WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 344

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The King Who Kills Others, the God Who Kills Himself - 4

A swift and silent ambush. If I had come alone, I might have lost my life without ever seeing it coming. But why else would I have brought Tyr along? When it comes to protecting me from humans, she is the most reliable companion I have.

Azzy protects me, but she's not much against humans. The regressor handles humans well enough, but she doesn't look out for me. So.

Darkness surged from between the black parasol's folds. The shadow that had lunged at me was swallowed in darkness and slammed into the ground. I glanced over to see Tyr close a small fist.

Reliable as ever. Glad I brought the right person.

"Is it alright to use darkness when there's sunlight?"

"A little is no problem. This is a shaded spot, as well."

Tyr and I were chatting companionably when a voice came from the attacker wrapped in darkness.

"A warning. I say this for your sake."

Despite being face-down in the dirt, the attacker spoke without the slightest agitation.

"If you want to protect yourself, turn around and walk away right now. Forget what you saw, erase what you heard, and leave. Don't think about coming back. Curiosity will kill you."

"Isn't that a bit much to ask? How could anyone not be curious?"

The attacker was wrapped head to toe in a thick robe and wearing a golden mask, as if trying to hide every trace of face and figure.

But for all that effort, it amounted to nothing. The pronounced hump of a back made its presence very much known, even beneath the robe.

A hunchback. The only hunchback I had seen in the Lesser States was one particular person.

I walked slowly closer, laid a hand on the golden mask, and spoke.

"For someone who should certainly be dead to be standing here like this."

Click. I released the latch and lifted the golden mask, calling out to whoever wore the face beneath.

"Isn't that right, lord Rowkett?"

Heatblast Lord Rowkett. The lord of the Lesser States who had, beyond any doubt, died at Hilde's hands back at the camp, standing right in front of me.

Exposed, the Heatblast Lord muttered in a voice stripped of feeling.

"So he died. As expected. He was never built to live long."

"Thanks to that, it's now confirmed that you're a homunculus. Which means this is the Golden Palace after all, isn't it?"

"You know that, and still you try to approach the Golden Palace? You don't value your life? No."

The Heatblast Lord stared up at me from the ground and asked.

"Are you not afraid of the soul that will be stained here, the dignity that will be desecrated, the self that will be violated?"

"Soul, dignity, uniqueness, none of that is my concern. The only thing I care about is my life."

"Remarkable."

"Please. You're far more composed than the original, at least."

A little warmth grew between us in the exchange. Imagine holding a normal conversation like this. What happens when you turn a man who's lost his mind into a homunculus, you get a reasonable result?

I had expected to find something like this, but having it show up so conveniently was a stroke of luck. Saved me the trouble of explaining anything.

"Hyu. How can this be..."

Someone who had already died once was standing right before her. Witnessing that unbelievable sight, Tyr was, for once, genuinely shocked. After twelve hundred years of living, very little rattled her anymore, but the truth laid bare in front of her had every right to shake even her.

"Your meaning is... the Golden Mirror can create humans...?"

A reasonable inference, and close to the truth. But the Golden Mirror had not yet reached that level. I shook my head and gestured toward the Heatblast Lord.

"Not in any true sense, no. If he could create humans perfectly, there would be no need to model them after lord Rowkett. And if he did model after him, the original's personality would have carried over."

If the Golden Mirror could create humans, he ought to be king of humanity. Well, thinking about it, even a king of humanity can't produce people without having children. By that logic, surpassing even kings, he would have to be called a god.

But the Golden Mirror had not reached that level. If he had become a god, there would be no need to collect humans.

"Still, at the very least... he has created the human 'body' in something close to perfection. That's right, isn't it, lord Rowkett?"

The Heatblast Lord shook his head.

"Perfection? No. It is the ideal. The flesh the Golden Mirror creates is an extreme no flawed human could ever reach. Had the original only been intact, this body would have had not a single flaw."

"Oho. A machine made of flesh and blood, then. Does that hold for the crops cursed by the Golden Mirror as well?"

"The Golden Mirror's crops carry no curse. On the contrary, his creations are 'ideal', which is precisely why they are crops with exceptional alchemic properties on top of everything else."

Alchemic properties meaning the quality of responding to alchemy. Ordinary wood and plants are known to have low alchemic properties because of their irregular structures, but the crops the Golden Mirror had made were something else entirely.

So that was why those who filled their bodies with the Golden Mirror's crops came to resonate with him.

"And... it is not only the 'body.' For a lord who understands even a little of the Golden Mirror's great principle, even the innermost image."

The moment the Heatblast Lord finished saying that.

A localized explosion burst across his entire body. The explosion scattered heat and light. The darkness tore apart and the Heatblast Lord's restraints weakened for a single instant. Through that gap, steel wings erupted upward. Before anyone could say a word, the Heatblast Lord shot high into the sky.

"A lord's innermost image is rooted fundamentally in the Golden Mirror. Even innate arcane is merely a technique the Golden Mirror can reproduce."

Rowkett's Geraut, Heatblast-Wing. It appeared before us now in a form far more fearsome and powerful than before. The Heatblast Lord blazoned the whole Heatblast-Wing in flames and roared down at us.

"I am the guardian of the Golden Palace! Die regretting that you ever came here...!"

Tch. That fool. Acting like he's actually a real person. If he were human, I'd have read his thoughts and stolen his innate arcane by now.

But I can't read the thoughts of that thing. Can't steal the innate arcane either. No matter how I look at it, that thing is...

[Let them be.]

A voice came from somewhere then. The Heatblast Lord, who had been about to charge down at us in a shower of flames, stopped dead in midair.

"Golden Lord...!"

As if in answer, the calm voice of the woman called the Golden Lord rang out.

[Let them come. The Golden Mirror requires inspiration.]

