The Imperial Central Hospital funeral hall.
With his attending secretary leading the way, Marquis Leo Herzl walked through the lobby of the funeral hall.
At the entrance, condolence wreaths stood lined up so thickly there was no room to step, headed by the one the Emperor had sent.
The companies run by Hubert Eigenhardt had sent wreaths as well. Only from the affiliates headed by those of pure imperial blood, however. Wreaths must never dare be sent in his name.
An exemplary attitude, as always.
Having seen him today, his son Drowpis Eigenhardt had been well taught too. If he used the boy as his son’s aide and tossed him a few carrots, his own pockets would grow quite heavy.
‘It would be nice to get an affiliate out of it.’
Swelling with dreams and giving a small nod, Marquis Herzl found the VIP suite and went inside.
It was a funeral hall, yet no weeping could be heard anywhere. Instead, a strange heat swirled through the air. At the entrance, several people stood clustered together, murmuring.
“We have come to pay our respects to His Grace the Duke.”
Since no one came to greet Marquis Herzl, his attending secretary stepped forward.
“Ah, there are suspicions about the body at present, so they are in discussion.”
“Suspicions?”
The ducal house’s butler had greeted Marquis Herzl, and Marquis Herzl promptly asked back.
“While preparing the body, we found bruising on the young master’s neck.”
A member of the lower house who had been standing beside the butler added his own words.
“Testimony has come from multiple witnesses. They say they saw young Drowpis Eigenhardt grab the young master by the collar. They say that when the young master first grabbed the rope to climb the stone wall, Eigenhardt followed on the same rope. It seems the young master stepped on his shoulders and head several times.”
Cheating.
No wonder he had made it up—he who had never once made it up the cliff, making excuses about violent stomach troubles and whatnot.
“Now that I hear it, it is strange. If young master Gaston climbed up by stepping on young Drowpis’s head, there would have been no angle from which to grab his collar, would there?”
“At the thirty-meter point, they had to switch to the stone wall. The ropes and iron bars were too hot to hold. The upper-tier mana-attuned climbed straight up without trouble, but the lower-tier ones had to switch over and climb by gripping the gaps in the stone wall.”
His son, who had come up first, had voiced his doubts in the car on the way to the hotel.
That without mana, you couldn’t grip either the rope or the iron bars, and that if you couldn’t gather mana in your fingertips, you couldn’t grip the gaps in the stone wall either. That he didn’t know how someone who had failed to climb the stone wall three times in a row had managed to come up this time.
In fact, there was a rumor circulating among the new students as if it were certain.
That because last year’s admissions had been higher than expected, the difficulty had been raised this year.
“After switching to the stone wall, Eigenhardt grabbed young master Gaston by the collar and shook him, then climbed on ahead, really irritated.”
With these words, Marquis Herzl understood the whole situation.
Drowpis Eigenhardt had lifted Gaston halfway up with the power of his own mana. On the course after that, he had planted mana in every hole in the stone wall and helped Gaston grab onto that power and climb up. He must have been scheming to get a line into one of the Empire’s high houses.
General Military Academy was where all of the Empire’s connections began. Just by sticking by Gaston’s side, connections would form on their own. He had helped that much, and still Gaston had died in the Ether Lake.
He must have been deflated.
From what he had observed over the meal, the dream of the seventeen-year-old youth was crystal clear. To make the Marquis’s son his connection in place of the dead Gaston.
“If there had been such contact, I doubt the instructors would have missed it.”
Did Duke Philippe think it would have been better for his son to make a fourth attempt?
Did he believe his son should have kept groveling at the bottom of the cliff?
‘Just by making it up the cliff, it seems the boy erased the rumors about an empty-vessel family and restored their honor.’
Unable to hide his surging interest, Marquis Herzl paid his respects very slowly. Since he also needed to get his face stamped in the Duke’s eyes, he lingered quite openly.
“Marquis Herzl, you have come?”
“Your Grace, please accept my deepest condolences.”
Duke Michiel de Philippe had appeared.
Urp.
As he bowed his head, Marquis Herzl let out a little mana and burped very softly. As if announcing that the family dinner celebrating his son’s admission had come before condolences.
No prospective cadet had ever been given so lavish a funeral. The entrance ceremony regulations of the military academy, which had served as a pillar of the Empire, must not change because a duke’s son had died. The countless precedents of quietly encoffining the dead on the school grounds and holding the funeral that same day must not be changed because of a duke either.
Of course, there had never been a case in the Empire’s history of a son of a ducal house dying at the entrance ceremony.
“The body is highly suspicious. Would you like to see it?”
“Sh-shall I?”
He was slightly flustered, since it was a request for witness testimony.
