The Genius Knight of a Fallen Race - Chapter 57

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Chen

◈ The Genius Knight of a Fallen Race ◈

Chapter 57: Only Faith Can Topple the Tower of Distrust

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Before the surgery began in earnest, Serin demanded a level of cleanliness that bordered on obsession.

She started with the operating room, having the furniture nearby and every tool wiped down with boiled water.

Then, when she demanded enough boiled water for everyone involved in the surgery, herself included, to bathe in, one of the village women timidly voiced a complaint.

“Um, it’s winter. If we boil that much water, we’ll run out of firewood...”

Even with Shan standing right beside her, she had spoken up because the village’s firewood supply was directly tied to their survival.

They could not avoid dying by the sword only to freeze to death instead.

Tata, the Weavers family’s butler, solved the problem.

He had the authority to use the family’s wealth wherever necessary in Kalion’s absence.

“Here. This should be enough, shouldn’t it?”

“Ah, of course! Oh...”

The amount he offered was enough to buy firewood from another nearby village with plenty left over. The villagers eagerly offered to sell theirs instead.

These were harsh times, but there had to be at least one nearby village with firewood to spare.

Once all the preparations were complete, the surgery finally began.

“You need to make an incision from here to here. Can you do it?”

“Of course.”

Serin had badly injured one arm, and even without that, she was not particularly skilled with a blade. Following her instructions, Shan took up the dagger himself.

The sharply honed blade lightly traced across Kalion’s scalp before sinking in as smoothly as if cutting through cheese.

The will to cut through everything distorted reality, supplementing the dagger’s insufficient force and allowing it to slice through a skull it should not have been able to cut.

“Good...”

Serin muttered from behind him.

Cutting into a skull was difficult, and its toughness sent a powerful shock through the body. With such a capable knight handling the blade, though, the work became much easier.

Once Shan cut away part of the skull and created an opening, Serin took over.

With an eerie chant, she thrust her index finger into Kalion’s head and pulled it back out, drawing a clotted mass of blood with it.

Anyone who saw it from outside would have thought she was using evil magic to pull out a human brain.

“Mm...”

The elderly priest behind them let out a dissatisfied groan.

That was all he did. Rather than getting up, he gritted his teeth and remained seated.

After Serin removed the pooled blood from Kalion’s head, she turned and spoke.

“Now!”

“Goddess, here is one who is sick and pitiful.”

As the priest recited the prayer, holy light flowed from his hands and enveloped Kalion’s head.

They repeated the process several more times, removing blood clots from his head and healing him. Once Serin checked his condition with diagnostic viewing magic, she nodded.

“That’s done. Now we just need to put the skull back in place and heal that part.”

When all the treatment was over, Shan looked down at Kalion, whose head had been wrapped in bandages.

The old man had not regained consciousness yet, but his face looked far more peaceful than before.

“It went well, right?”

“Yeah. He’ll probably wake up within a few hours at most. It was a success. That priest is more skilled than I expected.”

“Phew...”

Relieved, Shan thanked Serin with a light pat on the shoulder, saying he could finally face Roden now.

Unlike the two of them, who were in high spirits, the old priest covered his face and lamented.

“I’m going to hell... Helping someone betray the Goddess and use a demon’s power...”

“But you saved someone. If the Goddess cannot forgive even that, isn’t she awfully narrow-minded for someone called a goddess?”

At Shan’s muttering, the old priest glared at him, then sighed as though all his strength had left him.

“May I return now?”

“You worked hard, Priest.”

Since he had helped in the end, Shan politely saw him off.

Perhaps that made it feel even more dreadful, because the priest shook his head and left.

A little later, Shan emerged from the operating room and announced Kalion’s recovery. Everyone from the Weavers family cheered in delight.

“Thank you so much, Young Master! Miss Rin!”

“If something had happened to the old master...”

Everyone gathered here had remained loyal even as their master’s family fell into ruin.

To them, Kalion’s recovery felt like the sky had collapsed and then been restored.

As they celebrated for some time, one of the village women cautiously approached.

“The village chief told us to prepare a meal for the guests. Would you like to eat?”

Only then did hunger hit Shan all at once.

The last time he had eaten was the previous evening, and the sun was already high in the sky.

A simple meal was soon laid out in the village hall.

Stew with meat and vegetables, coarse bread, cheese, the usual fare of Pendia’s commoners.

Before everyone could pray to the Goddess and begin eating, Serin raised her hand to stop them.

“I’ll try it first. Someone might have put something strange in it.”

“What? Surely not...”

“Who knows how people whose lives were threatened might react?”

