Chapter 59 - A Wretched Life

"First."

Ferda broke the silence.

A damp echo fitting for a basement rang out.

"I am truly grateful to you."

"..."

"If you hadn't attacked that day, I would have had to surveil Chancellor Bernard for days on end, which would have been a useless waste of time."

"If you're so grateful... could you untie this for me?"

"I'd rather not. I am grateful to you, but I'm not an idiot."

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

"That transformation art is quite fascinating. It's not a magical imitation or a cognitive distortion, nor is it a clumsy mimicry like doppelgängers."

"If it's so fascinating, I could turn into you, Regent?"

He threw out the joke with a snicker.

"Can you become me too?"

Ferda immediately took the bait.

"It's possible as long as I have blood."

Ferda pulled a clean dagger from his pocket and slit his own arm.

Bright red blood flowed down his forearm.

"Become me."

"..."

The man caught and drank the dripping blood.

As a substantial amount of blood flowed in, his form of Chancellor Bernard began to change.

It was Ferda himself.

Gray hair and blue eyes.

A frail body that wanted to become a knight but couldn't.

Though bruised and with broken teeth, he was unmistakably wearing Ferda's appearance.

"It seems you can't restore the injuries. What happened to that monstrous healing power?"

"My role is to become that human. There's no way a human would have that kind of healing power, right?"

"How thorough."

To deliberately strip away the Demons' enhanced traits and focus entirely on imitating a human.

Ferda stared intently at him.

Meeting his gaze, the man burst into laughter.

"Ferda Valdrova. I thought you were a madman, but you exceed my expectations..."

"What do you mean?"

Ferda tilted his head.

"What you're looking at is yourself. A ruined, broken image of yourself. Yet you sit there looking amused."

"I'm not amused."

"And yet your eyes didn't waver even once?"

The man was right.

Ferda showed no sign of avoiding his gaze or feeling any fear.

He was simply observing his own broken reflection.

"You were... kicked out of the Rosnova family, weren't you?"

"..."

"I can feel through this body just how hard you tried. You have no muscle, but you worked so hard that you bruised your bones and blistered your hands, didn't you?"

"..."

"But your father didn't recognize that."

"True, and thanks to that, I became a fiancé."

"No. That was just an excuse to cast you out. You know it too, don't you?"

The man smirked coldly with Ferda's face.

"You were abandoned because you lacked talent. You're a human who was thrown away like an old shoe, just like me."

What his eyes appealed for was a sense of kinship.

A kinship felt through the shared emotion called revenge.

The man wearing Ferda's face was thirsting for revenge.

A man seeking revenge against the king who had forsaken loyalty.

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

Ferda could deeply understand that feeling of anger.

"Yes, I was abandoned."

Ferda displayed disgust at the sight.

"But you and I are different. Very different."

"What's different?"

"The soul."

Ferda tapped his own chest.

"My soul has always been my own."

Ferda looked up at him with contemptuous eyes.

Hearing Ferda's words, the man flared up and shouted.

"I didn't sell 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 second to sell yourself short. With that, your thirst for revenge became a cheap knockoff, worse than a dog's."

He shouted as if it were absurd.

"Does that matter? All I need to do is get my revenge. Even if I'm ruined, what matters is making that bastard suffer worse than hell!"

"No, revenge cannot be without a soul."

Ferda reached into the pouch he had brought.

"Even if it gets dirtied and broken, true revenge is only achieved when you hold onto your soul as entirely your own."

What he pulled out was a vial.

A vial with no color or label to indicate its effects.

Seven in total.

"So stop pretending to understand me just because you wear my face."

He popped the cork off one of them and approached.

"Enjoy your life."

* * *

Castle upper floor, alchemy workshop.

The alchemist was in the middle of cleaning up.

"May I come in?"

At the familiar voice of the old man, the alchemist paused and bowed his head.

"Greetings, Count Concillus. Of course, you may come in anytime."

"Thank you for allowing Regent Valdrova to use the workshop."

"Not at all. How could this humble servant refuse your request, Count?"

Count Concillus made a show of casually looking around before speaking.

"By the way, do you know what kind of potion Regent Valdrova was making?"

"Here is the list of ingredients the Regent requested."

The quick-witted alchemist showed him the written lists.

Count Concillus skimmed through the list.

Although a knight and a soldier, he had picked up quite a bit of knowledge over his shoulder.

Among that was knowledge of alchemy, so he could quickly grasp the basics.

