A Fishhook Made of Gold Coins (2)
The answer was surprisingly close at hand.
That was what Roselyn Ascalo had said—the woman who had spent three years sealed inside a chrysalis, only to finally achieve eclosion. Yet Najin could scarcely make sense of her words.
A little over a month had passed since he first became aware of the fragments of his mindscape; he was nearing the two-month mark.
Two months. Sixty days.
Those who awakened to the fragments of their mindscape typically ascended to the realm of Sword Seeker within forty days. After all, the critical step in reaching Sword Seeker was the awakening itself; what followed was secondary.
And yet, even after recognizing his mindscape, Najin had remained stalled for nearly two months, unable to take the next step forward.
It was not an unusually long stagnation. But for Najin—who until now had advanced without obstruction, growing at a pace dozens of times faster than anyone else—the sensation of being stuck felt utterly alien.
What's the reason?
Eclosion. Moulting. The reconstruction of sword aura.
He could not get a feel for the process at all. It was like grasping at clouds. Roselyn had told him it would be best to look back at himself.
—True enough. A reasonable observation.
Merlin's voice rang in his ear.
—It's only natural that it takes you longer than most. Why? Because your mindscape has two centers.
Najin closed one eye.
What appeared was the landscape nested within his mindscape: a star floating high above, and another hanging low.
—People normally carry only a single mindscape. One center. But not you. Yours has two. It's strange…
Merlin continued.
—And fascinating.
Then what should I do?
—This isn't something I can teach you. In truth, no one can. The answer is something you have to find for yourself.
Only then would it mean anything.
Only then could it hold meaning. That was what Merlin said. Najin let out a long breath.
—Still, if you want a hint…
Within Najin's mindscape, Merlin gazed up at the star hanging in that sky and spoke.
—Never compromise. Believe that the world you hold within you—not the world your eyes see—is the only true one.
The great archmage who had reached transcendence said:
—To place confidence only in the self.
That is the virtue required of those who walk the path toward transcendence. It can be selfish, self-righteous, and even ruthless. Whispering as much, Merlin laughed.
"Liquor is the lubricant of life."
Leaving Najin sprawled on the field in complete exhaustion, the man continued.
"Even a dry, miserable life, even a life that is pure hell—pour one glass of liquor into it and things tend to improve. That's why I like the stuff. Unfortunately, these days I can hardly feel the buzz anymore."
He took a sip against the wind that swept across the plain.
With a satisfied ahh, the man wiped his mouth, popped a piece of dried meat between his teeth, and wore the expression of a man who owned the world. Najin found himself glancing at the bottle and the scrap of meat in the man's hands.
Cheap liquor you could buy anywhere.
Nothing more than salted, dried strips of jerky.
Utterly ordinary things—yet the moment the man before him savored them, they ceased to be ordinary. Najin forced his screaming body upright and looked at him.
Master of the Sword Church, Sword Saint Caron.
Watching the Sword Master of six stars enjoy cheap liquor with jerky as his side dish, Najin smiled.
"You enjoy yourself rather simply."
"It's the simplicity that gives it meaning. Care for a drink yourself?"
"No. I'll pass on the liquor. Just a piece of that jerky, if you please."
Taking a strip of jerky from the Sword Saint, Najin chewed while rolling the stiffness from his shoulders. Caron had promised to look over his sword every month or two, and today was the appointed day.
I must have swung for half a day or so.
His shoulders and arms were screaming.
An opponent he could never reach no matter how hard he wrung every last drop of strength into each strike. He had charged at such a man for nearly half a day; of course his abused body was howling.
"Your sword has grown far sharper. Your movement, too. You must have met a decent opponent?"
"I don't know if he was decent, but I nearly died three or four times."
At Najin's answer, the Sword Saint burst out laughing and took another sip. Setting the bottle down with a satisfied breath, Caron jerked his chin as if to say, go on.
"I crossed blades with Sir Griffin, Knight Commander of the Arvenia ducal house."
"Ah, the one who wields the Trigardian sword. A knight who swings a stubborn, uncompromising blade—and breaking through that stubbornness is no easy task."
"After that I fought Pauve, a fourth-circle black mage who owns the Masterpiece Fire Shadow…"
"A black mage in possession of a Masterpiece? Interesting."
"And I clashed with Kaufman Teosis, former ranger of the Techel Mountains. Ah—this one was probably the most dangerous. I actually nearly died a few times."
