Prologue: The Boy Who Struck the Tree
I had spent my entire life lying in a hospital bed.
Lou Gehrig's disease. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, as it was formally known.
An incurable illness that slowly stole away every muscle in my body, until at last it robbed me of even the strength to breathe on my own. That was why I had spent a lifetime in that hospital bed, waiting for nothing but the day I would die.
Then one day, as I waited for that inevitable end, my sister—a web novel author—came to my room carrying a laptop.
"This is the romance fantasy I've been working on. Will you read it for me?"
The Terminally Ill Young Lady Wants to Quietly Recuperate.
The story was simple. A noblewoman diagnosed with a terminal illness regresses to the past and devotes her new life entirely to recuperation in hopes of a full cure—and along the way, she becomes entangled with a parade of male leads.
I read it diligently. Objectively speaking, it wasn't a particularly well-written novel, but she had written it to show to me, so I made a genuine effort to read it that way. When the protagonist was finally cured and the story closed on a happy ending, I nearly shed a few tears.
But the thing I envied most in that novel wasn't the ending—the cured girl smiling in happiness.
What captured my eyes was the power called aura, and the magic, that the characters wielded.
It was the world itself that enchanted me: a world where even the frail, terminally ill young lady could, the moment she wrapped herself in aura and took up a sword, enjoy a physical freedom beyond imagination.
I want to be like that too.
A body of diamond and iron, standing beyond the limits of humanity.
An aura whose sword energy could cleave the very sky.
Strength enough to topple a lumbering giant.
I yearned for those things. Even in the moment when the relentless beeping of my heart monitor finally fell silent and eternal darkness closed over me, a single wish filled my mind.
If only once—just once—I want a body that moves the way I will it to.
Perhaps that yearning crossed dimensions and reached somewhere, because when I opened my eyes again, I had been transmigrated into the novel my sister had written.
When the boy opened his eyes, he was deep in a remote forest.
In time, he came to understand that he was inside a body not his own. His line of sight sat lower than it should have, and the face reflected in the stream was not his face.
Above all, there were the unfamiliar memories drifting through his mind. The moments of a child who had lost his parents and wandered the battlefield for a long while before arriving here lingered like an afterglow.
"Hmm..."
Judging by the backdrop of that battlefield and the memories that surfaced, this was clearly not the real world.
So where was this?
Answering that question was not difficult. Combining the place names and factions left in his memory with all sorts of common knowledge, only one answer emerged.
...So I'm inside the romance fantasy my sister wrote.
The Terminally Ill Young Lady Wants to Quietly Recuperate. The very novel he had read over and over again in his previous life.
But realizing that changed nothing. Neither this forest nor this child had ever been mentioned even once in the novel. The story focused solely on the capital, the nearby territories, and the people surrounding the young lady.
Only the timeline could be roughly guessed. Early in the novel, there was a single passing line in the protagonist's recollection of her past life: the great war that had swept the borderlands had ended roughly ten years before her regression.
And if the battlefield in this child's memories was that same war, then the present moment lay roughly ten years before the novel's beginning.
Even after grasping all this, the boy drifted along the mountain paths with no destination in mind. There was no purpose, no reason behind his steps. The hometown remaining in his memory had long since burned to ash, and everyone he had known had been swallowed whole by the fires of war.
Yet even in that aimless wandering, one longing alone made the boy's heart beat.
I want to become strong.
He had to grasp that absolute power described in the novel with his own two hands. He refused to live again as a body that could do nothing—lying still, merely clinging to breath.
"Say, boy."
A voice called out to him.
"Have you lost your way?"
Lowering his gaze, he saw an old man leaning against the base of an enormous ancient tree.
The boy did not answer. He simply stared, silent, at the old man's legs—or rather, at what remained of them. They had been severed long ago, and where feet should have been, only smooth, bare stumps remained.
"Where are your parents?"
The boy shook his head. A look of desolation crossed the old man's face, and he asked again.
"Then your friends?"
There was no answer but another shake of the head. Only after several more rounds of this meaningless exchange did the old man let out a sigh and ask:
"Is there truly... no one left? Not a single soul?"
Only then could the boy nod.
"Even God is heartless. How could He visit such trials upon this child?"
Muttering to himself for a long while, the old man finally looked at the boy with eyes full of pity. The old man had lived a life and enjoyed many things; the boy had not. It was impossible to fathom what that life had been like, but looking into the boy's hollow eyes gave a glimpse of it.
Then the boy spoke.
"...I saw someone who split a mountain."
"Hmm...?"
The old man tilted his head at the non sequitur.
"Ah—do you mean a Swordmaster?"
The boy nodded.
"To split a mountain, the aura must reach its very limit, until the sword energy it births grows vast enough to swallow a mountain whole. Anyone who could do that would have to be at least a Swordmaster."
At those words, the boy recalled the protagonist of the novel. The scene where a single swing of her sword tore the earth open like paper, and where she lightly deflected the storm of arrows raining down from every direction with nothing but the aura wrapped around her body.
That transcendent sight, which knights could never reach even after a lifetime of devotion, seemed to vividly materialize before his eyes.
"Great beings—one of only seven on the entire continent."
The boy's heart pounded wildly.
"How can I become one?"
"How, you say? Swordmasters aren't some house pet you can pick up for the asking..."
The old man's face soured. He could well understand the boy's rash, boyish longing, but a Swordmaster? The dream was simply absurd.
And yet the boy's eyes did not waver.
Perhaps it was that relentless gaze that stayed with him, for the old man dredged up a memory from long ago.
