The Founding (4)
The testing to select the new knights wrapped up in grand fashion after ten full days. The total number of applicants came to some 6,200 — a crowd rivaling the population of an entire small city, all of it streaming into headquarters for the chance to join the order.
Of those 6,200, only five hundred were Awoken; the remaining 5,700 were ordinary people who had applied through the non-Awoken track.
Between the two of them, Vitten and Thalia failed 430 of the five hundred Awoken. To be precise: Vitten passed two hundred, and Thalia then cut another 130 from that number.
When Vitten protested that she was rejecting far too many good candidates, her answer was this:
"I am the vice-commander, after all."
"What? Hey, get back here! One more round!"
When Vitten's temper blew, Thalia left a remark rarely heard from her.
"That was a joke."
Before he could erupt a second time, she explained in her level voice.
"As you well know, Senior, the order's finances are in a sorry state. We're in no position to buy up mana sources as we please, so I believe the correct approach is to concentrate our resources on a chosen few."
I agreed.
From the 5,700 applicants of the non-Awoken track, I passed exactly one.
It wasn't stinginess that had me turning talent away. If someone with genuine aptitude had appeared, I would have spent whatever the budget demanded — but the only transcendent talent among them had been Laszlo.
My master did say it, after all: the bond between master and disciple is a thread tied by heaven itself.
With the testing concluded, I hosted a lavish banquet with the seventy-six new knights. All seventy-six were bold, promising recruits, yet two struck me as exceptional even among them.
One was an ogre named Srudal.
Or should I say, one ogre?
An ogre is a hideous monster standing over three meters tall, possessed of crushing strength and a taste for human flesh. By the bestiary's reckoning it ranks third-grade, on par with a lava spirit. When a monster like that turned up declaring its intent to sit the knight examination, you can imagine the commotion it caused.
The Awoken Ability Srudal carried was called Knowledge Devouring. It let him absorb the intelligence of the cleverest creature among those he had eaten.
After stripping one unfortunate "ecologist" down to the very marrow, he had gained intellect on par with an academy scholar — and begun to fundamentally reexamine his identity as a monster.
"The measure that separates man from monster is how devoted one is to values," Srudal said.
"In my days as a monster, I knew nothing but the prey before my eyes. But I am different now. I wish to devote myself to your values, my lord, so that I may become a better being."
"Mm..."
I had no idea how to answer that. My neck hurt, for one thing. His head sat so dizzyingly high that merely trying to meet his eyes threatened to snap my cervical spine.
"Which values of mine, exactly?"
"Honor, loyalty, and justice. You wrote them out quite elegantly on your proclamation."
It seemed Srudal had taken a liking to the phrasing of the notices I'd scattered across the city. Remarkably, hiring that celebrated biographer had actually paid off!
Srudal's Awoken Ability did nothing but raise his intelligence — hardly something you could call a direct asset in battle.
The reason he passed the tests with flying colors, and was even floated as a squad leader candidate, lay purely in the physical endowment of an ogre's body. Ordinary wounds closed in an instant, poison and disease could not gain purchase, his bare hands could pulverize boulders, and his stamina was such that even he had never found its limit.
He had even learned swordsmanship after gaining a human mind.
The other was named Shaka.
She was a small girl of fifteen that year, the dark circles under her eyes plain to see.
Like Laszlo, she was a child who had endured relentless abuse from her earliest years for the sake of forcing an ability to manifest.
Where Laszlo's father, for all his cruelty, had at least kept up a noble's facade, whoever had abused her spared no means and no method at all.
After tortures too unspeakable to put into words, Shaka at last succeeded in manifesting her Awoken Ability.
The power she awakened was called Telepathy — the ability to transfer the thoughts in her own mind into another's.
A handful of others besides Shaka had managed to manifest Telepathy as well; judged by rarity alone, it was a middling-to-low value ability. Worse still, it was never much of a weapon. All it did was carry thoughts from one head to another.
The reason Shaka had outlasted so many competitors to claim the top was simple: the moment she briefly shared what lived inside her skull, most people simply lost their minds. Not a single soul had remained sane before the torrent of thought she sent out.
"There's no such thing as honor or justice in this world," Shaka said in a leaden tone.
"Humans are beasts, after all. The only thing that separates a human from a beast is knowing how to dress itself up in respectable values."
"Shaka, I have traveled this world and seen proof upon proof that humans rise above the beasts," Srudal countered gently.
"Then will you look inside my head for one second? There's something in here that would change your mind."
Shaka giggled, tapping her own temple with her index finger.
Her mental state worried me a little, I'll admit — but of the three values I had laid out, honor, loyalty, and justice, loyalty was the one thing she didn't deny.
She hadn't originally planned on becoming a knight at all, she said.
Shaka had been one of the refugees who flooded into the city when famine struck Count Abaro's domain. Back then, Lucian had handed out food and clothing in my name, and for the first time in her life, she had tasted kindness given without price.
That was what stirred her curiosity about the man behind the name; seeing me in person only improved matters; and in her own words, she'd thought, "This is a man I wouldn't mind having abuse me"... or so she claimed.
...Something told me I was better off not knowing the details.
Once the knights had sworn their oaths of loyalty, I threw myself back onto the frontlines of work. Selecting the membership had only been the midpoint of founding the order; there were still plenty of mountains left to climb.
The next day, I summoned the master of the Adventurers' Guild to headquarters. It was time to sign a supply contract for mana sources.