"Hah…"
Caron laughed as if he couldn't believe it.
"It's not my place to say, but you lead a rather dramatic life yourself. Running into that many enemies in such a short span isn't something that happens easily. Did you go around challenging people to duels?"
"It just sort of turned out that way. I seem to have more people wanting to kill me than most."
The Sword Saint merely shrugged at Najin's words.
He had drawn a clear line from the beginning: he would teach Najin the sword, and nothing more. He would not involve himself so much as a speck of dust in Najin's life.
"Well, all of it becomes flesh and bone. There's nothing more valuable than diverse combat experience. Use this chance to train yourself thoroughly."
"Don't I have to survive first for it to become experience?"
"If you die from something of that level, then that was simply the size of your vessel. Surviving itself is part of growth. There are experiences you can only accumulate on the border between life and death."
Najin let out a dry laugh. He felt it every time they spoke: by his own standards, Caron was hardly normal either. The man had a strong streak of the battle maniac in him.
If anyone else said it, it would be pure nonsense…
But these were the words of a Sword Saint who had repeatedly charged at the strong, who walked the tightrope of life and death along the border of the Starfield and Camlann. They could not simply be dismissed.
"A rather extreme method."
"And also the correct one."
Caron stroked the hilt of his sword.
"I, Sir Gerd, and that friend Yuel—all of us climbed the path of transcendence this way. We stepped onto countless battlefields without a thought for our own lives."
He grinned at Najin.
"Do you think just anyone becomes a Sword Master? Only madmen become Sword Masters."
"Even you, Sir Caron?"
"Of course. I consider myself perfectly sane, but by the world's standards I'm just another lunatic. I have no intention of denying that fact, but…"
Caron shrugged.
"Among the Sword Masters currently active on the Continent, I'm the most normal one."
Sword Saint Caron.
The Murderer, Yuel Razian.
The Empire's First Blade, Gerd.
Among the three Sword Masters, he claimed to be the sanest. Yuel Razian had always been a billion years removed from normality, which left Gerd as the remaining comparison… Najin tilted his head.
"Isn't Sir Gerd the Empire's First Blade?"
"He is."
"A man of immense power who holds the very core of the Empire… and you're saying you're more normal than him?"
"How exactly do you see me?"
Caron looked incredulous.
"That's something you can only say because you don't know Sir Gerd. The man knows nothing but the sword and the Empire. In a certain sense, he's even more of a fanatic than Yuel Razian."
The sword and the Empire.
The two values that constituted Gerd.
"For the sake of the Empire, he killed his own daughter and son with his own hands. He killed his wife and every last one of his blood relatives. They were rebels, you see. And that wasn't all. For the sake of the sword, he abandoned everything—including his own humanity—because it got in the way of swinging a blade."
"…"
"The realm of transcendence, the path toward perfection—paradoxically, it is completed by casting things away. I am no different, and neither is Yuel Razian. But Sir Gerd…"
Caron paused for a moment.
He exhaled a long breath and spoke.
"He has discarded more than he has kept. By stripping away everything except the sword and the Empire, he reached transcendence. A terrifying obsession."
"That is certainly…"
"A being difficult to call human. Well, Yuel Razian goes without saying. How about it? Does the man sitting in front of you start to look a little more reasonable now?"
Najin let out a laugh.
"I can't deny it."
"Right?"
"Yes. Especially when I recall my encounter with Sir Yuel."
"What? You met Yuel?"
"Right after the fight with the black mage, I ran into Sir Yuel, who had been dispatched to assess the situation."
"Hah."
Caron looked genuinely startled.
"You nearly died, boy. Truly."
"Yes. I nearly died. Truly."
"If you met Yuel, that one surely took an interest in you… You're in for a hard time ahead."
He cast Najin a look of pity.
"If it had come out then and there that you were my disciple, a neatly gift-wrapped head would have been delivered to the Sword Church. A truly ghastly business."
Good thing I hid the fact that I met Caron.
Muttering as much to himself, Najin nodded.
"Sir Caron."
And Najin opened his mouth.
This was the real point of the conversation.
"Do you know about eclosion?"
"I do. I crossed that road more than ten years ago."
Caron narrowed his eyes.
"Come to think of it, you seemed to have awakened the fragments of your mindscape. Are you in the middle of eclosion?"
"More precisely, I'm stuck. I can't get a feel for what reconstructing the sword aura even means."
