I Became the First Prince

Seventh and Eighth (2)

The light disappeared as abruptly as it had appeared.

I went to support Adelia, who was staggering and was on the verge of falling.

Adelia looked at me and opened her mouth again and again, for there was a lot she wanted to say, yet she couldn’t find the right words to do so.

I grabbed the slender hand that still gripped her sword and led it up.
Her hand followed mine, and her sword was raised in front of her face.
Adelia looked at me, and I nodded my head in silence.
She hesitated for a moment, then fixed her sword before herself in a two-handed grip.

‘Wooo~’ the sword keened, and a dazzling flash erupted from it.
It was compressed qi, so dense that it was far greater than a sword aura: It was an Aura Blade.

“Ah!” Adelia exclaimed.

“I had a hard time and…” Her eyes quickly filled with tears, and she gazed at her Aura Blade and me alternately.

“Congratulations on becoming a Sword Master.”

The tears that came from her eyes started creeping down her cheeks.
At the same time, the Aura Blade of her sword dissipated.
She dropped her sword and looked up at me.

“Well, I… I am…”

She could hardly connect with the reality of it, so brimming was she with emotion.

I patted her head, saying nothing.
Adelia had been clinging to my shoulders and breathing so hard that her shoulders heaved, and then, she fell to the ground.

“Are you going to sleep here?” Eli demanded, and Adelia blushed so much that the tips of her ears shone red.
She seemed embarrassed, thinking that she looked foolish.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” she apologized to me moments later.

“Tchu,” I clucked my tongue, not satisfied with the atrophy of the moment.
I stared at Eli.

“What’s wrong with you?” I demanded.
I had no reason to congratulate him.

“It’s because my stomach hurts,” complained he, “I struggled, just like her, but I didn’t become a Sword Master.
Maybe I can’t.
It’s because my stomach hurts and I can’t bear it.”

I was thrilled with his unforeseen honesty.

I have seen the birth of numerous Sword Masters, and I have seen countless military-minded folk who had tried to hide their jealousy and deprivation toward such masters and convey words of false congratulation.

I’m sure none of them would speak like Eli.

“Your stomach hurts,” mused I.

Eli’s reaction to watching the birth of a Sword Master was childish and undignified, so I enjoyed it all the more.

“Honestly, isn’t it right that it should be me after Sir Arwen?” Eli continued his childlike complaints that had no logical basis.
“Everyone but me will become Sword Masters.”

I ended up laughing.

* * *

Adelia hadn’t changed much since becoming a Sword Master.

She always hesitated before fighting, and after fighting, she always shed tears.
The only thing that differed from before was the fact that her hesitation was not caused by fear.
She hesitated out of compassion for her enemy; her tears were sympathy for the dead.

I did not blame her for being weak.

Her mercy was the same as ruthlessness toward her enemy, for the quick and painless death was the mercy she chose to give them.

The type of completion reached by the meek maniac was so paradoxical, yet at the same time, perfectly harmonious.

Murderousness and madness combined with her traits of innate goodness and sympathy.
A bloody berserker in battle, a good and gentle woman in moments of peace.

It was the image of the ideal knight that common folk held in their minds, but of course, the contrast was too dramatic and radical to attain an ideal state.

Regardless, Sword Master is a term describing those who have reached perfection, not a term for those innocents who merely seek it.
I was very pleased with the completion of Adelia.

“From today on, let’s practice separately.”

Now that she had crossed the wall of completion, I had to cycle her out of battle.
Adelia had to refrain from releasing energy as much as possible, taking all the power in her body and awakening it, making it her own.

“Thank you for your consideration, your Highness.”

Adelia followed my orders without hesitating.
So, I left her to her own devices and headed into the forest with Eli, Gwain, and his two comrades.

The days rolled on like crazy.
Old trees, half-men: Nothing stood in our way.

The fights were still bloody affairs, and on some days, we fought from dusk till dawn.

The knights developed rapidly.
However, it was more of a superficial development.
They merely got used to dealing with the monsters in the forest, and the edges of their blades became a fraction sharper.

