Chapter 341

I Pulled Out Excalibur

Code Written in Blood (7)

A middle-aged man, younger than the godfather Yuel remembered, his hair not yet gone white, sat down in a chair. For a while he read the diaries left behind by the lords who had come before him.

He closed the journal and looked out the window.

He stood at the windowsill for a long time, gazing down at the city. Then he returned to his seat and opened the journal again.

"I am not a man suited to be lord."

That was how the first line began.

"I know myself well."

"I am the kind of middling man who can rarely make a decision, who even when forced to choose between two options cannot choose, and simply follows along with whatever others want."

"Unable to become a good man."

"I am not a person fit to sit in a seat so high, where one must lead others. I know that well enough."

Even so, he wrote.

"Someone had to sit in this seat."

"Because the one suited for this seat has not yet appeared in this city. Until that someone comes, I intend to hold this seat for a little while."

"In this city drowning in madness, someone must take responsibility for that madness. Middling as I am, I can at least serve as a scapegoat."

He closed the journal and pressed his palms over his face. Hidden behind his hands, he wept.

"I miss you. Sofia."

Time flowed on like that. The middle-aged man left the lord's chamber every day and wandered outside. He seemed to be searching for someone, combing through every corner of the city. At night he returned to the chamber and sifted through mountains of documents.

He was looking for something.

What that something was, Yuel already knew from reading the diary. Najin would soon know it too.

"Going through the records left by the lords before me, I have come to understand something."

"The Transcendent who threw us into this city desires something, and to that end has been conducting repeated experiments."

"That is right. As the fourteenth lord surmised, this is one great experiment."

He was not a man suited to be lord, but as a scholar he was exceptional. He sorted the materials and analyzed the information scattered across the diaries to reach his conclusions.

"In the case of the first lord, Torres, 'indiscriminate dissection' was carried out, but as the generations passed, all talk of dissection disappeared. I believe the conditions were changed, and those conditions are as follows."

"Human madness."

"Humans are being made to kill humans."

He had analyzed the conditions the Star of Omniscience, Hermann, had laid into this city.

"Humans are being turned into beasts."

"How does one resist this madness?"

"The twenty-sixth lord gives me instruction."

"It is the law."

He had seized the method to fight back.

"Humans are social animals. That they have become beasts is because society has grown unstable. And society collapses when the law is not upheld."

"Break the law, and punishment follows."

"If that fact is carved into them, they will try to suppress their own madness of their own accord."

From that day on he studied the foundations of the bill left behind by the twenty-sixth lord, and summoned to the castle those who had worked in matters of law outside its walls, debating with them through the night.

A month passed. A year. Several years. Ten years.

The city kept breaking down, but the law was slowly taking shape.

"I believe in the goodness of humanity."

"And that belief has not yet faded."

Wrinkles deepened in the man's face. Past middle age, his hair had begun to go white.

"That they became beasts is not because their nature is evil. If the Transcendent who built this city says that the nature of humans is beastly, then I choose to believe their nature is good."

"I saw an old man who had gone starving for days yield to a young child the food he had barely managed to obtain. That sight I will not forget. They are not beasts. They are people."

"I will make them so."

One day, as time passed.

A young girl set foot in the castle. She sat beside the old man and grumbled, but she began taking lessons from him all the same.

"I found her."

"She is still a child, yet I could see at once that she is the most upright person in this city."

"Her gaze does not waver. She knows how to refuse temptation. She knows how to restrain herself. And yet she knows how to stand above others."

The old man taught the girl. When teaching her he wore a gentle smile and treated her as a father would a daughter, but whenever the girl left and he was alone in the room, the old man would press his face into his hands and groan.

"I will end up making this child do something cruel."

"I will surely fall into hell."

"From hell, one step ahead, I will wait there for the Transcendent who built this city."

Because he knew what role he would force upon that girl, and how terrible that role would be.

"The law nears completion."

"The lords before me are helping me."

"The letters written in the diaries have begun to change. The changed letters are seeping into the code of law."

"My guess is that it was not until my generation that this single journal ascended into a Sacred Object."

A journal passed through the hands of countless lords.

The countless, countless rules they had written down.

"It is complete."

Letters that had flowed like blood seeped into the single code of law the old man had built. And so the code ascended into a Sacred Object. The old man suddenly understood. What remained now was the final step.

"Forgive me. Yuel."

Yuel's breath caught.

"There will be no occasion for you to read these words."

"But if, by some miracle, the impossible is permitted and you do read this, then to you who are reading these words, I want to say this."

The old man had finished preparing to stain the code with his own blood.

"You were my pride."

"The years I spent teaching you were among the few joyful memories I had in this hellish city."

"I do not know whether I, who thrust this role upon you, have any right to say so, but I pray with all my heart that you are victorious."

The girl came to the lord's chamber. She said there was a revolt outside, that they had to flee. The old man looked at her and rose from his seat.

Then he placed a knife in the girl's hand and used that knife to put a period at the end of his own life.

Blood flowing, his lips moved soundlessly. Because it was a reproduced vision, no voice could be heard. But Yuel knew what the old man had said in that moment.

The next lord is you.

