the word of Klein. (which, uh, eiden has feelings about after his little revelation with huey. this probably comes up in their intimacy rooms.)

chapter 21 (rei): woah! it’s rei! he’s been around the light territory and its weird (but not unwelcome) that he’s been in the mansion so often.

it turns out he’s researching something about his condition and the key lies somewhere within the king’s castle. eiden is like ‘woah! maybe aster can help?’ and rei is like ‘lmao. not with this’.

anyways, it leads to eiden helping rei as a ‘distraction’ while rei pokes around the castle. lots of using princess passageways and catching glimpses of the royal family’s portraits.

in the end, it results in rei being intercepted by the king himself in his childhood library and uhh. feelings. rei gets what he wants free of charge. eiden feels bad for being there.

the king, not actually being an old fool, speaks indirectly to eiden about not being able to support him but not supporting his detractors either. then the king leaves.

the chapter sheds some insight on rei’s background, but i can’t go too in-depth because, even tho he’s in my top three, im not super familiar with all his content.

chapter 22 (kuya): the wood territory is still in a bad state. eiden accompanies olivine with shipments to the wood territory on occasion. 

the woods are misty and like. im imagining someone from the tribe being like ‘it’s old knowledge that when the woods are misty, trouble is brewing’ or something like that. (it’s something quincy vagueposted about kuya a while ago.)

also, there’s been a monster depositing injured bodies in the town. whats that about.

similar to kuya’s original intro, eiden hears a voice summoning from the mist. he follows, calling tentatively for kuya.

he gets pretty deep before a shadow catches him and calls him ‘a delectably foolish young master’. then, he falls unconscious.

he wakes up in a room he recognizes to be from the big yokai house from mystic banquet and he’s all tied up.

basically, kuya tries to atticwife him because he might as well keep eiden if everything is going to end like this. (he is coping well with the loss of huey and the mass withering of the wood territory.)

eiden gets flashbacks to being with blade but this actually seems more dangerous. just as eiden makes a breakthrough with kuya about taking solace and making peace with the constant movement of time, yakumo, garu, and olivine break in. kuya laughs and acquiesces. 

chapter 23 (quincy): the crew (yakumo, garu, olivine, kuya, and eiden) chill out for a bit. eiden asks if kuya’s seen quincy. and kuya’s like ‘lol no. everything’s been falling apart. maybe he finally ran away for good from this troublesome place’. and eiden’s like 🤨 hmmmm…

tl;dr, after a bunch of sleuthing, quincy starts turning up as a cryptid. odd scraps of fabric, a silhouette in the distance.

it turns out, quincy is in crazy search and rescue mode. and he’s been doing it for a while. it’s him, he’s the monster. and he’s really hard to catch!!!

topper ends up helping them.

they finally get him when he’s pummeling some poachers. and kuya’s like ‘oh my, what a brute’ while everyone else is like ‘quincy, you’re gonna kill them!’

it turns out quincy has been working himself to the bone for the forest. he hardly wants to stop working. he’s all haggard and scratched up. apparently, an old mentor of his is struggling as well.

it turns out to be an old tree spirit, dying due to the flux of things in the forest. (riffing off the guymentioned in distant promise (iirc) as like a one off line. it helped quincy adapt to functional immortality as a immortal-ish being itself). quincy has been helping making preparations for it, more than it asked for really. once it dies, hopefully it will provide energy to replenish the forest. even if it doesn’t, it reminds that its end, and even the forest’s end, is hardly the end of everything. 

once it passes, they all stand next to the tree as little sprouts erupt from the ground.

later, eiden tries to get quincy to come back with them to the tribe and quincy, for right then, is like ‘no. i belong out here for now. protecting them from the end.’. and kuya’s like ‘haha, how self-sacrificial. im sure they appreciate it.’

and olivine and co. provide some helpful rebuttal about all the people he’s saved. and yakumo providing some stuff about monsters not necessarily being monstrous…

mostly this chapter would be self-indulgent to me (cryptid quincyyyy) and tie up that one line. 

chapter 24 (garu): ok. this is a bit of a hard cut, but like. interest is rising in the grand sorcerer because of all his visible activities, the recent catastrophes, and his growing reputation (good and bad). with that interest has come interest in his clan members and people with essence.

garu + karu are able to sniff out some odd people in their midst and reveal a plot about people wanting to harvest the power of the grand sorcerer and his clan members.

karu and rei do a bunch of sleuthing together too. heheh.

with this interest has come a interesting in vintage foreign technology…

this chapter would be to present a new plot to follow and intrigue while also following up on garu + karu’s revelations in the earlier chapters. backstory investigation… and rei and garu + karu working together….

chapter 25 (dante): dante has gone missing and eiden only knows because gyro, his butler, has alerted him directly to prevent others from taking advantage. everyone else is only speculating about his disappearance.

garu (helping with clan members being targeted), rei (familiar with black market rumors), blade (came on aster’s recommendation), and eiden head off to investigate. they find a bunch of conspiracy stuff. after a bit, they find him captive, fighting off assailants trying to do some funky essence experiment with him. the assailants are shortly dispatched.

dante is worse for wear. upon investigating the notes and instruments left by the assailants, it seems like theyre trying to do some funky magic with saian tech, which blade and rei recognize. dante also provides insight on what they were trying to do with his scholarly knowhow. nerd session.

