Chapter 25
I’m translating the full chapter into natural literary English and formatting it as required HTML. Next I’ll preserve the chapter’s tone and scene flow without flattening the narration.CHAPTER_TITLE: Chapter 24
After I returned from the boutique, the way the butler and the maids looked at me changed again.
At first they had stared at me as if I were filth; when the princess had openly declared that she cherished me, they had looked at me like a plague victim. Now, how should I put it….
“I really feel like livestock in a pen.”
Like an animal in a cage.
Or rather, like people hesitating just outside the bars, wondering whether to step inside?
Was it because the princess had approached me and bought me gifts? Or because she had asked them to tell her about the boutique so she could gather information?
Their gazes were so intense that even while I was learning to dance, I couldn’t help but divide my attention between the steps and them. Seeing that I was distracted, the princess merely shrugged and moved through the pattern with me.
“Pay it no mind.”
“I’ve told you several times already, but for the very person who caused this situation to say that… By the way, Your Highness.”
“Hm?”
“Why are you trying to… well, to make me human?”
For one thing, I understood the surface reason.
The princess was in a transitional period right now.
She was trying to become a proper imperial royal someday, someone capable of cold judgment; and to do that, she was trying to make me human, to make me pay the proper price for a human life.
It was a reason I could accept. A motive I could understand.
But if I believed that was all there was to it, there was still something about it that didn’t sit right.
If she wanted to make me human in order to pay for a human life, then how much would she have to pay for someone who was already human?
I didn’t know the exact answer, but I was certain it would be exorbitant.
And yet the princess hadn’t approached the princes.
She had offered marriage to one of them as compensation, but only as a reward for the prince I didn’t choose.
The prince I did choose would receive nothing and die.
When I thought about that, everything the princess did for me felt strange.
It was a very late question, but still.
“A hobby.”
“You’re dodging the question.”
“Even I have one or two things I’d rather not answer, you know.”
The princess fell silent.
She had answered me honestly, saying there were things she simply didn’t want to answer, and that no matter how many times I asked the same thing, she still wouldn’t tell me. It was her way of saying it.
I had never experienced something like that before, so I found myself staring at her without meaning to. Feeling my gaze, she gave a little snort of laughter and let go of the hand she’d been holding.
“Which of the princes do you like better?”
“Pardon?”
“I’m just asking. If you were to die two and a half years from now, which one would you prefer?”
“I’ve never particularly liked either of them.”
The princess changed the subject so smoothly it was almost absurd.
It was a topic I had never once considered, so I hesitated for a moment and looked at her. At her urging to think about it, I tried to call the princes’ faces to mind in earnest.
As I’d said before, the first prince was a half-baked politician with no backbone, and the second prince was a half-wild beast who thought with nothing but the excuse of adolescence.
Honestly, if you asked me which of them was better, it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.
“If I had to choose, I’d say the first prince.”
“Hm? Why?”
“He never laid a hand on me. My second prince looks like the type who’d throw punches even at Your Highness, so I think killing him would be better.”
“Hmm. That sounds less like your opinion and more like you speaking on my behalf.”
“Probably. I like Your Highness more than those princes, after all.”
“...Pfft. Is that so? Then shall we go take a look?”
“Pardon?”
“If it were up to me, I’d go to the chief butler or the head maid or whoever handles outside affairs and ask which prince is attending the ball, but this time I’ll be blocked for lack of a proper pretext. So let’s go see what the princes are doing instead. Which one should we look at first?”
The princess hummed as she asked where we could find them, clearly in a good mood.
At her question, I fell silent for a moment before telling her that if we went to the training grounds, we’d probably find one of them.
“He can’t wrap his sword in mana like sword qi or blade qi, but he does train fairly hard.”
The second prince, who had once slammed me down as if I were a pest to be crushed beneath a butcher’s cleaver.
He had done no damage to me, but that attack had carried the unmistakable movement of someone who actually trained his body.
Unlike the first prince, hadn’t he said he wanted to become a military physician after specializing in surgery?
“He’s the sort who’ll die quickly enough, frankly.”
“That’s a rather harsh assessment.”
“According to my memory, the places military physicians go are decided by luck when it comes to life and death.”
“And he’s only fifteen, isn’t he? He might be able to produce something like sword qi within a few years.”