Now that she mentioned it, she was not wrong.

Everyone had heard Shan threaten the priest with the villagers’ lives. Someone might have held a grudge.

“But what if something happens to Miss Rin after she eats first?”

“I have resistance to weak poisons. This village couldn’t make poison strong enough to affect me.”

Serin sampled a little of every dish, then nodded to say it was safe.

As everyone ravenously ate, Shan chewed on some bread and asked her a question.

“How do you build resistance to poison?”

“By taking poison together with a special antidote. Are you interested?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll help you later if I get the chance. It won’t work against potent poison, but it has plenty of minor uses.”

As she explained how to build poison resistance, a groan came from beside them.

Kalion, who had been moved to the hall after the surgery, was regaining consciousness.

“Ugh...”

“Old master!”

“The old master is awake!”

Perhaps the place where his skull had been cut hurt, because Kalion frowned as he turned his head.

Having lain unconscious for days, he could not even hold up his neck properly, much less stand.

“Master, are you awake?”

“Where... am I?”

“Bran Village. A small village east of Hasra.”

“Why...?”

Perhaps because the blow to his head had damaged his brain, Kalion could not remember recent events clearly.

He did not even fully understand that Shan had left for the ogre hunt, but after further explanation, he barely grasped the current situation.

“I see...”

“Yes. Thanks to Young Master Shan and Miss Rin, we barely escaped and received treatment.”

“Miss Rin?”

Kalion’s eyes widened in surprise and finally turned toward Serin, who stood behind them.

“Princess!”

* * *

Once her identity was revealed, a commotion broke out in the village hall.

The Weavers family servants, who had treated her as nothing more than a young woman skilled in magic, bowed so deeply that their heads seemed ready to pierce the ground as they apologized for their disrespect.

“No, I said it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

Even after Serin said that several times, the uncomfortable atmosphere around her did not easily fade.

Shan and Roden were the strange ones. For commoners meeting royalty, this was the normal reaction.

Fortunately, none of the villagers were in the hall, so the news did not spread.

If it had, they would have needed to leave the village immediately.

If Conrad learned Serin was here, he might send soldiers even if it meant taking a considerable risk.

“Haah, I’m tired... It was easier when I was just Rin, the mage.”

Once things had calmed down somewhat, Serin left the village hall with Shan.

The servants felt burdened just having her nearby.

“They’ll get used to it with time.”

“I hope so.”

Serin nodded at Shan’s words.

For the Weavers servants to get used to her meant Shan would accept her proposal and they would continue together.

“Come to think of it, when do you think Roden will arrive? People are probably coming from the north by now too. It would be a problem if they passed each other.”

“Can’t you see if you have a spider on him?”

Serin shook her head.

“It’s not that convenient. There’s a considerable limit on the connection range. It can’t even reach from here to the capital. And I can only see through one set of eyes at a time.”

Shan had thought it was an extraordinary ability that let her watch all of Pendia through countless spiders, but it seemed to have its limits.

If it did not, she would never have been captured instead of escaping.

“Ah, I meant to tell you this... Could you keep the magic I use to control spiders a secret from Roden too?”

Serin seemed to assume Shan would naturally refuse, because she quickly added,

“This is a secret I’ve never told anyone. Not Kagon, Aran, my maternal uncle, or even the Head of the Magic Society. If possible, I want it to stay a secret between just the two of us.”

“You really haven’t told anyone.”

“This kind of ability loses its power the moment people learn it exists. If Conrad or Elvin knew about this magic, they’d hold every important discussion in the middle of an open hallway, with guards making sure no spider could get close. I wouldn’t get the information I needed.”

Serin’s face was utterly serious as she murmured that this was a matter of life and death for her.

Shan remained silent for a long time before nodding.

“Alright. I won’t tell anyone. Not even Roden.”

He did not think Roden would spread the news carelessly if he told him, but this seemed like the right answer.

This was part of someone’s private life.

Just as Shan wanted to keep the fact that he possessed Thousand Forms a secret.

At his answer, Serin let out a deep sigh of relief.

“What a relief...”

“Still, if you end up living with Roden and me in the future, please don’t secretly put spiders on us either. If there’s something you want to know, we can ask each other, right?”

It was unfair for her to watch them when they did not even know such a method existed.

At the perfectly reasonable request, Serin bit her lip hard, then nodded with difficulty.

“Alright. Honestly, just imagining it makes me feel so anxious I could go mad... but I suppose I should.”

“You’re anxious?”

“Yeah. If I don’t put spiders on the people around me and watch what they do, I can’t feel at ease. I never know when someone might try to hurt me from behind.”

