Chapter 1 : Chapter 1
Chapter 1
If you asked whether I had lived a life full of regrets, I would say no.
If you asked whether I had lived a life without regrets, I would say that was not true either.
‘Perhaps from the moment I was born, fate never allowed it.’
The illegitimate son of the Northern Grand Duke, House Nordiar.
I had wanted to free myself from that label of “illegitimate son.”
I had wanted to declare, proudly, that I carried the blood of the Northern Grand Duke.
‘There was a time when I truly thought that way.’
But once I realized that dream could never come true, I gave up.
The bastard of House Nordiar.
And at the same time, the family’s disgrace.
Kairun Nordiar. That was who I was.
‘A wretch who should have been born a commoner.’
That was what I would hear whenever I stepped into the knights’ dining hall. Whispered words spat out over scraped wooden spoons, without so much as a glance in my direction.
‘A lucky bastard who just happened to be born a Nordiar. Who does he think he is?’
A knight would brush shoulders with me as he passed while I drank, and never apologize.
Ah, right. Somewhere along the way, I had forgotten.
This was how people saw me.
Silently, I looked down at my palm.
The calluses left behind by the sword I had swung mercilessly, and the faint scar across the back of my hand, earned on the Northern Front.
When I had first heard that rumor circulating among the nobility, had I laughed, or had I been angry?
First a lucky bastard, then a genius, and now a scoundrel.
It was not wrong.
It had already been a long time since I had picked up a wineglass instead of a sword.
I looked emptily down at my father.
There was something I had wanted to hear all my life.
I had wished that, just once, he would look at me with warmth.
But all I had ever received from him was disappointment and cold disdain.
So I broke.
I went astray for all to see.
And yet, why?
“Say something... please.”
My voice rang hollow through the empty space.
“You ignored me for my entire life... so why...”
You, who were stronger than anyone, colder than anyone.
Why would you die protecting this son you had despised and scorned?
“...Why did you die protecting me? You could have lived if you wanted to.”
‘Wasn’t I, Kairun Nordiar, supposed to be Nordiar’s only blemish?’
Since I knew he could not hear me anymore anyway, I swallowed the rest of the words.
A bitter, empty smile tugged at my lips.
At the edge of my vision, far away, I could see the Imperial Palace.
No, perhaps I should say what had once been the Imperial Palace.
The palace that had once been the pride of the Eternium Empire had collapsed, leaving only a skeletal frame pointing toward the sky, with traces of melted stone all that remained.
When I turned my head, the Mage Tower came into view in the distance.
The tower once called the heart of the Empire’s magic.
Its peak, which had once risen as though it could pierce the clouds, had now been severed in half and lay embedded in the ground.
Where the upper half of the tower had fallen, a massive fissure split the earth apart.
As I stepped back, something crunched beneath my feet.
A metal insignia from the Imperial Knights Order lay buried in the mud, stained with blood.
They had once been called the heart of the Empire.
Now, only their insignias rolled across the ground.
Some were still attached to severed forearms, while others simply lay abandoned in the dirt.
Ownerless suits of armor were scattered everywhere.
Sometimes, something red would ooze from inside them.
There were too many dead to count.
What was even more horrifying, though, were those who had not died.
The commoners and civilians whose mana had fallen below a certain threshold.
They had become things that only resembled human beings, trampling the imperial capital underfoot.
There were no screams, no groans. Only the sound of twisted limbs dragging themselves forward and rummaging through the ruined buildings.
If the end of the world had truly arrived, then perhaps this was what it would look like.
“Emperor of Eternium.”
But could that thing really still be called an emperor?
Before me stood a grotesque lifeform, so warped that it could no longer be called human, glaring at me.
Every member of the suicide corps had died at that bastard’s hands.
“The late emperor would be horrified if he saw this.”
My right arm, the one that had held the sword, was already gone.
My abdomen was riddled with multiple puncture wounds.
Each time I breathed, I could feel something leaking out.
My mouth was full of the metallic taste of blood.
I was in such a state that the very act of breathing was a miracle.
And yet, perhaps because I was still a Sword Master, this body of mine was clinging on better than it had any right to.
