Chapter 59
A Miserable Life
“First of all.”
Ferda began to speak.
His voice carried with a damp echo befitting the underground chamber.
“I am truly grateful to you.”
“...”
“If you had not attacked that day, I would have had to keep Chancellor Bernard under surveillance for days on end. That would have been a pointless waste of time and resources.”
“If you are that grateful... could you untie me?”
“No. I am grateful to you, but I am not an idiot.”
Ferda brought over a chair and placed it in front of him.
“That transformation ability of yours is quite fascinating. You are not imitating someone with magic or distorting people’s perception, nor are you clumsily copying them like a doppelgänger.”
“If you find it so fascinating, I could even become you, Regent.”
The man snickered as he made the joke.
“You can become me as well?”
Ferda immediately took him up on it.
“As long as I have your blood.”
Ferda pulled a clean dagger from inside his clothes and cut his own arm.
Bright red blood flowed down his forearm.
“Then become me.”
“...”
The man caught the dripping blood in his mouth and swallowed it.
Once he had consumed a considerable amount, Chancellor Bernard’s appearance began to change.
He became Ferda himself.
Gray hair and blue eyes.
A frail body that had longed to become a knight but had never been capable of it.
Though his face was bruised and his teeth were broken, there was no mistaking Ferda’s appearance.
“It seems you cannot restore existing injuries. What happened to that monstrous regenerative ability?”
“My role is to become that human. Humans do not possess that kind of healing ability, do they?”
“Thorough.”
He had deliberately excluded the enhancements unique to demonkin and focused entirely on imitating a human.
Ferda stared intently at him.
The man met his gaze and burst into laughter.
“Ferda Valdrova. I already thought you were insane, but you have surpassed even my imagination...”
“What do you mean?”
Ferda tilted his head.
“What you are looking at is yourself. Yourself, battered and broken. Yet you stare as though you find it amusing.”
“I do not find it amusing.”
“And yet your eyes have not wavered even once.”
The man was right.
Ferda did not avert his eyes in the slightest, nor did he show any fear.
He merely observed his own ruined appearance.
“You were... cast out by the Rosnova family, weren’t you?”
“...”
“I can feel through this body how hard you worked. You may not have built much muscle, but you trained until your bones broke and your hands blistered, didn’t you?”
“...”
“But your father never acknowledged any of it.”
“That is true. And because of that, I became a grand prince’s fiancé.”
“No. That was only an excuse to drive you out. You know that too, don’t you?”
The man wearing Ferda’s face smiled maliciously.
“You were abandoned because you had no talent. Just like me, you were discarded like an old shoe.”
His eyes appealed to a sense of kinship.
A kinship born from the same emotion called revenge.
The man wearing Ferda’s face craved vengeance.
One man sought revenge against a king who had betrayed his loyalty.
The other sought revenge against a father who had cast aside his own child.
Ferda understood that emotion of rage deeply.
“Yes. I was abandoned.”
Ferda looked at him with disgust.
“But you and I are different. Completely different.”
“What is different?”
“Our souls.”
Ferda pointed to his own chest.
“My soul has always belonged to me.”
He looked up at the man with contempt.
Hearing Ferda’s words, the man flared up and shouted,
“I never sold my soul to anyone! This is the path I chose!”
“No. You sold your soul. You allowed that filth to appraise you and reduce your worth, and you did not hesitate for even a moment. In doing so, you turned your vengeance into something cheaper than a mongrel’s life.”
The man shouted as though Ferda’s words were absurd.
“Why does that matter? All that matters is revenge. Even if I destroy myself, what matters is making him suffer more than he would in hell!”
“No. Revenge cannot exist without a soul.”
Ferda reached into the pouch he had brought with him.
“Even if that soul becomes filthy and broken, revenge can only be fulfilled when you keep it wholly your own.”
What he withdrew was a medicine bottle.
It had neither color nor label, making its effects impossible to identify.
There were seven bottles in total.
“So stop pretending you understand me simply because you are wearing my face.”
He opened one of the bottles and approached.
“Now, enjoy living.”
***
In the alchemy workshop on the upper floor of the castle, the alchemist was busy cleaning up.
“May I come in?”
Hearing the familiar voice of an elderly man, the alchemist stopped what he was doing and bowed his head.
“I greet Count Consilus. Of course, you may enter whenever you please.”
“Thank you for allowing Regent Valdrova to use the workshop.”
“Not at all. How could someone like me refuse a request from Your Excellency?”
Count Consilus pretended to be merely looking around before casually speaking.
“By the way, do you know what kind of medicine Regent Valdrova made?”
