A Formula Written in Blood (9)
In the square of Swaepedosi, Yuel's sword rose high toward the sky and caught the starlight. With the blade that had executed countless sinners, Yuel Razian carried out the sentence.
The sinner had been seized.
She knew her crime.
The lord of the city had delivered the verdict.
In this moment, the sinner's station meant nothing. Whether a transcendent with ten stars or a Great Constellation who had lived a thousand years, what mattered was that she had broken the law. That single fact became a binding, and it locked Hermann's body in place.
The law the lords of Swaepedosi had built by sacrificing their lives reduced Hermann to a mere criminal. Yuel's life, spent executing every lawbreaker without exception, had become a blade—and it fell to the executioner to swing it.
The sword of judgment dropped toward the sinner.
Yuel, lord of Swaepedosi, did not know how to wield a sword. She knew nothing of sword aura, nothing of drawing mana, and of course nothing of pouring her Mystery into a blade.
But the executioner Yuel Razian knew.
The woman who had lost her memories had swung a sword for a hundred and fifty years. She had executed countless sinners, and in that process she had reached the realm of Sword Master. Sword aura, mana, the art of lodging Mystery in her steel—she knew it all.
Yet the sword Yuel swung now was different from the one she had always used.
Because she had glimpsed her past.
Because she understood her life more clearly, because she had gained a new star, because she finally knew what her Mystery was for—and above all…
Because swinging the sword had meaning now.
Until now her blade had been empty of purpose, swung only for pleasure, only to kill. The sword she raised this time held something more.
Seok.
Yuel's—or Yuel Razian's—sword severed Hermann's neck. The severed head shot into the air, and starlight burst free. What had been cut was a head; what had been broken was Hermann's constellation.
Tidi-di-di-di-di-dik…
With a splitting sound, cracks raced through Hermann's constellation. The Mystery housed in Yuel's sword deconstructed Hermann. With the same Mystery that had once deconstructed her, Yuel deconstructed the star of the constellation who had toyed with her life.
The lords of Swaepedosi watched the scene unfold.
The lord who had filled the diary's first page. The lord who had wandered the city searching for a way out. The lord who had closed the diary in despair. The lord who chose to struggle after watching the ants. The one who laid the foundations of the law. The lord who decided her life by coin toss yet, in the final moment, acted of her own will…
The old man who prepared the law for the next lord after him.
They all witnessed Hermann's end.
Only after hundreds of years had they completed their revenge.
"Ah… aaah…"
In her last moment Hermann wore an expression of incomprehension—as if she could not understand why this was happening to her, as if the situation itself defied her grasp.
What the Constellation of Omniscience held at the end of her life was a question. The constellation who was meant to know everything faced the unknown, and at last became ignorant.
In her final instant, Hermann denied her own star.
As the sky shattered into pieces, Hermann's body dissolved into starlight and scattered. That starlight rose before the eyes of Hermann's nearest apostle.
The Star of Omniscience—■■.
It was the star that had been ruined the moment it was exposed to a Calamity Star a hundred and fifty years ago. A star that still held its shape, yet was hollow inside. Najin's eyes narrowed. This was not what they had expected. They had hunted Hermann to claim the Star of Omniscience; they had never imagined the star itself would be broken.
Najin and Merlin were thrown off balance.
"From the beginning,"
Yuel was not.
"I never intended to receive the Star of Omniscience intact. Omniscience, my ass. People don't even know what tomorrow holds—what kind of frozen hell is 'omniscience' supposed to be?"
She gave a short laugh.
"In the end, the knowledge any single person can accumulate is limited. And because it is limited, the world is full of problems that cannot be solved right now. In the ivory towers they call those unsolved problems and plaster them all over the corridors."
The woman who had been a mathematician before she fell into this city continued.
"Want to know the funny part? The ivory towers keep a vault of solved problems, and when you look through those problems you start thinking, This was an unsolved problem? You can crack this with a couple of equations?"
"And yet," Yuel said,
"when you think about it again, the equations used to solve those problems were all discovered later. Not even with the intention of solving the problem—people found them while chasing something else entirely."
"An unsolved problem that swarms of mathematicians couldn't crack for two hundred years was solved because some farmer, trying to work his fields more easily, divided his land in a certain way—and that inspired the solution."
"Ridiculous, isn't it?"
"That's just how the world works, apparently."
Yuel let out a long breath.
"Even a problem that looks utterly unsolvable right now often becomes absurdly simple once time passes, knowledge accumulates, and something new is discovered."
She reached toward the Star of Omniscience.
"So rather than a star called Omniscience,"
Into the hollow interior of the Star of Omniscience—■■—she poured her own life. She filled it with what she had come to understand.
"I prefer the meaning of knowledge passed down to those who come after—Transmission."
Because it is delivered to whoever comes next: Transmission.
Because it is knowledge delivered and built upon: the Star of Transmission.
"Like this single diary."
The Star of Transmission settled into the diary Yuel held in her hand. For Yuel it was her second star; for Yuel Razian, her eighth.
With Hermann's death, the sanctuary collapsed.
The gears that had formed the sky fell, crumbled, and powdered into snow. On a crumbling wall of Swaepedosi beneath that falling snow, Yuel and Najin sat side by side.
Watching the sky come down, Yuel spoke as if she couldn't believe it.
"It ended more simply than I expected. Shit, I thought we'd have to grab each other and blow up again like last time."
"The truth is, that fight was already over back then."
"Already over?"
To Yuel, tilting her head, Najin said,
"That day, Hermann had already lost to you. She took a hit she never saw coming, in a way she never expected."