they get back to solaria, which is doing pretty well. besides the capital, it got hit relatively less in the catastrophes. they reconvene on everything

this chapter is because i want whump. and also i want meaty exposition on essence flows… it doesnt have a lot of punch bc dante being missing is a one chapter thing but uhhh. just insert foreshadowing in the other chapters.

chapter 26 (blade): uh. so. people Want blade. old records of what blade is have resurfaced and he is… pretty recognizable.

after blade being recognized many times and being ultimately unable to hide him, a collection of Klein nobles, on behalf of Saia, are attempting to requisition blade from eiden. which like… hey. no.

blade is pretty uncomfortable with the whole situation because he doesn’t want to go back to being what he was and he wants to stay with eiden.

edmond is helping them navigate everything.

this chapter explores both blade’s past and his sense of identity in the present. i think other people ‘recognizing’ him as inhuman would be something interesting to see.

so huey signs a contract with someone and they each have to fulfill it. simple enough. in return for fulfilling the contract, huey gives them a fraction of his essence (which culminates in a gemstone on their body) and they go on a roadtrip to fix the altars every once in a while

each original clan member signed their contract for a reason. we have pretty good guesses for some of them quincy: to protect the tribe/tribe’s land (pretty much confirmed as of razor’s edge) olivine’s ancestor: to assist(?) the church dante’s ancestor: to protect the solaria yakumo’s ancestor: to protect his loved ones (see: misty vale) what happens when someone doesn’t fulfill their contract? based on rei’s flashback in ch. 12, i’m guessing that the body part their gemstone is connected to + their essence begins to go haywire. rei mentions he ‘never chose to enter any damn contract’ while his gem huey also mentions that rei must learn to ‘harness the power’ he was given. it seems like part of that ‘harnessing’ is using huey’s power in service to the original contract.

rei, it seems, was not doing that. this is in contrast to someone like quincy who spends a great deal of time protecting and aiding the forest tribe and, likewise, possesses an incredible amount of power.

i think olivine is in a similar position (though he doesn’t know it). he’s got a lot of control and power and, unlike yakumo and edmond, his gem wasn’t cloudy when eiden met him (although, his sr also covers his gem with a decorative gem so?) (at any rate, iirc, eiden doesn't notice anything wrong with his gem). (EDIT: i have been informed that eiden does comment on olivine's gem in his h-story room when he sees his real gem and he says it’s clear (healthy gem = good essence health). OLIVINE WIN.) olivine's ancestor (likely) asked for power to care for/protect the church and olivine has been doing that (monster semen not withstanding. we’ll get to that.📌) + regulating with the altar. the more a clan member ‘fulfills the purpose of their contract’, the more power they reap from it. it’s hard to say this definitively because some of the original contracts are very ambiguous.

this puts quincy + olivine + kuya(?) in the upper tiers edmond + yakumo + g/karu(?) are in mid tier

the familiars + blade are N/A (never signed a contract)

and then bottom tier are rei and dante. who also happen to be the only main clan members who have been conspicuously sick as part of their character rei, we know spent an ample amount of time doing something outside of klein (i.e. not fulfilling his ancestor’s contract). so, we know where his dysregulation came from and it likely didn’t occur while he was a kid based on the few childhood flashbacks we get from him. his problem was mostly getting megabullied 😔✊ but what about dante? how did he fail his contract as infant, straight from the womb??? (assuming that was the cause of his sickness)

well. when he was born, solaria wasn’t doing very well. and, honestly, his parents weren’t doing a great job running the show. it also probably didn’t help that he was stopped from doing anything that could help solaria since he was isolated to palace grounds.

that is until the night of the riot when he ran and sought out the elemental spirit of fire's trial.

we don’t know exactly when dante ‘stopped being sick’ but i’d hazard a guess that it was after his trial with the elemental spirit of fire. the essence + power he gained from the contract with the elemental spirit of fire (i.e. his agreement to protect the fire territory) stabilized his essence and thus, his health. his newfound health (plus a lot of training) gave him the strength to improve solaria and become what he is today. (as an aside, similar to how kuya provides a lot of insight on huey, dante provides a lot of insight on contracts and communication with the elemental spirits. his contract is directly compared to the contract scrolls used by huey (by blade in chapter 10 part 1). in that chapter we learn that failure to fulfill his contract will result in his death. otherwise, we see that he gains power and favor from the spirits.)

even though solaria has improved a lot, i think dante's essence from huey might be permanently effected given that in sunburst fever, he can’t use magic w/o the elemental spirits. in general, he seems to struggle with outputting essence compared to other clan members.

tl;dr: huey’s contracts make you more powerful if you do what you said you’d do (or your ancestor said that they’d do) and, if you don’t, wuh oh… 📌 so olivine and the monster semen. yes, he did try to sabotage the church, so why didn’t he face some kind of huge consequence for breaking the contract? well… he also protected the church and, despite trying to harm it, he did his best to maintain it. so, what might seem like a huge breach of contract, is actually alright. the church didn’t face any major harm and it was protected. bada-bing-badaboom also, a possible question might be ‘so what about the mid-tier guys?’. so, yakumo and edmond don’t appear(?) to be actively fulfilling their contracts (though yakumo is well on his way).