Chapter 497

“First?”

Elias blinked in confusion. If only he could know what his friend was thinking right now.

“You… You have a friend you care about, don’t you?”

The words slipped out before Elias could stop himself, and he fell silent. Thinking back to what that strange voice had said, he had assumed that someone must have cherished this friend enough, which prompted him to speak. But now that he had said it aloud, he regretted bringing up the subject so carelessly. His friend probably wouldn’t appreciate having a friend who had once been close enough to leave a deep impression on him brought up out of nowhere. Elias also felt a twinge of guilt for taking information his friend had never wanted to share and piecing together his own guess from it. But his friend answered without the slightest sign of agitation.

“Yes. Even so, you’re the first.”

The first in what? The first to recognize both sides of his nature? Or the first to say that he had no choice but to treat him as a human being no different from anyone else?

Still bewildered, Elias could only stare at his friend in silence. Before he could ask, however, his friend pointed at Elias’s clothes, as though there were still something bothering him.

“Let’s deal with this first. Why do you look like a drowned rat?”

“You were a soggy mess, too.”

“…What are you talking about? I’m not wet at all now.”

“I changed your clothes for you. Otherwise, you’d probably be coughing by now. And you wouldn’t have gotten any more sleep, either. Aren’t you grateful?”

At that, his friend narrowed his eyes and turned his clothes inside out. After checking what he had changed into, he thanked Elias.

“Thank you.”

“That’s cold!”

“What is…? But why haven’t you changed?”

“I thought I’d try catching a cold.”

You guys will be on leave until your arms and legs are practically falling off, but I won’t. I’m taking leave too. Let’s see if I can escape the Headquarters for the entire month of April… The playful words caught in Elias’s throat.

Perhaps his friend found the mere idea of wanting to catch a cold amusing, because he laughed as he got to his feet. He then picked up the clothes spread out over the spot where he had been lying and gave them a few good shakes.

A cool white light drifted down. He had actually used divine power for something this trivial. Once the clothes were neatly dried and smoothed, he held them out to Elias.

“I slept well thanks to you. Thank you. So now, change your clothes.”

Elias met his eyes for a moment, then nodded. He roughly picked out the wet clothes, changed, and sat back down. His friend asked, “But why…? That’s strange. Did they say it was going to rain?”

“It did rain.”

“I’m sure there was nothing about that in the bulletins.”

His friend murmured as he effortlessly retrieved the memory. Elias only smiled and remained silent. How long had they stayed like that? His friend spoke again. Looking out at the bushes visible between the pillars of the temple, he said, “I’ve hardly ever told you much about my own life.”

“Neither have I.”

Realizing that his friend intended to continue what they had been talking about earlier, Elias quickly shook his head, not wanting him to feel indebted in any way. His friend gave a faint smile before speaking again with a calm expression.

“You know that I was tired before. That I was numb, and because of that, I never felt even the slightest need to reach for the future. You even know that when I realized how meaningless everything was, I began shaping my future through you.”

At the words through you, Elias felt an inexplicable warmth of joy well up inside him. He had heard it before, but it still affected him the same way. At the same time, however, the mention of being tired made his heart sink. His friend had spoken of all those negative things in the past tense, implying that he was no longer like that, but Elias had been feeling inexplicably uneasy, and he couldn’t help it. So instead of showing his joy, Elias listened with the same calm expression as his friend.

“But I’ve never told you what I went through to live all those years. In truth, you rarely get the chance to bring up something like that, do you? What happened seven years ago, what happened six years ago, what people were saying about me a year ago—ordinary, unremarkable things that aren’t even interesting enough to talk about. I’ve never thought that a friend had to share the entirety of my burdens with me, either.”

His friend gazed thoughtfully toward the other side of the temple. Elias kept his eyes on him.

“Maybe I was numb from the beginning, just as people said. I suppose it’s simply in my nature. But as far as I can remember, I wasn’t tired from the beginning. Like it happens to so many people, I gradually became that way without even realizing it. Because of days that were so trivial and ordinary they weren’t even worth bringing up. To be more honest, I didn’t even realize I was heading toward the end because of those insignificant things. I only kept asking myself what was wrong with me that I was so tired. In other words, I stood at the center of all those years without knowing anything, just staring blankly ahead. By the time I realized those little acts of shedding weren’t actually insignificant, it was already too late. And yet you figured out where the problem was from nothing more than a vague impression you gathered after looking into me for a brief moment, even though you never watched my life from right beside me.”

He lowered his eyes, thinking for a moment, before continuing.

“And there have always been plenty of people who figured out where my problem was.”

“…I suppose so.”

Elias answered almost as if entranced. His friend nodded.

“Just as you said. Some people criticized me, but many praised me for what they saw as my problem. They never outright told me what I should change or how I should change it, but they advised me on what I needed to fix and how I needed to change if I wanted to fit into this world. And I always took their words to heart.”

There were countless people who thought Elias was strange after seeing his eccentric behavior. There were also quite a few who knew that those eccentricities were connected to matters involving either his uncle or the Imperial Family. Adults who prided themselves on their insight often assumed that Elias, knowing that his mana had made him a threat to imperial authority, had grown unbearably arrogant and was indulging in reckless behavior because of it. After thinking about it for a moment, Elias decided to count even that as a correct answer. He knew that what his friend was talking about now was much the same as what had happened to him in the past.

His friend’s gaze shifted from the empty air back to Elias. It was trembling.

“But you just told me that there was nothing wrong with me.”

Elias, who had been staring blankly, widened his eyes as his mind snapped back to the present. From the moment his friend spoke those words, from the instant his voice and expression reached Elias’s senses, time seemed to slow. No, it felt as though it had stopped altogether. Elias could not tell what expression he had read on his friend’s face. It was a mirror, and in his friend’s face, Elias saw himself. There was no way to put it into words.

