Chapter 216 |
The imperial palace archive. A corner of the library lit by the soft glow of mana stone lamps.
Hanna Usar was reading a book.
The paperwork for her dispatched assignment, the registry project, had been set aside for the moment. She was reading Moonlight Below, Maximilian's autobiography.
"......"
She read in silence, drinking in the lines one by one. Just as she had in her Empire Point days, pulling all-nighters to work through military theory, she held a pen in one hand and drew red underlines beneath every passage that mattered.
"...... A people is a bond that shares a historical identity and bloodline."
She murmured the line quietly aloud, then copied it carefully into her notes.
"To share in the sublime awareness of being Aran...... through oral traditions passed down across the ages......"
The scratch of her pen nib.
The soft rustle of turning pages.
"Without this distinction, humanity will be torn apart and ultimately destroyed."
Hanna pressed the underline twice.
"The pure Aran are a race that stood at the very dawn of this continent. They are those who were conceived as its true masters......"
"Hey. What are you doing?"
A familiar voice came from behind her. It was her classmate Dare Tan. He too was holding a copy of Moonlight Below.
"...... Studying."
The words printed in this book were Maximilian's own language. The ideology behind his eyes. The will that spoke for Ebenholtz, and for the Empire itself. To fully absorb and internalize it, study was essential.
"You too? Same."
Dare Tan smiled and dropped into the seat across from her. He set two warm cups of coffee on the table and slid one toward Hanna.
Slurp.
The two of them sipped their coffee and sat quietly facing each other, each sinking back into their own silence.
......
In the Imperial center, the Kaiser Society's racial research was now more active than it had ever been.
The one thing drawing all their attention: a single book.
Kaiser Society president Wilhelm turned a page of Moonlight Below.
Maximilian Ebenholtz himself had given him this book as a gift right after publication. It had arrived alongside a certain glorious certificate.
Certificate of Authenticity for Family Register.
The original family register of Wilhelm, personally verified by Maximilian as being of "pure Aran bloodline." It sat proudly in an ornate gold frame at the most visible spot in Wilhelm's office, right in the center of his desk, on full display.
"Haa......"
As he read, Wilhelm's eyes grew red with emotion.
The superiority of the Aran people. A lofty, refined ideology. In truth, these had amounted to nothing more than a tempest in a teacup, circulating only within the Kaiser Society itself. To be more precise, there had never been enough authority to spread this thinking across the entire continent and rally people behind it. Scholars who pushed back against Wilhelm's theses and argued with him were still everywhere.
But now things were different.
Maximilian Ebenholtz. He had put the Aran's convictions into a book himself, in his own hand. Who on earth would dare raise a pen against his words, against his beliefs? Those parasites who called themselves intellectuals and walked around with their noses in the air would never have the nerve to cross swords with Maximilian on paper. They would mutter under their breath, no, they would hold even that back, terrified of being overheard, and simply keep their heads down.
What's more, this great work even cited some of the ideas Maximilian had borrowed from Wilhelm himself.
[ ...... The classification of bloodlines may be understood as follows. The "ruling bloodline" at the apex, which leads the continent. The "quasi-applicable bloodline," which through loyalty to the Empire may receive treatment equivalent to Aran...... ]
"The very image of the Aran. A true idol......"
Wilhelm muttered in a daze, then suddenly shot to his feet.
Near the bottom of one paragraph. A small footnote printed there.
Wilhelm's eyes went wide staring at it. His entire body trembled like an aspen in the wind.
[ The concept in this passage draws in part from the racial classification system of Dr. Wilhelm, President of the Imperial Kaiser Society. ]
A single line of attribution. His mind locked up completely. It felt as though every bone in his skull had cramped at once.
With shaking hands, Wilhelm clutched his curly hair.
His lips moved soundlessly for a moment, and then, without quite knowing it, he briefly fainted dead away.
......
Thud.
Arthur Winston dropped the book onto the table.
"Good grief......"
The premises of this worldview, dressed up to sound like science, ran very deep. It divided race and ethnicity however it pleased, yet within that very framework the concept of "the state" itself was strangely absent. A calculated move to sidestep the diplomatic friction that lay ahead, perhaps.
"...... Tsk."
