A Beggar's Life

“First.”

Ferda began.

A damp echo befitting the underground reverberated.

“I owe you a great deal of thanks.”

“……”

“If you hadn’t attacked us that day, I would have had to watch Chancellor Bernard for days on end. That would have been a needless waste.”

“If you’re so grateful… could you untie me?”

“I don’t like that. I’m grateful to you, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”

Ferda brought over a chair and set it in front of him.

“That transformation technique of yours is quite fascinating. You don’t use magic to imitate someone or distort perception, nor do you imitate someone clumsily like a doppelgänger.”

“If you’re so fascinated, shall I become you too, Regent?”

He chuckled and tossed out the joke.

“Could you become me as well?”

Ferda seized on the joke.

“As long as I have blood.”

Ferda drew a clean dagger from inside his coat and cut his arm.

Bright red blood streamed down his forearm.

“Try it.”

“……”

The man drank the blood dripping down.

Once a considerable amount of blood had flowed into him, Chancellor Bernard’s appearance began to change.

It was Ferda himself.

Gray hair and blue eyes.

A frail body that had wanted to become a knight but never could.

Though bruised and bearing broken teeth, he unmistakably had Ferda’s appearance.

“It seems you can’t restore injuries. What happened to that monstrous healing ability of yours?”

“My role is to become that human. Humans don’t have that kind of healing ability, do they?”

“Thorough.”

He had deliberately removed the demons’ enhancements and focused entirely on imitating a human.

Ferda stared intently at him.

The man holding his gaze suddenly burst out laughing.

“Ferda Valdrova. I thought you were insane, but you’ve exceeded even my imagination……”

“What do you mean?”

Ferda tilted his head.

“What you’re looking at is yourself. A broken and shattered version of yourself. And yet you’re looking at it as if you’re enjoying it.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m enjoying it.”

“Even so, your eyes haven’t wavered once.”

The man was right.

Ferda did not avert his eyes or show the slightest sign of fear.

He was observing his own broken appearance.

“You were… driven out of the Rosnova family, weren’t you?”

“……”

“I can feel how hard you worked through this body. You don’t have any muscles, but you worked until your bones broke and your hands were covered in blisters, didn’t you?”

“……”

“But your father failed to recognize that.”

“Yes, and that was how I became engaged.”

“No. That was merely an excuse to throw you out. You know that too, don’t you?”

The man gave a mirthless smile with Ferda’s face.

“You were discarded because you had no talent. You’re a man cast aside like me.”

His eyes pleaded for kinship.

Kinship with the emotion that bore the same name: revenge.

The man wearing Ferda’s face yearned for revenge.

A man seeking revenge against the king who had betrayed his oath.

A man seeking revenge against the father who had cast out his child.

Ferda could deeply understand that anger.

“Yes, I was discarded.”

Ferda showed his disgust at the sight.

“But you and I are different. Vastly different.”

“How are we different?”

“Our souls.”

Ferda jabbed himself in the chest.

“My soul has always been mine.”

Ferda looked up at him with contempt.

The man was overcome by Ferda’s words and shouted.

“I never sold my soul to anyone. This is the path I chose!”

“No, you sold your soul. You let those pieces of trash appraise you, and you didn’t hesitate for a moment to cheapen yourself. That made your thirst for revenge cheaper than a dog’s.”

He shouted as though the words were absurd.

“Does that matter? All that matters is getting revenge. Even if I’m ruined, what matters is making that bastard suffer more than hell itself!”

“No, revenge cannot exist without a soul.”

Ferda put a hand into the pouch he had brought.

“Even if it becomes filthy and broken, revenge is only achieved when I hold my soul wholly as my own.”

What he pulled out was a vial.

A vial with no color or label, making its effects impossible to identify.

There were seven in total.

“So stop pretending you understand me just because you look like me.”

He opened one of the vials and approached.

“Try enjoying life.”

* * *

Upper level of the castle, alchemy workshop.

The alchemist was busy cleaning up.

“May I come in?”

The alchemist stopped at the familiar voice of an old man and bowed his head.

“Greetings, Count Consilius. Of course, you may come in at any time.”

“Thank you for allowing Regent Valdrova to use your workshop.”

“Not at all. How could I, your humble servant, refuse your request?”

Count Consilius pretended to casually look around before speaking.

“By the way, do you know what sort of medicine Regent Valdrova made?”

“Here is the list of ingredients the regent requested.”

The quick-witted alchemist showed him the lists he had written.

Consilius scanned through the list.

