Sentenced to confinement, Ethan returned to the annex.
It was an entirely understandable arrangement. Given the outrages and incidents on his record, he ought to take a punishment of this order without complaint.
'Luxurious, for a punishment.'
The annex had been set aside for confinement, and yet there was not one thing lacking in it.
Perhaps because this was the continent's foremost sword clan, even a building raised for the purpose of punishment boasted considerable scale.
There were no extravagant furnishings, but for Ethan and a handful of attendants it was more than ample. It overflowed.
'Lucky, if anything.'
Ethan steadied himself. The water was already spilled.
Denying reality and running from it was not in his character.
If the thing had happened, then he had to avoid the worst of it and manufacture the best result he could.
'Can't die in a ditch in the opening act.'
He had no intention whatsoever of playing that sort of extra.
If Ethan was a villain with no weight to his name, then from here on he meant to build that weight up.
'Have to make the body first.'
Ethan looked down at his body. The situation pulled a sigh out of him on its own.
'I can't see my legs.'
It did not make sense. However much flesh a man carried, this was hard to accept.
Give it a little longer and it would not be the least bit strange for him to roll about instead of walk.
Before he could execute any plan at all, the body had to be transformed.
Ethan stood in front of the mirror.
He had no way to know his exact weight. But he could estimate.
"Height in the mid-170s, weight around 150 kilos."
Hoo.
A sigh came out of its own accord.
A long career had made him an old hand at cutting weight, but he could not get a feel for where to even begin.
'There's nothing I can do with this body.'
However much Ethan knew of the novel's contents, those were things he could only put to use once a minimum set of conditions was met.
With his reputation on the floor and his body a wreck, as now, the information he held was worth nothing.
"Hey. You there."
Ethan called one of the attendants.
The usual Ryu Tae-sin would not have dropped straight into blunt address, but perhaps because the body's original owner's memories were mixed in with his own, a sharp, irritable voice came out of him.
"That's right. You."
In that instant, the attendant's face blanched.
"D-did you call for me?"
From the way he came trembling closer, he was plainly terrified.
'......What a shitshow.'
His head was throbbing already.
Just how often had the man brutalized them, as casually as another man eats his meals, to get a reaction like this?
Ethan let out a breath and asked.
"Where's the training ground around here?"
"Th-the training ground, you say?"
"That's right. The training ground."
The attendant's eyes began to roll this way and that, uneasy.
"Young master, I have done wrong!"
All at once the attendant flung himself flat. Ethan asked, dumbfounded.
"Why, out of nowhere?"
"I do not know what wrong I have committed, but please, anything but that...... Sob, sob."
"No, I'm asking you why you're doing this."
At the question, the attendant lifted his head a little.
"Were you not going to punish me at the training ground?"
"......Why would I?"
"Because you simply did not like me......"
"......Was I in the habit of beating people over nothing?"
The attendant showed a moment's hesitation, then nodded.
"Haah."
Ethan dragged a hand down his dry face.
Proceeding as planned was going to be harder than he had thought.
***
"You are saying you will begin conditioning, all of a sudden?"
Nade asked with a deliberately surprised expression, and Ethan nodded.
'Strange.'
Something had changed.
The usual Ethan would not have trained; he would have been after drink and women from the middle of the day.
'Simple caprice?'
It was a reasonable suspicion.
The atrocities Ethan had committed were far too substantial for anyone to believe he had changed in a single moment, so writing it off as a whim would have been nothing strange.
'But if that is all it is, then that technique......'
Nade remembered the technique Ethan had used in the wrecked tavern.
It was a technique he had never met before.
He had prided himself on knowing every martial art and hand-to-hand art worth the name, yet a technique that turned an incoming opponent's own force against him was a first.
'It would not hurt to trust him once.'
He had not asked for anything large to begin with. And Nade had no authority to forbid him the training ground.
Nothing fit together more neatly than a son of a sword clan training his body.
"I would recommend, however, that you not think of going to the main house."
Nade smiled softly, but Ethan's brow drew together.
"Don't waste worry on that. I'm not planning to leave here for a while."
It suited him, if anything.
If every part of his life could be lived inside this estate, he had no desire to step outside it.
Ethan meant to transform this body that was so hard to look at.
'Much like a fight camp.'
A fight camp, built to bring the body to its best before a bout.
Come to think of it, the environment here was not greatly different.
And a closed environment like this was familiar to him.
His circumstances were ill-starred enough to draw a laugh out of him. Ethan took his first step.
Start slow. He had to warm the muscles up so they did not take a shock.
Once the sweat was running and his body had loosened somewhat, he began to raise the pace by degrees.
The slowly climbing pace reached something like a jog before long.
'Goddamn it. This really is worse than I thought.'
He had never expected it to be this bad.
He had only just started running. At a very comfortable pace, at that.
A level too embarrassing to even call jogging.
Ryu Tae-sin in his competing days could have run this much all day without strain.
But this goddamn body started sending up red flags the moment he began to run.
His joints creaked and clamored, and his muscles screamed without pause.
The massive body sloshed noisily with every step he took.
He wanted to quit on the spot and lie down on the floor. But Ethan did not sit down.
This was only the beginning. Give up here and he would not even get the first button fastened.