Their growth was skill-based, physical.
They were just like the Knights of the Ring – Mana was extracted from the heart, and that was that.
They did not know how to weave new dance poems.
Even the scion of the Eli family, a family who had insisted on the use of mana hearts till the very end, remembered only the old traditions.
He was rendered illiterate when it came to creating new poems.

“It’s not enough if it’s sharp and fast!”

“Put your will in the sword!”

“Look back at what you did and then at what you’re trying to do!”

I continued to yell in frustration, but the knights didn’t understand my words at all.

“So what the hell do you want from me? Want me to catch a floating cloud?” Eli protested in slight anger.

“Now listen to me.
I’ll explain it simply.”

After I confirmed that the knights were fully attentive to my words, I explained to them very slowly, in the most basic manner, what it meant to weave a Muhunshi poem.

“You engrave what you have done on your own into the sword by will.
What you have already achieved is called karma, and what you want to achieve in the future is called qi.
Isn’t that easy?”

It was a concept that the ancient knights had known before they even wielded swords.

“I know roughly what karma and qi are, but how do you weave it?”

But Eli, Kampra, Gwain, and Trindall did not grasp what I was trying to teach them.

Yet, the latter three were different.
I so clearly remembered when the Ekyon brothers had composed the first verse of a poem.
The speakers of the poem were not aware of it at the time, of course.

A sigh entered my mind.

b It is a matter of knowing, yet not knowing.
They don’t have to understand the basic reason}

I agreed with what Agnes was saying.

b The will is qi, and the process of reaching completion of qi is through karma.
Please explain it to them again}

Her interrupting me didn’t help much.

“What dog shit is that?”

b You don’t even try to understand me because you’re the same fucker as always! Truly, the same bastard through all the ages! If this was the old days, I would have taught you a lesson myself, I would’ve wrecked you, you bastard!}

The shouts bursting into my head did little to calm me.

“Four hundred years.
Truly a long time, eh Agnes?”

I sighed and then looked at the knights.
They had never been stupid men; no, they were quite intelligent.

Eli, as the descendant of a prestigious family, was a brilliantly talented man.
And the other three had been carefully selected by the royal family, so a lack of talent was not to blame in their case.

What was as natural as breathing to me and the ancient knights was not so for these four men.
Whether gathering mana in the heart or in rings, they were not like the knights I had known in ages past.

I had to admit this to myself.

It wasn’t very wise to deny change, to cry out for the old ways and stick blindly to ancient concepts.

Once I admitted my own ignorance and arrogance, I knew where I stood.

“Let’s return at once.”

We returned to camp; the knights exhausted after fighting monsters all day and by my constant nagging.
I entered my tent, my thoughts confused.
I tried devising a manner in which I could make them understand karma and qi and engrave it upon their hearts.

My head hurt, but I had to find a way!

Even if you become a Sword Master, it has little meaning if you can’t weave dance poems.

I’ve tried thinking about everything I could do and even went to the Sky Knights who Doris had left behind for our return journey.
However, the Knights of the Sky weren’t so different from my knights.
They had also inherited some of the ancient traditions, and they merely used them instead of improving upon them.

Doris or his father, the king – the scions of the Sky Knight – might have known the answer, but they weren’t here.
And I wasn’t sure if they would tell me the answer if they knew it.

In the end, the matter rested in my hands.
I wrapped my head around it again.

In the meantime, Eli and the others continued their training as they wandered through the forest.

Four days passed without success.

Bernardo Eli still hadn’t crossed the wall or figured out how to weave poems.
There was nothing much to say about Gwain, Trindall, and Kampra.

I was forced to focus on my own development, for my heart had become harder after it had been so weakened.
It is only if you are careful that you can fill an empty bowl.

I absorbed mana without delay.
In less than half a day, my mana heart was filled.

It was time to make a decision.

I had hoped to make Bernardo Eli a Sword Master as well and let him grasp Muhunshi so that he could weave an entire song of the full-moon race, but I could no longer wait, for there were no promising developments.

Eventually, I decided that we had to return to Leonberg and leave things as they were.

The night when I was about to inform everyone of my decision, Gwain came into my barrack, greatly excited.

“Okay! I understand it a bit now!”

Gwain was so excited that he forgot of his uncomfortable relationship with me.