Chapter one was unmistakably an autobiography. It traced the path the author had walked as a knight, narrating his own history and background, drawing the reader straight in. The prose was remarkably fluid. The sentences were poetic and never excessive, so the book read easily.
Arthur himself had mistaken it for literature at first.
But from chapter two onward, the book drew readers in through the warm doorway of "people," then concealed a racial hierarchy beneath it.
The book never forced a clear conclusion. It left the space for judgment deliberately open so that readers filled in the blank themselves and arrived at agreement on their own.
This was not Maximilian's autobiography. It was a tract written to condition the public.
Tap. Tap.
Arthur drummed his fingers lightly on the table. A servant entered the room shortly after.
"Take that and use it for kindling."
He nodded toward the book lying on the table.
"Yes."
As the servant gathered up the book and left, Arthur sank into thought.
Maximilian Ebenholtz. A nobleman who concealed a fanatical ideology behind a beautiful smile, as though he were imperialism itself made flesh.
He was the most dangerous man on the entire continent. Even within the Empire, those who feared him were now countless.
"Maximilian......"
Arthur had faced him only once, but that single encounter had left a strong impression even on someone as seasoned as Arthur Winston.
"There's one thing I'm genuinely curious about."
A question he wanted to put to a man he would likely never have the chance to ask-a man he had no desire to meet again.
"Are you satisfied with where you are?"
Not the sky, but the ceiling. The man who stood closest to the very top but still had to tilt his head up from the ground to see it.
And yet Arthur Winston was certain.
That boundless ambition of yours must reach somewhere above even that.
Because you are, at least in some ways, a person like me.
"......"
Arthur turned his gaze to the window. Night had fallen while he read, and out in the moonlight below, he could see a servant walking away with Moonlight Below tucked under one arm.
......
The Western Prozen Republic. A research office at the national university.
Professor Jean Pierre finally lifted his eyes from the page after a long stretch of reading.
"Hmm......"
He dropped his rimless glasses onto the desk and pressed his fingertips hard into his tired eyelids.
Moonlight Below.
This book was packed with sentences that were simply impossible to accept as a scholar and professor. The sociology professors at Prozen National University in particular were probably already furious, ready to fly off the handle. They would tear apart the book's logic point by point, annotate it with commentary, and flood the journals with papers attacking the dangers of its ideology.
But in Jean Pierre's view, this book was very clever. Its structure was tight. The content might be sophistry, but the form was beautiful. A well-crafted piece of writing, all told. Chapter one even gave off a genuine literary quality.
There might be no more perfect instrument for binding the Empire together and rationalizing hatred toward other peoples......
Knock. Knock.
Without warning, a knock broke through his heavy thoughts. It was Akenji, Director of the Prozen Central Intelligence Bureau.
"You're here."
Jean Pierre greeted him with a wry smile.
The explosion and assassination of Defense Minister Louis Marceau was still wrapped in mystery. They had identified a suspect named "Felix Renoir," but the man had vanished like a ghost.
"Jean, you were reading that book too."
Akenji glanced at the copy of Moonlight Below on Jean Pierre's desk. Jean Pierre nodded.
"The translation came out unusually fast. Have you finished it, Akenji?"
"I'm the director of an intelligence bureau responsible for national security. Not reading a subversive work like this would be a dereliction of duty."
Akenji answered with a bitter smile.
"What do you make of it?"
"Virulent racism, very neatly packaged."
He pulled his own copy of Moonlight Below from inside his coat and pointed to a page.
"This section about Izenheim in particular. They used crime statistics from the Empire very cleverly, claiming Izenheim crime rates are overwhelmingly higher than those of other peoples......"
Listening to him, Jean Pierre thought of the Izenheim settlement that existed in Prozen.
A lot of people would use this book as a justification for hatred. Would those people be caught up in it again, guiltless as ever?
"And they pin nearly all ideological crimes on the Izenheim as well......"
Jean Pierre stared out the window and thought.
Before long, hatred would take shape.
* * *
A book.
Whether I can call this my autobiography even I am not certain, but it is cut from a completely different cloth than that crude piece Johann once wrote for the Emperor. No, the very standard itself is different.
This book carried literary enjoyment and artistic metaphor woven together with exquisite precision. The talent that Johann Georg Goetze, that genius, had finally brought to bloom in a prison cell before my regression had now flowered a step ahead of time in this life, through me.