“Here is the list of ingredients the regent requested.”
The perceptive alchemist showed him the written list.
Consilus carefully read through it.
He was a knight and a soldier, but he had picked up a considerable amount of knowledge through observation over the years.
That included some understanding of alchemy, and he could easily identify the basics.
That was why Count Consilus looked dumbfounded.
“These... appear to be ingredients for healing potions. Am I correct?”
The alchemist nodded at the count’s question.
“Yes, that is correct.”
“He came all the way here merely to make healing potions? Surely that is something he could have asked you to do.”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly?”
The sigh Consilus had been about to release vanished.
The alchemist began to stammer.
“No, well...”
“Speak. I will forgive even a little exaggeration.”
“At the risk of offending you... Regent Valdrova’s skill in alchemy was rather... No, he was simply the worst.”
His voice was filled with revulsion.
Count Consilus blinked at his reaction.
“He was bad enough for you to say that?”
“Yes. He was a complete beginner at alchemy. No, he did things even a beginner would know not to do. Had one of my apprentices behaved that way, I would have slapped them across the face on the spot.”
“Gold...”
“Ah, my apologies. I spoke out of turn...”
Count Consilus quietly stroked his beard in thought before speaking.
“That probably was not inexperience.”
“But his manufacturing process and handling methods were completely wrong. Unless he was a novice...”
“Tell me. What effects occur when the preparation method is incorrect?”
“Well...”
The alchemist began reading from the notes he had recorded.
“To give one example of what the regent did, he stirred the mixture far too quickly.”
“What happens if it is stirred too quickly?”
“The healing potion’s effectiveness decreases.”
“And what else?”
“He shook the cauldron during the cooling process. Shaking it while the medicinal properties are being evenly distributed reduces its healing effect. And then...”
The alchemist continued listing the worst possible mistakes.
In a short preparation process, Ferda had committed more than twenty errors.
“All of those steps...”
The alchemist could not conceal his astonishment.
He had not noticed while watching Ferda work, but now that he examined each action individually, a pattern began to emerge.
Alchemy was delicate.
One mistake during the process could completely eliminate a potion’s healing effects or turn it into water less useful than fruit juice.
However, every supposedly inexperienced act Ferda had committed produced one consistent result.
“They all reduce the recovery speed and healing power...”
The direction was far too deliberate to be the work of a novice.
“Grrrrgh!”
Every muscle in the man’s body tightened.
The veins in his neck bulged, and he clenched his already broken teeth so hard that they shattered further.
“Can you feel it?”
Ferda asked as he lightly shook the empty bottle.
Everything that had been inside it was now flowing through the man’s body.
“Does your entire body feel like a field on fire? As though it is being burned slowly and intensely?”
“Grrrrgh... What the hell did you do to me...?!”
He could not finish speaking.
Ferda answered anyway.
“A Miserable Life.”
“W-What the hell is that...?!”
“It is the name I gave it. It grants the most painful life imaginable to men like you who have already resolved to die. What you are feeling now is the growing pain of nerves that were killed by severe torture coming back to life.”
“Grrrrgh...?!”
“That is correct. This is not killing you. I am healing you.”
“B-Bullshit...!”
There was no way this could be called healing.
Ferda shook the empty bottle as he spoke.
“Fascinating, is it not? The more effective a healing potion is, the more powerfully and rapidly it restores the body. That is why high-grade healing potions are always popular. They are so well refined that they cause no aftereffects even when consumed during battle.”
The man had once been a knight.
He had fought on battlefields and knew very well how high-grade healing potions worked.
“Cheap healing potions, on the other hand, are painful. They heal slowly and possess little restorative power. What I made is the cheapest of the cheap. Therefore, if I press here...”
Ferda placed his index finger against a bruised area and pressed down gently.
“Aaaaaagh!”
A scream burst from the man.
Though he had endured the executioner’s torture, this was the first time he had let out such a raw cry.
“Newly revived nerves are extremely sensitive. Even a finger causes this much pain.”
Ferda picked up an object the executioner had left behind.
It was long and sharply pointed.
A needle.
“What do you think this will feel like?”
Clank! Clank!
“Stop! Stooop!”
The man completely lost control and began thrashing wildly.
“I’ll tell you everything! Everything!”
“What will you tell me?”
“There has to be a reason you’re torturing me, you bastard! I’ll tell you everything! I’ll even tell you where our base is! Just stop! Please! Pleeease!”
Five minutes.
That was how long it took for a man who had endured the executioner’s torture to surrender.
It ended remarkably quickly.
Of course.