“So this is where the Empire’s fate ends. Though I was only dragged here by my father in the first place.”
House Nordiar had guarded the North like an immovable mountain, offering up its life and loyalty for the Empire, and yet the man called the emperor had ruined the entire Empire through his own madness.
“......”
The emperor, rampaging in an unconscious frenzy, muttered something under his breath.
At those words, the air trembled and mana shuddered.
A magic wondrous enough to be called miraculous unfolded before my eyes, and my memories drifted back into the distant past.
“...A dying flashback, huh.”
Looking back, I could say that my life had been twisted from childhood.
My first vivid memory was of wandering the streets without a single soul to rely on, only to be abducted and subjected to human experimentation.
‘It was an experiment to inject monster mana into a human body.’
A cramped space like a narrow box.
The stinging smell of chemicals.
Cold chains tightening around my wrists.
Someone injected something into my arm.
It was hot. No, it was cold.
I could not tell the difference.
Something writhed inside my body as it burrowed its way inward.
Had I screamed? I probably had. But all I remembered was darkness and pain.
Then I was rescued.
They said I was the illegitimate child of the Northern Grand Duke Nordiar. A missing bastard born out of wedlock in his early years.
Drunk on that revelation, I had rejoiced, thinking that all my suffering had finally been worth it, that at last my chance had come.
But then, It was the day I had distinguished myself on the battlefield.
The day I single-handedly stopped the demonic beast assault on the Northern Front. The knights had cheered. My comrades had slapped my shoulder in celebration.
When I opened the door to my father’s office, I was certain of it. Now, surely now, I would finally be acknowledged.
“I received the report.”
My father did not even lift his eyes from the papers.
“You may go.”
That was all.
That night, I drank for the first time. The next day as well, and the day after that.
After seeing that even great achievements could not change my father’s attitude, I gave up and drowned each passing day in alcohol.
Even so, I was not entirely lacking in talent, so I somehow managed to reach the level of Sword Master...
But that was where it ended.
At least, that was what I had believed until just moments ago.
“...What is this?”
At the boundary between life and death, I heard a voice calling to me from beyond.
I had used mana all my life, yet never once had mana called out to me.
...Grand Master.
A realm that would be remembered in history, a stage known as the supreme pinnacle.
The five senses I had been feeling expanded in an instant, and I could vividly perceive the movement of mana.
‘To think I would only realize it at the very brink of death.’
No one had to tell me. Instinctively, I knew I had finally reached it.
To achieve Grand Master, one had to stand at the boundary of life and death and gain enlightenment.
But what was the point?
Even my father, who had been called a Grand Master, had failed to withstand that monster and died, and I doubted whether any number of Grand Masters could truly face that thing.
To stop the emperor, a realm beyond even that was necessary.
‘To attain something beyond that... would I have to transcend death itself?’
But I knew that was impossible with a human body.
So I let go of the strength in the body that had been desperately clinging to life.
If only I could turn back time.
Yes. If only I could turn back time.
With that thought, I closed my eyes.
***
I opened my eyes.
No, they were forced open.
By cold pain.
Ice-cold water splashed over my body and jolted me awake.
A cramped space like a narrow box.
The stinging smell of chemicals.
...A scene so familiar it felt as though I had already seen it in a dream.
“Hey. Wake up.”
A somewhat unfamiliar voice.
And yet, a hazy memory stirred, as though I had heard it somewhere before.
“Handle him carefully. It’s rare to find one with this much talent.”
“I know that. At first I thought he was just some commoner with no talent at all, but to think he has this much aptitude... it really is surprising.”
“Exactly. So be careful with him.”
“He’s just a test subject anyway. As long as he doesn’t die, what does it matter?”
The bastards cackled, but that was not what mattered.
“...Where is this?”
I tried to bring my hands together, but the clanking of chains made me realize at once that I was restrained.
I darted my eyes to both sides, but all I could see were dark iron bars, the chains binding me, and...
My own sturdy, yet still youthful body.
‘Seventeen? Or eighteen?’
The chill of the chains was far too vivid for this to be a dream.
