Autumn crawled by unnoticed, and here it is—winter again.

  A new regime settled over the farm: "waiting for mail" mode. The moment a message arrived, Aya and Alastor would drop whatever they were doing—whether milking cows or fixing the roof—and rush to the sphere like a whirlwind.

  — Ungrateful children! — Alastor grumbled. — Is it so hard for them to write every day? Only one message a week! We're sitting here worrying, and they're probably out there getting into trouble!

  I watched this from the corner, sipping hot milk. Tizor had also been put to work—he was sent to a normal school in town. The house emptied out, and the silence inside took on a sort of... businesslike quality.

  I hadn't been wasting time, though. The other day, a highly curious little item fell into my hands. Granted, to get it, I had to carefully knock out a passing guard who was bragging a bit too much about his gear.

  He called it a "musket."

  I turned the heavy iron stick with a wooden stock over in my hands. My compliments to the technology. No spells, no complex mana. Just gunpowder. You pour in the gray powder, drop in a round lead bullet, a spark...

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  BANG!

  The explosive force pushes a chunk of iron out at a speed the eye can't even register. Magnificent. Physics turned into an instrument of destruction. It seems this world has finally started groping its way toward a kind of progress that doesn't depend on the size of a mana pool.

  While I tinkered with mechanisms, my demonic "relatives" went fully into business. Apparently, Aya and Alastor got too bored within these four walls, and they decided to take over the local market.

  The first thing they did was buy out Gorston's farm. The guy seemed more than happy to get as far away from his neighbors as possible. Alastor hired a whole horde of local peasants, and work began to boil. They opened a full-fledged dairy production. Cottage cheese, sour cream, kefir... But the pinnacle of their creation was cheese. Aya crafted it using some transcendent recipes, putting an insane amount of concentration into the process.

  Alastor, ignoring the blizzards and frost, set about building a second mill. Right in the middle of winter. With his four arms and immunity to cold, he worked like a wound-up automaton.

  Lucia and I remained the only islands of calm in this agro-industrial madness. We just sat, watched the falling snow through the window, and played the observers.

  — Look, Zen, — Lucia nodded toward the yard, where Alastor was single-handedly dragging a massive log. — Your monsters are completely domesticated. The Demon of Poverty is building factories, the Demon of War is making cheese... The world has gone mad.

  — The world just found itself a new rut, — I replied, stripping the bolt of the musket. — And honestly, I like the smell of fresh cheese a lot more than the smell of burning flesh.