A Happening (0)
My current realm was the Origin Spirit Realm—two steps shy of the Ascension Realm, and by this world's standards, strong enough to trade blows with a Master-rank Awoken Ability user.
Reaching Origin Spirit had brought one worry into sharp focus: unlike in my past life, the power of my Severed Meridian was steadily growing stronger.
The Severed Meridian was, at bottom, a matter of constitution. There was no reason for it to grow just because I did, yet for whatever reason, the thing kept pace with my every advance. It had finally reached the point where my teacup froze over mid-sip, and cold qi forcing its way out of my body unbidden was never a good omen.
Knock, knock.
"Come in."
The visitor was Thalia. Judging by the state of her, the recruits had been running her ragged; she looked every bit as worn out as I felt.
"The documents you requested, my lord."
She set a thick bundle of papers on my desk.
"How are the recruits?"
"Brimming with anticipation and drive."
"No—their current level."
Thalia's head tilted at a quizzical angle.
"Speaking frankly, Shaka alone could finish off the entire rest of the order within the hour. The statement holds equally true if you replace Shaka with Srudal."
"So they have no fundamentals whatsoever."
"Correct. All they possess are their Awoken Abilities. In terms of conditioning, they are hardly distinguishable from ordinary civilians."
"Then we focus on fundamentals and nothing else for the time being."
I rose from my chair.
"I'm leaving the training schedule entirely in your hands. If anything urgent comes up, reach me through Lily."
The urgent matter at the moment was my own. This latest sign boded genuinely ill.
"As it happens, there is something urgent. Right now."
Thalia said it with a look of mild despair.
"What urgent matter?"
"It concerns Shaka. I believe you need to see it for yourself, Lord Iden."
The knight order had been groaning at the seams from the very day its recruits were chosen. I was in the middle of receiving reports when Thalia brought me wholly unexpected news: one of the recruits was refusing to train and defying direct orders.
Trivial, if you wanted to call it that. Wherever people gather, discord is bound to spring up.
By rights, it should have been settled at the vice-commander's level. The reason she had escalated it to me was that the troublemaker was Shaka—the recruit destined to become a squad leader and one day lead the order itself.
I canceled my afternoon schedule and headed for the training grounds. Word had evidently gotten around; headquarters was already in a state of unrest.
No—unrest didn't begin to cover it.
Dozens of recruits lay strewn across the training hall like fallen leaves. None of them appeared to be injured. They were simply sprawled flat, dead to the world, unable to move so much as a finger.
And at the very center of the fallen, standing upright like a banner planted amid the wreckage, was a girl whose dark circles stretched all the way down to her philtrum.
"Your Highness, Lord Iden."
She sank into a light curtsy before me.
"Sorry about the commotion. That wasn't the plan."
"What exactly happened here?"
"Nothing much. I just taught them which of us is stronger."
In the corner of the training hall sat Srudal, unable to keep his enormous frame steady, both hands clamped over his head.
"Thalia tells me you refused to train."
"The Vice-Commander has misunderstood, it seems. As you can plainly see, I have been applying myself to training more diligently than anyone."
"To be precise, she refused the swordsmanship training," Thalia supplied from beside me.
I glanced at the wooden sword lying abandoned at Shaka's feet. So this had started out as a sparring match.
"And your reason for refusing the sword training?"
"Because I'm the strongest."
Shaka said it with a flash of her eyes.
"I can blanket the worthless little thoughts inside people's heads with my own. I can make them writhe in the wretchedness of their own existence until they drive a blade into their own mouths. I'm already the strongest, so swinging sticks around is a waste of everyone's time."
"I've heard your Awoken Ability is powerful. But there are any number of opponents it won't work on."
"No one can stop me. Not monsters. Not demons."
Her voice was brimming with certainty—a confidence far too absolute to write off as a fifteen-year-old's bravado.
Besides, she really had neutralized Srudal, a Grade 3 monster. That alone shrank the list of people in the duchy capable of facing her to a handful.
So it was a genuine emergency after all.
Even a Master-rank fighter like Thalia would be hard-pressed to deal with Shaka's deathly musings echoing through her skull.
Which suited me fine. There was no better moment to knock this order's discipline into shape.
"You're mistaken, Shaka. You are not the strongest."
Her brow creased.
"I am loyal to you, Lord Iden, but you cannot force me to believe something false."
"The strongest is me."
"...I beg your pardon?"
I tapped my own chest with my thumb and declared it with a confidence bold enough to sweep her aside.
"You don't follow me because I'm the Duke's son. You follow me because you are weaker than I am."
Shaka's fluster lasted all of a heartbeat. Then she thrust out her chest and left me with her grand declaration:
"The strongest is me. Your being weaker than I am doesn't change my loyalty, of course."
"Thalia. Your sword."
"Yes, my lord."
The recruits began to murmur. Thalia handed her sword over without a word of protest. Her faith in me did not waver by so much as a hair.
"Two people can't both be the strongest, can they?" Shaka giggled.
"A fair point. But I can't fight you, Lord Iden."
"If it's because I'm your lord that you hold back, then I swear by the name of Lord Solitas: I will hold you accountable for nothing that happens from this moment on."
"I'm a mental-type Awakened. Once I commit to my power, there is no such thing as going easy."
"Beat me, and I'll exempt you from sword training."
She still didn't look thrilled about it.
"And I'll take you on as my personal bodyguard."
"...Do you mean that?"
Both of Shaka's eyes abruptly blazed alight with ambition.
"I don't say things twice."
"Then I accept those terms. I'll give it everything I have."
"In exchange, if you lose, you obey your superiors promptly and completely. Deal?"