"The mana sources the guild is able to supply are limited to the fifth and sixth grades."
The guildmaster was a middle-aged man with a thick, unkempt beard. His eyes glinting with shrewd intelligence, he continued his explanation.
"Prices for mana sources have climbed steeply of late — the nobles are falling over one another to buy them up. Even so, I have every wish to build a lasting relationship with you, Young Lord Eden. Sign with me today, and I will bring the supply price down to nearly our own purchase cost."
"And why so generous with me?"
"Because you treated me well first. My dealings with Young Lord Chris were far from pleasant to recall."
The guildmaster answered with complete honesty. I was nodding along, finding it entirely plausible, when a question suddenly occurred to me.
"Out of curiosity — what was my brother Mavel like when he did business with you?"
Caroi's old theory about Mavel being a black-hearted schemer still lingered in my mind. Anyone can wear a mask when formality demands it — but faced with someone of lower station, that's when the buried true nature shows itself.
"Young Lord Mavel never signed a supply contract with our guild."
The answer caught me off guard.
"Never signed one with the guild? But Mavel keeps a personal knight order of his own."
"We are hardly the only supplier of mana sources, my lord. There are trading houses that keep professional hunters on retainer, and the black market thrives as well."
He seemed to know nothing further about my brother, so I decided my digging into him would end there.
I signed a supply contract with him worth 800,000 baht a year. That single line item — mana sources — swallowed forty percent of the order's budget.
No sooner had he withdrawn than the next visitor, who had been waiting, entered the office. This guest was a young man of about twenty, fresh-faced and guileless.
"Welcome, Kaspar."
"I-it is an honor to meet you, Lord Eden."
The young man offered his greeting in a trembling voice.
This reedy boy, who looked as if a decent gust of wind could carry him off, had — not long ago — planted himself between me and a pack of vicious mercenaries to shield me, with a body that couldn't so much as squash a bug under its own strength.
"Not sure this will suit your taste."
A maid brought in hot tea and set two cups on the table.
"Anything you serve will be fine, my lord. I'm not particular."
Kaspar sipped his tea in careful little mouthfuls.
They say a good ruler must be exact in the rewarding of merit. But that wasn't the only reason I had called Kaspar here — if it were, I'd never have committed the discourtesy of dragging my benefactor all this way for nothing.
"Did you think over my proposal?"
"Yes, my lord. I haven't slept a wink these past few days, turning it over."
"And the answer?"
"I am deeply sorry, but Grandfather Rupert says that at his age, and in his poor health, he cannot take the post you so graciously offered."
"And? That can't be the end of it."
Wriggling with embarrassment, he answered.
"He asked what about me instead. I've studied alchemy under Grandfather quite a long while myself, so..."
The conversation was flowing exactly as I'd expected, so I began with a smile.
My master had taught me the art of medicine, but in my previous world, ginseng and mushrooms were about the whole of what could serve as ingredients. This world, though — its range of materials existed on another plane entirely. Countless byproducts harvested from spirit beasts; the spirit fruits and spirit herbs that grew wild across mountain and field...
Combined with skill, they might well yield an elixir to make the fabled udumbara flower itself look second-rate.
For that, I needed an expert who had mastered this world's pharmacology and herbology. For months I had quietly canvassed shop after shop, and no alchemist had surpassed Rupert, a man who had walked the single road of alchemy for forty years.
Rupert would hate to abandon his shop — but he would hate even more to miss the chance to bind his own grandson to a duke's son.
"Welcome to the family, then."
I held out my hand to Kaspar. Flustered, he caught it in both of his.
"I will work hard so as never to tarnish your name, my lord."
"Tarnish nothing — if anything, I'll be the one benefiting. The workshop is on the third floor, to the left. Stop by later and we'll draft the formulae together, so go on ahead and have a look around the place."
"Yes, my lord."
"Ah — one thing I should mention in advance."
Kaspar's face was swollen with anticipation. I grinned ear to ear at the thought of dashing it.
"The work I'm entrusting to you is not alchemy. It's pill refining."
"...Pardon?"
"I take it you haven't heard?"
"Wh-why, you only said you were looking for a master for the alchemy workshop... I've never in my life even heard the term pill ref—!"
Startled out of his wits, Kaspar swallowed his tea through his nose instead of his mouth. Before my eyes, he coughed again and again, his face burning crimson.
"Kaff, kaff! My deepest apologi— KHRGH!"
Patting his back, I carried on with the explanation.
"There's no need to panic. Pill refining and alchemy are practically siblings. The methods are much alike — you might say it's the goal that differs a little."
"M-may I ask what the goal of pill refining is?"
"To create an artificial mana source, and with it..."
For dramatic effect, I let the words hang.
"To never grow old. To live forever."
Kaspar swallowed hard.
That's right — the aim of pill refining was immortality and eternal youth. In a word: to become an immortal.
And somewhere along that long, long road, we would mend my severed meridians, strengthen the knight order, and see to the rest.
Once Kaspar had withdrawn, I stayed alone in the office and lazily tipped my teacup.
Preparing for the founding had kept me frantically busy this past month. A little time to take stock of myself seemed only fair.
And yet no matter how I tilted the cup, not a drop of tea came.
...Huh?
I turned the cup upside down to peer inside — and my brow furrowed.
The tea had frozen solid, cup and all. Along with my hand.