In the continent, there were six who dwelled within the light and five within the darkness.
The six powers that had risen to become the radiant suns of the continent were called the Six Kings. Those who lurked underground, who spread defeat and fear like a slow poison through the roots of civilization, were called the Five Demons.
House Zieghart was one of the Six Kings. It ruled the North.
"Ah-ooh."
Raon made eye contact with the head of House Zieghart and let his mouth fall open in the way that babies did when they had not yet learned to conceal their reactions.
Is this a good thing?
He turned the question over carefully, the way he had once turned over information about a target — examining each face of it before committing to a conclusion.
Zieghart lost nothing in comparison to House Robert. The family that had taken everything from him in his past life had been powerful. This family was powerful in a different register entirely — openly, structurally, in the way that mountains were powerful rather than in the way that poisons were.
If I build my strength here, my day of revenge may come sooner than I thought.
"He is blonde and has red eyes, just like you and me, Father."
Sylvia smiled gently and smoothed Raon's hair while he was still working through the arithmetic of his situation.
Glenn said nothing.
His silence had the quality of weather — not aggressive, simply present, filling the available space without apology. He reached out and lifted Raon from Sylvia's arms.
Huh?
Something entered through his wrist the moment Glenn's hands closed around him. Warm. Careful. Moving through him like sunlight finding its way into a room that had been shuttered for a long time.
"Ooh—"
The sound left him before he could stop it.
What kind of aura is this.
In his past life, he had felt the aura of many warriors. Powerful ones, restrained ones, aura sharpened into instruments of killing. Glenn's was different. It was not merely strong. It carried the particular quality of something that had come directly from its source — high purity, the warmth of nature itself, moving through his body without the distortions that came from decades of being used as a weapon.
It's warming me.
He had been cold since his reincarnation. He had attributed it to the limitations of an infant's body. He had been wrong about that, he was beginning to understand.
Glenn's aura moved through him with the methodical attention of an examination, tracing his mana circuit from one end to the other. Then, without comment or change of expression, he returned Raon to Sylvia's arms.
What?
Raon watched Glenn's face for something — any indication that he had found what was there to be found. A warrior of Glenn's level could not have missed it. The cold blocking his mana circuit in nine places was not subtle. It was the kind of thing that would be immediately obvious to anyone with the sensitivity to look.
Glenn's expression gave him nothing.
Raon could not decide whether that was reassuring or not.
"Sylvia."
"Yes."
"The child's name shall be Raon."
"Raon?" Sylvia's brows drew together. "Father. The name Raon means…"
"It means that. Quiet like a shadow. To live without standing out."
His voice had none of the warmth his aura had carried. It came out cold as frost on stone.
Huh.
Raon turned the coincidence over in his mind. The same name as his past life. The same meaning. He was not certain whether to find that amusing or disturbing, so he settled on neither.
He had believed Glenn to be cold-hearted. The naming confirmed something, at least — Glenn had no particular interest in a sick grandson.
"That is all."
Glenn smoothed the front of his dark red coat and turned away, as if the room and everyone in it had served their function and he had no further use for the scene.
"Wait — Father! At least another name —"
Sylvia followed him toward the door, Raon still in her arms, but Glenn did not turn back. His footsteps moved down the corridor and continued until they were gone.
It was more accurate, Raon thought, to say they were strangers than father and daughter.
"Ooh-woo!"
A sound escaped him involuntarily. The cold wind coming through the open door found the exposed skin of his face and hands, and his body registered its displeasure before his mind could instruct it otherwise.
"I'm sorry — I'm so sorry!"
Sylvia pulled him close and pressed her face against him. Her shoulders moved in the small, controlled way of someone holding back something larger.
There is something here I don't understand yet.
The thought was clear enough. What followed it was not. His thinking was beginning to soften at the edges, the way it always did when his body decided it had spent enough time being awake.
A child's body is very inconvenient.
The moon hung directly overhead.
Raon lay in his crib and opened his eyes carefully.
She's asleep.
He turned his head. Sylvia was in the bed beside him, her breathing slow and even.
He knocked once against the side of the crib. She did not stir.
Good.
He let out a small, quiet breath.
The past hundred days had been suffocating in a way that had nothing to do with danger. It was the particular suffocation of someone accustomed to constant activity being confined to approximately four hours of wakefulness per day, most of which was spent being shaken at with rattles.
He could not train while Sylvia was present. Even the gentlest attempt to circulate mana would register as unusual to someone paying close attention, and Sylvia paid very close attention.
But from today, he slept in the crib separately. Helen — the head maid — had suggested it. Sylvia would not wake unless something was genuinely wrong.
The conditions were as good as they were going to get.
Let's begin.
Raon exhaled slowly.
The Ring of Fire.
The cultivation method common to the continent operated by drawing mana from the surrounding environment through breath and accumulating it in the lower abdomen. It was straightforward. It was also not what he would be doing.
The Ring of Fire was different.