The concept of Omniscience was powerful. And a powerful concept exacted a steep price when it was denied.
Exposed to a Calamity Star and forced to pay the price of her own concept's denial—Najin himself could barely imagine the load Hermann's star had been under.
She only lasted that long because she was Hermann. An ordinary constellation would have been a corpse right then and there.
Najin nodded.
"Still, calling it simple feels a little off, doesn't it?"
"What? What do you mean by that?"
"It took tens—hundreds—of thousands of people to bring Hermann down, and then hundreds of years on top of that."
As he spoke, Najin pointed to the book in Yuel's hand.
"Hermann lost to those hundreds of years. To the knowledge you and countless lords built up, one on top of another. In the end, what brought Omniscience down was Transmission."
And then—
"What sealed that ending was the obsession of someone who endured to the last in this deranged city: yours."
"…"
"As you said yourself, everything that happened in this city had its own meaning. Leave any one piece out and the whole strategy falls apart."
So, Najin said,
"Wouldn't it be all right to be a little prouder?"
"All right to be prouder, huh."
Yuel's lips moved. She started to say something, then closed her mouth and lowered her head.
"Honestly."
When she lifted her head again, she was smiling. Still smiling, Yuel rested her head on Najin's shoulder.
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"Do I really have to spell it out? For this, for that—just for everything. If I say thank you, just take it as thank you."
Snow fell from the sky.
Hermann's remains, steeped in starlight, drifted on the wind.
"You know,"
Snow piled on Swaepedosi. Watching it gather over the city, Yuel spoke.
"Whenever I saw people falling for someone, or saying they couldn't live without so-and-so, or becoming the kind of pair that would die for each other—I always thought they were idiots."
"Is that so?"
"Yes. Don't you think? In a world where keeping your own body intact is hard enough, handing half your life over to someone else—what kind of foolishness is that? Even calculated mathematically, it's a choice with nothing but losses."
Still grumbling, Yuel let a little more of her weight go. The strength she released settled onto the shoulder where her head rested.
"But, well."
She said,
"With you, I think it might be all right. Not just half—I could hand over the whole thing."
Having said that, Yuel did not wait for Najin's answer. She lifted her head, hopped down from the wall, and landed in the square of Swaepedosi, where snow lay thick and soft.
Najin blinked, then gave a helpless little laugh and started after her.
Yuel pressed her footprints into the snow the way a child seeing snow for the first time would. Bouncing lightly across the square, she turned to look back. Watching Najin follow, she tilted her head.
Hair white as snow spilled down.
With a mischievous look, Yuel spoke.
"I've already handed over half, so do your best with the rest. Though it looks like that side of things has already come over to you as well."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"What do you think it means?"
Chuckling, Yuel waved her arm.
The bracelet dangling from her wrist chimed.
"This time I can give a different goodbye than last time."
"A different goodbye?"
"See you again, Najin."
Before long—again.
Those were her last words. Yuel closed her eyes. The instant she did, her sanctuary—Swaepedosi—dissolved into starlight and scattered.
Looking around, he saw the landscape of a canyon.
They were back outside. Blinking as he adjusted to the changed scenery, Najin turned his head. There stood Yuel, staring blankly into space.
"Hmm."
Yuel Razian.
"Hmm… mmm…"
Wearing a complicated expression, she met Najin's eyes. After chewing on her lip, her first words were these:
"I can feel another self inside me. That personality is whispering to me. Be a little bolder. Why not pretend you don't know and close the distance? And then, Shit, why would you say that out loud?"
She tilted her head.
"What on earth is going on…?"
"What are you doing, Najin?"
On the road back from the Outer Land.
While they rested by a small campfire, Yuel asked the question of Najin, who was writing something.
"Oh, this?"
As if it were nothing special, Najin showed her the book in his hands. The title was plain.
Surviving the Outer Lands
It was a book he had happened to pick up near the start of this journey. Tapping the cover, Najin said,
"By the end the author made a contract with a demon just to stay alive, so the content goes off the rails—but up through the middle there was quite a bit of useful material."
"Isn't that a book contaminated by a demon?"
"Well, as for that—"
Najin closed his hand on empty air. When he brought the Excalibur he drew from the void close to the book, it shrieked Kyaaaaah! and the demonic energy lingering in the pages was purified in an instant.
"Anyway, I plan to continue writing it."
"That book?"
"Yes. It seems like it could be fun."
A book written by Francis, the legendary adventurer said to have survived a hundred and eighteen years in the Outer Land—Najin meant to write what came next.
Leaving information for whoever came after.
That act had begun to interest him.
Before the crackling fire, Najin pressed his fingers hard against his brow. What sentence should he start with? After fretting over it for a long while, he lifted the quill.
This one, somehow, felt right.
This is a formula written in blood.
Of course it was not Najin's blood.
It was the blood of demons, magical beasts, the dead, jesters, and the many constellations who had stood in his path—but Najin deliberately did not mention that fact. Sometimes it was better not to say everything.
Ah, how about this? Let's write this too! I know a thing or two about how to beat witches into the ground!
"In the Outer Land you can distinguish black mages like this. The method is as follows."
The blood of witches and black mages was mixed in as well, but he did not mention that either. At the end, among the names of those who had helped with the writing, only two more were added: Merlin and Yuel Razian.
Surviving the Outer Lands
Author — Francis
With assistance from — Najin, Merlin, Yuel Razian
The review of a certain reader who later opened this book ran as follows:
A minor problem, really.