Chapter 343 |
Rules Written in Blood (9)
In the plaza of the Sealed City, Yuel's sword caught the starlight as she raised it high. With the blade that had executed countless criminals, Yuel Razian carried out the sentence.
The criminal had been captured.
She had been made to know her crime.
The Warden of the Sealed City had passed judgment.
In this moment, the criminal's standing was meaningless. Whether a ten-star Transcendent or a great Constellation who had lived a thousand years, what mattered was that she was a lawbreaker. That single fact became a chain that bound Hermann's body.
The law forged through the lives of the Sealed City's successive wardens had reduced Hermann to nothing more than a criminal. Yuel's lifetime of executing every last lawbreaker without exception had become the blade. And it was the executioner's task to swing it.
The sword of judgment fell.
Yuel, as Warden of the Sealed City, does not know how to swing a sword. She does not know how to wield sword aura, how to draw on mana, or, naturally, how to channel her Mystique into a blade.
The woman who had lost her memory had swung a sword for 150 years. She had executed countless criminals, and through that process she had reached the rank of Sword Master. Sword aura, mana, the art of filling her blade with her Mystique, she knew all of it.
Yet the sword Yuel swung now was different from any she had swung before.
Because she had dimly come to understand her past.
Because she understood her own life more clearly. Because she had gained a new star. Because she knew what she ought to do with her Mystique. And above all else...
Because her sword now had a reason to be swung.
Up until now, the sword she had swung for the sake of pleasure had lacked purpose. It had been a sword swung simply to kill enemies. But the sword she swung in this moment carried a meaning beyond that.
Shhk.
The sword of Yuel, of Yuel Razian, cut through Hermann's neck. Her severed head shot upward, and starlight burst free. What was severed was her head, but what had been cut was Hermann's constellation.
Tik-tik-tik-tik-tik...
Cracks raced across Hermann's constellation with a splitting sound. The Mystique dwelling in Yuel's sword unmade him through Dissolution. With the very Mystique that had once unmade herself, Yuel dissolved the constellation of the star that had toyed with her life.
The lords of the Sealed City watched.
The lord whose writing had filled the journal's first page. The lord who had wandered searching for a way to escape the city. The lord who had closed the journal in despair. The lord who, watching an ant, had chosen to keep struggling. The one who had laid the foundations of the law. The lord who had let a coin decide their fate but in the final moment had acted on their own will.
An old man who had prepared the law for the lord who would come after.
They watched Hermann's end.
After hundreds of years, they had at last finished their revenge.
"Ah... ah..."
In her final moment, Hermann wore an expression of incomprehension, the look of someone who could not understand why any of this was happening, who could make no sense of the situation before her.
What the Star of Omniscience carried at the end of her life was a question. The constellation that was supposed to know all things came face to face with the unknown, and in the end became ignorant.
In that final moment, Hermann denied her own star.
His body dissolved into starlight as the sky shattered to pieces around him. That starlight drifted before the eyes of the apostle who had been closest to Hermann.
The Star of Omniscience (■■).
The star that had broken the moment it was exposed to the blight star 150 years ago. A star with its form intact but its interior hollowed out. Najin's eyes narrowed. This was not what they had expected. They had hunted Hermann to obtain the Star of Omniscience, but it had never occurred to them that the star itself might be broken.
Najin and Merlin were taken aback.
"From the very beginning," Yuel said.
Yuel was not.
"I never had any intention of receiving the Star of Omniscience intact. Omniscience, please. People can't even know what tomorrow holds, what kind of omniscience are we even talking about?"
She let out a short laugh.
"In the end, the knowledge any one person can accumulate is limited. Because it's limited, the world is full of problems that can't be solved right now. In the ivory tower, they call those unsolved problems, and paste them all over the hallways."
The woman who had been a mathematician before she fell into this city continued.
"You know what's funny? The ivory tower has a library where all the solved problems are kept. When you look through them, you start thinking: this is supposed to be unsolvable? You just need a few equations to crack it."
But then again, Yuel said.
"When you think about it, every equation used to solve those problems was discovered by later generations. And not with the intent to solve anything, either, they were equations stumbled upon while trying to do something else entirely."
"An unsolved problem that hundreds of mathematicians had thrown themselves at for two hundred years was solved by a farmer who drew inspiration from the way he divided up his fields to make tending them easier."
"Funny, isn't it?"
"That's how things tend to go in this world."
Yuel let out a long breath.
"Even a problem that seems to have absolutely no answer right now has a way of being solved far too easily once time passes, knowledge accumulates, and new things get discovered."
She reached her hand toward the Star of Omniscience.
"So rather than a star called Omniscience..."
Into the Star of Transmitted Knowledge (■■), its interior hollowed out, she filled it with her life. She poured in what she had come to understand.
"I find myself preferring Transmitted Knowledge-knowledge passed on to those who come after."
Passed on to someone who would come after, so passed, transmitted.
Knowledge passed down and built upon, so Transmitted Knowledge.
"Like this one journal."
The Star of Transmitted Knowledge settled into the single journal Yuel held in her hand. For Yuel it was her second star, and for Yuel Razian her eighth.
2.
Hermann's death brought the sanctuary crashing down.
The gears that had made up the sky fell, crumbled, and became powder that drifted down like snow. Beneath that snowfall, Yuel and Najin sat perched on a wall in the Sealed City.
Watching the sky come apart, Yuel spoke with something like disbelief.
"That ended simpler than I expected. I thought I'd have to grab her and blow up again, like last time."
"In truth, the fight was already decided back then."
"Already decided?"
Najin spoke to the tilting-headed Yuel.
"Hermann already lost to you that day. He took a hit in a way he never anticipated, in a form he never anticipated."
