0.
After successfully scraping the Inner Tower community,
the first thing I asked Yuna about was background knowledge on this world.
"So this is, like, a memoir?"
A memoir written by someone not long after the Tower appeared. It seemed useful for figuring out what kind of world this was.
[Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, isn’t it?]
[I think reading this one should be enough.]
It was a little longer than I expected.
─────────────────
It may be a familiar concept now, but the Tower appeared one day without warning.
Before that mysterious structure, humanity had no choice but to stop everything it was doing.
Of course, that was only natural. Something of a height no one had ever seen before had appeared overnight.
Yet the Tower held many things that did not exist on the surface.
Minerals never before seen, medicinal herbs never before touched, technologies never before imagined.
And beings who were not human… dwarves, elves, and dozens of other races.
They had lived within the Tower from the very beginning.
─────────────────
Wait a second….
"Hold on."
[?]
"Give me the one-line summary."
That was what AI was for: summaries.
[Tower appears → humanity climbs it → nations disband their armies and form climbing parties → noble houses send their heirs into the Tower → wars decrease, but the Tower becomes a battlefield for competing interests]
"Damn, you’re actually good at this."
[Sheesh.]
[That’s why most people apparently called the Tower a proxy war.]
"…So it really is a Tower-climbing story."
This was the kind of world I had entered.
1.
"It’s warm."
After Dolores said that,
I had the illusion that every sound in the room had vanished.
Ruby was asleep in bed, and she might have even been snoring.
I stood before her.
Dolores was staring down at her own hand, perfectly still.
How many seconds had passed? It felt longer than I expected.
For now, I had no way of knowing what she was thinking.
Still.
Glimmer.
I could only hope that shining mark at her wrist would lead me onward.
2.
Water ran from inside the glove.
That sensation was unfamiliar to Elysia von Dolores.
Warmth. What kind of feeling had that been again?
Dolores recalled the past.
Elysia von Dolores had entered the Tower alongside her six sworn sisters.
They climbed faster than any other team, and people called them the Dawn Apostles.
It was around then that the epithet High Ranker began to follow her.
Then, one day.
"……."
Dolores realized that her body was breaking down.
The congenital Nine Yin Severed Meridians, an illness like a curse upon the Dolores family.
An illness in which the nine channels through which mana flowed froze over one by one.
It was a curse for which every elixir and every treatment that could be used had already been tried over countless generations.
But no cure existed. All they could do was slow its progression.
She had thought, surely not. Surely it would not happen to her.
But the curse of her family ensnared her.
While her sworn sisters opened their Upper Dantian one by one, she alone remained where she was.
The Upper Dantian was a door that would not open for one whose channels were blocked.
She sought out every physician said to be the best in the Tower. The same was true outside it.
The last person she visited was the Great Sage Gorgonew.
The White Gloves of Gorgonew he had made for her.
And the equipment she had gathered from various places.
That was both the best she could obtain and all she had.
The problem was that, although her condition could be halted…
it had done no more than stop it.
As time passed, her fingertips grew numb… and then her toes followed.
From a certain point onward, days passed in which her body no longer felt like her own.
‘This is as far as I go.’
In the end, she left her sworn sisters behind and stopped climbing.
When such circumstances arose, her family’s ancestors had produced heirs through marriage.
That was the way of House Dolores.
But so that the Dolores family’s curse would not continue, she chose to raise disciples connected to her not by blood, but by heart.
She did not want to pass this pain on to anyone.
How much time had passed that way, as one dull day after another went by?
She had thought her choice that day would be no different from any other.
He was simply a child with good eyes. Nothing more, nothing less.
She merely hoped her disciple could find companions with whom to climb the Tower, so she picked a little boy who seemed to have good eyes.
It had not even been grand enough a matter to call a choice.
And yet, now.
That little boy had given her gloves.
Trickle…
Water was leaking out between the gloves.
The ice was melting. It was warm.
‘Warm?’
What kind of feeling had that been again?
