The Birth Celebration of the First Blium Patriarch
The birthday celebration of the founding Blium patriarch.
He was apparently the sort of great man even the person who had cursed me would have acknowledged, but if you asked whether all these people really needed to gather in one place and throw a festival in his honor, I could only tilt my head in bewilderment.
Just how often did an ordinary person ever have the experience of dying with their intestines spilling out through their mouth and anus? And yet here they were, praising the founding patriarch of Blium.
If the Blium territory were overflowing with healers, perhaps I might have understood it better, but that wasn’t the case either.
The resident healers were only at the empire’s average level.
There were far more healers in the northwest, where monsters swarmed in greater numbers, and the academy tended to cluster there as well.
If anything, this place felt more like a graduate school, and the only thing you could really call a local specialty were the pilgrim healers who traveled from town to town.
And what they did was less like the work of professional healers and more like... I don’t know. They seemed to promote folk remedies.
Of course, unlike the folk cures that became fashionable in Korea, these were only the ones whose effectiveness had been confirmed through properly designed research, so they didn’t make patients worse—or do nothing at all—just because of some superstition.
But that was all they were. The old people in the villages already knew plenty of things through experience, even if they didn’t understand the reason behind them, so it wasn’t especially valuable information.
That was why I couldn’t understand this festival.
I hadn’t received any help from the Blium family, and it wasn’t as if this territory was better off than any other. So why were they celebrating something that, by all rights, should have only been worth a cheerful laugh among the people of Blium itself?
“There isn’t really any reason.”
“Pardon?”
“As you’re thinking, they probably consider Blium’s founding patriarch to be rather beside the point. Still, isn’t there no national holiday for a while? So they invent an excuse like the founding patriarch’s birthday and hold a festival. From the Blium family’s perspective, the pretext is good, and public sentiment is easy to manage, so they provide the money and labor.”
“I see.”
“You don’t seem particularly fond of it.”
“Who am I to voice an opinion like that?”
I simply didn’t understand it, that was all.
When I said as much to the imperial princess, she shrugged lightly and held out a kebab to me. The thing was far too large to eat alone, so I cut it in half and handed her a piece.
“I’ll eat it myself.”
“It’s too big.”
“You’ve swallowed who knows how many portions of leftover meat by yourself.”
“To be honest, I hate flour.”
“Hmm?”
“I just do, all right?”
It was just pickiness, that was all.
At that, the imperial princess burst into laughter, apparently finding something terribly amusing, then suddenly stared at a merchant in exotic clothing nearby. Following her gaze, I turned my head and looked at the person she was watching.
“It seems the Wolpa Crown Prince went missing during a subjugation operation. So he’s going to be active in Poltia for a while. He brought his whole family with him.”
“Hmm.”
“Do you know him?”
“I’m not sure whether to say I do or not. The Kone Kingdom, where the Wolpa Crown Prince is from, is much like our own country—a land where fierce battles against monsters are constant—so we’ve had quite a lot of exchange. I do know the Crown Prince, at least.”
“I see.”
“Still, that’s worrying.”
“Pardon?”
“The Wolpa Crown Prince is the legitimate eldest son of the Kone royal family and the current king’s most treasured child. If such a person has gone missing, and merchants are beginning to pull out, then they may be scrambling to raise an unreasonable army.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“If the Kone Kingdom can’t deal with the monsters, they could flow straight here, into Blium’s direction. If they push into the southwest, wouldn’t that become dangerous? Even if this time is all right, next time or the time after that, the army’s stability may weaken, and the monsters could come in greater numbers.”
“Do monster forces come that often?”
“They’ve started appearing frequently since ten years ago. It’ll be nearly five hundred years soon, after all.”
“Five hundred years?”
“Yes. It has been exactly five hundred years since the hero appeared. And the birth of a new hero also means the birth of the true King of Monsters.”
“That is, well.”
“Perhaps the Demon King has already been born.”
The imperial princess frowned, her expression turning serious.
Apparently this wasn’t something to take lightly. She immediately wrote a letter and sent a maid off with it, and I watched her for a moment before looking around again.
Just as the princess had guessed, there were quite a few people in exotic clothing on the streets.
It was certainly strange.
If this festival were something immensely famous, like the Sapporo Snow Festival, I might have understood it, but this celebration commemorating the founding patriarch’s birthday was the sort of festival you could find in any city.
The maids and soldiers who had watched me before the curse—making sure I didn’t run away—had said the festival was on a grand scale because it was a ducal family’s event, so that part was undoubtedly true.
But foreigners were gathering for a local festival like this?
Just as the Blium family had given people an excuse to rest so they could govern them more easily, it was entirely possible that these visitors were using the festival as a pretext to slip into the Poltia Empire.
As the princess said, perhaps things would become dangerous in a year or two.
