WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ Reformation of the Deadbeat Noble

Chapter 26

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New Change (2)

Dream.

The term for the mental phenomenon that occurs during sleep, letting a person see, hear, and feel various things just as they would while awake.

Of course, most dreams made no sense at all.

You could be walking through a dense forest one moment, and the next the whole backdrop had shifted to a desert. Sweat pouring off you under a scorching summer sun, and then suddenly it was winter.

The flow of events tangled itself into knots, and the people who showed up had no connection to each other whatsoever.

That's why most people thought of dreams as something separate from reality. Something meaningless, something apart.

But the lazy lord, Airen Farreira, was different.

'Started already, huh.'

The boy sank into the dream and felt the scenery around him settle into place.

A yard, neither cramped nor wide, weeds growing wild across it, a low wall running the whole way around, and above it all, a blue sky and scattered white clouds looking down in silence.

And within that scene, a nameless man raising his sword without a word.

Everything was exactly the same. The day before. Yesterday. Today.

Airen Farreira had been having the same dream for six months straight now.

And it never stayed just a dream.

The boy possessed the man's body inside this vision, and trained.

Swung the sword without end. And that memory carried through even after he woke, shaping both his body and mind in the real world.

'The reason I went from lazy and useless to this is all thanks to the dream... huh?'

The lazy lord was murmuring to himself about the same miracle happening again today, when something felt off.

Strange.

Something, to put it more precisely, had changed.

As already established, the Airen inside the dream wasn't really Airen.

He was nothing more than a nameless swordsman swinging a blade from morning to night without rest, while his own consciousness sank down into some deep place.

But not this time.

Even though he hadn't woken from the dream, he could still hold onto his own sense of self.

'What in the world is going on?'

Of course, staying conscious didn't mean he could wander freely through the dream. The man kept breathing the way he always did, raised his sword the way he always did, and swung it hard the way he always did.

Whoosh!

'Whoa!'

Airen startled.

The sensation coming through the man's body felt far too vivid.

Nothing like this had ever happened before.

Sure, it was a vision powerful enough to affect his real body, but a dream was still a dream.

What the boy had experienced up to now had always been hazy and blurred, like walking through a foggy dawn.

Nothing solid remained in his hands except the broad strokes of feeling that survived being washed clean by time.

But this time felt different.

Whoosh!

'Ohh!'

The heavy iron sword swung down.

Power flowed into every part of the body with it. The relaxing and tensing of muscles, the beat of the heart, even the heat escaping through each breath, all of it felt close enough to touch.

Considerable time passed like that.

Whoosh!

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat again.

The count climbed past what would have exhausted any ordinary person several times over.

And it wasn't done carelessly either. The man poured his full effort into every single moment.

Even with a body built like steel, it was hard enough that even he felt pain, and that sensation reached Airen Farreira just the same.

But what the boy focused on wasn't the heavy ache settling into every part of his body.

It was the man's astonishingly fine control, the way he kept himself perfectly in check even in the middle of that hardship.

'Incredible.'

Raising the sword overhead, then dropping it straight down, or on a diagonal.

On the surface, it looked simple enough for a five or six year old to manage.

But it wasn't. No matter how easy or basic a motion looked, doing it 'perfectly' demanded a high level of skill.

Refined breathing.

A steady center.

Perfect balance.

And the flawless coordination of muscle, tendon, and joint that made all of it possible.

The man's swordsmanship held every bit of that, and what made it all possible was his focus.

Needless to say, it stood far, far above whatever Airen Farreira had ever thought of as his own 'best.'

The boy kept feeling the man's sensations, caught in a hazy kind of awe, the way a villager in some backwater town might feel meeting a hero who'd come to visit.

But that time didn't last forever.

"...Awake, huh."

The lazy lord muttered, pulled out of the dream.

He hadn't slept long. Three hours, at most. The dark scene outside the window confirmed it. It probably wasn't even four in the morning yet.

Of course, there was no physical toll from it at all.

The recovery magic woven into his bedding, along with the healing arts performed every day, helped the trainees get maximum benefit from minimal sleep.

Airen hadn't once thought he needed more sleep since enrolling.

Today was different. Even if he had to force himself back to sleep, he wanted to experience that dream one more time.

But there was nothing he could do.

The strange dream couldn't be had more than once a day. Actually, he couldn't even fall asleep more than once a day to begin with.

At some point Airen's body had simply become like that.

In the end, there was only one thing left for him to do.

The boy got up and made his way to the training ground.

* * *

A day passed. A week passed. A month passed.

The whole time, Airen Farreira's dream kept changing.

It grew more vivid. It drew closer to reality.

Sight, hearing, touch, every sense sharpened.

It felt like the moment he fell asleep, he was transported into an entirely different world.

Thanks to that, the boy could immerse himself more deeply, more thoroughly, in the dream man's swordsmanship.

Meaning that with every motion the man performed, Airen could feel his perfectly controlled body, and the intense focus that made it possible, more vividly than ever.

This shift in the dream naturally had a major effect on reality as well.

"All right, what I just showed you was an applied movement combining Krono's basic forms four and six. A useful technique, since it lets you dodge and attack in the same motion. I'll show it again."

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!

The motions flowed together, smooth as running water.

Calling it a basic technique felt like an understatement given how complicated it looked, at least to the C-Class trainee candidates. Most of them wore expressions like they'd just bitten into something rotten.

But Airen Farreira was different.

His eyes went wide, taking in every detail of Instructor Karaka's movements.

It wasn't especially difficult for him.