A thousand years old. Obtained through fate in his past life and left unfinished. Its method did not use the lower abdomen. Instead it rotated a spherical ring around the heart — the way a sorcerer inscribed a magic circle, patient and exact — improving the body's physical condition and its sensitivity to mana simultaneously. It could not generate aura directly. What it could do was create the ideal conditions for everything that came after.
It also, notably, followed the flow of nature so precisely that even a skilled warrior examining him would find nothing to identify.
Derus Robert — said to be the greatest swordsman on the continent — had never known Raon carried it.
That advantage remains.
There was, however, the other matter.
Coldness.
He had attempted to use mana briefly once before, feigning sleep while he worked. What he had found had nearly made him cry out. Nine points along his mana circuit, each one blocked by a dense cold that did not belong there. Moving mana through them was like trying to push water through packed ice.
He drew a slow breath, deeper than his lungs were comfortable with, and reached for the mana distributed through the surrounding air.
It's dispersing.
His affinity was poor in this body — much worse than his past life. The mana slipped away from his attention like smoke. He gathered it slowly, fragment by fragment, until he had enough to settle into the first point of blockage.
Nine places.
He directed the mana into a thin edge and pressed it against the cold.
Screech—
Like a chisel working at a frozen waterfall, a small piece of the blockage fractured and broke free.
Wait.
He paused.
The cold that had broken loose was dense. Concentrated. It had a purity to it that he recognized from Glenn's aura earlier — that quality of something drawn directly from nature without the distortions of use. Releasing it seemed wasteful in the way that discarding a useful material was wasteful.
Can I use this?
He guided the broken cold carefully, working it into the flow pattern of the Ring of Fire. Natural mana and purified cold, moving together through his mana circuit.
It's circulating.
Slower than his past life by a significant margin. But it was moving. The Ring of Fire was running.
He became aware of the cold air the mana drew inward, settling into his body like a held breath slowly released.
It will take time. But it's workable.
The next thought arrived before the satisfaction had finished:
Already?
His eyelids were descending without his permission. His body had spent what it considered an adequate amount of effort and had now submitted its conclusion.
Damn it.
He shut his eyes against his will. Sleep arrived immediately, the way it always did when his body wanted it.
Outside the door, sometime later — the moon having moved approximately three fingers' width across the sky — a figure appeared.
The door did not open. The figure simply entered.
Glenn Zieghart stood at the edge of the crib and looked down at the sleeping child. After a moment, he extended one hand. A pale light bloomed from his palm — the color of late afternoon sun through thin clouds.
Where Raon's forehead had been faintly creased, the tension smoothed away.
Time passed in the particular way that it did when every day was structurally identical to the one before it.
"A-bu-bu."
Raon gave a small sigh.
As expected. It isn't easy.
His waking hours were short. When he was awake, Sylvia or one of the maids was almost always present. The sessions with the Ring of Fire were being measured in minutes rather than hours, and the cold was yielding slowly.
And yet — the progress was better than it should have been. Meaningfully better. As if something external were quietly supplementing what he was doing alone.
He had not worked out what that something was.
"Raon, shall we move a bit more today?"
Sylvia leaned over the bed and shook the rattle. She had developed a firm theory that he was fond of rattles, based on the fact that he kept reacting to them.
Playing with her is more tiring than enduring the cold.
He acknowledged this privately. An adult's consciousness in a child's body produced frictions that were difficult to account for. He was aware, for instance, that the appropriate response to a rattle being shaken at him was to reach for it with apparent enthusiasm. He was also aware that doing this required a specific kind of effort that had nothing to do with physical strength.
He was preparing to crawl toward Sylvia in the expected manner when the door opened.
An old man entered. Silver hair — not the silver of age maintained carefully, but the silver of someone who had stopped paying attention to it some time ago. Clothes that communicated poverty clearly and inaccurately. Eyes as clear as running water.
"Oh? Uncle!"
Sylvia turned toward the door with a brightness that Raon had not seen her direct at anyone other than him.
"It has been a long time."
"No, no. Saint—"
"Aah-woong."
The sound came out of Raon before he fully registered what he was looking at.
The Ragged Saint.
Patrick. One of the most capable healers on the continent. Holy powers and medical knowledge at a level that made him sought after by everyone with the resources to search for him — which was why he was also, perpetually, somewhere else. A vagabond by disposition. Difficult to locate by design.
"Not Saint. Uncle. Like before."
Patrick chuckled and approached the bed with the unhurried ease of someone who had learned, over a long life, that urgency was usually optional.
"I heard you had a child. I was passing through." He looked at Raon with the frank assessment of a professional. "Oho. Blonde and red eyes? The first since you, yes?"
"That's right." Sylvia stroked Raon's hair. "Isn't he beautiful?"
"That's what I mean. Not even a year old and already pretty. Completely different from a wild creature like Glenn."
Patrick waggled a finger in front of Raon's face.
"His name?"
"Raon."
The old man's expression shifted.
"Don't tell me it means 'shadow.'"
"It does."
"Whatever is Glenn thinking."
He said Glenn's name with the easy familiarity of someone who had long since stopped attaching titles to it.