zChapter 54 - Interlude Targes and the Platinum Satchel, Part 2 (1/2)

I left the royal capital for the first time on this mission, which sent me to a fief on the border of Silus Kingdom: the fief of Couto. [1]

In this fief, a dry wind always blew over the arid land. The people of this land all wore cloth over their heads, walking with their eyes and faces turned downwards.

The occasional raging bursts of wind whirled sand into the air, relentlessly buffeting me with sandy gales. In this state where I could barely open my eyes, I carried out my border duty despite the difficulty.

Or rather, I should say that I got used to struggling through it.

Rintz Kingdom and Silus Kingdom had built up a friendly relationship for many years.

In the past, Silus Kingdom had never once invaded across the border, and the people of Couto fief had no sense of awareness of being people who lived along a border.

All they did was live their lives, trying to evade the fierce winds.

In the Couto fief, even if they tried to plant crops, the wind would just blow most of them away. As such, they primarily planted trees to harvest fruits.

The trees also served to break up the wind. They planted thick crowds of trees around the villages, and the people who lived there passed their everyday lives in the restricted, confined space in the middle of the trees.

It made me understand that what I knew about the world was very little.

Even though I knew nothing beyond the royal capital, I had still felt as if I knew everything.

Now, when I thought about it, I understood why His Majesty wanted so much to know about the outside world.

I could feel, now, that my world was narrow. I knew that I lived in a confined, restricted world.

I had been walking through life with my eyes closed, my ears covered, as I carried a heavy burden.

I had been traveling down a path, never allowing my steps to deviate away from it.

In the past, I was just as those words His Majesty had murmured described me to be.

After that, my border duty assignments changed four more times, bringing me to different places. Each of those lands was completely different from the others.

There were places which were so completely different that it made me want to ask whether they really belonged to the same country. There were lands full of wealth and prosperity, and there were lands full of povery and misfortune.

There were Lords who crushed the souls of their people, and there were also Lords who imposed heavy taxes so that they themselves could live in luxury.

There were things which ought to be seen, as well as things which weren’t important to see.

I was called out on occasion by the commander of the border guards, who was the leader of our mission, as well as by the squad captains.

When my fellow guards saw just how many times I had been called out to talk to them, they condemned me behind my back as a bastard ass-kisser.

No matter what my coworkers said about me, I didn’t care at all. To me, I wanted to hear at all costs the stories that the commander and squad captains had to tell me.

I wanted, as well, to share my own stories with the captains.

All of them were people who, for some reason or another, carried some memories with His Majesty.

There were people who had only met with him for just a short, transient moment of time, as well as people like me, who had served at his side.

All of them wanted me to tell them again and again about His Majesty’s last days, and then they would press their hands over the corners of their eyes.

When His Majesty had passed away, the lives of the people living in the royal capital remained mostly unchanged.

In the borderlands, it was even more apparent. Their daily routines were completely unaffected.

There were many people who weren’t even aware that a new king had been crowned.

Every time I see people like that, it feels so unbearable that I can’t stand it.

How could someone who loved his people so much, who worked so hard for his entire life and gave everything he had for them, be forgotten by them, just like that?

When I was like that, the conversations I had with the captains comforted my rattled heart.

It was because I could see that everyone who had met that person, even if it was only once, was moved into such sadness as they reminisced over him.

While on my fourth assignment, I heard that the previous commander of the royal guards had died. And just before I was sent out on my fifth mission, I caught wind that the chief chamberlain who had served the previous King had passed away.

I felt like a dry wind blew over my heart.

Just like that, will I lose the people that I can chat and reminisce with over the memories of His Majesty, I thought.

While I was on my fifth mission to guard the border, Rintz Kingdom celebrated the birth of a new Crown Prince.

Fifty years had already passed since His Majesty, the current King, had invited his first consort. In that time, many consorts had been sent up to the palace, yet not a single one of them had gotten with child.

Now that the long-awaited crown prince had finally been born, the entire Kingdom of Rintz was in an uproar.

Even in this borderland far from the capital, it was like a festival.

The Lords of the fiefs wildly spent their money, whether it was to show their loyalty to the Kingdom or to shrewdly compete with other fiefs, and even the poor regions were steeped in an atmosphere of delight.

In the middle of this crazed situation, I alone looked at this world with cold eyes.

All of these people who couldn’t give a damn when that person, who had borne through so many hardships, and who had loved his people so deeply, died… were now rejoicing just because some baby was born.

What an absolute farce.

There was nothing that said this baby wouldn’t be a disaster that destroyed the country.

What would they do if that baby turned out to be an idiot?

While the entire country celebrated, I morosely shut myself away in my room and just drank. As I kept on drinking, a single letter – a set of orders – arrived for me.

It was an order to serve as a guard for the crown prince.

As I drank down the last mouthful of alcohol in my glass, I glared at the sheet of paper that had those words written on it, and then, I tore up that letter in my hands and tossed it away.

After the crown prince was born came a second child, then a third. As if a stopper had been pulled out, the King’s children kept being born one by one; and as the entire country rejoiced and danced in celebration, I left the country.

All of it was just ridiculous to me.

They wouldn’t pay their respects to the person who had spent his entire life protecting the kingdom, but they would throw themselves into applauding someone who’d just been born.

Why were they going so far to celebrate someone when they didn’t even know what kind of person he would be?

The poets wrote out sonnets about this baby who couldn’t even hold his head steady as if he was some almighty, all-knowing person.

The painters drew this baby, who was locked away and kept so deep in the royal palace that the common person would never lay eyes on him, as if he was someone who held all of the beauty in the world in his body.

Toward all of this, I just felt numb.

After leaving Rintz Kingdom, I took a look at Lux Kingdom and entered Silus Kingdom.

Even though these countries were founded by people of the Schell race, just as Rintz was, the other two countries were bustling and flourishing.

It made me understand just how poor Rintz Kingdom was. It also made me appreciate how well Rintz Kingdom had protected its self-reliance until now.

The soldiers I passed carried their bodies differently.

The quality of the weapons they carried was not the same as ours.

Above all, the number of soldiers in their armies was incomparable.

No matter how many times the Kingdom was exposed to danger, His Majesty had protected it with his savvy and skill.

The words that the captain of the guards and the chief chamberlain had once said now resurfaced in my mind.

Only now that I had seen the difference in power between our countries with my own eyes was I able to understand His Majesty’s greatness.

I was unable to believe that the present King would be able to accomplish what His Majesty had done. And for a newborn baby to be able to follow his footsteps was something I couldn’t possibly fathom.

I spent over ten years in those two countries, and then I departed from the Schell continent.

Once you took a single step out of the Schell continent, it really was another world out there.

I entered the Sout continent, and there, for the first time, I saw with my own eyes the ocean that I had told His Majesty about.

The sky was a clear, bright blue, and the ocean sparkled, glinting light off of its azure surface. The Sout people, who had long limbs and thin membrances between their fingers, swam freely through the ocean.

They swam as freely as birds flying through the air, and once they surfaced on land, they were like slugs.

Their frames didn’t seem to have any muscle at all. The softness of their bodies made them unable to stand on land. They walked slowly, and each and every one of their movements was languid.

As a matter of course, they couldn’t do something like farming on land.

The ones who grew and even shipped the fruits that were Sout Continent’s specialty product were actually people of the Schell race.