The concept of Omniscience is powerful. When a powerful concept is denied, the price to be paid is proportionally great.
Hermann's star had not only been exposed to the blight star but had also been forced to pay the price of its own concept being negated. Just imagining the load that must have placed on it was beyond even Najin.
"She only held on that long because it was Hermann. A normal constellation would have become a ghost on the spot."
Najin nodded.
"Still, it feels a bit much to call it simple, doesn't it?"
"Excuse me? What do you mean by that?"
"Bringing down Hermann required tens, hundreds of millions of people, and hundreds of years on top of that."
Najin said that, then pointed to the book in Yuel's hand.
"Hermann was defeated by those hundreds of years. By the knowledge accumulated by you and the countless wardens who came before. In the end, what brought down Omniscience was Transmitted Knowledge."
And.
"What finished it at the very end was the tenacity of someone who endured to the last in this thoroughly insane city."
"..."
"Just as you said yourself, everything that happened in this city had its own meaning. If even one piece had been missing, the whole strategy would have fallen apart."
So then, Najin said.
"Isn't it all right to be a little more proud of yourself?"
"Be more proud of myself."
Yuel moved her lips. She seemed about to say something, but quickly closed her mouth and bowed her head.
"Really."
When she raised her head again she was smiling. Wearing that smile, Yuel leaned her head against Najin's shoulder.
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"Do I have to spell it out? For this and that and everything else. I'm saying thank you, so just take it as a thank you."
Snow fell from the sky.
The remnants of Hermann, steeped in starlight, scattered through the air.
"I've always," Yuel said.
Snow piled up over the Sealed City. Watching it gather, she continued.
"When I saw people falling for someone, saying they'd go crazy without a certain person, becoming the kind of pair who'd die for each other... I thought that was pretty foolish."
"Did you?"
"Yes, wasn't it? In a world where keeping yourself alive is already hard enough, handing half your life over to someone else, what kind of idiotic thing is that? Work out the math and it's nothing but a losing trade."
Grumbling that, Yuel let a little more tension out of her body. The weight she shed settled onto Najin's shoulder where her head rested.
"But, well."
She said.
"I think you'd be all right. Not just half, I could hand over the whole thing."
Having said that, Yuel did not wait for Najin's answer. She lifted her head, dropped off the wall, and landed in the plaza of the Sealed City where snow had piled up softly.
Najin blinked, then let out an amused, helpless laugh and began walking after her.
Yuel pressed her footprints into the snow the way a small child seeing it for the first time would. She crossed the plaza with a light, almost bouncing step, then turned around. Looking back at Najin following behind her, she tilted her head.
Snow-white hair spilled down.
A mischievous look settled on her face.
"I've already handed over half, so do your best with the other half. Though it looks like that other half already came over too."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"What do you think it means?"
Chuckling, Yuel swung her arm.
The bracelet at her wrist jingled.
"This time I can say a different goodbye than last time."
"A different goodbye?"
"See you again soon, Najin."
Soon, we'll meet again.
With those last words, Yuel closed her eyes. The moment she did, the Sealed City, her sanctuary, dissolved into starlight and scattered away.
Looking around, the view of the gorge came into sight.
They were back outside. Najin blinked, adjusting to the changed scenery, and turned his head. There stood Yuel Razian, stock-still with a vacant look.
"Hmm."
"Hmm, mmm..."
She wore a complicated expression, then met Najin's gaze. Her lips worked for a moment, and her first words were as follows.
"I can feel another self inside me. That personality is whispering to me: try being a little bolder; how about closing the distance while pretending not to notice? And now she's saying, god, why would you tell him that."
She tilted her head.
"What on earth is going on...?"
3.
"What are you doing, Najin?"
On the road back from the Outland.
During a short rest by a campfire, Yuel asked Najin, who was writing something.
"Ah, this?"
Najin held up the book in his hand as if it were nothing. The title was plain and simple.
Surviving in the Outland.
It was a book he had stumbled across right at the start of this journey. Tapping the cover, Najin said.
"At the end, the author made a contract with a demon to survive, so the later parts go a bit off the rails... but up through the middle, there was quite a bit of useful content."
"Isn't that a book tainted by a demon?"
"Well."
Najin closed his fist in the air. He drew Excalibur from nothing and held it near the book. A shriek of "KIEEEEEEK!" rang out as the demonic energy still lurking in the pages was purified in an instant.
"Anyway, I'm thinking of continuing the manuscript."
"That book?"
"Yes. It seemed like it could be fun."
The book written by Francis, the legendary adventurer said to have survived 118 years in the Outland, Najin intended to continue it.
Leaving behind information for someone who would come after.
That was what had caught his interest.
Crackle. Sitting before the campfire, Najin pressed his fingers to his brow. What sentence should he start with. After thinking it over for some time, Najin lifted his quill.
This line seemed right.
"These are rules written in blood."
Not Najin's blood, of course.
It was the blood of demons, magical beasts, the undead, jesters, and the many other constellations that had stood in Najin's way, but Najin chose not to mention that. Sometimes leaving things unmentioned was the wiser choice.
"Oh, what about this? Let's put this in too! I know a thing or two about dealing with witches!"
"In the Outland, you can identify black mages this way. The method is as follows."
The blood of witches and black mages was added to that, but that too went unmentioned. Only at the end did the names of those who had helped with the writing get added, with "Merlin" and "Yuel Razian" joining the list.
Surviving in the Outland.
Author, Francis
With assistance from, Najin, Merlin, Yuel Razian.
One reader's review of this book, in later years, went as follows.
"Part One is the real Surviving in the Outland. Packed full of information useful for staying alive. But Part Two... well, this feels less like 'surviving' and more like 'conquering'..."
A minor quibble.