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‘Swish,’ came his nervous gesture, and the palace knights and attendants nodded, bowed their heads, and stepped from the room.

The door closed behind them. The only people left were the king and I.

The king was silent, and I remained standing still.

All I wanted to receive was the sword hidden under the palace, but the king knew he would be giving me more than a sword. The sword itself symbolized the throne, as it was the sword the founding king had used to kill Gwangryong, the great dragon. Giving me Dragon Slayer meant that he would be proclaiming that I would be the next king. His mouth could not so easily come to terms with this truth. When I was far from the throne, he didn’t want to give me anything. Now, I was an ugly truth that he wanted to get rid of right away.

The king had bitten off more than he could chew; he had promised me too much.

But he could not change his mind.

The words of the monarch are like heavenly gold, immutable and pure. What’s more, his words become even more set in stone if he made a promise for the throne.

Even if I had forced him to bite into my lure, who would believe and follow the king, were he to break his word to his eldest son? If he did that, it would be as if the monarch chucked his own authority in the gutter.

“I…” the king said, and then stopped speaking for a goodly while.

“I hate you,” he confessed.

“I know,” came my casual response.

“I really hate you.”

“I know that very well.”

The king’s tone changed: He had pretended to be embarrassed, now his voice grew a little harder.

“I really hate you, for you walk around as if you are okay with your past brutality and betrayal. You, a traitor, swagger about my palace as if you attended a fair or a ball.”

Even such blatant hate-filled words did not shake me.

From the moment I had first met him, the king’s eyes had been the same. Not even for a moment had he considered me in a favorable light. His blue eyes had always contained contempt and hatred.

That was nothing new to me.

“But,” said the king with a distorted face, “as monarch, I have every intention of taking responsibility for an oath that I had made.”

The king now arose from his seat.

“Our agreement will be implemented,” he said, and I realized he wanted to leave things as they are.

“You may make wrong choices,” the king then said as he looked at me, “and you might do things that everyone criticizes. If you don’t make such mistakes later, you will have realized something. It will always be a continual process of learning.”

It was like asking what kind of fat you wanted to eat with your fat: Useless words.

“That’s what Your Majesty told me when I woke up from my wound.”

“Since your loss of memory, you have not taken a single step away from your past mistakes. Also, I know you will not be able to move forward.”

“This is also what your Majesty said.”

The king slumped back into his throne and said, “If you have something to say, don’t let me get in the way.”

At those words, I spoke, for I had been waiting to do so.

“There have only been fifty-six minor skirmishes in the past year.”

The king frowned at my sudden statement. I didn’t care and started listing the gains I had made as I stood before him. The tens of thousands of orcs, more than 20,000, that we had defeated, and the fact that I had slain their king, the Warlord. The unsealing of the kingdom’s tower and the circumvention of the treaty, allowing the training of wizards.

The recent successes that the kingdom’s envoys had in concluding negotiations with the dwarves. The fact that this has laid the foundation for a profitable business that would continue even after the kingdom has shored up its financial shortfalls.

It was with an extremely cold expression that the king was staring at me. He seemed to think that I was putting up a show to praise myself.

But I didn’t want to list all the troubles I went through. I wanted to ask something. And so did.

“So, where are you right now? And where were you?”

While I was fighting monsters in the north, while I was negotiating with the imperial ambassador to regain the use of the spire, and while I was parlaying with the dwarves, I wanted to know where the king was and what he was doing.

“Are you trying to admonish me in my own hall right now?” came the king’s rebuke, and he pretended to be dignified. I laughed and asked again, “I have taken many steps, so what about Your Majesty? What did you do?”

“You dare!”

I studied the king’s face: Even while it was bloodshot with extreme anger, it looked like a corpse’s visage. Corpse, it was an apt description.

The day when the great vision failed, time stopped for the king. He became a man that only recycled resentment and hatred throughout his being in an endless loop. It was as if one of the Death Knights had become stuck in their past, repeating the same motions and emotions over and over again.

This king was no different from the dead.

“Even a single step?” I asked.

“I won’t listen to this anymore!”

“Did Your Majesty take even a single step?”

“I won’t listen, I said.”

“If you had gone ahead, what would your steps have been?”

The king jumped from his seat as he stared at me. His was an anger-filled face. Still, it was all just empty rage that flowed uselessly into the void.

“Knights, get inside here!” the king cried out, and the doors to the hall opened.

“Get this thing out, now!”

The palace knights approached slowly, hesitantly. They didn’t dare drag me out; they just hung around on the periphery. I looked at the man on the dais. The king’s age was over forty, which was still too young for him to be called an old man. However, if the definition of an old man was someone who lived in the past and hid behind the screens of the stage, then the king was indeed an old man.

He hid himself in a throne that no longer fit his body.

“Between Your Majesty and I, who is the one who is still standing?”

He was a stubborn old man who got angry just because he could not answer a little prince’s questions.

“What are you palace knights doing!?” the king demanded as he ridiculed their inaction.

Shek.

Someone grabbed onto my sleeve. I turned and found myself looking into a wrinkled face. It was the Marquis of Bielefeld. He quietly shook his head.

“Your Majesty, my king, His Highness the First Prince will be stepping back,” the old man said calmly and pulled on my sleeve. We stepped from the hall.

“Your Highness,” the Marquis of Bielefeld said, “Would you like to talk with me for a moment?”

I did not refuse his request. “Let’s go to my palace,” I said and led the marquis to the First Palace. Carls visibly brightened when he saw me, but corrected his glee when he saw that the old marquis was following me.

“I need a private talk with the marquis.”

Carls glanced at the other knights to see whether they had grasped the meaning of my curt order.