“You didn’t become me and live through all those years yourself. You didn’t watch me live my daily life from my side, and you never heard it from me either. And yet you… even after watching the barrage of thoughts that not even I could make sense of, you told me that I wasn’t a strange person.”

Elias finally understood the question his friend had asked earlier.

Were you serious?

The pieces fell into place.

For the first time, Elias found himself curious about the stories from his friend’s past that he had never told him. Yet even without knowing what kind of years his friend had lived through, Elias understood why he had diligently taken notes all this time despite having no need to write anything down. He imagined what must have happened to him to become that way.

The rambling, disorganized nonsense Elias had told him—despite thinking that it would look foolish to go on about his own experiences, he had babbled on anyway because he wanted to ease his friend’s worries—had been the answer all along. His friend had been alone for the same reason Elias had. To live as an outsider for an entire lifetime. That was the source of his exhaustion.

Being close friends didn’t mean understanding everything about each other. Being childhood friends didn’t mean sharing the same feelings about everything that had happened over the years.

Leo and Julia were always there for Elias, steady and dependable in their own way, but that was a different matter. They weren’t being chased by the shadow of death like Elias was. They weren’t ghostlike beings who were there and yet somehow weren’t. They didn’t have to fail exams, nor did they need to learn how to cross mountain streams.

Yes, they would frown at horse racing just as Elias did. They would raise textbook moral questions in the refined yet stern manner of royalty, dressed in their neat uniforms. But they wouldn’t find human likenesses in racehorses driven until their joints gave out with bulging veins in their necks, nor would they throw up everything they’d consumed the day afterward. With a single polite suggestion, they could have every illegal racetrack within their territory dismantled. Elias couldn’t do that.

They did the right thing because it was right, but they did not fight because they understood better than anyone what it meant to have one’s dignity trampled underfoot.

That was why, even when they knew why Elias was absent for weeks at a time, they found it strange. They didn’t know why he received failing grades, why he could climb a tree in an instant, or why he would pour alcohol into his stomach while desperately wishing to get drunk. They didn’t know that every time he spoke in the Prussian manner of speech, he felt as though his throat were tightening.

They knew, but they didn’t know.

They were still Elias’s irreplaceable friends, and without them, Elias wouldn’t be able to live with his sanity intact. He had never imagined a world without his friends. Despite all the differences mentioned before, they were people Elias cherished like his own life—people who understood him. And that was still possible for two reasons.

First, Elias himself didn’t fully understand the private hardships and struggles of his two friends. Second, even if they couldn’t completely understand the roots of each other’s pain, they understood each other’s differences. They loved each other for what they were.

If one could understand everything about someone, then that person would be oneself rather than someone else. And even when it came to oneself, wasn’t it often the case that one couldn’t fully understand oneself?

So surely the friend before him, too, had many sides that he did not share with Elias. Even so, at that moment, Elias felt as though he and his friend were not different people at all. He finally understood what it meant to resonate with someone.

Only then did Elias realize that, for the first time in his friend’s life, he had become the first person to truly understand him. And he realized that, to Elias, his friend was the same.

The days when they had grown close simply because their family circumstances were similar now felt like a dream. The thoughts and resolve they had held at the beginning had long since faded. Elias had met someone who was an outsider at the very core of his being, and so had his friend.

Once again, a shock ran through his entire body.

“You said that you and I are no different from each other, and no different from the people walking down on that street either. To me, saying you wouldn’t revere me or be wary of me meant precisely that.”

Elias felt his friend’s voice slowly sink into his ears.

“So I’m in your debt again. You so willingly give me things I never thought I could even hope for.” He gave a self-deprecating smile. “What am I supposed to do if I get so used to this that I can’t stand on my own without you guys?”

Elias snapped back to his senses at those words. Before he could say anything, his friend rubbed a dry hand over his face and said with a faint, hazy smile, “You’re going to spoil me.”

Elias didn’t know what to say. He was still in shock. His friend, meanwhile, returned to the concern Elias had been wrestling with all this time as he carefully chose his words—the guilt he felt over having read his thoughts without permission—and tried to reassure him.

“I know you tried to choose your words carefully. I was the one who told you that I wished I could show you my life, even if I had to tear out my memories to do it. Even if it was something that could never actually happen, I never said it without meaning it. I was only caught off guard because I didn’t think it would happen today.”

“…….”

“Now that it’s happened like this, I don’t know if the day when I’m ready will ever come.”

Elias looked into his friend’s eyes. His friend didn’t look away either.

“You asked if you could keep calling me the way you always have.”

At the return to the subject Elias had been most nervous to bring up, his ears rang again. His friend smiled, then answered with an unreadable expression.

“Of course. As long as you don’t change your mind, you can. Eli.”

It was an answer Elias should have been happy to hear. And yet, all of a sudden, he remembered the voice from somewhere in the back of his mind wondering if someday everything would return to the beginning. Something inexplicable began to churn inside him.

He’s mistaken. I’m not ready either—not when it comes to what that ‘beginning’ is, now that things have turned out this way. I don’t want to return to some beginning whose nature I don’t even know. And if there has to be a beginning, I want today to be that beginning.

Elias prayed more desperately than ever. He prayed haphazardly to the sky until his vision began to blur, and at some point, he felt the fog in his mind slowly begin to clear. He finished his prayer and smiled. It was time to return.

“All right, Luka.”

Elias crooked up the corners of his mouth and smiled in the way they both knew best. His blue eyes gleamed as he said, “I promise I won’t change.”