WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 444

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Heaven-Defying Trial - 12

Thralls are commonly compared to a maker's limbs. It is not a simple metaphor. A thrall is governed by the maker's mood, the maker's will, the maker's commands.

Think of your right arm. Give it a command, and it moves. Want to grab something, and it reaches out and seizes it instinctively, without consciously directing each finger and joint. Sometimes it hits a limit or something goes wrong and it won't move right. But it never acts on its own selfishness or indulgence. Not unless it belongs to a newborn still learning what its body is.

A thrall is exactly that. A limb. The Progenitor, who had nothing but her dominion power, swept through the world with thirteen limbs fighting on her behalf. Now those limbs have broken free and are raising their blades against her.

Which raises a question. What becomes of all the strength and knowledge a limb acquired along the way? Does it belong entirely to the arm and leg, vanishing forever once the shackle snaps?

For most, probably. But not for all. Or rather, a maker who experienced and learned far more than she ever could have without those limbs becomes something far greater than what she was before.

Struck head-on by that enormous arm stained in darkness, Meurie found herself thrown into confusion. Not from the impact, naturally.

Long ago, the most dangerous enemy of vampires had been neither the Sanctum nor humans. It was light. The sacred force that transforms all things. For vampires whose bodies had died and frozen in the moment of their turning, sunlight, which warped the very medium of bloodcraft, was a potent venom.

Tyrkanzyaka was no different. She had wrapped herself in blood to keep the light at bay, crafting a blood-shield through powerful bloodcraft to protect vampires from it. The corrupted, tainted blood blackened quickly, but even the crumbling fragments served as a barrier against the light.

Darkness is not a dominion power. It is simply the absence of light, nothing more. As long as light can be blocked, darkness can be conjured anywhere. Tyrkanzyaka only ever used that blackened blood as a tool.

But humans who saw vampires constantly wreathed in darkness feared it, and named it the darkness raised against the gods.

The shared belief of countless people twists the nature of things, especially anything that touches the human realm. And so Tyrkanzyaka came to wield darkness, separate from bloodcraft entirely.

Meurie, who was intimate with darkness and had inherited a share of its authority, knew its true nature well. Crumbled, rotted blood, meant only to block light. Something that had never even properly received the dominion power of bloodcraft. It had grown beyond a clump of filth by becoming a false idol, but the force darkness could exert was paltry at best.

And yet. Right now, this darkness was overpowering Meurie, if only for a moment.

"Blood energy-? No, even the Black Knight clad in blood energy couldn't-this is-."

Meurie tore free of the darkness and pressed herself to the ceiling. She looked down at Tyrkanzyaka with eyes that could pierce the dark.

"Progenitor-?"

Tyrkanzyaka had her arm extended.

Not the arm that had struck Meurie. Those short, slender arms could never have reached her. What had struck Meurie was Tyrkanzyaka's shadow. Floating behind her, a trembling darkness was extending its own arm as though mimicking her.

The same shadow that had mimicked her movements once before, in the Abyss. The only difference was that it was uncannily, impossibly powerful.

Tyrkanzyaka opened her mouth. Following her lead, the shadow parted its own lips, and darkness dripped from between them.

[Meurie. Does it not strike you as strange.]

"Hm-? What does-?"

[Those of you who seemed as though you would be loyal for eternity turned on me overnight, like the flipping of a palm.]

Vampires do not feel fear. Their hearts have stopped, their sense of pain has died, and even injury heals with ease, the emotion called fear is simply absent in them.

But whether it was from severing the shackle, or because her opponent was the Progenitor, Meurie felt something like cold water trickling down her spine. This, she supposed, was what one would call fear.

[I lived in an unchanging world for nearly a thousand years. I believed loyalty, love, emotion, all of it would be eternal, just as I am.]

The voice that rose from Tyrkanzyaka's shadow seemed to seize the surrounding space and shake it. Standing before this ominous presence that stirred dread, Meurie felt a strange impulse.

The urge to sing.

[...I believed my feelings for Hyu, too, would never change. Even as recently as the night we spent together, my chest swelled with the thought that this moment would continue forever, day after day. I gazed at his sleeping face and sank into happiness.]

"Progenitor, who finally held the happiness you sought. Progenitor, who awakened to pleasures you never knew. Tell me. How are you now-?"

To Meurie's question, carried on a quiet melody, the shadow answered in a viscous voice.

[I despise him. I despise him so deeply I cannot bear it. I thought I would give him my everything, and it is agonizing to know I cannot become his everything. Only a single night has passed. I only heard one whisper from all of you, nothing more. And yet.... can the heart truly change this easily? Was will truly this frail and soft?]

"The heart is a reed-, the heart is a reed-. When the wind blows it lies down without conviction, the heart is a tender and yielding reed-."

[You are no different. Nearly a thousand years of loyalty was nothing but words bound by the shackle. The moment the blood shackle broke, you turned your blades on me.]

"Who let the wind into the reed bed-. O tree standing quietly in a tilted world, did you see, who let the wind into this reed bed-."