And the situation itself was strangely familiar.
‘Did I come back? To the past, when I was being experimented on? Why?’
No. “Why” did not matter.
If I had truly returned to the past, then all I had to do was what needed to be done.
I quietly examined the inside of my body.
There, an incomplete mana heart was stirring to life.
Perhaps because it was unfinished.
The mana it released was so weak it felt as though it would scatter if touched.
Still, it was not so weak that I could not use it at all.
As I was now, remembering the senses of a Grand Master, I could easily kill the men standing there laughing with their bare hands.
But not yet.
“Let’s see, today is... the thirty-fourth experiment, right? The mage seemed awfully excited.”
“Still, I’m curious who’s behind experiments like this. The mage himself doesn’t seem like one of the upper-echelon executives.”
“I don’t know either. But one thing’s certain, whoever it is must be a complete psychopath. Injecting the power of monsters into humans? Can something like that even succeed?”
The bastards went on, spitting as they laughed, but I barely heard anything else.
The thirty-fourth experiment.
‘You brought me back at exactly the right time.’
If my memory was correct, this was where the branch point would soon come.
Either I would become a cripple, or I would not.
One or the other.
“Ah, Mage, you’re here.”
From the distance, an old man appeared, walking with a thud-thud-thud while clutching his staff.
Stroking his long beard, the elderly mage scanned the paper he had brought.
“Let’s see. Yes, this is already the thirty-fourth time. He’s not merely somewhat talented. He’s extraordinary. To have accepted even an ogre’s power... By this point, a normal subject should have long since undergone monstrous transformation.”
“Indeed. He must be the sort who is innately gifted at receiving mana.”
“......”
Dark circles under my eyes, I merely stared at them in silence.
Could those bastards even imagine it?
That the organization overseeing this experiment had the emperor himself at the very top.
“Well, well? Look at the way this bastard’s glaring. Still don’t understand your place?”
Then again, if they knew that fact, they would never have reacted like this.
Idiots who did not even care to know who stood above them.
One of the guards must have disliked the look in my eyes, because he grabbed me by the hair and forced my gaze up to meet his.
I spat a mouthful of saliva into the face of the man smirking so smugly.
Apparently, even after all that time as a scoundrel, my temper had not changed. My body moved before my thoughts could stop it.
“Ptui.”
“...You little bastard!”
His tone made it sound as though he was about to throw a punch at any moment, but the mage stopped him.
“That is enough. He’s a precious test subject. No one else has lasted through this many experiments.”
“This damned... Understood.”
Leaving the guard smacking his lips in frustration behind him, the mage began scribbling something onto his paper.
“Then let’s begin the experiment. The one in the next room has already proven stability, so this should be fine. Thirty-fourth experiment. This time, it’s phoenix mana. Try not to break. Endure it well.”
Chuckling as though he were looking at an amusing toy, the old mage drew out a syringe.
Inside it, concentrated crimson phoenix mana had been liquefied.
My body had already undergone several rounds of modification.
‘I did not know it back then, but if Nordiar’s blood had not flowed through me, I never would have made it this far.’
The phoenix mana flowed through the needle and entered my body.
“Ghk!”
The pain far exceeded imagination. The blood vessels in my eyes must have burst, because my vision turned black-red.
Even from the outside, my body began to glow red, as though a crimson aura were rising from beneath my skin.
It was not only the power of the phoenix.
The inhuman energies I had accepted all this time collided with the mana inherited through the blood of the North, each one claiming my body as its own territory.
If I gave up here, my body would proceed straight into monstrous transformation, and I would follow the same path as the earlier subjects, discarded as waste.
‘Stay calm. You already did this once in your previous life. There is no reason you cannot do it twice.’
Slowly, I soothed the raging mana and forcibly breathed power into my mana heart.
The energies that had tried to seize my body fell asleep one by one, and at last I succeeded in settling the phoenix’s mana within myself.
“...He adapted to the mana already? Something feels off. It took him an entire night to calm the ogre’s power last time.”
The old mage muttered in disbelief.