He may have learned how to resist while dying, but he had never learned how to resist being kept alive.
“No.”
Instead of questioning him, Ferda placed a gag in his mouth.
“Your surrender was inevitable, but the time has not yet come.”
He set down the empty bottle and picked up the one beside it.
The liquid sloshed softly inside.
To the man’s hypersensitive ears, it sounded like waves crashing beneath a violent storm.
“Sing a little longer. Experience more of the miserable life you abandoned.”
Along the spiral staircase leading underground, the screams of a sinner trapped in hell continued without pause.
***
Three hours later, Ferda met Count Consilus again in the reception room.
“I learned several interesting facts.”
“What did you discover?”
“They call themselves Dopplers.”
“Dopplers? The name seems derived from doppelgängers.”
“Correct. They claim the name signifies that they are beings superior to doppelgängers.”
“Such narcissism. How very fitting for demonkin.”
Count Consilus laughed softly.
“I never imagined we would obtain information about the demonkin.”
“It helped that he was closer to a human than a true demonkin. Had he been less human, the methods of torture I know would not have worked.”
“You truly are remarkable. You created something that none of us would ever have imagined...”
Even the alchemist who had served in the castle for thirty years had been astonished by the idea.
Ferda had deliberately ruined the potion with precision dozens of times greater than what would have been required to make a proper healing potion.
It could almost be called a work of art.
“Chancellor Bernard cannot have been the first target of these Dopplers. Did you learn when they began operating?”
“They apparently began around ten years ago. The prisoner had only recently risen from Servant rank to Knight rank, so he did not know the exact details.”
The demonkin followed a hierarchy.
Servant rank consisted of ordinary human followers—disposable pawns.
From Knight rank onward, they began to enjoy the true power and authority of the demonkin.
“If they began ten years ago, then many of them must already be in hiding.”
“They are likely concealed not only in Escholeia, but within the Grand Council itself.”
“That is... impossible. How could servants of chaos exist within the domain of Lord Blancaros, the great Aspect of Order?”
“They already knew what Chancellor Bernard said at the Grand Council. Whether human or Doppler, it is now certain that a demonkin follower is inside.”
Count Consilus understood the logic, but accepting it completely was difficult.
“The Grand Council, where the entire continent gathers in harmony, will now begin losing trust.”
The Grand Council had been created to preserve harmony across the Cerdes Continent.
If one of the Wicked Dragon Godwin’s servants had infiltrated Blancaros’s absolute domain, the revelation would shake the entire continent.
Its political impact would be too great to exploit carelessly.
“What will you do?”
Consilus asked Ferda.
Perhaps Ferda would make a wise decision in this crisis.
“The best option would naturally be a preemptive strike.”
“Ambushing the enemy is indeed an excellent tactic. However, we would need to know the location of their base before we could attack.”
“Of course.”
Realizing the meaning behind Ferda’s words, Count Consilus brightened.
“Do not tell me you discovered the location of their headquarters.”
“Not their headquarters, but a critical facility. He served as captain of the guards at the research facility where those creatures are produced. As a result, he knows its vulnerabilities better than most.”
“Then we can attack immediately.”
They knew the enemy’s location.
The conditions were practically perfect.
“There is one problem.”
“What is it?”
“The research facility is located within Silverwind territory.”
“Ah...”
Consilus knew the current state of relations with Silverwind.
“That complicates matters. It would be easy if we could request Silverwind’s cooperation...”
“They would never cooperate. And making the request would take time, would it not?”
“That is true. Then perhaps it would be better simply to provide them with the information, but even that is unappealing.”
“If our only objective were extermination, we could collapse the entire mountain and erase the facility.”
The target of the preemptive strike was not a gathering place for demonkin forces, but a research facility.
In other words, its primary value was information rather than troops.
It would likely contain not only information about the Dopplers, but also details of the demonkin’s plans.
Ferda made his decision.
“We will have to strike covertly, destroy the facility, and withdraw.”
It would be a precarious special operation that could easily lead to war.
Just as Ferda began constructing the framework of the plan, Count Consilus unexpectedly spoke first.
“Forgive my presumptuous request, but would you grant this old man an opportunity?”
“An opportunity?”
“Yes.”
Count Consilus knelt and placed a hand over his chest.
“As a shield of the Empire and a knight loyal to the great Aspect of Power, I wish to lend you my strength, Regent.”
He was an elderly man with graying hair.
Yet in his prime, he had been a knight recognized throughout the Empire.
He was a knight who had knowingly surrendered everything and chosen his own demotion.
Ferda welcomed his request.
“We depart tomorrow. Begin preparing immediately.”