Systematic training? Improved condition?
The countless training programs drawn from his years as a competitor?
Things like that were a luxury right now.
First he had to strip away this endless fat.
What training, what exercise, when he could not even hold his own body up?
Huff, huff.
As Ethan ran on, gasping, Nade watched him with a strange look.
'That he would truly begin to train.'
He had half doubted it at first, but Ethan really was moving his body.
It amounted to nothing more than a wretched, desperate run, but this was a man who had hated so much as walking.
Ethan was the sort who would not go a step beyond the gate without his personal attendants and a carriage.
And that man, running.
Nade felt something strange stir in him.
'Then perhaps I shall prepare this evening's meal.'
There was a head cook whose duty was the meals, but Nade intended to step into the kitchen himself for the first time in a long while.
Ethan's effort struck him, oddly, as admirable.
***
Four hours.
A full four hours.
That was how long Ethan ran without stopping.
Even an untrained adult man finds his breathing labored after an hour of running.
And Ethan, who had never exercised in his life, ran four hours straight without a break.
Hauling 150 kilos of mass, on willpower alone.
The training ground was slick with sweat from end to end.
The clothes Ethan wore were soaked through with sweat and assorted other fluids.
Sprawled face down on the training ground, Ethan's body heaved with each breath.
"Huff, huff."
His head swam, and his stomach rolled as if he would bring it all up on the spot.
It was agony.
The pain in his body went without saying, and the pain of not being able to draw breath properly was beyond saying.
But Ethan made no sound of complaint; he slowly evened out his breathing.
Sucking air in too eagerly here carried a high chance of hyperventilation.
Ethan held the pain down.
A man does not die from this much, anyway.
Pain of this sort he could endure.
Ethan steadied his breathing and got up. The sweat-wet floor was slippery.
'Better than I expected.'
Ethan looked at his body with fresh eyes.
The start had certainly been murder, but the further he went the more manageable it had felt.
It was not his imagination. The body had genuinely adapted fast.
'Washout or not, sword clan blood is sword clan blood?'
A laugh came out of him.
To let talent like this rot and build a body like this out of it.
That too was a talent, if you wanted to call it one.
But Ethan had not the slightest intention of leaving this body as it was.
His body might be wretched now, his reputation and his standing scraping bottom, but he felt no despair over any of it.
Because he meant to climb, in the end.
'And it's not as if I've got nothing.'
Ethan knew the future.
To put it precisely, he knew the rough shape of the original's story.
'At the least, I'm not dying a dog's death.'
In the original, the sword clan called Blante is destroyed.
***
Ethan wandered the corridor on unsteady legs. His body weighed a thousand pounds, like a waterlogged towel.
But Ethan knew: this, too, was astonishing shape to be in.
As the price for running four hours on his first day of training, he had got off very cheap.
He had no intention of whining over this much. Ethan set his teeth and kept walking.
Then a maid appeared in front of him.
"......What is it?"
He looked at the maid standing stiff with fright before him.
Thoroughly frightened at the sight of him, she spoke in a voice that seemed to crawl along the floor.
"......I have come to attend you at your bath."
"......Hah."
Dumbfounded by the answer, Ethan shook his head and started on his way.
"I don't need that, so don't come for bath duty from now on."
"......Truly?"
"Don't make me say two things out of one mouth."
Irritation crept into his voice, and the maid startled and nodded.
"Go on, then. Ah, wait."
Ethan called the maid back as she edged away.
Her face turned the color of dirt in an instant. The look said, 'Of course.'
"......Where is the bath?"
The annex was considerably large.
***
Ethan stripped in front of the bath.
Thanks to all the bloated flesh, even the simple act of undressing was not easy.
The sweat-sodden clothes clung to him like leeches.
'The state of these clothes is a sight.'
The body was what it was, and yet the clothing could not have been more splendid.
Was this what they meant by a pearl necklace on a pig's neck?
Ethan let out a small sigh and flung the clothes aside.
'I'll have to ask for comfortable clothes from now on.'
From here on, Ethan had nothing to do but train.
Splendid ornamentation was of no help whatsoever to movement.
Stripped bare, Ethan looked at his body.
White.
That was his first impression.
Fat lay generously over the white flesh.
"......"
Ethan could not bring himself to go on, and looked at his body.
He found himself missing the body he had as a competitor.
In those days Ryu Tae-sin's body had been tough as an animal's, hard, and springy.
Ethan's plump body was something he could not get used to at all.
"There's one decent thing about it......"
Ethan stepped up to the mirror set before the bath.
The generous flesh swayed, as if it were dancing.
Just looking at it was revolting, but an objective analysis was necessary.
Standing before the mirror, Ethan took himself in slowly.
Reach, frame, and build.
There was so much fat that a firm analysis was difficult, but even a rough look told him at once that the body was remarkably good.
Ryu Tae-sin, too, had been on the superior end physically for an East Asian. But set against Ethan, even he came up short, which said everything.
'This much even while obese......'
It stung his pride in an odd way.
"Might as well get in the water."
As though to hide himself, Ethan pushed his white, heavy body into the heated bath.
As he shoved himself in, the water that had filled the tub overflowed like a tidal wave.
"......Goddamn it."
His mood was foul.