“Well… maybe. But at least from what he’s doing now, I doubt it.”
My memory was old, and in some ways it was a memory left behind by someone who was clearly a genius even compared to the founder of the Blium family, so I didn’t know how accurate it all was. But if the second prince was only at that level, and only that trained, then two and a half years wouldn’t be enough.
If he were willing to risk death, maybe something else might happen—but from the look of him, he didn’t seem to have that kind of courage.
Maybe he was the sort who would go to the battlefield after being enchanted by propaganda?
The kind who wanted to flaunt his own moral superiority like some cat mom who needed everyone to know how virtuous she was.
“And the fact that I can’t even create what I’m trying to create means I’m hopeless myself.”
Besides, sword qi itself wasn’t actually all that difficult.
In this world, mana had a tendency to spread throughout the body with every beat of the heart.
The reason the princess’s body made those discordant sounds that somehow mismatched the rhythm of her heart was because of that very nature. And because of that strange quality, sword qi in this world wasn’t some advanced technique that required meditation or sudden enlightenment the way it did in wuxia novels.
It wasn’t common, exactly, but it wasn’t something you never saw either….
If I had to compare it to something, it was more like becoming a professional athlete or a player on a company baseball team.
A technique ordinary people could still learn to imitate if they trained with enough obsession to either live or die by it.
The second prince hadn’t even reached that level yet, and the fact that he couldn’t complete even a technique that was within reach with enough effort meant that unless he was unbelievably lucky, he was destined to die someday.
And yet the second prince kept running around the training grounds, saying he wanted to be a military physician. To me, he looked either like a delusional fool or an idiot who believed himself to be the protagonist of the world.
The first prince, by comparison, was a little better.
He might end up entering a region stricken by plague, I didn’t know, but at least he wasn’t the type to gamble with his own life, and he had no courage for fighting either, so he probably wouldn’t even dare raise a hand against anyone else.
He might stab people in the back or destroy them with law and procedure, but even that would be respectable, I suppose.
Besides, it didn’t seem like the princess would be taken in by anything like that anyway.
“You are quite severe, aren’t you?”
“I wonder.”
“Then shall we go see?”
“The second prince?”
“Yes. Let’s see if he dies quickly.”
The princess grinned and stepped outside.
When I followed after her, I saw the second prince in the training grounds, jumping in place.
He was wearing only pants, his upper body bare as he ran and trained his physique like the other knights.
He wasn’t muscular, but the firm, sinewy body of a deer showed exactly what people in my previous life had meant by “lean muscle.”
He probably really was strong, in his own way.
But—
“I think I understand what the princess means.”
Mentally, his movements weren’t consistent.
He needed to control his body to a certain degree, but instead of that, he was just flailing around to build strength.
Even after receiving the knights’ instruction, he was still just moving through the motions.
That wasn’t necessarily bad in itself.
If the body grew stronger, mana efficiency would improve, and if mana efficiency improved, the odds of surviving would increase.
But to sink entirely into physical strength without properly mastering mana, and then to head for a battlefield and say he wanted to become a military physician—that looked less like ambition than a desperate attempt to kill himself.
And if he was going to die anyway, I wanted him to die in a way that would help the princess, even a little.
For example, by becoming the one and only medicine that could cure an incurable illness.
If he died for the princess, wouldn’t he at least consider himself honorable?
From the way he always talked about honor and duty, it seemed like if he could sacrifice himself for the family and the empire, he’d gladly throw himself into it.
“...And what business do you have here?”
Had I been staring too long?
A knight who had barely managed to hide his contempt in front of the princess approached and greeted her, and in response the princess said she had come to watch the training.
“I see.”
Then the knight looked at me with obvious discomfort.
He looked at my arms and legs, at a body that still plainly seemed undernourished, then back at the princess.
He was probably wondering what the point was of watching someone with a body like this.
That was certainly a reasonable question to have.
“In that case, how about this? Call over the second prince and have him spar with the princess. If he only ever plays around with our knights, he’ll get bad habits.”
But the princess didn’t seem to like the knight’s tone. She handed me an estoc with a smile, and the knight stared at her in disbelief before looking at me, his mouth curving into a thin, ugly smile as he nodded.