"Yes. If I lose, I'm the Vice-Commander's slave."
There was no need to go quite that far, but fine.
And so the match was struck: the order's strongest recruit against the Duke's third son. The recruits slapped their fallen comrades awake—hard enough that the slaps stung—so that not a single one of them would miss it.
At the center of the training hall, Shaka and I faced each other.
Did this fight truly need its importance spelled out in words?
I had no intention of being followed by knights who knelt to nothing but my bloodline.
These people would fight for me. They might die for me. One day, they might have to march into the far reaches of the Demonic Realm to claim a dragon's heart.
And I possessed no grand ideal lofty enough to move them. The only thing I could offer was overwhelming force.
"Let's begin."
Shaka let her eyes fall half-closed.
My master had once told me this: for every Daoist who walks the righteous path, there is another who walks the demonic one.
The demonic path, he said, was the road of taking humanity's darkest emotions—malice, bloodlust, envy—and refining them into the soul's fuel in pursuit of transcendence.
That was precisely what I felt, standing across from Shaka now.
She hadn't even unleashed her ability. She had merely opened those half-lidded eyes and looked at me. Yet the malice dwelling within her ran so deep that I felt as though I had set foot at the mouth of the Avici Hell, the deepest pit of torment.
Those glass-bead eyes held nothing but endless dark.
In my heart, I began to recite the Taixu Zhenjing, the True Scripture of the Great Void—a scripture for expelling every wicked qi and setting the mind upright, one that righteous Daoists reached for only when confronting the demonic path.
"...I'll begin now."
Shaka's lips parted.
—Iden Esterji.
Hm?
It was a singular sensation. For an instant, it felt as though her mind had been wired directly into mine, and her intent came pouring across the connection in the shape of language—fast, astonishingly fast.
—You froze your mother to death the moment you were born. Your retainers must have lined up every excuse you wanted to hear, but you know the truth.
Remarkable. Her voice arrived inside my mind wearing an utterly persuasive shape.
My mother's death remained an unexplained affair, and she had struck true at that weak point—all the more so given that, counting my past life, two mothers' fates were bound up with mine.
—But was your mother truly the only one you killed? Was she really only ever going to bear one child—you?
Huh. That angle had never occurred to me.
Wait—was this an angle she was even allowed to jab at? I was the Duke's son, last I checked.
I had told her to use any means at her disposal, so I had no one to blame but myself.
My mother had been a devoted family woman who had looked forward to a future filled with children. A woman like that would gladly have borne more after me.
—Right, surely several more. Your mother was quite the lover, after all.
—And the object of that love was not the Duke.
What?
—You know how it is. Our illustrious Duke thinks of nothing but his work. Off to war at the drop of a hat, leaving the castle empty behind him. Your mother was his second wife, already far younger than he was, and no woman can spend her whole life gazing at an old man who has no intention of ever coming home.
This was nonsense. My mother's letters had never mentioned Father once, but I refused to believe she was capable of such betrayal.
—You do know your hair is a different color from Mabel's and Chris's, don't you?
My hair color was the work of the Cold Yin Severed Meridian. I had worn this exact head of hair in my past life, too.
—I suppose you might think it has something to do with your ice. The fact that a handsome, high-born nobleman with hair precisely as white as yours was comforting your mother at her side? Surely that means nothing at all to you.
...That one would be difficult to verify, actually.
—The truth is, you look nothing like the Duke. He is masculine and imposing; you are delicate as a girl. If I were you, I could never have gone anywhere and introduced myself as the Duke's son with a straight face.
......
—For the record, that nobleman is dead now. The Duke took him to the front lines—a man who had never once in his life learned to fight.
—In short, you are a cuckoo's chick. You drift across the lake as gracefully as if you had been born a swan, but none of it was ever given for you. Not from the very beginning.
—I can hear them. Can't you? The voices whispering behind their hands, pointing at that white hair of yours? The chatter of everyone who knows what your mother was?
—The truth is always uncomfortable. The fools who cluster around you would never dream of speaking it.
—Why do you even struggle? If the Duke names you his heir, the Esterji bloodline dies with you. Is that what you want?
It was genuinely impressive. She left me no room to draw breath, pouring a voice of tremendous persuasive force straight into my psyche. Against an attack of this kind, even the mightiest power in the world would have been helpless.
But I happened to be a Daoist who had trained his mind his entire life, with a past life on top of that. If you wanted to break me, you would need to assault two lifetimes at once.
Even so, Shaka's ability was formidable. That persuasiveness, that insight...
Had it not been for the Taixu Zhenjing, I might actually have gotten angry.
I snapped my eyes open.
"How in the world..."
The surging malice had dissolved. In its place, Shaka stared back at me with both eyes round as saucers.
Then, all at once, she clasped her hands together.
"I'm sorry! You endured it so well that I got carried away and said far too many things I shouldn't have!"
"...No, it's fine. I'm the one who swore the oath."
"How is this even possible? You're the first person my power has ever failed on. Demons, monsters, ogres—not one of them has ever lasted more than ten seconds!"
"Want to know?"
"Yes!"
"Then take your training seriously."
I drove the point home.
"You have to be ready for the day your power doesn't work."
Shaka's Awoken Ability was not yet complete. As she stood, she merely persuaded her targets with inborn insight. But if she ever acquired magic power of a higher grade, I would not be reciting scripture at her—I would need true spellcraft to hold my ground.
"Yes! I'll train hard!"
She was surprisingly docile about it. Still burning with ambition, mind you.
"Maybe next time we could—"
"Next time, we settle it with swords."
To leave no room for misunderstanding, I stressed it once more.
"Swords. Understood?"
"Yes!"