The instant the old man's form scattered, the lord's chamber filled with starlight. The journal Yuel had been holding also transformed into starlight and drifted away.

The drifting light gradually took shape.

"......"

She closed her eyes and opened them again.

Standing inside the lord's chamber were countless people.

2.

Yuel looked around in silence.

Those standing there were her predecessors. The lords who had sat in her seat before her and then gone, the ones who had written words in the journal for the sake of their successor, stood there now.

Were they visions conjured from starlight?

Or were they the will those people had left behind, dwelling within the starlight?

Most likely the latter. Someone stepped forward from among the lords. It was an old man with white hair, Yuel's godfather. In his hand he held a single code of law. The old man held it out to her.

"......Ah."

Yuel wiped her face.

She asked the godfather standing before her, her predecessor as lord, whether it seemed like she had done well. The old man did not answer.

He only smiled.

It was a more certain answer than any words. Yuel's eyes wavered. Her lips trembled faintly. Then she let out a long breath and reached out her hand.

"You impossible old fool."

The last lord of the Sealed City took hold of the code of law.

The moment she gripped it, the visions of the former lords that had filled the chamber transformed into starlight and seeped into the code. Their will became like blood and adorned its pages.

The Rules Written in Blood became Law.

A journal that had been nothing became, through the blood and obsession of countless lords, something that held starlight within it, and that starlight hardened into the form of a code of law. The desperate struggle of lords who had wanted to leave something behind had at last given birth to a Sacred Object.

A code stained in blood.

It was also the object that symbolized Yuel, who had become a constellation. Yuel looked in silence at the code in her hand. How the law she had enforced across so many long years had come to be, what the letters composing that law truly were, she understood it now for the first time.

......All the starlight that had piled up and piled up found meaning when it reached the last lord.

Gathered starlight becomes a single star.

Not a blight star, but a star of platinum white.

Yuel had gained her seventh star, or perhaps her first.

The star of Inheritance.

Having gained the star, she now understood what she had to do. When something that needed doing arose, some people put it off and others moved right away. Yuel was the latter.

Step.

The last lord of the Sealed City began to walk.

The moment she took that step, the city began to crumble. Because this city was no longer a prison to her.

And Hermann noticed the anomaly.

Sensing that a change had begun from the very foundation of his sanctuary, that something unknown to him had appeared, Hermann's sanctuary began to shake.

The shapeless city surged over them like a wave.

Grinding gears bore down to block Yuel's path, yet her eyes held not the slightest tremor. Because there was no need to worry.

"If you put a chessboard on the table, you play chess."

Najin drew his sword.

"You cannot simply kill the player. That is a violation of the rules, and the one who violated them first is you."

There was nothing left to hold back.

Gripping Excalibur, Najin took his stance.

"I will open the path."

Najin smiled.

"Just like back then."

3.

They walked through the shaking sanctuary.

Yuel's footsteps were pressed into the Sealed City, becoming history that Hermann could not dissect, and they remained there. With every step Yuel took, the sanctuary trembled more violently.

But Najin would not allow the shaking sanctuary to wash over her. As if to say that anyone who wanted to stop her walking would have to break him first, Najin swung his sword.

Step.

Walking forward, Yuel spoke in a murmur, not aloud, not past her lips. But it would surely be recorded somewhere.

In the code stained in blood.

In the single book that had been someone's diary before it was a code of law, Yuel's words became letters and were inscribed.

"It felt like a lonely life."

The last lord of the Sealed City wrote.

"I was dropped into this city without understanding why, and when I came to my senses I found myself sitting in the lord's seat. In my hands was a code stained with blood."

She walked forward.

"What on earth was this thing for?"

"Why had that old man left this to me, why had he chosen me, what was the point of struggling in this city, in the end I would just rot away here too."

"What meaning could there be in all that resistance?"

"I could not understand it."

She laughed softly, almost without meaning to.

"Then a thought came to me. Even without meaning, there was a reason. I could not let myself dance to the tune of that damned bastard who threw me into this city."

"So I struggled."

"To the very last moment, I moved with one single conviction: things would not go according to that bastard's intentions."

That was how she had lived.

"But now, looking back."

"There was meaning."

"There was worth, too."

"So your lives also have worth. Whatever you left behind also had meaning."

Yuel had seen the visions of the countless lords who had passed through the journal. They became steps and prepared places for her to set her feet. In the crumbling city, she climbed those steps and rose toward the sky.

"Because."

She looked up at the sky.

The sky of Omniscience, where countless gears meshed and turned.

"Right now, I am standing here."

Cracks began to spread through the gears. Inside the sanctuary of Omniscience, it had been proven that the Star of Omniscience was not omniscient. One small gear had broken, but the intricately fitted sky allowed not even the smallest error.

The sky collapsed. The sanctuary of Omniscience crumbled.

A tearing scream echoed through the sanctuary.

And at last, Hermann's true form, hidden beyond the falling sky, revealed itself. The smile that settled on Yuel's lips as she looked at him was contemptuous.

, By what does humanity challenge the heavens?

By the records it has built up.

By the history it has carried forward.

And by an obsession that not even a Transcendent could calculate.