Renher stood still, the weight of the nameless figure's words pressing down on him like stones.
The current rightful owner. He turned the phrase over in his mind, examining it from different angles the way he might examine an unfamiliar weapon — looking for the balance, the edge, the hidden cost of holding it.
Kazuma, characteristically, had already moved past the existential and arrived at the practical.
"Would they pursue me as well?" he asked, his translucent form drifting upward slightly as he looked at the figure on the throne. "If I'm connected to the owner of this place?"
The nameless figure's hollow eyes moved to him without hurry.
"Are you connected to him?"
"I am the previous owner of this body," Kazuma said simply.
A sound escaped the figure — low, resonant, somewhere between acknowledgment and dark amusement. "Then yes. They will pursue you. They follow threads, not people. Any connection to the owner of this place is thread enough. They will hunt you to the last fragment of whatever form you inhabit."
Kazuma absorbed this with the expression of a man recalculating a journey he had already committed to.
Renher looked back at the figure. "I was reincarnated into this body. I had a previous life — people connected to me there. Would they pursue those connections as well?"
A rare silence fell over the nameless figure. Not the silence of someone thinking, but of someone genuinely encountering the unfamiliar — a pause with texture to it.
"That," he said at last, "is the first time I have come across a case like yours."
He was quiet for another moment, and in that quiet something shifted in his bearing — the faint impression of a mind moving through very old, very vast stores of knowledge and finding a gap where there should have been an entry.
"Their tracking works through disturbance," he continued. "The power of this place, at its peak, leaves an enormous signature — something impossible to miss. In the beginning, at its current level, it will not draw their attention." A pause. "As for whether they have any means of tracing a soul's past life to its current form — I cannot say with certainty. You are the first case of this kind I have ever encountered. The precedent does not exist."
"And worst case?" Renher asked.
"Worst case, assume they can." The hollow eyes held his gaze steadily. "Which means the people from your previous life — anyone with a meaningful connection to who you were — may eventually become a liability. For them, more than for you." A beat. "If you have any way to reach them, to warn them, to sever the visible tie between that life and this one — you should consider it."
Renher was quiet for a moment.
"I don't know where they are," he said. "Not from here. Not in this world."
"Then that is a problem for another time," the figure said, without cruelty. "But do not forget it."
He let that sit for a moment before continuing.
"You mentioned a kingdom. I overheard you earlier — you were a king, it seems." Something shifted faintly in the hollow eyes, an old curiosity awakening. "I was well-versed in the histories and geographies of many lands, in my time. Tell me the name of your kingdom."
"Skairus," Renher said.
The figure was still. He searched — visibly, as though moving through an enormous internal archive — and found nothing.
"A powerful name," he said finally. "Strong syllables. But I have no record of it." He said this without condescension, only with the particular note of someone who found the gap itself significant. "That tells me it existed somewhere beyond the reach of what I was given to know. Which is not nothing."
"It was powerful," Renher said. "What it is now, I can't say."
The figure did not press further.
His hollow eyes drifted instead to the sword resting beside his throne — not looking at it exactly, but acknowledging it, the way one acknowledges an old companion who has not spoken in a long time. The blade was dull. The rust had crept across its surface in slow, patient patterns, consuming what had once been a fine edge. Whatever the sword had been, it was a relic of that now.
He rose.
The movement was slow — careful, in the way of something immense that has learned to be deliberate — but it was not frail. There was still mass to the figure, still a sense of compressed presence, like a fire that had burned very low but had not gone out.
"Follow me," he said. "Pleasantries are finished. It is time for the business."
He moved toward the cocoons.
Renher and Kazuma fell in behind him without discussion — Renher on foot, navigating the uneven ground with the grim patience his wounds demanded, Kazuma drifting silently above, his luminescence trailing after the enormous figure like a small moon following a dark planet.
The figure spoke as he walked.
"Before I explain, understand what you are looking at. This artifact is called by many names across many ages." He did not look back. "I call it the Ten Rings. That is what it is, at its foundation."
"The rings I found in the forest," Renher said. Not a question — a confirmation, pieces fitting quietly into place.
"The same. They have served different functions across different eras and for different owners, but their essential nature does not change." A pause. "They are a forge."
Renher's eyes moved to the cocoons — the crimson light pulsing slowly within each one, steady as a heartbeat. "A forge," he repeated. "Without fire. Without an anvil."
"Ha." The sound carried something almost like satisfaction. "Think past the familiar, little one. The cocoons are the forge."
They arrived at the cluster of hanging cocoons. The nameless figure stopped before them, and in the red light his armour looked almost alive — the ancient metal catching the glow and holding it in its dull surface.
"You, Renher — or Cornelius, as this body is known — are the current owner of the Ten Rings. When I leave this place, the full transfer of their power will complete itself. What remains of my will and my soul will cease to exist at that moment." He said this without particular weight, as a man might describe the end of a lease. "This meeting is the last I will have."
Neither Renher nor Kazuma responded immediately. The casual gravity of the statement left little room for an immediate reply.
The figure touched one of the cocoons with the back of one enormous finger, and for a moment his expression was somewhere else entirely — in a time that no longer existed, perhaps, or a place that had long since changed beyond recognition.
Then he continued.
"Feed the cocoons raw materials. They will forge from those materials the best artifact possible, guided by the intent of the owner. Think of a blacksmith — a master craftsman does not use bowstrings as raw material and expect a sword. What you put in determines what can come out."
"But what comes out — is that fixed?" Renher asked. "If I feed it specific materials, do I know exactly what I'll receive?"
"Not exactly. The forge interprets. It follows your intent and produces accordingly. A rare ice shard and refined metal — you might receive a blade with cold properties. An ice shard and a lava crystal—" he tilted his head fractionally — "you might receive something that channels both elements. Or you might find they cancel one another entirely and produce something lesser. Intent matters as much as material."
kazuma proudly with a smile visible across his face replied, "well yes we do have it , his body has that power "