Because of this, Count Concillus wore a dumbfounded expression.

"These... look like ingredients for a recovery potion, am I right?"

At Count Concillus's question, the alchemist nodded.

"Yes. That's correct."

"He came here just to make a recovery potion? If that was all, he could have just asked you to do it."

"My thoughts exactly."

"Your thoughts exactly?"

The sigh he was about to let out disappeared.

The alchemist stammered.

"No, well..."

"Speak. I'll forgive you even if it sounds like you're talking slightly ill of him."

"At the risk of my life, I must say... Regent Valdrova's alchemy skills are slightly... no, they're simply atrocious."

Absolute disgust leaked out of his voice.

Count Concillus blinked at his reaction.

"Is it really that bad for you to say so?"

"Yes. He acted like a complete amateur, no, worse than an amateur, without hesitation. If my apprentice had done that, I would have slapped them across the face on the spot."

"Hmm..."

"Gasp, my apologies. I was out of line..."

Count Concillus stroked his beard in quiet thought before speaking.

"It probably wasn't out of inexperience."

"But it completely violated all methods of preparation and usage. Unless he's a novice..."

"Tell me. What are the effects of deviating from the preparation method?"

"Well..."

The alchemist began reading from his records.

"First, to point out some of the Regent's actions, his stirring speed was too fast."

"What happens if it's too fast?"

"The potion's recovery effects are reduced."

"And what else?"

"He shook the cauldron while it was cooling down. Shaking it while the medicinal properties are spreading evenly reduces the recovery effects. And..."

He continued reciting a list of atrocious actions.

Ferda had committed over twenty errors in a short process.

"All those processes..."

The alchemist could not hide his amazement.

He hadn't realized it while watching, but breaking it down one by one, he started to see it.

Alchemy is delicate.

If anything went wrong during the process, the recovery effects could vanish completely, or it could become water worse than juice.

However, every single one of the supposedly amateurish acts Ferda committed led to a consistent effect.

"They all serve to reduce the recovery speed and restorative power..."

It was far too intentional to be the work of an amateur.

* * *

"Urghhh!"

The man's entire body went rigid.

The veins in his neck bulged outwards, and as he clenched his broken teeth, they began to shatter even further.

"Can you feel it?"

Ferda asked, gently shaking the empty vial.

Everything that had been inside it was now inside the man's body.

"Doesn't your whole body feel like a burning field? I bet it feels like you're being roasted, slowly and very hotly."

"Urghhh... What the hell did you do to me...?!"

He couldn't even finish his sentence.

However, Ferda answered him.

"A wretched life."

"Wh-What is that...!"

"It's the name I gave it. It's the most agonizing life given to bastards like you who are prepared to die. And what you're feeling right now is the growing pains of dead nerves reviving after harsh torture."

"Urghhh...!?"

"That's right. This isn't meant to kill you. I'm keeping you alive."

"B-Bullshiiit...!"

There was no way this crap was recovery.

Ferda rattled the empty vial and said,

"Isn't it fascinating? The better a recovery potion is, the deeper and faster it heals. That's why high-grade recovery potions are always popular. They're so well-refined that drinking them mid-battle leaves no aftereffects."

The man had once been a knight.

Having been on the battlefield, he knew very well what the effects of high-grade recovery potions felt like.

"Conversely, cheap recovery potions are painful. The recovery speed is slow, and the restorative power is weak. What I made is the cheapest of the cheap. So when I press down like this..."

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

"Aaaaargh!"

A scream burst out.

The man, who had withstood the executioner's torture, let out his very first shriek.

"Revived nerves are extremely sensitive. If just a finger does this much..."

He picked up the tool the executioner had left behind.

A long, sharp-pointed object.

It was a needle.

"How do you think this will feel?"

RATTLE! RATTLE!

"Stop, stooop!!"

He completely lost his mind and started thrashing wildly.

"I'll tell you everything! I'll tell you everything!"

"Tell me what?"

"You obviously have a purpose for torturing me, fuuuck! I'll tell you everything! I'll tell you exactly where our base is! Just stop this! Please! Pleaaase!"

Five minutes.

That was how long it took for the man who endured the executioner's torture to submit.

It ended truly quickly.

Of course; he might have learned how to resist while dying, but he hadn't learned how to resist while being kept alive.

"No."

Instead of questioning him, Ferda shoved the gag back into his mouth.

"Your submission was inevitable, but it won't be right now."

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

It sloshed.