Not that it was any of my concern.
“Haa... sorry. Something urgent came up.”
“Didn’t the capital know already?”
“Who knows? They may already have sensed something from the borderlands and contacted us. Still, in cases like this, it’s better to report it even if it ends up being duplicate information.”
“Because the matter is serious?”
“Exactly. If things go badly, thousands could be hurt. In the worst case, a whole city might vanish.”
Apparently imagining the worst-case scenario, the princess frowned and her fingertips trembled. Seeing that, the maid immediately drew a cigarette from her bosom.
It was less a cigarette than a lump of medicinal herbs soaked through with all sorts of potions.
The thing barely lit at all, and the princess grumbled at it for a moment before lowering her head toward me. I struck a flame for her cigarette and asked if she was all right.
“Well, I’m doing this precisely because I don’t know that yet.”
“Hmm?”
“To put it bluntly, if I were certain two cities were going to be destroyed, I wouldn’t be this on edge. It’s a cruel thing to say, but if more than ten thousand deaths were already guaranteed, then all we could do would be to think about how to keep the number of victims to ten thousand.”
“Even royalty can’t do anything about that, then.”
“That’s why I pity my older brother and sister.”
The princess exhaled a plume of blue-tinged smoke thick with drugs, as though trying to sort out her thoughts, and explained why the future felt so uncertain.
“If the Wolpa Crown Prince is still alive, that would at least be fortunate. There’d be a hole in the budget, yes, but they’d absorb the soldiers and use them to defend the border properly. But if the Wolpa Crown Prince is dead, then the real problems begin.”
“Is this Wolpa Crown Prince really that outstanding?”
“You have a talent for using difficult words, don’t you?”
“...Your Highness.”
“Puhahaha. Well, he is outstanding, but not as a politician or as a king. If anything, he’s outstanding as a knight.”
“Then what’s the problem? Royal blood may have a higher average, but it shouldn’t be impossible to replace him.”
“The Kone Kingdom hasn’t given succession education to anyone after the second prince. So if it’s determined that the Wolpa Crown Prince has died, the succession struggle will begin with the second prince and continue all the way to the sixth.”
“...The Kone Kingdom does have information about the Demon King, doesn’t it?”
“Hmm, I imagine so. This isn’t exactly high-level secret information, and their history isn’t short enough to prevent it.”
“Isn’t there anyone unusually exceptional?”
“Didn’t I say the Wolpa Crown Prince was outstanding as a knight?”
“Yes.”
“He reached the level of Swordmaster at twenty-five.”
“...”
“He’s the most exceptional among his siblings. That’s why, despite his mother coming from a very weak count’s family, he was able to solidify his position as Crown Prince and rally his retainers behind him.”
“But what does that have to do with not educating the heirs?”
“Didn’t I say his mother came from a humble family? If they were to educate the second and third princes in succession as well, then the retainers would split into factions and fight each other. It seems they deliberately withheld the education in order to prevent that.”
“That’s a disaster.”
“It is. If his wife had simply done things in the proper order, none of this would have happened.”
Even if she called it a disaster, the country wouldn’t collapse completely overnight.
By the time the nation truly went to shit, the princes embroiled in their succession struggle would be doing their best to stabilize it so they wouldn’t end up as wandering men who used to be princes.
But there was nothing anyone could do about the decline in national power, and monsters would obviously begin spilling in here in the meantime, just as the princess had said.
“Before that happens, why not take my life early?”
“Hahaha. I can’t do that while the Blium head is blocking the way.”
“What a pity.”
The ducal head who had let herself be burdened with that ridiculous guilt was useless even in a situation like this.
She’d said she would grant any wish, and yet she wouldn’t even allow me to die. It was all such a mess.
She probably thought she was tossing out empty promises on the assumption that I would die, but even so, it was infuriating to see a noble boasting of her status after failing to keep her word.
“Still, the Kone Kingdom, huh. Not bad.”
“Pardon?”
“The Kone Kingdom is famous for livestock. If merchants have come all the way here emptying their coffers, then they’ll bring cheese or jerky with them, won’t they? Jerky from our empire isn’t bad, but Kone cheese is what’s really famous.”
“Do you like cheese?”
“Hmm, I do. Most food you eat on the street gets better if there’s cheese in it. Kone’s cheese, especially, is nicely sorted from beginner-friendly all the way to stuff for enthusiasts.”
“I see.”
“Why don’t you try some too?”
The imperial princess had, once again, bought a kebab somewhere without my noticing.
Maybe she’d been irritated that I hadn’t finished the one from earlier, because she shoved this one into my hands and ordered me not to cut it since it had cheese inside and to eat it whole by myself. Through the bandages, I could faintly feel its warmth, and with a sigh I forced it into my mouth.