"Hmm."
He slowly rose to his feet.
"Eclosion. Moulting. Reconstruction of the sword aura. It sounds complicated when put into words, but in truth it's simple and clear."
Across the broad open field, Caron drew his sword.
"A sword is a single brush."
The Sword Master—
the Sword Saint—spoke of the sword.
"Sword aura is the paint that dyes the brush."
Sword aura bloomed along Caron's blade.
Najin could neither see nor comprehend the aura the man had raised. The sheer gulf in realm distorted even perception itself.
"The sword is the brush, the aura is the paint, and the paint is none other than the mindscape you hold. The mindscape is your world."
Yet the moment the Sword Saint swung his sword—
the moment that blade advanced a single span—
"To swing a sword is also the process of painting your world over the world itself."
Najin's eyes saw it.
The landscape being overpainted along the trajectory of the Sword Saint's blade. It was the mindscape Caron held, the color of his soul.
With a light flick, Caron swung again. Wherever the path of his sword passed, the world was repainted. Najin could not fully grasp the scenery unfolding before him, but he roughly understood what the Sword Saint had done.
"This is the destination those who walk the path of the sword must pursue. And a Sword Seeker is a seeker who wanders in search of that path. They cannot yet dye the world by swinging their sword, but…"
Caron sheathed his blade and smiled.
"Wherever their sword aura reaches, they make it into a world of their own. What is needed for that, more than anything else, is unshakable confidence in oneself."
The Sword Master looked at Najin.
"From where I stand, you are locking yourself away. That is not a bad thing. Tempering one's own conduct is excellent and worthy of praise."
But, he said—
"It must not lead to the denial of your own self. You must never deny your own nature. Do not try to change everything at once. The staircase toward perfection is not something you can leap in a single bound."
Caron prodded Najin's heart with the scabbard of his sword.
"First, shatter the cage, boy."
Do that, and a new path will open.
"Today's lesson ends here."
Walking away, Caron waved a hand.
"Next time we meet, I hope to find a seeker of the sword."
The heart of the City of Opportunity, Cambria.
Where the Central Guild and Merchant Street stood side by side.
In a location that could rightfully be called the city's true heart, the building of the Dieta Trading Company rose tall. And on its uppermost floor, a single snake lay coiled.
The Snake That Swallows Gold Coins—Dieta.
In an office hemmed in by maps and documents, contracts, transaction records, ledgers, and countless numbers and sentences, she narrowed her eyes. Her golden pupils, the color of gold coins themselves, drank in the light of the mana-stone lamps and gleamed with a metallic sheen.
Money moves people.
People move money.
And wherever money has moved, traces inevitably remain. Information remains. Any competent merchant must know the path gold coins have taken—and the path they will take next.
In that sense, the Snake That Swallows Gold Coins was a merchant without precedent.
The achievements she had built were not the product of mere luck or a few happy accidents layered together. She had stacked them carefully from the very bottom—with astonishing speed and precision. How was such a thing possible?
Her eyes pursued gold coins. She pinpointed with exactness the places where gold had flowed, where it would flow, and where it gathered. That was the talent she had been born with, and the one she had honed over the past several years.
…And once one understood that entire process, artificially creating a current was no difficult matter either.
The Snake That Swallows Gold Coins flicked gold coins.
Just as a swordsman swings a blade, a mage casts spells, and an archer looses arrows, the Snake That Swallows Gold Coins flicked gold coins. That was the weapon she possessed.
The gold coin she flicked settled upon the map.
The coins spread throughout every corner of the adventurers' city. The form of a gold coin was never fixed. Sometimes it became a person; sometimes a commission; sometimes the gossip that passed through a tavern. In this way she carved waterways through which gold would flow.
A waterway made of gold coins—and the fish, never realizing the current was artificial, gathered of their own accord.
Dieta simply tossed her fishing rod into the waterway with a casual flick. Thus the angler waited with a fishhook made of gold coins dangling in the current. Time, after all, was on her side. And she would not have to wait long.
A snap of the fingers.
One flick of a gold coin—
and even the speed of the current could be adjusted to her will. The waterway surged. Fish began to be swept along by the violent torrent. Their vision clouded by the chaotic rush of water, the fish inevitably bit the bait.
"Found you."
And the angler smiled.
A fishhook made of gold coins.
At its tip, the fish she had impaled was thrashing for its life.