He believed the mind he’d been blessed with must have been for this purpose. Claude found himself in mortal danger many times, but was willing to keep searching and searching for a way to save Laetitia.
I made sure Letty’s engagement failed because I wanted her to marry King Glenreed.
He’d managed to infer that Glenreed likely possessed the power of ancestral reversion. If he brought him and Laetitia closer together, Glenreed would probably be able to stop the slumbering first-generation king inside himself from killing her. Once Claude calculated this plan, he determined Laetitia and Glenreed wouldn’t be a bad match, so he ended up guiding his sister onto the path to becoming the figurehead queen.
But it went even better than I expected. King Glenreed was the one who saved her in the end.
His deep love for Laetitia was why they were now able to gather for their wedding.
Claude’s secret maneuvers had been saved thanks to good fortune, and now, they were at a place where Ishnad and the other Wing Chord rulers wouldn’t be able to lay a hand on Laetitia without a fight.
But that was where he hit a dead end. He was able to suppress outside factors from harming Laetitia, but he was never able to find a method of stopping her soul from destabilizing by the time she was twenty, at the very latest. Not only that, but he failed to find Laetitia’s past life name that could recall her soul once it was expelled from this world.
Claude gave up. He almost gave up.
By using his gift of intelligence to take on many countries and opponents, having already calculated the outcomes of everything in his head, Claude was ready to give up on recalling Laetitia’s soul without ever trying. He simply didn’t see how it could be done.
But King Glenreed ignored my resignation and called Letty’s soul back to us. His emotions pulled on that delicate, invisible thread and managed to pull off what felt like a miracle.
Thanks to that, Glenreed now held Claude’s deep gratitude and respect. He felt sad that his sister would be leaving their homeland to become the official queen of Wolfvarte, but he believed Glenreed would be able to grant Laetitia a happy life.
Claude silently took a sip of alcohol from his glass. He gazed at his sister and Glenreed as they conversed with guests.
Hayruth, the painter from a foreign country, was congratulating the smiling Laetitia. Hayruth was Claude’s friend, but right now, he thought back to that day he conversed with something different lurking inside of Hayruth.
Hayruth possessed the power of ancestral reversion belonging to the sacred snake. Claude could trace his bloodline back to the royal family of a desert country that no longer existed. This country had murdered their own Heaven-Wing clan members hundreds of years ago, and without the Wing Chord at their disposal, the nation soon collapsed. However, the royal family’s bloodline lived on, resulting in people with ancestral reversion powers and no country to rule over. Just once, the first-generation king slumbering inside Hayruth took over during a moment of Hayruth’s drunkenness to exchange words with Claude.
“Sometimes monsters, no, forgive me, human outliers like you show up from time to time. It’s most fascinating.”
The thing with Hayruth’s face—someone else entirely—sounded amused as he spoke.
“It seems your efforts behind the scenes are going to eliminate the Wing Chord in many countries soon. No one’s accomplished such a feat in six hundred years. Was that another one of your goals?”
“No, I only want to solve the problems surrounding Letty’s soul. Destroying the Wing Chord in the process isn’t enough to make me slow down. That’s all it is.”
Claude hated the Wing Chord and the Renewal, but he had no interest in taking proactive measures to get rid of them either. He’d come to see the merits of the Renewal, even if he disagreed with it, and he wasn’t motivated enough to put in the hard work of destroying it for good.
“Hmm, I see. But many countries on this continent are going to undergo tremendous changes thanks to your actions. The Wing Chord allowed citizens of these countries to live in peace under the rule of their kings, the reborn gods. Of course, it was still a peace they never chose. But that’s going to be lost soon. It’s the end of those fairy tales with their happily ever afters, and they’re going to be replaced by an era of history where the future is completely undetermined.”
Those words came from the person inside Hayruth. He practically sung them, or maybe it was more like a drunken ramble. But Claude remembered the mysterious emperor, Ishnad, speaking of very similar things.
A few months earlier, after a week or two had passed since Laetitia’s soul returned to their world, Claude paid a visit to Ishnad himself. He snuck past the emperor’s heavy security to confirm if Ishnad really felt less attachment to the distant past life he lived alongside Laetitia—alongside her. He also wanted to ask him something that weighed on his mind.
“Emperor Ishnad, did you regret losing your loved one to illness in your first life, and was that part of your motivation for building up this empire and changing the power structure of this continent?”
“…I’m surprised you’ve figured that out. If you want to take control of the things the gods put in their fairy tales, you have to put an end to the fairy tales first. What else can you do but walk the blood-soaked path of history to move forward?”
Ishnad had laughed quietly, showing no fear toward the man who snuck into his room in the middle of the night. Claude wasn’t surprised that the emperor of such a great land would have guts.
So long as governments are run through Wing Chords and Renewals, education and technology will remain at a standstill. It will be difficult for royalty and nobles, the people with the most magical energy, to continue their control in a world where technology other than magic dominates the battlefield. Kings awoken by the Wing Chord can crush any new technology, even medical ones. I don’t think Emperor Ishnad could allow that as someone who lost the woman he loved to illness.
Claude had lost his mother to illness as well. He felt a connection to Ishnad in that sense. The emperor was a nuisance of a man who tried to take Laetitia away, but Claude still sympathized with his hatred of things like the Wing Chord.
I still can’t tell how technology and power are going to change across this continent…but I suppose history starts once the fairy tales end. I bet Letty is going to be one of the very important stars of history once it’s written.
He watched over Laetitia, clad in her white dress as the guests congratulated her marriage. Now that the problems around Laetitia’s soul had been solved, meddling in her life any further would be illogical—nothing more than an insult to his sister.
…That’s why all I can do is pray for Letty’s happiness as her big brother.
“May the rest of my sister’s life be full of blessings.”
Claude stared at Laetitia, smiling in her bridal gown, until that image was burned into his mind forever. Then he finished off the last of the alcohol in his cup.