Chapter 6
Chapter 6
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: Vine
Chapter: 6
Chapter Title: The Weight of Life
-----------------------------------------------------------------
By that time, eight-year-old Dale had three masters.
Sephia, an elder of the Blue Magic Tower, who taught him water-attribute magic. The Master of the Black Magic Tower, his father the Black Prince, who taught him shadow-attribute magic. And finally…
Hot breath plumed in the biting, frosty air of dawn.
*Swoosh!*
Dale swung a wooden sword in the spacious training ground prepared for the ducal knights. Parrying the blow was Lord Helmut Blackbear, leader of the Night Raven Knights, who served Duke Sachsen directly.
The moment Dale’s sword swung, Lord Helmut moved to parry it with an effortless application of strength.
Just then.
Dale’s sword, instead of meeting Lord Helmut’s head-on, coiled around it like a snake, deflecting it off-center. The art of the soft overcoming the hard.
*‘Hoh!’*
But he was one of the seven greatest knights on the continent; he wouldn’t fall for such a simple trap. Not that he needed to use his full strength, either.
Lord Helmut pretended to fall for Dale’s feint and let go of his sword.
“Haha, Young Lord! That was quite impressive!”
He watched his own wooden sword spin through the air and laughed heartily, throwing up his hands.
“Oh, come on. You let me do that on purpose.”
Lord Helmut caught his breath for a second at Dale’s words.
“…It is truly a pity that the Young Lord is destined for the path of magic.”
With his wife Elena’s consent, the Black Prince had officially taken Dale on as his disciple just a short while ago. Dale was, after all, the son of the Master of the Black Magic Tower before he was the eldest son of the ducal house. It was a foregone conclusion that Dale would walk the path of black magic under his father’s tutelage.
But in the eyes of Helmut, one of the Seven Swords of the Continent, Dale's talent for the sword was anything but ordinary.
The same overwhelming talent he had felt when he once crossed swords with the strongest knight of a bygone era, the Divine Sword, Lord Badel. A fragment of that very talent could be felt at the tip of this eight-year-old boy’s blade.
The Divine Sword, Lord Badel, who had long ago been struck down by the ‘Hero’… this was a raw gem that might rival his talent.
But what good was regret? The boy already had the continent's greatest mage at his side, helping his commensurate magical talent to blossom.
*‘Why did the heavens grant such conflicting talents to a single body?’*
He was teaching the boy swordsmanship in the hopes that he wouldn't neglect his physical training even if he became a mage, but a mage could not utilize the aura in their energy center.
Just as mages circulated mana around the circles in their hearts to process it into ‘magical power,’ skilled knights accumulated mana in their energy center to wield it as a form of power called ‘aura.’
Though sword and magic drew from the same source, the bodily organs used to harness that power were separate.
Helmut’s regret every time he taught Dale was beyond words.
But a feeling stronger than regret drove Lord Helmut’s passion: pride. Most mages were far removed from physical exertion. On the battlefield, they were always accompanied by a considerable number of knightly escorts, supplementing their physical shortcomings with outside help.
So was there any need to take up a sword and endure such physical hardship?
Even for Dale, it would be an excessively harsh education for an eight-year-old. But Dale’s way of thinking was different.
‘I don't want to rely on escorts or defensive magic and neglect my physical training.’
The logic itself wasn't hard for even a child to grasp.
Yet, it was a truth that even veteran mages, who had weathered decades on the battlefield, found difficult to truly appreciate. Indeed, the majority of mages Lord Helmut had slain on the battlefield were those who had fallen into such complacency.
A single clash.
Whether or not a mage could block that one exchange determined their survival once they had let a knight get too close. And Dale understood this fact more clearly than anyone.
An eight-year-old boy who had likely never even seen a battlefield!
Swordsmanship was, in the end, the art of killing. And in the eyes of Lord Helmut, who had spent his entire life honing the ‘art of killing,’ Dale’s combat sense was a gift from the heavens.
That was why it ignited Helmut’s passion as a teacher all the more.
Even if he did not walk the path of the sword, young Dale was the ‘radiant gem’ Helmut had been searching for.
* * *
That afternoon.
In the expansive underground cavern beneath Duke Sachsen’s castle, an entire space existed as a grand workshop for a single mage.
The Black Prince’s magical workshop.
It was there that Dale was engrossed in new training with his father.
However, they didn't immediately start reanimating the dead or moving corpses. In fact, when Dale told him he had already learned such basic necromancy, the continent’s greatest necromancer had inwardly clicked his tongue.
*‘You mean to say you revived a subject without even understanding what you were moving?’*
For Dale, who had secretly expected praise, it was a surprising reaction. The first things the Black Prince handed him after that were books of staggering thickness.
Medical texts detailing the anatomy of humans and various creatures, the mechanics of bones, organs, and muscles. Knowledge of a professional caliber that one would rarely encounter unless they were a 21st-century surgeon.
Only after Dale had devoured those books to the point of memorization did the Black Prince finally begin to teach him practical magic.
In his workshop, the Black Prince placed the mummified corpse of a goblin on an altar.