Rummaging through the documents he had brought, he scratched the back of his head as though the whole thing made no sense.
‘Was he Fifth Class, or Sixth Class?’
It had happened so long ago that the memory was hazy.
In any case, one thing was certain. He had reached the utmost limit an ordinary human with average talent could attain.
That was why I did not act rashly.
Even though I had awakened to the realm of Grand Master, there was no guarantee I could defeat him in my current physical state.
Besides, there was still the brand controlling my body, so rebellion as a test subject had been unthinkable.
When you were born a bastard and had to survive in that position, the ability to assess yourself objectively was essential.
“Hm. Something is strange, but good is good. At this rate, we can complete it in the next experiment. The groundwork is finally done.”
He had sensed that something was off, but dismissed it without much concern, clicking his tongue as though something about it disappointed him.
“What am I supposed to report to the higher-ups...? Though I doubt it matters.”
Muttering to himself, the mage left after opening the bitterly cold iron bars.
The guards also shot me a sour glance for having digested the phoenix mana, then turned and walked away.
‘If only you knew how badly I once wanted to open those bars.’
At first, I had envied them for opening and closing the bars I had longed so desperately to touch.
Then, after realizing that their freedom should have been the natural order of things, all that remained was hatred.
“Hey. You still alive?”
...I had only just thought I finally had time to think alone, but apparently not.
At the hoarse, dying voice calling out to me from the next room, I turned my head.
I could not see his face because a stone wall separated us, but the voice spoke to me with familiar concern.
‘Come to think of it, back then, asking whether the one in the next room was dead or alive had been our only means of communication.’
Only after barely recalling that fact did I force out an answer to the boy in the next room, my voice drained of all strength.
It was a weak voice, but enough to reply.
“...At least I’m not dead.”
“You really are hard to kill. I don’t know whether to call that lucky or unlucky.”
The boy next door had also lost all strength in his voice from the long experiments and restraints.
“...You sound like you’re holding up well enough yourself.”
“Hardly. I’ll spend my whole life either writhing in pain as my body burns up again and again until I turn into a monster, or I’ll rot away and die like this. One or the other. I’ve already given up.”
“That’s a lie.”
“How would you know that?”
“The fact that you’re still alive means you’ve kept yourself alive by somehow controlling your mana. A man with that much will to live would never have given up.”
Those bastards had started the experiments without ever teaching us how to use mana in the first place.
‘If you have no talent, you deserve to die,’ or so they said.
Anyone who awakened mana on his own under those circumstances was talented indeed.
“Yeah, right.”
“Don’t worry. Rescue will come.”
“That’s ridiculous. Who would care about street orphans like us? No one is coming. Ever. There’s no torture crueler than hope.”
The boy next door answered in a metallic rasp.
‘Hope, huh. There was a time when I thought such a thing did not exist either.’
But rescue had come in the end.
That was why refusing to abandon hope had become an important part of my life.
“...You. What’s your name?”
“Hah! You’re a strange one, asking a street orphan for his name.”
“...If we make it out of here alive, it’s because I want to keep you by my side.”
...I could not remember whether the boy next door, my one and only comrade back then, had survived or died.
But if he had lived, would he not have become a fine blade?
He had stubborn resolve, and he had awakened mana control from an early age.
“...Number Nineteen.”
“What?”
“Number Nineteen. That’s my name.”
To the boy who thought the number they called him by in the experiments was his name, I answered,
“Then I’ll call you Nine, after the last digit. Number Nineteen is too much.”
“Sure, whatever you say. Call me what you want.”
***
A week passed after that.
Whether it was because Nine and I had actually been close back then, or because I had simply been bored, I could not say. But when he kept talking to me, I answered him, sometimes properly, sometimes half-heartedly.
“You know quite a lot, don’t you?”
‘Well, that’s because this is my second life.’
There was no value in saying something he would never believe.
“Today’s my experiment day.”
“Ah, yours has been once a week lately, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“...Don’t die.”
“I won’t.”
Absolutely not.
Not before I was acknowledged by my father as a Grand Master, and not before I dealt a blow to that mad emperor.