He was a knight and a soldier, but he had acquired a fair amount of knowledge by watching others.

Some of that knowledge was in alchemy, and he could quickly grasp the basics.

That was why Consilius made an incredulous face.

“This looks like the ingredients for a healing potion… am I right?”

At Count Consilius’s question, the alchemist nodded.

“Yes. That’s right.”

“Did he come here just to make a mere healing potion? If that’s all it is, couldn’t he have asked you to make it?”

“Indeed.”

“‘Indeed’?”

The sigh he had been about to let out vanished.

The alchemist stammered.

“No, it’s just that……”

“Go on. I’ll forgive you even if it amounts to a little disparagement.”

“At the risk of my life, I must say… Regent Valdrova’s alchemy skills were somewhat… no, they were simply the worst.”

His voice was filled with disgust.

Count Consilius blinked at his reaction.

“Is it bad enough for you to say that?”

“Yes. He did things that were completely amateurish in alchemy—no, worse than amateurish—and without the slightest hesitation. If my apprentice had done that, I would have slapped him across the face on the spot.”

“Hmm……”

“Gasp, I apologize. I was being rude……”

Count Consilius stroked his beard, thought quietly for a moment, and then spoke.

“It probably wasn’t inexperience.”

“But he was completely wrong in both the preparation and the usage. Unless he’s an amateur……”

“Tell me. If it goes against the preparation method, what effect does it have?”

“Well……”

The alchemist began reading from what he had recorded.

“First, to point out one thing the regent did, he stirred far too quickly.”

“What happens if it’s too fast?”

“The healing potion’s effect is reduced.”

“And what else?”

“He shook the cauldron while it was cooling. Shaking it while the medicinal effect is spreading evenly reduces its healing effect. And……”

He began listing the worst things Ferda had done, one after another.

He had made more than twenty errors during the brief process.

“All of those steps……”

The alchemist could not contain his amazement.

He hadn’t noticed them while watching, but when he singled them out one by one, they began to stand out.

Alchemy was delicate.

If something went wrong during the process, the healing effect could disappear completely, or it could become water worse than juice.

However, every one of Ferda’s clumsy actions had produced a consistent effect.

“They all reduce the speed and effectiveness of recovery……”

The direction was far too deliberate to call him an amateur.

* * *

“Grrrgh!”

The man’s entire body tensed violently.

The veins in his neck bulged, and he clenched his broken teeth until even they began to crumble.

“Can you feel it?”

Ferda asked as he gently swung the empty bottle.

Everything it had contained had entered the man’s body.

“Doesn’t your whole body feel like a burning field? It must feel as though you’re being burned slowly, and very hotly.”

“Grrrgh…… what the hell did you do to me……?!”

He could not finish the sentence.

But Ferda answered him.

“A beggar’s life.”

“Wh-what is that supposed to mean……!”

“That’s the name I gave it. The most painful life I give to those prepared to die, like you. What you’re feeling is the growing pain of nerves that died under brutal torture coming back to life.”

“Grrrgh……!?”

“Yes. This isn’t killing you. It’s keeping you alive.”

“B-bullshit……!”

This could not possibly be recovery.

Ferda said, shaking the empty vial.

“Isn’t it fascinating? The better a healing potion works, the more thickly and quickly it heals. That’s why high-grade healing potions are always popular. They’re so well refined that you can drink them in battle without suffering any aftereffects.”

The man had once been a knight.

He had fought on battlefields, so he knew well what high-grade healing potions could do.

“Cheap healing potions are painful, by contrast. They work slowly and heal weakly. Mine is the cheapest of the cheap. So when you press it like this……”

Ferda pressed down firmly on a bruised area with his index finger.

“Gaaah!”

A scream burst forth.

He had endured the executioner’s torture, but this was the first time he had let out even a single scream.

“Regenerated nerves are extremely sensitive. Even a finger is enough to do this.”

He picked up an object the executioner had left behind.

A long object with a sharp tip.

It was a needle.

“What do you think of this?”

Clink, clank!

“Stop, stooop!!”

He began thrashing wildly, having lost all reason.

“I’ll tell you everything! I said I’ll tell you everything!”

“What will you tell me?”

“There has to be a reason you’re torturing me, you son of a bitch! I’ll tell you everything! I’ll tell you where our base is and everything! Just stop! Please! Pleeease!”

Five minutes.

That was how long it took him, despite enduring the executioner’s torture, to surrender.

It ended very quickly.