At Duke Philippe’s signal, the knights parted to both sides, revealing the coffin. Gaston Philippe lay inside, and the bruise on the front of his neck was distinct.
“Strange, is it not? I must erase even a fistful of suspicion.”
He did not say with his own mouth that there would be an autopsy, but it amounted to the same thing. It was also an order for Marquis Herzl to say it aloud.
“May this humble servant be of help in Your Grace’s grief.”
Leo Herzl bent his knee slightly and replied courteously.
“Please send for the pathologist. No—moving to the autopsy room would be faster.”
“Summon Drowpis Eigenhardt, who raised this question. Would it not be proper to autopsy even his expression?”
Duke Michiel de Philippe gave the order to his head butler as though he had been waiting for this.
Marquis Herzl’s brow creased slightly. Only if Gaston had died wrongfully rather than from a lack of ability could the ducal house save face. It was obvious that the Duke intended to erase this suspicion while also arranging a companion for his youngest son on the road to the afterlife. The Duke had made up his mind.
***
When I arrived at the autopsy room attached to the funeral hall, I’d already become a murderer. That was what Duke Philippe’s expression said.
Behind Duke Philippe stood two freshmen from the academy who had climbed the stone wall at nearly the same time as me. They seemed to have come with their parents to pay their respects, and through them, I grasped the situation.
It looked like they’d raised objections about the death of Philippe, who’d climbed the same rope as me. An eyewitness account full of excessive devotion, I’d bet. Despite having seen nothing.
At this point, for the first time, I supposed a “what if.” What if I’d been the son of Professor Hubert Eigenhardt, a man of pure imperial blood—would they have dared to bring out their eyewitness account? What if I’d been merely the son of an ordinary immigrant—would they have tried to grab me and wring me dry?
I had a fate that wouldn’t let me stand out. That I was in such a vulnerable position—I only learned it after regressing. No, I learned it only after being exiled to Devil’s Island.
I’d stopped my father when he said he’d come with me. The moment he arrived here, my father would have bowed his head, and I didn’t want him to have to bow his head because of me.
―Don’t worry. Nothing will happen, because I didn’t do anything.
―We are the people to whom anything can happen precisely because we did nothing.
In the past, I hadn’t understood the sorrow in those words.
I’d thought he could solve things with money and simply chose not to. I’d pushed him, saying that if money couldn’t solve something, it was because there wasn’t enough of it, that he should spend more to solve it. Enough money to be crushed to death under—when on earth, and where, did he plan to spend it?
―In the end, I know the only way you and I can deal with this is by bending at the waist.
I decided to bend at the waist in a different way from my father.
There was a best that I could do.
No matter how I thought about it, my father’s way was a little, well, humiliating.
―You seem to have changed. How far am I to interpret this?
―As far as you want to believe.
The past me had thought I lived a dense, full life. I’d been a patient with an inflated ego. Even though my father was the developer of my life, I’d believed he had made me his paradise.
How foolish a judgment was that?
I hugged my anxious, trembling mother and patted her back. To reassure her.
I’d lived to forty-one, I knew what death was, and I’d seen the bottom of the Empire.
“Do you see this bruise?”
Duke Michiel de Philippe pointed to Gaston’s neck and asked. Snapping out of my reverie, I bowed my head toward Gaston’s waxen face as he lay in the coffin.
When I moved him onto the stone wall, I’d deliberately grabbed his collar roughly, and it seemed that was when the bruise had formed. And it seemed they’d concluded that the bruise had led to his death.
The place I’d arrived at was the autopsy room.
They’d denied the academy’s tradition and called me here to perform an autopsy.
So they could watch my demeanor the entire time they autopsied him?
Was the anxiety I’d feel supposed to become the surest proof of murder?
I took a step back from the coffin and alternated between a bewildered expression and a mournful one.
“Surely you know what the witnesses said without needing to hear it?”
“I don’t, sir. I would like to hear it.”
Reading the intent behind Duke Philippe’s slight turn of the body, one of the freshmen stepped half a step forward to testify.
The witness had drooping eyes and brown irises. His short height, just under 170 centimeters, his thin body, and his narrow shoulders made him look narrow-minded. In contrast, his precise diction and calm, mid-low voice infused with mana were enough to pass off a lie as truth.
He was a little nervous, but his determination not to miss this golden opportunity made him a brave witness.
I remembered the voices of the twelve I’d heard right before my regression, and the eye colors and eye shapes I’d seen through their masks, but none of them matched the witness.
A bastard whose blood fell infinitely short of what it took to join the Slaughter.
The son of a commoner of pure imperial blood who worked at my father’s company. The badge on the suit of his father, who stood behind the bastard, belonged to one of my father’s many affiliates.