Every night he shared the sensations of the man in the dream, shared that razor-sharp focus.

Compared to the man, Airen was still clumsy, but even that much had sharpened his powers of observation to a startling degree.

"All right, want to try it?"

Watching and remembering wasn't the whole of it, either.

Airen Farreira raised his greatsword, took a deep breath, and reproduced the applied movement combining forms four and six.

What followed was swordsmanship polished enough to draw the attention of every trainee nearby.

Even Instructor Karaka, who was as stingy with praise as he was gentle in speech, ended up clapping.

"Excellent! The arm's motion matters, sure, but what matters even more is quick, light footwork, and you clearly understand that. Sharpen it up just a little more and you could use it in actual combat!"

"What. How did he do that?"

"Wasn't he barely getting through form three a few days ago?"

Murmurs rose from the trainees around him.

It was true. Only a week earlier, Airen had been struggling to keep up with the pace of the C-Class lessons.

But not anymore.

After running through the motion three times in a row, the boy closed his eyes and turned his awareness inward on his own body.

Like an image surfacing on a still lake, the sensations from every part of his body began rising clearly into his mind.

'The body isn't one solid mass. It's a union of countless parts, each fulfilling its own role to carry out a single motion...'

Senses pushed to their limit distinguished, recognized, and oversaw dozens of these separate clusters.

Roles were assigned with perfect efficiency, no waste, no misalignment anywhere.

And all of it came together as one to complete the ideal motion.

Without rest. Without stopping. Without end.

The lazy lord traced the sword's path through his mind, then opened his eyes. And performed the motion again.

Cleaner this time. And because of that, far more powerful.

Instructor Karaka's eyes went wide.

'Has trainee Airen Farreira's talent always been this remarkable?'

No, it hadn't. Airen's talent was exactly what it had always been.

What had changed was simply the mindset he brought to every moment, every motion.

The result of pouring even the smallest scraps of focus, the kind he would have once let slip away for nothing, entirely into his swordsmanship.

And naturally, sustaining that level of focus over long stretches of time placed an enormous strain on his mind.

"Hah, huff, hah..."

"That guy's been breathing real hard lately."

"Right? If it's just stamina, he's tougher than Judith, but..."

"Did he eat something bad or what?"

A few trainees whispered among themselves, watching the lazy lord look unusually exhausted during independent training.

A situation they couldn't make sense of.

But to Airen Farreira, it made perfect sense.

Back when he didn't understand it, there had been nothing to do about it.

But now, having felt the density of the man's time in the dream, felt his swordsmanship down to the bone, there was no way he could go back to swinging his sword carelessly like before.

"Whew."

Swish!

Airen swung his sword. Kept swinging it.

Sadly, he couldn't sustain peak focus every single moment. Like a long-distance runner whose legs slowed with every passing mile, the boy had no way to hold back the mental fatigue that kept piling up.

But this wasn't unfamiliar territory for him.

A day passed.

A week passed.

Another month went by, and right around the three-month mark since he'd started swordsmanship lessons.

Airen Farreira finally managed to hold onto his morning focus all the way through late into the night.

"Hm."

Even so, he wasn't satisfied.

The boy still dreamed every night, still shared the dream man's sensations every night.

And that was exactly how he knew.

Even at the peak of his own focus, he still couldn't reach even the toes of the man's most ordinary, unremarkable moment.

'What do I have to do to reach that level?'

The most refined breakdown he could manage was, at best, grouping muscles into broad clusters, biceps, triceps, pectorals, lats, quads.

The man operated on a different plane entirely. His focus was so fine, so sharp, it looked like he had every single muscle fiber under direct control.

Of course, what Airen had gained already looked impressive enough to anyone else.

But he couldn't stop there.

It wasn't greed, and it wasn't some vague longing. It felt closer to some vast will he couldn't resist.

The boy wanted to draw closer to this nameless man.

Just like the first time he'd had that strange dream, and felt a powerful pull toward a sword he'd never once cared about in his whole life...

"A dream, huh..."

"Huh? What'd you say?"

"What. Don't stop mid-spar."

Judith asked, having caught Airen's muttering, while Brett snapped at him, annoyed.

Things were still rocky between the two of them, but ever since Brett's proposal, their relationship had recovered enough that they could spar together now.

Airen had been off to the side, swinging his sword alone.

But not anymore.

Deep in thought about something, he walked off, footsteps steady, toward a bench in the corner of the training ground. It had been put there for rest, but Airen had never once used it.

Which was exactly why Judith and Brett both looked puzzled.

"Hey! Hey! What are you doing! You ignoring me? Hey!"

"Leave him be. Probably just worn out."

Airen Farreira, tired and going off to rest. It looked completely out of character, but there was no other explanation for it.

Losing interest, Brett turned back to Judith to press her into sparring again.

Just then, Airen reached the bench and lay himself down neatly.

Then closed his eyes.

"What is he doing?"

"Is he sleeping?"

"No way."

"That Airen Farreira?"

Every trainee candidate nearby fell into confusion.

Judith. Brett. The Brett family crowd, Lance Patterson included.

All of them wore the same blank expression, like people watching something they couldn't begin to understand.

'If I take the same position I sleep in, maybe I can pick up even a little of that feeling from before?'

Whether the people around him were shocked into a stupor or not, the lazy lord gave it everything he had, trying to reach the sensation from the dream.

Roughly thirty minutes passed like that.

Snap.

Airen Farreira rose to his feet, and a sharp, keen edge glinted in his eyes.

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