Serin gnawed at her fingernails, showing anxiety that bordered on paranoia.

It was an unfamiliar sight.

Perhaps this was the real Serin hidden beneath the relaxed exterior she always showed.

“Is there a reason you feel so anxious?”

It might simply have been her nature, but Shan had a feeling that was not the case.

After a brief silence, Serin spoke in a slightly cracking voice.

“I had a nanny. She was as good as a mother to me after my mother died giving birth to me.”

It was a common story among high-ranking nobles.

Some nannies even formed stronger bonds than biological mothers and became the hidden forces controlling nobles or royalty from behind the scenes.

“I trusted her enough to think that if I had a mother, I wanted her to be like that. I shared everything with her.”

There was only one thing Serin had hidden from her nanny: the process of developing the magic that synchronized her consciousness with spiders, which she completed on her twelfth birthday.

She was old enough to understand that secretly spying on others was wrong.

“Even so, I planned to tell my nanny about this magic. I wanted to spy on people just once to see what they were doing first.”

Through a spider’s eyes, Serin could freely observe every corner of the royal palace.

The royal knights and guards maintaining tight vigilance, as well as magical traps placed everywhere, could not stop a mere spider.

After becoming absorbed in the thrill of secretly watching others, the final person she looked for was her nanny.

Serin had wondered what her nanny did whenever she left, saying she needed to handle personal business.

Before long, she learned that her nanny had entered the king’s chambers.

It was a terrible misfortune for her nanny, and incredible luck for Serin.

“There, my nanny was telling Father everything about me. How clever I was, what I could do and wanted to do, even what I liked and disliked.”

Serin was deeply shocked by the actions of the nanny she had believed was completely on her side, but she tried to understand.

After all, her nanny’s employer was not Serin, but the king.

What went beyond even that understanding was what the king said next.

“Father gave her an order. He said he would keep me around for now because I had talent, but if I tried to meddle with excessively dangerous techniques, she should dispose of me properly and report it afterward. Using the medicine he had given her before. My nanny said she understood.”

It was a chilling instruction, impossible to imagine a father giving to the nanny of his young daughter.

It meant Gizelle the Third already considered the still-young Serin a threat.

Then again, she had developed magic like this at twelve.

“I asked my nanny again and again when she came back. Where she had gone, whether anyone had given her something strange... I wanted her to please tell me the truth, but she smiled warmly as always and said nothing had happened.”

That night, Serin gave her nanny a sleeping drug and pushed her from a terrace.

Her death was ruled an accidental fall caused by drinking.

“After that, I put spiders on everyone around me, including Father. Whenever they planted a spy, I got rid of them, so they eventually gave up. That’s how I earned the nickname the Witch of Pendia, though none of the palace maids would serve me anymore.”

There was an expression of relief on Serin’s face after she told him everything.

It seemed she had wanted to tell someone, anyone, about the things that had piled up inside her.

After hearing it all, Shan could not say Serin’s suspicion was excessive.

The fact that the nanny she had trusted and depended on most had been an assassin was too powerful a reason.

After a moment of silence, Shan deliberately changed the subject to lighten the mood.

“Is controlling spiders difficult?”

“Yeah. Magic that makes you friendlier with animals exists, like in storybooks, but borrowing an animal’s eyes and ears is a completely different field. I had a strong spiritual affinity with spiders, but even apart from that, I had to raise the synchronization rate in several ways.”

“What ways?”

“Various ones. First, I built familiarity by keeping and touching spiders. Later, I even ate them raw. Do you know what spiders taste like?”

“They taste bitter. Depending on the type, smaller ones can taste a little sourer.”

“...How do you know that?”

“I ate a lot of them before.”

Shan remembered his time living in Willow Vilalge.

Back then, scraps left over from the village chief’s family were never enough to fill his stomach. Every kind of bug that crawled around the barn was good food.

Ants, cockroaches, grasshoppers, even fleas...

After hearing that, Serin sighed.

“I was going to brag about how difficult it was to acquire this magic, but now I just look ridiculous.”

“I wasn’t trying to say what you did was nothing.”

“Of course you weren’t.”

After they joked around and the mood eased a little, Shan brought up what he had wanted to say.

“Serin.”

“Yeah?”

“For now, it’ll stay a secret. But if we end up together, I hope you can tell Roden eventually. He’s a friend we can really trust.”

Serin did not hear Shan’s words as merely a guarantee that Roden was trustworthy.

It sounded as if he was telling her that she could open her heart a little more and try trusting people.

“...I’ll try.”