Those who had followed me to Winter Castle quickly sent out all the knights newly stationed to the First Palace. I went in only after all the palace knights had been driven out, and the doors thudded shut.

“Your Highness,” Adelia said and bowed her head. She had been tidying my bed. “It’s because I like it,” came her justification as I stared at her. A woman with the skills of a Sword Master was making up beds. “Please do not take away my joy,” she demurely said.

Faced with her consistent attitude, I felt a bit better after having been alone with the king.

“Shall we serve tea?” Adelia, who has become quite shameless, asked me with a smile.

“I think whiskey is better than tea,” the marquis answered, and I frowned at him.

“I didn’t know that it is wise to enjoy a daytime drink,” I stated.

“If the person is strong, it matters not,” came the marquis’s impudent response.

Adelia smiled at his words and quickly placed two glasses and a bottle on the table.

“If you have need of anything else, please send for me,” Adelia said and left us. I stared at her as she exited and then asked the marquis, “So what do you mean to tell me?”

The marquis made sure that the door was closed and then picked up his filled glass. He emptied it in one gulp and then smacked his lips together in satisfaction.

“How do you feel?” the marquis asked, and seeing me frown, added, “I’m asking if you’re a little excited.”

I stared at the marquis after he had asked me such a blatant question. I couldn’t be sarcastic, and things didn’t seem encouraging. I would be too embarrassed to admit this before the marquis.

So, instead of answering, I drank whiskey.

I took a moment to organize my thoughts while my mouth blazed. I had pushed the king, who considers me a thorn in his backside, into a corner. I had reclaimed my body, and as a bonus, I have been recognized as the successor of the throne.

“It feels different than I thought it would,” I finally stated. Instead of being happy, the resentment that had lurked in the corner of my heart now felt greater than ever.

“I dare say, it must have felt like persecuting a powerless old man,” came the marquis’s blatant comment, and I could not refute his words. His words exactly matched the feelings I felt but a while ago, so I could not deny them in the slightest.

Even if he had not won them through battle, I still felt like I was forcibly taking away the possessions of an old, worn out and exhausted man.

I drank again, and the taste of the alcohol was as bitter as my heart. While I frowned and wiped my mouth, the marquis smiled.

“It is the way of the world,” the marquis stated. I didn’t think it was funny, as I listened to the marquis talk about the reasons for things occurring in the world.

I suddenly felt dizzy.

My past as a sword was an incomplete existence, wherein strength and violence was all that mattered. I wracked my wisdom to gain insight into everything.

Up to this point, I was nothing but a child who had accidentally obtained a sword that was too good for him. I only realized this fact after mixing with people and wearing Adrian’s body for a while. I could only admit my foolishness after I became a Sword Master.

“The son cannot see the way his father has taken, and the father cannot see his mature son along straight lines.”

Now I thought I knew what the Marquis was talking about.

“It’s not that kind of relationship,” I said as I filled the marquis’s empty glass and then mine.

We clinked our glasses and emptied them at once.

“But I’ll listen to you, this once,” I said as I held the bottle, which seemed to have been half-emptied in mere moments.

“We will need more whiskey,” the marquis stated.

“We will die if we only drink, and eat nothing.”

“We must have some snacks, then.”

“A man can only wish,” I replied.

“I will tell many stories yet, so why don’t we fill our stomachs?”

As the marquis said this, I clapped my hands. Adelia appeared, having awaited my summons. I asked her to bring some simple fare, and it wasn’t long before so many platters were stacked before us that we couldn’t eat it all, even if we ate all night.

I bit into a piece of jerky as I sank deep into the sofa and waited for the marquis to begin his tale.

“Since your opportunity to become the king of this realm has arrived, I will tell you everything, right from the beginning.”

The marquis’s eyes deepened.

“It was about twenty years ago, and His Majesty had just ascended to the throne.”

The Marquis of Bielefeld had such a rich voice that it felt as if my mind had been transported twenty years into the past. The story began. It was the history of the kingdom that was unknown to me, a royal secret that none spoke of.

It was about the tyranny of the strong and the fleeting resistance of the weak.

I drank in silence. I simply filled my glass when it was empty, emptied it when it was full, and listened to the marquis’s story until as the night passed.

His was a tale filled with tearful efforts and would be a difficult one to hear had I not drunk. It was a story about a man who worked hard for a great time, only to have his limbs severed, and eventually, his will broken.

It was also a long, long story that seemed without end. However, there was no such thing as an endless story in this world, so the marquis’s story did end after some time.

‘Thuk,’ came the sound as the marquis’s head struck the table, with him passing out just like that. I quietly summoned my palace knights.

“Your Highness, what is this?” Carls asked with wide eyes as he saw the fainted marquis, his head resting in a puddle of whiskey and among rice cakes.

“It’s a cumbersome thing to explain, so just lay him out in any room,” I ordered.

Carls nodded and did what I told him to do.

I stared at the bottle and then grabbed it.

“It’s really not enough,” I muttered as I downed it. I suddenly looked into the clear glass of its bottom, so I threw it aside and buried myself in the sofa.

“It is lost, but not taken away…”

I had learned many things thanks to the marquis, but my head got muddled by all the complexities as well.

I was not given the time to organize my thoughts.

‘Dookdookdook,’ someone pounded on my door. The sound echoed like cannon fire in my hungover mind.

“How dare you!” I shouted as I grabbed Twilight and ran from the room.

“Your Highness!” Carls cried as he came to me. His face was filled with an urgency I had never before seen.

“Explain while we go!” I ordered. It seemed that there was no time for hesitation.

I just wished I could forcibly awaken my body.