And yet this had become purely my autobiography. Nowhere in the text did Johann's name appear. He had refused even the title of ghostwriter.
He said he was nothing more than a scribe who had taken down my great convictions on the page, and he earnestly asked to remain a shadow.
Moonlight Below became the best-selling book in the Empire the very year it was published. That was not all. It was translated into multiple languages almost at once and spread across the entire continent, crossing every border.
Some called it a political treatise, an ideological text, a manifesto of imperialism. Particularly in the west. Scholars, professors, intellectuals of all kinds strained their voices and flooded the journals with papers attacking my arguments.
For the record, it could not even be sold in the Eastern Alliance.
And now.
A night thick with settled darkness.
I look down quietly at the book bearing my name and feel, all at once, a pressure like something squeezing the breath from my chest.
The invisible countdown to that day is drawing closer, slowly, but without pause.
To save humanity, I must kill countless other human beings.
A war that belongs only to me, one whose true nature no one knows and no one can understand.
I spread an ideology through the Empire.
But ideology must never become the purpose of a life. It is, in the end, nothing more than a means of sustaining and maintaining life.
Survival. There is no value in this world that stands above the act of living and breathing.
That is why this ideology of mine must take precedence over every other.
"......"
I buried myself in the deep silence of my office. An unnameable fear and doubt rose from somewhere beneath my feet, but I held myself still and quiet.
This is something only I can do.
The fate that the vision of destruction I once witnessed has placed on my shoulders.
As Johann has praised, I must become their north star without fail.
Even if every light inside me burns away and crumbles at last into black ash......
* * *
Spring came.
The fourth year since I returned to this world from a destroyed future. What was I doing with my life around this time before my regression? It is a wretched past I would rather not revisit, but rummaging through my memory roughly.
I was obsessed with auctions.
Auctions. The auction house.
Around this period, the Imperial Guard had begun looting and exploiting the assets of subspecies, Mer, and various other minority peoples, and the auction house was the primary route by which those goods were converted into cash.
To launder their funds, they sold the stolen goods in Selbia, the continent's most famous neutral country.
Looking back at who I was then, I might have been almost endearing. I had no idea what any of it was and celebrated like a child every time I won a bid on something cheap. I even swaggered around thinking I might have a talent for trading, a born merchant, that sort of thing, after reselling those items back in the Empire at a profit.
Of course, that business was only possible because I was a knight.
Knights, under the privilege of being the Empire's watchmen, could bypass the strict customs inspections at the imperial border for personal goods.
Anyway, around one spring day in those years.
A very precious gemstone appeared as a single lot at Lucen, the prestige auction house in Selbia.
It was not looted goods. It was not stolen property. Just a rare gem, the Silver Diamond, consigned by some nameless person.
I had intended to have it crafted into a top-tier artifact and give it to Ezel, whom I still had not managed to let go of.
That was a mad idea.
By sheer good fortune, I never got my hands on it. I did win the bid, but I was robbed. Not swindled exactly, robbed.
Right after the auction ended, unidentified attackers raided Lucen and made off with every item that had been won. The auction house's insurance meant the purchase price was refunded, but the sense of loss at the time had been considerable, and I had even cried a little.
Who was behind that incident, and which faction had led it...... I would not find out until quite a bit later.
"...... It's been a while since I was here."
I arrived at the entrance to Lucen, Selbia's finest prestige auction house. Before my regression, I had lived in the hotel right next door for nearly a full month.
This time, however, I had not come under my real identity. The name and face of Maximilian Ebenholtz had grown far too well-known across the continent. I needed an identity that could move in the shadows.
"Please stop there."
As I stepped up to Lucen's entrance, a broad-shouldered security guard approached and asked politely.
"Your invitation. Do you have one?"
"Yes."
I handed over the invitation. The guard held up some kind of flashlight artifact and examined it with careful scrutiny.
This identity was the financial backer of the Revision Society, the radical far-right organization in the Prozen Republic, the man now worshipped as a de facto shadow figure among their ranks.
The actual culprit behind the bombing assassination of Prozen's Defense Minister Louis Marceau.
"Welcome, Mr. Felix Renoir."
The security guard bowed deeply and stepped aside.
Felix Renoir.
He had returned.
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