‘Just wait, Father. And you too, Emperor of Eternium.’
I could not die.
Thud. Thud.
From afar, I heard footsteps, and before long the familiar guard and the mage arrived at the bars of my cell.
As though it were the most natural thing in the world, the guard unlocked the bars and the mage pulled out his papers.
But something was a little different than usual. The mage, whose voice was normally coarse and rough, cleared his throat and deliberately composed himself before speaking.
Was it because he believed he was taking part in a great experiment that would go down in history?
It seemed that even the mage himself was flushed with excitement.
‘Though for me, it is nothing but pain.’
“Well then! No need for long speeches. Let us begin the thirty-fifth experiment. The real thing starts now. We have spent all this time making you adapt to the mana of monsters precisely for today. Try your best to endure it. That is, if you can. Heh heh heh.”
The mage pushed the syringe’s piston slightly to release the air bubbles as he spoke.
Within the syringe, black mana swelled and rippled, dark enough to seem as though it could swallow all light around it.
‘The real thing, huh. It really is.’
This experiment was the turning point.
Either I would gain a fated opportunity, or my mana channels would run wild and leave me a cripple for at least five years.
The mana entering me this time was...
‘A dragon’s mana, diluted to the minimum concentration possible.’
Dragons, the species called the strongest on earth.
No matter how diluted it was, that immense power and mana would not simply vanish.
I did not know how those bastards had obtained dragon mana or how they had diluted it, but...
‘They really are insane. Trying to inject dragon mana into a human.’
They had already modified my body several times so it could better receive mana, but a dragon was still a dragon.
Even if I had inherited the blood of the North, what was impossible remained impossible.
But,
‘This time, things will be different. If I fail to accept this mana... then that is as far as I go.’
Perhaps dragon mana was the final piece needed to reach a realm beyond Grand Master.
To attain an unknown domain, I could not afford to give up even the smallest opportunity.
“Well then, do your best to endure.”
The syringe pierced my flesh, and the liquefied black mana slowly seeped into me.
“Ghk, aaaargh!”
The pain was so intense that even the phoenix was incomparable. It was pain that made me wish I would rather die.
An ordinary person might have lost his mind on the spot, but I had already died once in my previous life and returned.
Clinging to my fading consciousness through the agony, I desperately circulated my mana with everything I had.
‘If I do not use mana, I will turn into a monster.’
In my past life, my mana control had been too immature, and the pain too overwhelming, so I had failed to absorb the dragon’s mana and shattered my own mana heart, crippling myself.
It had taken far too long to restore a mana heart once broken, and because of that my growth had slowed to a crawl. At the time, however, I had had no other choice.
But,
‘This time is different.’
The dragon’s mana surged through my channels, ravaging everything inside my body.
Calmly, I wrapped the mana of the North around the channels through which mana flowed, protecting them first.
‘It’s not over yet.’
Protecting the channels was not enough. If I did not somehow subdue the dragon’s mana rampaging so brazenly, it would all be meaningless.
At least one thing worked in my favor. The dragon’s aura was so overwhelmingly powerful that it suppressed the mana of all the other monsters.
Now it was a battle that could not end until either I, or the dragon, yielded.
Puhwak!
My skin turned black, and blood burst from all seven orifices in my face, leaving it smeared crimson.
It hurt.
It hurt so much I wanted to give up.
But I could not abandon hope.
‘If I can gain Father’s acknowledgement and stop the emperor’s plan, I will do anything.’
Just as I had once been rescued at the very moment I was about to abandon hope.
“Mage! Activate the brand!”
The guards sensed something was wrong when blood poured from all seven orifices and leveled their spears at me in alarm. But the mage seemed to think otherwise. Raising a hand to stop them, he slowly shook his head.
“No, something... is happening.”
The skin that had turned black gradually began to return to its original color.
The pain that had made me want to let go of my mind slowly began to fade.
“...Good heavens. He absorbed it? The dragon’s mana?”
“It’s a success! You truly never disappoint! As expected, you are the finest test subject of them all! Number Thirty-Two!”
The mage shouted in delight, but my consciousness was already slipping into darkness.