“Man, what the hell...?” I grumbled.
The sun had set, and I’d finally gotten a proper meal and bath. But I still felt pretty down as I lay sprawled out on the bed I’d been provided.
“I can’t believe she actually went with my stupid ‘scold the emperor’ joke!”
Yep. My joke had gone right over the head of Empress Dowager Eldia. In fact, she’d thought it was a great idea. And gone with it. Seriously!
Like, hello?! Come on, man! How was a common village dude like me supposed to reprimand royalty?!
Not to mention... “Do it ‘boldly’? In front of everybody?! How the hell am I supposed to do that?!”
Just thinking about it made my stomach drop.
Empress Eldia had said I was to receive a public commendation from the emperor and was supposedly making arrangements for the ceremony to take place at the heart of the imperial capital.
That meant I was going to have to meet the emperor in front of tens of thousands of people.
This alone made me nauseous from anxiety, but having to scold him on top of that?! There was no way.
“Ugh. I’m an introvert! Why do I have to do this?! I wanna go home,” I whined, rolling around in bed.
Oh well. I was sure the emperor was gonna lose his shit. And people were gonna stare at me like, “What’s this guy’s problem?”
See, I had apparently become the talk of the country.
Everyone was convinced I was some kind of heroic badass. It turned out the dragon I’d killed was this legendary, powerful thing called Nidhogg, Blight of the Heavens, or whatever.
But you know, if I let that get to my head and started talking big to people above me in the food chain, everyone would be like, “Who does this loser think he is?” and such, wouldn’t they?
“Man, people at the capital are gonna throw rocks at me. To city people, I’m just a hick from the boonies.”
All I had to my name was knighthood. Otherwise, I was just some nobody without any authority. A country bumpkin going around talking big, grand achievements or no, was gonna catch a lot of flak.
A dog’s still a dog no matter how strong it is, you know? Without status or authority, biting the hands of my masters would make me an infuriating, dangerous mongrel who doesn’t know its place.
“Man, if only I married into a noble family, or something.”
Status adds dignity to your image, you know. Whether or not you’re a village boy by birth, if you climb up the ladder, people start saying it was “circumstance” and “effort” that got you there.
The words of a village nobody and the words of a villager who got themselves a noble family crest carried totally different weights.
So, if I’d married into the royal family or something, that’d have been, like, the climax of a story.
“If some villager is stern to the emperor, it’s ‘lèse-majesté,’ which is a crime. But if a noble does it, it’s ‘sage advice.’”
Now, if a member of the royal family opposes the emperor? That’s “overthrowing tyranny.” It’s like saying, “I will never acknowledge you as our ruler. I will not stand for your reign. I will drag you down from your throne.”
And if that person originally came from common stock, well, all the more exciting for the audience, right?
People tended to side with those in power who they related to. They might have hated others of their same social status rising to the top, but they sure loved it when someone at the top shared their roots, their hobbies, their tastes.
“People are complex creatures,” Fukashi, my one friend back home (later eaten by aetherborn and now deceased), had always said.
You know, he hadn’t amounted to much, but he’d always talked big.
Well, anyway...
“Shape it up, Crow! Face reality! You haven’t married into a noble family! You’re just some virgin loser who’s never even had a girlfriend!” I scolded myself, bringing myself back down to earth. My tears started anew.
Reality was cruel. I, a virgin and a commoner, now had to scold the emperor (a man over thirty years my senior, by the way) in front of everyone. He’d probably be furious, and everyone else would think I was a menace.
I’d thought about declining, of course, but Empress Eldia had seemed so excited about it. Besides, it had been my suggestion initially, so...backing out now would’ve been pretty bad, wouldn’t it? Sigh.
“Well, maybe Empress Eldia will cover for me. Yeah. I’ll at least avoid execution. I hope.”
Ugh, enough! Thinking about my bleak future just made me bawl like a baby. I was going to sleep!
And so, I dispelled my left arm.
“Phew. Man, it’s weird to not have a limb,” I mused, staring at where my missing arm had been severed at the shoulder.
Muramasa’s new ability “soul materialization,” which the weapon had received when it evolved, was powerful. It could summon aetherborn, and it could make up for my missing body parts by materializing my own soul.
Maintaining that materialization, however, cost a significant amount of aether.
“The winds from Vita’s weapon, the light from Iris’s sword, they all come from the aether stored in their aethereal arms too,” I pondered.
That was why neither of them could keep those things going whoosh whoosh shing shing all the time. They had to wait for their weapons to reabsorb aether from the environment.
Which meant I had to be mindful of that from now on.
Paying attention to this was even more important in my case, since if Muramasa ran out of aether, I was toast.
“Muramasa’s patching up my torn organs too. It’s my literal lifeline,” I murmured to myself, looking at the black sword sitting in the corner of the room.
It was sound asleep now, filled to the brim with the dragon’s soul.
“Wow, I’m here losing my shit over the emperor and this guy’s just snoozing.”
Selfish idiot sword.
Well, whatever. Future me could handle future problems. Present me was going to sleep.
G’night!
As I fell asleep, I thought I heard Iris’s voice. “Crow? Are you asleep?”