Having suffered from illness for so long, Dolores knew the state of her body precisely.
Her channels were thawing? Her severed meridians were opening?
How could that be possible?
Besides, this mark was the mark of the Sun Dwarves.
Not even the mark of an ordinary blacksmith, but one only craftsmen who had endured brutal trials could earn.
Equipment made by an elite Sun Dwarf blacksmith was something she had always desired, so she knew better than anyone.
It simply was not something one could obtain merely by wanting it.
‘Heirs of Fire….’
That was what they were called, wasn’t it?
In her entire life, Dolores had seen that engraving exactly twice.
The first had been armor bestowed upon one of her sworn sisters by the Imperial Family.
The other had been the [Genesis Sword] sold at an auction house on the 125th floor.
And now, a third.
The gloves this child had made for her.
Of course, the engraving’s shape was slightly different.
But the two engravings she had seen before had also differed from each other, so that was not an issue.
‘…A third.’
An engraving that even she, a High Ranker, could count on one hand the number of times she had seen, was on gloves made by an orphanage brat.
If it had been some absurd fake, that would have been easier. She could simply be amazed and leave it at that.
The problem was that this seemed genuine right now.
It was unbelievable, but.
These gloves were clearly, slowly unraveling the severed meridian disease that even the Great Sage Gorgonew had only been able to halt.
That was not something a fake could do.
Dolores looked down at her hand again. Then she slowly raised her head.
"Can you explain this?"
She had no choice but to ask.
3.
Explain what?
What was there to explain?
Wasn’t this beyond the realm of explanation in the first place?
I made them, and she put them on. Isn’t that a win-win for us?
She did look a little startled, judging by her expression.
Drip.
Seeing the droplet from the gloves fall to the floor, it seemed something had definitely worked.
If it had gone wrong, she would already be dead.
"Explain."
"Yes, ma’am."
So, Dolores was asking how I had made these.
And I had to answer.
‘…I’m actually a Sun Dwarf.’
That was a difficult thing to say.
But judging by everything so far, Dolores seemed able to distinguish lies from truth.
Besides, she had always emphasized one thing to me.
‘Speak only the truth.’
In that case, I needed words that were not lies, yet could get me out of this situation.
Squeeze something out, Kim Yujin—no, Lionel.
You can do it. You’ve got this.
"…I learned the metallurgical arts of the Sun Dwarves. The Heirs of Fire."
I deliberately stressed the words Heirs of Fire.
It was not a lie.
I had read their textbook, studied the leatherworking section closely, and made the finished product.
Strictly speaking, it was not metallurgy.
But some people used the word metallurgy as a collective term for blacksmithing techniques in general.
The answer did not need to be exact, but I felt I should leave as little room for rebuttal as possible.
Dolores’s eyebrow twitched slightly.
"Where did you learn it?"
"I saw it in a book."
"What book?"
A brief silence.
"A Sun Dwarf book."
Every time I answered, Dolores’s eyebrow twitched.
Everything I said was true, so from her perspective, it must have been impossible to understand. How could some country orphan have seen a book belonging to dwarves who lived in the Tower?
And one from the Heirs of Fire, at that.
"…Ha."
I wanted to inspire trust here.
What was trust, anyway? In truth, trust was an illusion.
For a moment, I recalled an old memory.
A game I had loved playing when I was young. After gathering the massive sum of one hundred million, I went to the marketplace that day to finally be happy.
And I met that person.
‘I am here to help you.’
Thinking back, it was an incredibly untrustworthy thing to say, but I had believed it then, and my hundred million had vanished into thin air.
And now I could use those very words. Why?
Because Dolores could tell when I was lying.
And this time, it was real.
I raised my head.
"I am here to help you, Dolores."
My desire to help her was real.
Even if my motive was to save myself, that was beside the point.
"……."
As though judging whether I was sincere, Dolores stared into my eyes once more…
Rustle.
Then she slowly sat back down in her chair.
And then.