"...There was one story that went around back when I was adrift on the battlefield. Soldiers at the very bottom of the heap, nobodies—they say some of them drove their bodies half to death in a frenzy, and one day, their aura suddenly bloomed. Nine out of ten of them either ended up crippled or died trying, so I wouldn't put much stock in it."
"And the one who remained?"
"No idea. Whether anything came of it, or he simply went mad and died. It was just one of the nonsensical tales that drifted through the war—no need to take it at face value."
The old man laughed as he said it, but the boy did not laugh.
He had nothing to lose. The boy had no teacher, no money, no other path. Unless he clung to even a scrap of rumor, nothing could begin.
Even if the old man's tale was nonsense, pushing his body to ruin would, in time, at least build him a body capable of swinging a sword properly.
"...If you truly must try, then you should at least be able to smash that old tree over there with your bare fists before we talk."
The old man rapped a knuckle against the great tree behind him. The boy stared at it blankly. By any estimate, its girth would take dozens of people linking arms just to encircle.
"Think you can do it?"
"Only one way to find out."
"Well, at least I have to admire your nerve."
The old man chuckled at that.
"Fine. Go on, then—give it a try."
"..."
"Who knows how long I've got left, but I'll watch for you."
The boy raised both fists before the enormous tree standing right beside him. Judging by its girth, it did not look like something that would be fazed by a child's punches.
He thrust out his fist.
What rang out was less a thud than a pitiful little tok.
...Well, that was only natural.
He raised his fist again.
Tok.
Once more, the bark merely quivered slightly. Of course it did. The tree was far harder than his fist.
The boy looked down at his hand for a moment. A small, soft hand. Skin without a single callus, smooth enough to look positively harmless.
Could this hand break that tree?
Tok.
Tok.
Tok.
Nothing happened. The tree still stood where it had always stood, and he was still weak.
He kept swinging.
Tok.
Tok.
Tok.
Before long, his hand began to sting. A little while longer, and the sensation grew numb. The rough surface had torn his skin open, and before much longer, blood began to flow.
He kept striking the tree until the sun set that day.
Days passed.
"Back again, are you?"
The old man looked grimly at the sight of Sian emerging from the underbrush, haggard-faced—it seemed the boy had been camping nearby. Three days at the most, a week at best. That was what he'd assumed a child's self-restraint would amount to. Even so, the old man had not expected this boy to hold out for so long.
Whatever the old man felt about it, the boy stood before the ancient tree that day as always and raised both fists.
Tok.
Nothing happened, as ever—but it hurt a little less than it had days ago. He swung again.
Tok.
Tok.
Time passed. The backs of his hands cracked open and bled. The wounds scabbed over, only to split again and again.
Still, the boy did not stop. Morning came, and he struck the tree; he swung his fists until the sun went down. Except for the moments he had to venture out to hunt for a single meal, most of the boy's day began and ended with striking the ancient tree.
Am I fated to be party to sin even in my old age?
Watching him, the old man smiled bitterly.
He was no Swordmaster, no knight who had ever bloomed aura—just a man of common soldier stock.
Smash a tree and become a Swordmaster? He had never heard of nor seen such a crude training method, and no child who had not even grasped aura could possibly shatter that tree.
The old man felt guilty toward the boy, but he never voiced it aloud.
If that boy leaves, I'll be a dead man where I sit.
Without his legs, the old man could not leave this place, could not find food. However much of his life remained, he still could not bring himself to be detached in the face of death.
Time flowed on.
Over the turning of one full season, the scar on the tree widened to the size of a palm, and the boy's fists became a map of scars. There was still no sign of anything one could call aura—but at least, more often than not now, a full day of striking the tree ended without bleeding.
Sometimes, lying awake at night and watching the stars through the branches, a thought would cross his mind unbidden.
I've been punching a tree for years... on the strength of a single rumor.
But every time that thought came, a memory followed on its heels: the days in that hospital room, unable to move so much as a finger, unable even to shoo away a single fly that landed on his body.
Compared to then, now was far better. At least now, these hands could do something.
The boy clenched his fists once more.
At some point, the old man's coughing had grown noticeably more frequent.
"Are you all right?"
It was the first time the boy had ever spoken first. The old man gave a faint smile and waved a hand.
"Comes with the age. Don't fret yourself—get back to what you were doing."
The boy stood there a moment, then turned back to the ancient tree.
A few days later, the old man's breathing grew conspicuously shallow.
And the next day.
The old man was slumped against the ancient tree, head bowed. He looked as though he had simply fallen into a deep sleep.
The boy walked over and crouched down in front of him.
No breath came.
The boy knew perfectly well what that meant. Even so, he spent a long while shaking the old man, trying to wake him.
"...Grandfather."
"Grandfather."
No answer came.
The boy sat there for a very long time—until the sun set and rose again.
The next day, the boy began digging into the earth beside the ancient tree. With no shovel, no pickaxe—bare-handed. His nails split, blood welled from his fingertips, but he did not stop.
After laying the old man to rest beneath that earth, the boy stood before the ancient tree once more.
Tok.
The same sound as any other day.
The seasons changed, again and again. The boy grew a little taller, and the bark of the ancient tree peeled away a little at a time—for he struck the same spot every single day. What had begun as a shallow mark grew, with the passage of time, deeper and clearer.
The boy paid it little mind. He simply swung his fist each day as he always had.
Then one day, the punch that had only ever produced a tok let out a heavier, duller sound—a thud.
He looked down at his fist for a moment. The hand that had once been soft and tender was now covered in a web of small scars. He clenched it again, and without a word, extended his arm toward the tree once more.
And so, several more years passed.