Chapter 5: The Birth of a Literary Catastrophe
Pale moonlight spilled through the half-open window, laying cold streaks of light across the oak desk. Under the flickering candle, elegant, butterfly-winged strokes of High Elvish poured endlessly from Lucian's quill.
The handwriting was refined, otherworldly. The content, on the other hand, reeked of cheap pulp swordplay and every tired dramatic beat his past life's webnovels had ever recycled.
...Wind howled across the peak of Snow Mountain. The Knight in Black stood with his back to a ten-thousand-foot drop, his tattered cloak snapping in the blizzard. He did not draw his sword — the enemy before him wasn't worthy of freeing it from its sheath. He only sighed. "I walk in darkness, so this world might keep one last flicker of light..."
Lucian shuddered the second he finished the line. Every toe in his shoes curled with secondhand embarrassment, his stomach twisting into a wave of nausea.
Oh my god, Lucian thought, gritting his teeth and giving himself a light slap on the cheek. That's so cringe. Cringe enough to headbutt a wall over. Say a line like that out loud in public and people would laugh until they choked.
And yet, above the page of vellum, the pale blue notification panel kept flashing numbers, utterly hypnotic:
[New grammatical construction rate: Flawless.]
[High Elvish comprehension: 42%... 45%... 48%...]
Lucian took a deep breath, swallowed his own disgust, and bent back over the ink to keep writing.
The most maddening part of writing fiction in High Elvish was this race's shockingly thin violent vocabulary. The ancient elves had fourteen separate words just to describe "a dewdrop resting on a blade of grass at dawn" — and not a single one for "slap the arrogance off someone's face" or "hide your strength and bide your time."
To keep the story moving, Lucian had to dig up every last scrap of linguistics knowledge from his past life and start splicing words together. He fused "One who walks in mist" with "Lord who claims no throne" to build the concept of an Anti-Hero. He fused "The stillness before the storm" with "The invisible blade" to describe a killing sword-technique.
That very awkwardness, that forced creativity, was exactly what triggered the System's reward mechanism at full power.
Knock, knock.
The sudden rap on the door in the dead of night made Lucian jump.
The survival instincts of a man who'd spent years browsing the internet on company time kicked in without a second's delay. In one lightning-fast motion, Lucian scooped up the freshly written sheets of vellum, buried them at the bottom of a stack of the family's wool trade paperwork, and dragged a thick ledger over the top of it all. The whole thing took less than half a second.
The door creaked open. Old steward Boris stepped in, a silver tray in his hands bearing a steaming glass of hot goat's milk.
"Young master, it's well past midnight," Boris said, his voice warm, his old eyes full of quiet worry. "However important the family's affairs may be, you shouldn't be up working this late."
"I'm just... going over a few numbers, that's all," Lucian said, flashing an innocently angelic smile, both hands still pressed flat against the ledger.
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Boris's gaze drifted over Lucian's sweat-dotted face, then landed on the corner of vellum peeking out from beneath the tax paperwork. With all his years navigating the business world alongside the Sword Emperor, the old steward understood instantly.
That guilty, startled look... that reflexive shove of documents to the bottom of the ledger stack...
Boris's heart trembled with emotion.
Vance blood, through and through! Only six years old, and already keeping double books, hiding the original receipts to build his own private slush fund — exactly like the Old Lord used to, back in his day! This family's prosperity was secured for another thousand years!
"I understand completely," Boris said, smiling with knowing warmth, and set the milk down respectfully at the corner of the desk. "I won't breathe a word to Lady Valeria about you 'reviewing the books' tonight. Please, take all the time you need, young master."
With that, the old steward gave a meaningful wink and quietly withdrew, closing the door behind him.
Lucian watched the door click shut, let out a long breath of relief, and picked up the milk for a large gulp. He didn't have the time to wonder what conclusions the old man had jumped to — the priority right now was finishing the ending.
For ten thousand years, this world had drowned in endless, unbroken war. Its entertainment culture had withered into something pathetic. Every publication in circulation fell into exactly three categories: chronicles glorifying royal military conquests, eight-hundred-page knight-house genealogies packed wall-to-wall with the names of the dead, and church hymnals as dry as roof tile.
The people of this continent had never once felt the thrill of a story with a real twist, never tasted the satisfaction of an underestimated protagonist turning the tables, and couldn't even conceive of a knight who might act without chasing glory or a royal medal.
To Lucian, this book was a pile of trash stitched together from every cheap trick in the book. But to this world, it was about to become an incurable mental epidemic.
Lucian picked up his quill and dipped it into a bottle of black ink made from deep-sea magical beast sacs — the Vance trading house's specialty ink, waterproof, fade-proof, capable of surviving a thousand years on vellum.
He set the quill down and wrote the final lines of Volume 1, closing out his protagonist's tragic, heroic backstory. In the bottom right corner of the page, in the spot where an author's name should go, Lucian idly sketched a plain, empty circle: ⭕ — the mark of the nameless, mostly because he was too lazy to come up with a pen name that actually sounded good.
Ting!
A clear, bell-like chime rang through his mind, silvery and bright:
[High Elvish comprehension: 50.0%!]
[MILESTONE CONDITION EXCEEDED.]
[Support Skill unlocked: 'Sound Cadence' (Tier 1).]
[Effect: Suppresses sound-wave vibration and air pressure by 50% when voicing magical commands. Allows spells to be whispered without disturbing the surrounding environment.]
The corner of Lucian's mouth curled up. He tested it immediately, murmuring a single High Elvish syllable under his breath: "Lumin" (Light).
A tiny pinprick of light flared above his fingertip — but the air around him stayed completely still. No rush of wind, no crackle of mana particles snapping into place the way it normally would. The sound wave was fully suppressed within a ten-centimeter radius.
Paired with 'Layered Focus' from before, Lucian could now hold an ordinary conversation while quietly casting a spell at the same time, and an enemy standing one step away wouldn't notice a thing.
A perfect skill set for assassination, evasion, and discreet self-defense.
Lucian folded the thick stack of vellum, bound it into a neat square with a strip of leather cord. He stood, crouched down, and buried the manuscript deep in the back corner of an old toy chest under his bed — the one crammed with broken wooden swords and ragged magical-beast dolls he never touched.
Dusting off his sleeves, Lucian looked into the dark space under his bed and smiled, deeply satisfied with himself.
"Done. This cringe garbage is never, ever seeing the light of day."
He climbed into his soft bed, pulled the blanket over his head, and quickly fell into the peaceful sleep of a man who'd just crushed his quota for the day.
He had absolutely no idea that this exact toy chest was the first place Sword Emperor Regulus was planning to look tomorrow morning, hunting for a few keepsakes from his son's childhood.