The Codex Written in Blood (7)
A middle-aged man sat in the chair — younger than the godfather Yuel remembered, his hair not yet gone white. For a long while he read the diaries the previous lords had left behind.
When he closed the journal, he looked out through the window.
He stood at the sill for a long time, gazing down over the city, then returned to his seat and opened the diary again.
I am not a man suited to the office of lord.
I know myself well enough.
I am the kind of indecisive creature who can hardly ever make a choice — who, even when forced to pick one of two paths, cannot decide and simply follows wherever others lead.
I am neither good enough to become a saint, nor ruthless enough to become a villain or a tyrant. Merely a man caught in the middle.
I am not the sort of talent who belongs in a seat this high, a seat from which one is meant to lead others. I know that perfectly well.
And yet, he wrote on.
Someone had to sit here.
No one worthy of this place has yet appeared in this city. Until that someone arrives, I intend to hold the seat for a while.
In a city drowning in madness, someone must take responsibility for the madness. I may be an inadequate man — but I can at least serve as a scapegoat.
He closed the diary and covered his face with his palms. Hidden behind his hands, he sobbed.
And so time passed. Every day the middle-aged man slipped out of the lord's chambers and wandered the city beyond. He searched every corner as if hunting for someone. At night he returned to the chambers and leafed through mountains of documents.
He was looking for something.
Yuel, reading the diary, already knew what it was — and Najin soon understood as well.
In organizing the records left by the lords before me, I have come to understand something.
The transcendent who cast us into this city desires something — and for the sake of that something, she has been running her experiment over and over.
Yes. Just as the Fourteenth Lord surmised, this is an experiment.
He may not have been suited to lordship, but as a scholar he was exceptional. He collated the materials, analyzed the information laid out across the diaries, and drew his conclusions.
In the case of the First Lord, Torres, there was talk of "indiscriminate disassembly" — yet as the generations advance, such accounts vanish. The conditions were likely altered, and those conditions, I believe, are as follows.
Human madness.
She is making human beings kill human beings.
He had analyzed the conditions Hermann, the Constellation of Omniscience, had laid across this city.
She is turning humans into beasts.
How does one resist this madness?
The Twenty-Sixth Lord is teaching me the answer.
It is the law.
He had seized a means of standing against it.
Humans are social animals. They become beasts when society itself is unstable. And society collapses when the law is not upheld.
Break the law, and you will be punished.
If that truth can be branded into them, they will try, of their own will, to hold their madness in check.
From that day on he studied the foundations of the "bill" left by the Twenty-Sixth Lord, summoned to the lord's castle those who had worked with the law in the world outside, and debated with them day and night.
A month passed. A year. Several years. A decade.
The city continued to rot — but the law, slowly, took shape.
I believe in human goodness.
And that belief has not yet left me.
The lines on the man's face multiplied. Past middle age, his hair began to turn white.
That they became beasts is not because their nature is evil. If the transcendent who made this city claims that human nature is beastly, then I will believe their nature is good.
I once watched an old man, starved for days, give the food he had barely managed to obtain to a small child. I will never forget that sight. They are not beasts. They are people.
And I will make them so.
Time passed. One day, a girl set foot in the lord's castle. She perched beside the old man, grumbling all the while, and began to take his lessons.
I have found her.
She is still only a child — yet I could see that she is more upright than anyone else in this city.
Her eyes do not waver. She knows how to refuse temptation, how to restrain herself, and still understands how to stand above others.
The old man taught the girl. When he taught her he smiled with gentle kindness, treating her as a father treats a daughter — but when she left and he was alone in the room, he would cover his face and groan.
I am going to force something cruel upon this child.
I will surely fall to hell for it.
In hell, one step ahead of her, I will wait for the transcendent who built this city.
He knew what role he would compel the girl to take — and how terrible that role would be.
The law is nearly complete.
The previous lords are helping me.
The characters written in the diary have begun to change. The altered letters are seeping into the codex.
I suspect that only in my generation has this single volume of diaries at last been sublimated into a Star Relic.
A diary that had passed through the hands of countless lords. The countless precepts they had written down.
It is finished.
Letters that flowed like blood soaked into the single volume of law the old man had crafted. And so the codex rose into a Star Relic. The old man understood, all at once, that only one final step remained.
I am sorry, Yuel.
Yuel's breath caught.
You will never read these words.
But if — by some miracle — you should one day read them, then to the you who is reading this, I want to say:
The old man finished his preparations to stain the codex with his own blood.
You were my pride.
The years I spent teaching you were among the few joyful memories I had in this hell of a city.
I do not know if I, who forced this role upon you, have any right to say it — but I hope, with all my heart, that you will win.
The girl came to the lord's chambers. She told him a rebellion was rising outside, that he had to run. The old man looked at her, rose from his seat —
—and pressed a blade into the girl's hand, then used that same blade to put a period at the end of his own life.
Bleeding, the old man's mouth worked soundlessly. Because this was a reconstructed vision, no voice could be heard. But Yuel knew what he had said in that moment.