"Kgh...!"

Face twisting, the Heatblast Lord drew back the flames. Heatblast-Wing, robbed of its thrust, plummeted to the ground in an instant. The Heatblast Lord landed on both feet with a heavy thud, glared at me, and shouted.

"You...! You will regret not dying here...!"

Sparing us, with nothing left but residual consciousness? Quite something, for a corpse.

A laugh rose in me. I smiled faintly and gave the Heatblast Lord a light pat on the shoulder.

"That won't happen. I don't do regret before I'm actually dead."

The Heatblast Lord stared at me, then put the golden mask back on. I left him to turn away and headed toward the Golden Palace.

Almost there now. I could feel it. The Golden Mirror. The thoughts of the Demon God who could create all things.

***

Uriaa Elik, king of the Gold State that held all the wealth in the world, and steel king who had mastered all the knowledge and craft in the world. She brought the fan in her hand down sharply against the desk in evident displeasure.

Having reproduced every craft in existence and absorbed countless stores of knowledge, she was now mired in a terrible boredom.

Born with a king's power, she could make anything except the things that could not be made. The line between possible and impossible was perfectly clear to her, so where was the meaning in a challenge when the end was already visible? Unable to feel the joy of pressing through the unknown, the world was like a dull and flat textbook to her.

If there was one thing she threw herself into, it was raising disciples.

Humans are creatures that hold chaos within them. Even Elik, who understood everything, could not predict them. Their skill could not touch the hem of her robe, but the small imaginations of her disciples at least served as a spark of inspiration. Like every other Elik before her, Uriaa Elik kept many disciples.

Lately, even that had grown stale.

It started with an assignment she had set on a whim.

Fill this room with a single gold coin.

It was widely known as a test of wisdom and wit, but that was not true.

Take a single gold coin as seed money and work it, and you could fill the room. At least, Elik could.

A sword sharper and sturdier than any other sells for several times the price of an ordinary blade.

An alloy produced by combining several metals in a specific ratio earns the name of legendary metal, and the price to match.

Any fraction of the many arts Elik possessed would be enough.

That was what she wanted. She wanted her disciples to wring their inadequate minds and attempt everything they could think of, to multiply that single gold coin as far as possible.

But.

"I filled the room with candlelight. Gold may gleam, but even gold's brilliance fades before real light. Surely the only thing that can truly fill this room is light alone."

Someone pulled that trick. Childish, but as a vaguely clever answer appearing among so many failures, Elik praised him generously. It was not the direction she had wanted, but it was inspiration enough.

The problem was what came after.

"A torch!"

"Incense!"

"Smoke!"

Every single person who followed began giving the same answer. As if it were the correct one.

Even a fresh answer grows stale when repeated. And when it is nothing more than a shortcut to begin with, it only grows irritating. So Elik prepared a second question.

"Turn what you filled the room with back into gold."

At that, every one of them went slack-faced and tore at their hair.

It had not been a question with any deep meaning. Elik was simply being difficult. Light and fragrance, once scattered, lose their value. She had only wanted to make fools of the lot of them for trying clever tricks in front of the steel king.

Her plan worked exactly as intended, and just as the number of trick-players had begun to dwindle.

"A bell! I filled this room with the sound of a bell!"

Late to hear the news, one disciple appeared clutching a small bell. Elik delivered the second question as always.

"Turn this into gold."

"P, pardon? Into gold, you mean?"

The disciple looked thoroughly flustered. Elik clicked her tongue loudly, guessing why.

There are craftsmen like that. Those who know how to buy and make a thing but not how to sell it. Skill without any talent for trade, and a lifetime of being worked to the bone before dying alone somewhere far from home is the fate that awaits them. Elik put on a severe expression and said.

"You're saying you can't?"

"I, I. I beg your pardon. I cannot think of any way at all... please, teach me..."

Anger flared up sharply.

Up to now, many had brought candles and incense. Elik had felt vexed by them, presenting their fleeting things so proudly as if they had found the answer, and so she had turned difficult and told them to bring it back as gold. The idlers who had copied someone else's trick without a second thought would go pale.

But a bell was different from those things, which lost their value the moment they were scattered. The value of a bell endured. It was not the answer Elik had wanted, but the bell the disciple had made was a fine piece, its clear tone ringing deep from somewhere inside the chest. Sold as it was, it would easily recover the gold that had gone into making it.

And yet this person couldn't even manage that?

When she had praised the one who filled the room with candlelight, it was because she had valued the flexible thinking and the brazen wit. But here was someone parroting a trick they had heard from someone else, without even enough commercial sense to back it up, asking to be taught.

Elik's expression twisted into something fearsome.

"You turned gold into a worthless scrap of iron, and you don't even know how to turn iron back into gold! You want to call yourself the king's disciple while turning gold into trash?! Get out of my sight! Don't come back until you've turned that into gold!"

Elik's shout sent the disciple fleeing in a panic. She clicked her tongue and sat back down.

The sound of the bell had been good. That, at least.

But a craft like that was far too trivial for Elik, who possessed the power of understanding. The moment she understood it, it became far too easy.

No craft could ever move her, in the end. If that was the case, at least have some wit, like the brazen one who had brought a candle.

If she had known it would come to this, she should never have praised him in the first place. Elik lamented and called for the next visitor.

A day passed.

Two days went by.

Over the course of three days, Elik received many disciples and welcomed guests who had traveled from far away. The memory of the disciple who had produced that clear bell tone was slowly fading into the background of her ordinary days.

"I, I did it! Eternal Elik. I have accomplished what your majesty commanded!"

He had kept his word about turning the bell into gold. The manner of it, however, soared far beyond even the imagination of Elik, who had mastered every art and body of knowledge there was.

Before Elik, a golden bell sat gleaming brilliantly.

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