In the past, I would have scorned and mocked him. I would have pitied him for struggling to grab onto a connection and told him to get lost. I would have taken a high-handed stance, insisted on my innocence, and threatened a court battle.
After my regression, I’d changed.
Hadn’t I seen just how deep the Empire’s bottom went?
I’d known of that endlessly petty bottom in the past as well. Even knowing, I’d looked on the trampled lives of immigrants as pathetic. My father was being trampled, and so was I, but I hadn’t accepted it.
By the Empire’s standards, I was inferior to the witness.
“I saw you grab Gaston Philippe by the collar and press him against the stone wall. He must have been choking then.”
“That couldn’t be.”
I pleaded in a very aggrieved tone.
“You’re telling me you didn’t switch to the stone wall because you couldn’t stand Gaston stepping on your head, and then strangle him while pretending to grab his collar to vent your anger?”
So the answer was already decided, and all I had to do was say it?
“You’re saying I was angry about being stepped on, so I moved to the stone wall and grabbed the young master by the collar to vent it—but that’s just an optical illusion caused by the distance. We never made contact. Me, grabbing the young master’s collar because he stepped on my head? Surely......! Are you saying you see young master Gaston as an empty vessel? So much that he’d have to climb up by stepping on my head? The nobles of the Empire are all magic bodies who’ve opened their mana.”
“Th-that’s not what I’m saying.”
Flustered, he glanced at Duke Philippe’s expression.
“Furthermore.”
I paused for a moment and looked straight down at the witness.
“Making contact with one another while climbing the cliff violates the academy’s practical exam rules. If young master Gaston had stepped on my head, the instructors could never have missed it, and he would have been disqualified on the spot. The young master would never have cheated. Did you really see it?”
This had to become something he hadn’t seen, even if he had.
That crazy jerk had tried to get noticed through excessive loyalty and was about to send his own father to the grave.
“......”
“As far as I know, young master Gaston climbed the stone wall and stood proudly at the top of the cliff. While I was hesitating, steeling my resolve, he went into the Ether Lake ahead of me. I went in quite a while later, after steeling my resolve. Inside there—did you see? I couldn’t see a thing in front of me.”
My tone was still aggrieved, sorrowful, and humble to the point of humiliation.
“They said in the Ether Lake, only those whose mana is in about the top twenty percent can see clear through the labyrinth made of waterweeds. He must have drowned in the Ether Lake because he was choking from having his collar grabbed when you switched to the stone wall.”
“If he were an empty vessel, he would have stuck his head above the water, and if he were a magic body, he would have slid down the cliff somewhere in the labyrinth. If having his collar grabbed by me were the cause, he would never have made it up the stone wall. The young master drowned because he had mana and didn’t fall into the trap.”
Ironically, that was true.
An empty vessel would have no choice but to raise his head above the surface. Immediate elimination.
“Your Grace, let us proceed with a public autopsy. So that not even a fistful of doubt remains. If doubt remains, he can be put before a public court.”
Judging that the conversation had gone far enough, Marquis Herzl brought it to a halt. The Marquis wore an expression of believing in my innocence, acting like the righteous guardian of a young man who had come alone.
If someone with power came to hold money as well, they could rise to the highest seat in the Empire. Not just marquis, but past duke, all the way to grand duke. A golden opportunity to claim one of the duchies that made up the Empire. The opportunity said to come three times in a lifetime—Marquis Herzl believed he had seized it.
How do I know?
With three handshakes, everything about Nikolai Herzl had been transferred to me. I’d thought only his past had come in, but even his present had come in.
When I repeated his name to myself, thinking about how I’d kill Nikolai, the space before my eyes rippled. A hologram appeared, and the inside of the car carrying the Herzl father and son home came clearly into view. As if looking into a crystal ball, as if I’d hacked a CCTV feed. The scene, as expected, came with sound.
‘Stop.’
With that word, the scene ended its playback, but I’d heard more than enough of the conversation between father and son.
“Yes, Marquis Herzl. A public autopsy is a fine idea.”
Though he had called me here with that intention already, and had already moved the coffin to the autopsy room, Duke Philippe answered as if he were following Marquis Herzl’s suggestion. Duke Philippe was now flagrantly violating the long tradition of the military academy that had served as a pillar of the Empire.
The Marquis’s recommendation.
It was a suitable reason for not completing the funeral on the same day.
Wearing my mask of loyalty, I complied obediently, without any resistance or appeal. Moving awkwardly, like someone of low grade who didn’t know how to use even a bit of magic power, I was seated before the coffin in the electrified witness’s seat.
If my heartbeat grew even slightly unsteady, restraints would immediately clamp onto the seat, and I’d be electrocuted to death.