“Let’s begin by raising an Undead Soldier.”
An Undead Soldier. The reason for calling it a soldier and not simply an undead was because this magic went beyond merely raising a corpse.
Just as elemental magic could be given unique properties through formulas, necromancy could also modify the form of reanimation according to the caster’s will.
Among these, the art of raising a corpse specialized for combat. An unskilled black mage could only raise an ordinary zombie even with the body of a Sword Master, but a high-level black mage could raise a Death Knight from the corpse of a common foot soldier.
Dale focused his consciousness, concentrating on inscribing the necessary formulas.
Recalling the knowledge from the anatomy books he had studied, he wove threads of mana throughout the goblin’s body.
Necromancy was not, as commonly thought, about truly bringing the dead back to life. If one had to use an analogy, it was closer to the art of a puppeteer controlling a marionette.
And the formula Dale was inscribing into the goblin’s corpse with those threads of mana was—
Hardening. The induration of the outer skin by accelerating rigor mortis.
The goblin’s corpse staggered to its feet with movements that were, at a glance, unnaturally stiff.
*‘This is different from moving the rabbit.’*
The body of a bipedal goblin was difficult to manipulate without understanding the principles inherent within it. Moreover, necromancy was a purely unknown discipline to him, one in which his past self had not the slightest expertise.
That was precisely what made Dale’s heart pound with excitement.
“Accelerating rigor mortis to strengthen the goblin’s hide was a good idea.”
The Black Prince watched and smiled with satisfaction. The unmistakable smile of a father. But it was only for a moment.
The smile was soon replaced by the cold composure befitting the continent’s greatest black mage.
“However, cadaveric spasm—in other words, the contraction of muscles—has the side effect of unnecessarily restricting the corpse’s movement.”
“Are you saying there’s a better way?”
In response to Dale’s question, the Black Prince silently snapped his fingers.
*‘…!’*
In that instant, an utterly ominous dark power shot through the room. The hardening formula Dale had added was dispelled, and the muscles rapidly relaxed.
*Crack!* There was a sound of something twisting.
“The ribs are an organ meant to protect the innards.”
It was the sound of the bones inside the body contorting.
“But the dead have no need to protect their innards.”
The Black Prince continued.
“—So, how will you use bones that are no longer needed?”
It was the answer from the continent’s greatest black mage to Dale’s question.
*Crack!*
No sooner were the words spoken than the goblin’s abdomen twisted, and ‘bone blades’ sprouted from its hands. White blades with a deadly, gleaming edge. Just seconds ago, they had been part of the rib cage that protected the goblin’s organs.
“Understand the subject’s structure, and reconstruct it to suit your purpose.”
He had instantly turned part of the rib cage into a weapon. As he said, the dead had no reason to protect their innards.
The Black Prince snapped his fingers again.
*Crack!*
Once more, the goblin’s bones and muscles twisted at bizarre angles, like a joint-cracking monster from a horror film. But Dale could intuitively grasp the form of this contortion.
*‘He’s eliminating all elements necessary for survival, reconstructing it into a body purely for combat.’*
The Undead Soldier goblin, born at the hands of the Black Prince. Sharp bone blades protruded from all over its body, serving as both armor to protect it and sharp weapons to tear its enemies apart.
This was beyond mere reanimation. Not a trace of its living form remained.
A perfect modification.
It was, in a word, a rebirth.
A monster with a combat strength not just several times, but dozens of times greater than when it was alive.
“Do you know the principle that the Black Magic Tower pursues?”
Just then, the Black Prince spoke.
Dale didn't answer, simply shaking his head. It wasn't that he didn't know. Of course, he also needed to pretend he didn't. But the true reason for his silence was different.
It was because he wanted to hear it from his father’s lips.
“—Truth.”
The continent’s greatest black mage answered.
“And truth always resides within death.”
Dale quietly held his breath at the Black Prince’s words. But what followed was completely unexpected.
“That is why you must understand.”
“Understand what?”
“The weight of life required to reach that truth.”
The weight of life.
“…”
Only then did he realize. Black magic, the magic of death that people feared and whispered about, was an act made possible only by first understanding life.
For Dale, who had dedicated everything solely to slaughter, it was an incredible paradox, an irony of the highest order.
For he had spent his entire life staining his hands with blood, never knowing the ‘weight of life.’
Killing, killing, and killing again.
* * *
A few months later.
A woman’s pained screams echoed from the Duke and Duchess’s bedchamber. Dale stood outside the room, anxiously staring out the castle window.
“Young Lord!”
At the sound of an old woman’s voice calling his name, Dale rushed into the bedchamber without delay.
“Dale.”
His father and mother smiled at him calmly. And beside them, a small life.
A whimpering, crying bundle of flesh was wrapped in a swaddling cloth, held preciously in Elena’s arms.
“She’s your little sister. She looks just like you.”
Elena wore the smile of a mother who had just endured the pains of childbirth.
“Would you like to hold her?”
With Elena’s help, Dale carefully took his younger sister into his arms. The weight of a life, felt for the first time. It was as heavy as a thousand pounds, yet as light as a feather.