To his hypersensitive ears, it sounded like the crashing waves of a raging storm.

"Sing for me a little longer. Let yourself feel a bit more of the wretched life you threw away."

The spiral staircase leading down to the basement.

Below it, the endless screams of a wicked soul burning in hell continued without rest.

* * *

Three hours later, Ferda met face-to-face with Count Concillus in the reception room once more.

"I found out a few interesting facts."

"What might they be?"

"They call themselves Dopplers."

"Dopplers? Sounds like it was derived from doppelgänger."

"Correct. They call themselves Dopplers to signify that they are beings superior to doppelgängers."

"Such narcissism. How typical of a Demon."

Count Concillus chuckled.

"I never imagined we would obtain information on the Demons."

"It was largely because he was closer to a human than a Demon. If he wasn't so close to a human, the torture methods I know wouldn't have worked."

"You are truly amazing. To create something we wouldn't even dare to imagine..."

It was an idea that even left an alchemist who had worked at the castle for thirty years clicking his tongue in disbelief.

Ferda ruined the potion with a level of difficulty and precision dozens of times harder than brewing a normal recovery potion.

It was practically a work of art.

"Those Doppler characters... Chancellor Bernard couldn't have been their first target... Do you know when they started?"

"He said it started ten years ago. It seems he doesn't know the exact details since he just got promoted from Servant-class to Knight-class."

There is a hierarchy among Demons.

Servant-class consists of ordinary human followers who act as expendable pawns.

From the Knight-class onward, they begin to genuinely enjoy the strength and authority of a Demon.

"If they started ten years ago, there must be many of them hiding already."

"They're probably already hiding in Escolaia, not to mention within the Grand Council."

"That... makes no sense. The idea that a horde of chaos exists within the territory of Lord Blancaros, the great Aspect of Order, is just absurd, isn't it?"

"They already knew exactly what Chancellor Bernard said at the Grand Council. Whether they are humans or Dopplers, it's an established fact that Demon Followers are inside."

Count Concillus understood that, but he couldn't bring himself to fully accept it.

"The Grand Council, where the entire continent comes together in harmony, will now begin to lose its trust."

The Grand Council, a stage created for the harmony of the Serdes Continent.

The news that the underlings of the Evil Dragon Godwin had been planted in Blancaros's absolute zone would shake the continent.

The fallout was too massive to just be used politically.

"What will you do?"

Count Concillus asked Ferda.

Perhaps he would make a wise judgment in this situation.

"The best course of action is, of course, a preemptive strike."

"Ambushes are indeed an excellent tactic. But wouldn't we need to know the enemy's base to launch one?"

"Of course."

Realizing the meaning behind those words belatedly, Count Concillus's face lit up.

"Don't tell me you found out the location of the enemy's base?"

"Not the base, but a core facility. He said he served as the captain of the guard at the research facility that creates those things. So he knows its vulnerable points better than anyone."

"Then we can just go and strike the enemy right away."

Knowing the enemy's location made the conditions absolutely perfect.

"There's one problem."

"What is it?"

"That research facility happens to be in Silverwind's territory."

"Ah..."

Count Concillus knew exactly what their current relationship with Silverwind was like.

"This puts us in a difficult spot. It seems like something that could be easily resolved by requesting Silverwind's cooperation..."

"They would never do it. Besides, wouldn't it take too much time to make the request?"

"You're right. In that case, it would be better to provide them with the information... but even that feels unsavory."

"If it was a simple subjugation, we could just collapse the mountain and bury it."

The target of their preemptive strike wasn't a gathering point for Demons, but a research facility.

In other words, a place where the core objective was information, not troops.

Among that information, there would undoubtedly be details about the Dopplers as well as the plans the Demons had set in motion.

Ferda made his decision.

"We'll have to slip in quietly, crush it, and get out."

A risky special operation that could lead to war if they made a mistake.

Just as Ferda was about to lay out the framework for the plan, Count Concillus unexpectedly beat him to the punch.

"Forgive my presumption, but could you give this old man a chance?"

"A chance?"

"Yes."

Count Concillus dropped to one knee and placed a hand over his heart.

"As a shield of the Empire and a knight loyal to the great Aspect of Power, I wish to be of great help to you, Regent."

He was an elderly man whose hair had gone completely white.

However, in his prime, he was a knight who had earned the Empire's recognition.

A knight who had lost everything and voluntarily demoted himself.

Ferda gladly accepted the request.

"We depart tomorrow. Make your preparations immediately."