"Sit down."
She invited me to take a chair.
I did not know what it meant, but I wanted to believe it was a good sign.
When I sat down and waited quietly,
Dolores slowly opened her mouth.
"Ten million gold."
"……."
"That was the winning bid for the [Genesis Sword] auctioned recently. One made by the Heirs of Fire."
I did not know the exchange rate, but it was clearly an extraordinary amount.
"And that may not have been all. There could have been under-the-table dealings as well. Auctions on the 125th floor are notoriously opaque."
"I see."
I did not understand.
"To give you a comparison."
Dolores paused, as though selecting a suitable analogy.
"It would be roughly equal to half a year’s budget for a duchy. Including insurance and everything else."
"……."
"Or about the annual expedition budget of one of the greatest climbing parties of the past."
Whoa.
She had kindly given me two examples, but without knowing the exchange rate, neither meant much to me.
Then.
[I did a rough conversion. It’s enough money for you to live with me for 333,000 months.]
One hundred billion?
O-one hundred billion?
In other words, enough to subscribe to a little sister for 333,000 months….
The sheer amount suddenly hit me, and my mind started to go blank.
‘What the hell is a [Genesis Sword]?’
[I’ll show you the appraisal report that was made public.]
Yuna answered, apparently noticing what I was wondering about.
─────────────────
[Genesis Sword] [★★★★★] [Unique Equipment]
─────────────────
『"I want to cut down a star," she said.
It was an absurd question, but with this sword, I spent my entire life answering it.
Now, the only thing this sword cannot cut is the death that took her from me.』
- Sage Craftsman Ogeron -
─────────────────
【The sword that lost its master found its way to an auction house. No one will buy it with the intention of cutting down a star.】
─────────────────
What was this?
It was so cool. And romantic, too.
I should have done something like that. Compared to my "Give Eric to Eric," it was endlessly embarrassing.
Next time, I should engrave something more serious.
Just as I was marveling at the words, which carried an entirely different weight at a glance,
I came to my senses and found Dolores staring intently at me.
"Of course, these gloves would not fetch the same price as the [Genesis Sword]."
I had not expected them to.
Anyone who thought otherwise after seeing that would be a shameless bastard.
Dolores continued slowly.
"But while a sword that has already been made is sold once and that is the end of it…"
She lightly brushed the gray sun engraving on the gloves with her fingertips.
"The person who made it can make anything again."
Rustle.
As though it were precious, Dolores slowly removed the gloves. Her attitude was completely different from before.
Her hands, freed from the gloves, had thawed warmly.
Soft, dry fingers. Pale pink backs of her hands.
They were, by all appearances, the hands of a noble lady.
But the instant the gloves left her hands, her fingertips began to turn pale.
Frost spread over the backs of her hands, and it took less than five seconds for a thin layer of ice to spread up to her wrists again.
"……."
Dolores looked down at that hand for a moment, then frowned.
Tap.
She placed the gloves neatly on the table.
"I will have to visit the Tower for a while."
"Pardon?"
"I am going to take them to an appraisal office. To verify whether they truly were made by the Heirs of Fire."
"…Yes."
Honestly, I was confident about the verification.
The status window said as much, after all.
Dolores placed the removed gloves into a pouch that looked rather luxurious.
Then, as though something had occurred to her, she called to me.
"Ah, and Lionel."
"Yes, ma’am."
"What was our promise?"
Our promise.
I had to find a way to surprise Dolores within a week.
It just had not been magic.
"I was supposed to… surprise you."
Honestly, didn’t this count? I had definitely surprised her.
"Even if."
Dolores paused briefly.
"Even if the appraisal determines that these gloves are not the work of the Heirs of Fire, it does not matter."
"…What?"
"You have already kept your promise."
She smiled.
It was the first smile I had ever seen from her.
"You surprised me very much."
Apparently.
"So do not be too afraid."
It seemed I had succeeded.
Comments (0)
Please log in to leave a comment. Login or Register