That was the best Serin could do right now.

* * *

Shan’s group stayed in Bran Village for several days rather than heading farther east.

Kalion had only just regained consciousness, Serin’s arm was injured, and neither was in good shape for travel. The servants had also been thoroughly frightened by Pendia’s brutal natural environment and did not want to leave.

While the others rested, Shan inspected the equipment he had taken from Kamad and tested its performance.

With Serin’s help, he was able to learn their functions in considerable detail.

“This spear is called the Spear of Blazing Fire.”

“I guess it got that name because the spear tip explodes.”

“Yeah. It’s an old magic device. To use it, you need to channel Spirit that desires an explosion.”

After hearing Serin’s explanation, Shan mounted Awin, moved forward at a light pace, and pointed the spear at a rock ahead.

‘Explode...’

Spirit generally only acted through methods that seemed naturally possible for the thing carrying it.

A bladeless sword or club could cut or pierce something, but it could not perform magic such as making something burn or freeze as it cut.

Yet this magic device, the Spear of Blazing Fire, made such a thing possible.

The moment Shan imbued it with the will for it to explode, the spear glowed brightly, just as it had when Kamad used it.

The rock before its tip exploded with a bang, scattering stone fragments in every direction.

“Goodness!”

“What was that...?”

A few villagers nearby were startled, but Shan had at least learned for certain how to use the weapon.

Serin warned him as he smiled in satisfaction.

“That spear doesn’t have an automatic repair function like the magic devices I made for you. It’s sturdier, so it won’t break easily, but once it does, assume it’s finished.”

“Yes.”

Its shape made it inconvenient to grip and swing freely, but it was not bad at all to have a stronger and more useful weapon for lance charges.

Kamad’s sword and shield were magic devices as well.

No, strictly speaking, the shield was not a magic device.

“It’s a holy relic.”

“A holy relic...?”

“Yeah. People also call them sacred relics. They’re usually made from the remains of distinguished priests after they die. Only the Holy See knows the exact manufacturing method.”

The Holy See was the sacred site of Old Faith believers in Libert’s capital, where the Pope, the spiritual leader of all Old Faith followers, resided.

Serin added that, as a mage hostile to the Old Faith, it was a place that should be burned down someday.

In any case, the sword’s function was to electrocute enemies it struck. It had probably not been noticeable because Guardian of the East was a magic sword mixed with true iron.

The shield gave its user additional vigor.

“Then I should use this shield from now on. The one I used before broke.”

Of course, he would first need to scrape off Kamad’s crest on the front of the shield.

Unless he wanted it to be a provocation.

Lastly, Kamad’s armor was nothing special. It had been made by a skilled craftsman and blessed by priests, much like armor with a stronger, longer-lasting enchantment magic placed on it.

Since Shan’s blade had already damaged it in several places, even if it was repaired, it would likely be worth no more than ordinary plate armor.

“I want to give this to Roden. He can’t wear plate armor since he isn’t a knight, though.”

“Should I knight him?”

At Serin’s question, Shan hesitated, then shook his head.

“Thank you, but Roden said he can’t accept it until he proves his own worth.”

“Blades?”

“Yes.”

Serin smiled at Shan’s expression, which clearly said, So you were eavesdropping after all.

Admitting that she had overheard it was her own way of showing goodwill.

“Come to think of it, I meant to mention this. May I work on your armor later?”

“My armor?”

“You said you have the ogre’s Magic stone. If we use it as material to turn your armor into a magic device, it’ll be effective. I’ll need to examine your body too.”

Something had changed in Shan’s body after he hunted the ogre, but he had not yet been properly examined.

Serin had lost all the magical tools needed for that when Elvin captured her.

She would only be able to examine him after contacting the Magic Society again and bringing them under her command, or having the necessary magical tools made anew.

“Just so you know, I’m not saying I’ll only help you if you help me. This is the price I should pay for saving my life.”

If Shan had not helped her, Serin would be starving to death in a tower of the Blue Palace right now.

She might already be dead.

Serin added that as if to make sure he did not misunderstand, and Shan smiled and nodded.

“Thank you, Serin. I won’t forget it.”

As the two examined various magic devices and talked, a servant hurried toward them.

After deeply bowing to Serin first, the servant spoke to Shan.

“Young Master! The elder young master has arrived from the east!”

“Oh, really? You’re not mistaken?”

“Of course not!”

Shan had mistaken passing merchant groups for Roden several times already, so he quickly mounted Awin and headed to the east side of the village.

When he climbed onto the palisade, he saw a line of people ahead, with Roden at its front.