You are the next lord.
The instant the old man's form scattered, the lord's chambers filled with starlight. The diary in Yuel's hands dissolved into starlight as well and drifted away on the air.
The drifting light took on shape.
"…"
She closed her eyes, then opened them.
Inside the chambers stood a multitude of human figures.
Yuel looked around in silence.
Those who stood there were her predecessors — the lords who had sat in the seat before her and left, who had written entries in the diary for the sake of the ones who would come after.
Visions woven of starlight?
Or their wills, steeped into the starlight itself?
Almost certainly the latter. From among the lords, someone stepped forward. A white-haired old man — Yuel's godfather. In his hands he held a single volume: the Codex. He held it out to her.
"…Ah."
Yuel wiped a hand down her face.
She asked the man standing before her — her godfather, her predecessor — whether she had done well. He did not answer.
He only smiled.
It was a reply more certain than any words. Yuel's eyes trembled; her lips quivered; then she let out a long breath and reached out her hand.
"Honestly. You damn old man."
The last lord of Swaepedosi took hold of the codex.
The moment she grasped it, the visions of the previous lords that had filled the chambers turned to starlight and poured into the book. Their wills became blood and adorned its pages.
Precepts written in blood became the Law.
A diary that had been nothing at all took on starlight through the blood and obsession of countless lords, and that starlight hardened into the form of a codex. The struggle of lords who had wanted to leave something behind had, in the end, given birth to a Star Relic.
A codex stained with blood.
It was also the object that would come to symbolize Yuel herself, once she became a Constellation. She gazed at the book in her hands without speaking. At last she understood how the law she had enforced for so many years had been made — and what the characters that composed that law truly were.
…Starlight, piled and piled again, found its meaning only when it reached the final lord.
Gathered starlight becomes a single star.
Not a Calamity Star — a star of platinum white.
Yuel obtained her seventh star. Or perhaps her first.
The Star of Succession.
Having gained the star, she now understood what she had to do. There are those who put off what needs doing and those who act at once — and Yuel had always been the latter.
Tak.
The last lord of Swaepedosi began to walk.
The moment her foot came down, the city started to collapse. This place was no longer a prison to her.
And Hermann sensed the anomaly.
She felt the change beginning from the bottom of her own domain — something she did not know, something she had not accounted for — and her sanctum began to shudder.
The formless city surged toward them like a wave.
As grinding gears blocked Yuel's path and crashed down upon her, her eyes did not waver in the slightest. There was no need to worry.
"If you're going to put a chessboard on the table, you ought to play chess."
Najin drew his sword.
"You don't just try to kill the piece first. That's against the rules — and it looks like the other side broke them first."
There was nothing left to hold back.
Gripping Excalibur, Najin settled into his stance.
"I'll open the path."
Najin smiled.
"Just like last time."
She walked through the shuddering domain.
Yuel's footprints stamped themselves upon Swaepedosi and remained there as history Hermann could not disassemble. With every step she took, the sanctum trembled harder.
But Najin would not let the convulsing domain fall upon her. As if to say, If you want to stop her steps, try breaking me first, he swung his blade.
Tak.
As she walked, Yuel spoke to herself. It was a monologue that never left her lips — and yet it would, without question, be recorded somewhere.
In the blood-stained codex.
In a book that had been someone's diary long before it became a book of law, Yuel's monologue became letters and was written down.
I felt it was a lonely life.
I fell into this city without knowing why, and when I came to my senses I was sitting in the lord's seat. A codex stained with blood was already in my hands.
She walked forward.
What even is this thing?
Why did that old man leave it to me, why did he choose me, what meaning was there in thrashing about in this city — when I, too, would only rot and fall apart here in the end?
What meaning could any of that resistance possibly have?
I did not know.
She smiled, almost without meaning to.
Then a thought occurred to me. Even if there was no meaning, there was a reason. There was no way in hell I was going to dance to the tune of the bitch who threw me into this city.
So I fought.
To the last possible moment, I moved with a single conviction: that things would not go the way she wanted.
That was how she had lived.
But looking back now —
There was meaning.
There was value, too.
So your lives had value as well. Whatever you left behind — it had meaning.
Yuel saw the visions of the many lords who had passed through the diary. They had become stairs, laying a place for her feet to land. In a collapsing city, she climbed those stairs toward the sky.
Because —
She looked up at the sky.
At the sky of Omniscience, where countless gears meshed and turned.
I am standing here, right now.
Cracks began to run through the gears. Within the Domain of Omniscience, it had been proven that the Constellation of Omniscience was not omniscient after all. It was only a single small gear that had broken — but a sky so precisely engineered would not tolerate even the slightest error.
The sky fell. The Domain of Omniscience collapsed.
A rending scream echoed through the sanctum.
And beyond the crumbling sky, Hermann's true form revealed itself. A sneer curved at the corner of Yuel's mouth as she looked at her.
"With what do humans challenge the heavens?"
With the records they have stacked high.
With the history they have carried forward.
And with an obsession even a transcendent cannot calculate.