[...And what torments me most is that I cannot deny it: all of this is what Hyu wanted.]

Having poured out her feelings through Meurie's song, Tyrkanzyaka let her hands fall and gave a quiet lament.

[Perhaps, if you had not started your rebellion, would I not have been able to stay with him longer. This resentment becomes a sharp thorn turning in every direction. I want to stab something. I want to pierce it and make it bleed. But I know. The one who let this wind in was none other than Hyu.]

As Tyrkanzyaka finished speaking, the castle itself began to move. Because the bricks had been packed with blood, Erjebeut could manipulate the castle's brickwork piece by piece through bloodcraft. Having located Tyrkanzyaka, she cleared the obstructing paths and opened a straight road toward her.

At the far end of that road stood the Elders, each carrying their own desires. Erjebeut with her ambitions, Rahu Khan seeking an unchanging lineage, Lungken wanting endless battle, Cabilah with her twisted loyalty. Starving Bakuta and singing Meurie.

"Progenitor."

"Clan chief."

"Unni."

They were the same as Tyrkanzyaka had once been, the one who had longed for a heart. They had come bearing their desires, and were trying to wrest something from her. Feeling the wind blow through the wide space, Tyrkanzyaka murmured.

[...Hyu. So this was the sight you wanted. I think I understand it a little now.]

Until now, Tyrkanzyaka had never needed to scheme. She had limbs to move on her behalf.

Now that she had lost all her limbs, Tyrkanzyaka drew on everything she had ever witnessed and experienced.

The Elders might be more skilled in battle. But bloodcraft was Tyrkanzyaka's. Even if she could not understand combat as such, every trace of bloodcraft used within it fell entirely under her dominion power.

All power converges to a single point.

Black darkness gathers and sculpts a body. A pitch-black shadow in her likeness rose up.

[In those days I was a corpse, and I was myself the Duchy, the ancestral god. I was the very ground that held you up.]

It was the image of Tyrkanzyaka, as a shadow ought to be, yet at least ten times her size. The only thing that distinguished it from a shadow was that it possessed a distinct, solid form.

[You do not want a living, breathing nation, a land that moves with selfishness and indulgence. You reject my very existence.... That is your desire, is it not.]

With a surge of powerful will, the blood energy that had filled Tyrkanzyaka's body flowed into the giant shaped from shadow, with Tyrkanzyaka herself as its heart.

The shadow stretched and stirred. Its two reddish arms raked against the walls of the castle. A grinding crack, the stone walls crumbled away without the slightest resistance.

The giant that had gained substance and strength, and emotion, and a heart, was no longer a simple shadow. It had surpassed the level of a doll shaped from darkness. That thing was Tyrkanzyaka's own body.

If blood cannot leave the body, then expand what counts as the body. Through dominion power and bloodcraft, shape a giant. A giant cast in Tyrkanzyaka's exact image, merely dyed black, rose up at her back.

[Then I will ask not by right but by force. Are you prepared to receive a tyrant?]

Before blood energy blazing like molten rock, a god who had reclaimed her heart put the question to her former subjects.

A great tidal wave approaches.

The drift whale and the cloud ray. Both sea-beasts are enormous existences that rival natural disasters, yet they are still living creatures that roam the open ocean. She had warned that the cloud ray would not always stand by and watch the drift whale block the currents and fill its belly, and that it would shatter the sea to make what she called a "formal protest."

Valdamir was so caught off guard that words failed him, not because the content was unexpected, but because the "prophecy" had been used for the sake of vampires. Every Holy Maiden's prophecy he had ever encountered had been wielded against vampires, and his first instinct was to doubt it and seize the source for questioning.

Two reasons stopped him.

One was that preparing for a prophecy could only help. Having people pull back from the shoreline for a short while during the Night Ebb would cause humans no more than a little inconvenience, no grave loss would follow. The absence of opportunity cost was a matter of considerable importance to Valdamir.

The other reason.

He could not gauge the other party's power.

The Holy Maidens of the Sanctum each possessed strange abilities of their own. The Steel Maiden, Peruel, was the prime example. A Holy Maiden who foresaw her own future and brought it to pass was invincible. Even Valdamir could not directly harm her.

If that one was also a Holy Maiden, she could not be underestimated. What she knew, how she had obtained two great swords, too many unknowns made it far too risky to touch her carelessly.

Above all, he had heard she was wounded by Dogo, yet here she stood, radiating that uncanny air and looking perfectly unharmed. If he started a fight for nothing and got drawn into a delay, Valdamir, with so much left to do, would be the one to suffer.

Especially now.

"Ah, Valdamir."

He had to go and receive the Black Knight, Du Lahan, who stood before him.

"A welcome face. You feel the same, don't you? Though I have no face to speak of, ha ha ha!"

Sir Lahan, his severed head tucked under his arm, laughed at his own joke. Rather than returning the smile as a vampire might, Valdamir asked flatly.

"Lahan. You've woken up."

Du Lahan the Black Knight, once the mightiest warrior before he became an Elder, shook his head cheerfully at the sight of an old enemy, and a long-standing friend.

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