“Now, look here-” Gwain drew his sword, then started to shout out loud, as if he was an actor upon a stage.

“I am broken, my light is lost”

“So I shall follow as a sword in the dark”

The words that came from his mouth were as crude and tacky as the ‘Song of the Sword’ sung by the Silver Fox mercenaries.
But what it contained was Gwain’s strong will.

‘Sooah~’ a wave of energy spread out, and Gwain’s blade turned black.
Not in a sinister manner, it was merely a dark black blade.
It was as if it had become a shadow.

Gwain swung his blackened sword.
There was no sword aura, and there was no sound.
Gwain’s strike silently cleaved through the air.

Even though the rhyme was crude and the words grim, it was still a dance poem.

“Did you see it? Have you seen it?”

Gwain laughed, and I gave him a thumbs-up.
We shared a smile, and then it became awkward for a moment.
We stopped laughing at the same time.

“Hggm,” Gwain then coughed, marshaling his excitement.

I asked him what the name of his poem was, and he hesitated for a moment before saying, “I named it Poetry of Shadows.”

It was a pretty good name.

* * *

After Gwain had done it, his comrades also wove Muhunshi, one after the other.

The three of them had composed: [The Poetry of Shadows], [The Poetry of the Old Day], and [The Poetry of the Night].
All three poems weren’t even [Extraordinary], and were composed with the use of dark and gloomy words.

This was because these men’s past was marked by despair and frustration, and also because, even if they hungered for the sun, they were not yet ready to go outside on their own.

I ignored our bad relationship, congratulated them, and encouraged them selflessly from that moment on.

“So… How did you weave them?” Eli asked after hesitating for a while upon seeing the three knight’s dance poems in action.
They said that they realized how to do it by reflecting on their past.

“That’s what we did.
After all, you don’t have to know how to weave.
You just do it.”

“No, I understand.
There is no way to explain it,” Bernard Eli said with a frown.

He seemed disappointed, having expected more of an answer.
I was wondering how the knights of this era would come to form their poems through karma and qi.

* * *

That evening, Eli went into the forest and did not return.
I knew why he went.

Adelia had become a Sword Master, and Gwain’s troupe had each succeeded in weaving their dance poems.

Eli couldn’t stand the fact that he alone had failed.

Still, in case of misfortune, I set out to find him with Gunn.

It wasn’t difficult to find Eli, for he was fighting monsters solo on the edge of the forest.

His whole body was full of wounds, but fortunately, none of them were made by a lycanthrope.
We hid in the darkness as we watched Bernardo Eli fight.

“My sword is like a flurry! I am the early wind!

“The city has fallen, its glory taken! I will recover all I have lost!

“I cut the head of the wolf and offer it to the full moon!”

Eli was constantly speaking like a madman.

“Fuck it! Why not!?”

Perhaps Eli had been shouting for a long time before I came, for his voice had cracked to the utmost point of hoarseness.

“Why can’t it be me!? Why the hell is this so difficult?”

I could watch no more and made to leave, but suddenly felt a familiar energy from the opposite direction.

It was Gwain, Trindall, and Kampra.

They were hiding in some bushes, unaware that I was watching as well.
Their heads stuck out above the thicket as they watched Eli.
Even if they had exchanged strong words with him in the past, they had still followed Eli to the forest in the middle of the night, watching over him like a friend.

I quietly returned to camp.

* * *

Bernardo Eli did not return the next day, nor the next.
From time to time, I headed out to confirm that he was safe.
And upon the fourth day, Eli finally made his return.

“Wake up! Come out!”

He arrived in the middle of the knight and woke up Gwain’s troupe.
Eli was a sore sight: His eyes were red and his body bloody, with all the scratches and wounds upon it making him look as if he had jumped into a pool of broken glass.

Nevertheless, Eli was laughing.

‘Shick,’ he drew his sword, and a brilliant, blazing flash erupted from it.

It was definitely an Aura Blade.
And upon that night, the eighth champion of Leonberger was born.

“That’s not all,” said he before anyone could even congratulate him.

Bernardo Eli began reciting his poem with a voice that rang out sharp.

{We’re stockpiling!}