Yes, he had learned how to resist while dying, but he had never learned how to resist living.

“No.”

Instead of questioning him, Ferda gagged him.

“Your surrender is inevitable, but not yet.”

He set down the empty bottle and picked up the one beside it.

It sloshed.

To his sensitive ears, it sounded like waves facing an approaching storm.

“Sing a little longer. Feel a little more of the beggar’s life you threw away.”

The spiral staircase leading underground.

Below, the screams of villains fallen into hell never ceased.

* * *

Three hours later, Ferda faced Consilius again in the reception room.

“I learned several interesting facts.”

“What are they?”

“They call themselves Dopplers.”

“Dopplers? It sounds like the name was derived from doppelgängers.”

“That’s right. They call themselves Dopplers to imply that they’re superior beings to doppelgängers.”

“How narcissistic. Typical demons.”

Count Consilius laughed heartily.

“I never imagined we would obtain information about demons.”

“The fact that he was closer to human than demon was significant. If he hadn’t been so close to human, the torture methods I know wouldn’t have worked.”

“Truly remarkable. You created something we could never even have imagined……”

Even the alchemist who had worked at the castle for thirty years was astonished by the idea.

Ferda had ruined it dozens of times more painstakingly and precisely than when making a normal healing potion.

That could truly be called a work of art.

“Those Doppler fellows can’t have started with Chancellor Bernard…… Do you know when they began?”

“They say they began ten years ago. He didn’t seem to know exactly, since he had only just advanced from Servant rank to Knight rank.”

Demonkind had its own hierarchy.

Servant rank consisted of ordinary human followers, expendable pawns.

It was from Knight rank onward that they could fully enjoy the power and authority of demonkind.

“If they began ten years ago, there must already be many of them hiding among us.”

“Not only in Escolleia; there must already be some hidden in the Grand Council as well.”

“That…… is impossible. It makes no sense that agents of chaos could exist in the domain of Lord Blancaros, the Aspect of Great Order, does it?”

“I already know what Chancellor Bernard said at the Grand Council. Whether human or Doppler, it’s an established fact that a demon follower is inside.”

Count Consilius understood that as well, but fully accepting it was difficult.

“Then the Grand Council, created for harmony across the continent, will begin losing its credibility.”

The Grand Council had been created for the harmony of the continent of Cerdess.

The claim that a servant of the Evil Dragon Godwin had been planted in Blancaros’s absolute domain would shake the continent.

Its political repercussions were too great to exploit.

“What will you do?”

Consilius asked Ferda.

Perhaps he would make a wise decision in this situation.

“The best course is still to strike first.”

“Ambushing the enemy is indeed an excellent tactic. But don’t we need to know their base in order to launch an ambush?”

“Of course.”

Count Consilius belatedly grasped the meaning of his words and brightened.

“Surely you’ve discovered even the enemy’s base?”

“Not their base, but a key facility. He said he served as the head of security at the research facility where they create those creatures. So he knows their vulnerabilities better than anyone else.”

“Then we can go strike them at once.”

They knew the enemy’s location, so the conditions were perfect.

“There’s one problem.”

“What is it?”

“That research facility is in Silverwind territory.”

“Ah……”

Consilius knew the current state of relations with Silverwind.

“That complicates matters. If we asked Silverwind to cooperate, it seems the matter could be resolved easily……”

“They won’t. And wouldn’t it take time to make the request?”

“You’re right. Then it would be best to provide them with the information, but even that is hardly appealing.”

“If all we wanted was to exterminate them, we could simply bring the mountain down on them and wipe them out.”

The target of the preemptive strike was a research facility, not a gathering place for demons.

In other words, it was a place where information, not soldiers, was the key.

There would surely be information about the Dopplers, as well as the plans the demons had drawn up.

Ferda made his decision.

“We’ll have to strike covertly, bring it down, and withdraw.”

It was a precarious special operation that could easily turn into a war.

Just as Ferda began outlining the plan, Count Consilius suddenly spoke first.

“This may be an impertinent request, but could you give this old man a chance?”

“A chance?”

“Yes.”

Count Consilius knelt and placed a hand over his chest.

“As a knight who is the Empire’s shield and loyal to the exalted Aspect of Power, I wish to be of great assistance to you, Regent.”

He was an elderly man with graying white hair.

But in his prime, he had been a knight recognized throughout the Empire.

He was a knight who had lost everything and had voluntarily accepted a demotion.

Ferda welcomed his request.

“We’ll depart tomorrow. Prepare at once.”