Tree of aeons 7 an iseka.., p.31
Tree of Aeons 7: An Isekai LitRPG Adventure, page 31
“Okay, not that one,” the swordsmith said. “Something else. Faster.”
The apprentice quickly offered some flowers. The flowers were strangely taken, as they vanished into the sword.
The apprentice handed a pen to the swordsmith, but then he stopped. “Wait. It’s saying something. Wait. It’s ready. Apprentice, wait.”
The swordsmith turned to face the sword and bowed to it. He began to mutter certain words of prayer, and the glowing between the two brightened slightly.
At that moment, the swordsmith picked up a hammer that was on his belt. “I am ready.”
Edna and Ebon watched as the swordsmith’s eyes began to glow, as if he was having an out-of-body experience. They felt some magic flow between the swordsmith and the descendant sword, and the swordsmith just knelt for the rest of the evening, his eyes glowing but his mind clearly not present.
The apprentice held the swordsmith and kept him supported during the rest of the evening. Edna and Ebon watched, and Edna felt the subtle shifts in the sword during this entire time. Sometimes it got stronger; sometimes it turned weaker.
Maybe it wasn’t the perfect outcome, but in the depths of night, the glow between the two vanished, and the swordsmith returned to his body thoroughly exhausted. The sword landed back on the altar. “Water.”
The apprentice ran with two large mugs that the swordsmith finished in two big gulps. At that point, the apprentice asked, “How did it go, Master?”
“I—I think I did decently. Let’s check the sword. Help me up.” The swordsmith’s body was kneeling the entire evening, so the apprentice helped him up. The two walked to the sword to inspect it.
The swordsmith looked at it, a little frustrated.
“Ah. It’s not much different from what it was. I thought I did better.”
The man took a deep breath and prayed anyway.
“Let’s make a scabbard for the sword tomorrow.” The man left the blade on the altar and took a good rest.
The next few days, the man made a relatively elaborate scabbard, and then Edna and Ebon watched the two swordsmiths present their completed weapons to the town lord.
The town lord inspected the weapons and didn’t seem too impressed.
Despite that, he said nothing of it and just thanked the two swordsmith for their work. One of the lord’s treasurers paid the two for their services and sent them away.
The two infiltrators didn’t just leave it as that and stayed back to listen to their honest assessment.
“It’s average. Good enough for knights, but not something that could replace this.” The town lord tapped a sword on his belt, also a hero-descendant sword. Edna noticed almost everyone in the lord’s personal knights possessed a sword of similar category.
The lord’s knight commander nodded, as it was now his turn to inspect the weapon. “It’ll be good enough for the newly promoted knights, but this does mean we can only promote two new knights this year.”
“Two will have to do, then,” the lhe lord declared to his men. “Let the remaining squires compete for the post.”
Ebon and Edna left the two to explore another bigger town.
Caval’s towns were all spread far apart, and the farms were fairly clustered. One of the primary causes of the high density and clustering was because of the hero swords.
A town without a hero sword was no town.
There were smaller villages, but these were often linked to a larger town that regularly sent knights to protect them from the monsters. In between all the towns and cities were plenty of untamed forests and mountains and monster lairs.
On a macro level, this fed into the myth of the Knights of Caval. Knight would set out to slay the monsters, defend their cities from the dark creatures.
According to the reports, the largest towns generally correlated to the strength of their hero swords. Stronger hero swords attracted more people to live under its protection, since the powerful hero swords created stronger descendant swords and stronger knights.
The hero swords were like fruit trees. Each hero summoned to Caval started with a sword seed, which grew into his personal sword. It was this sword that became a hero sword when he died or when he gave it away. It was said that a hero could create a new hero sword if he gave one away, but there was some kind of price to be paid. Details were fairly scarce, since most of the drunk knights only regurgitated tales from their travels, the stories brought by travelers and merchants or whatever their lords told them.
The next city they arrived at didn’t display the hero sword out in the open. Instead, it was hidden deep in the city’s keep. The city lord styled himself a king, though it seemed that no one dared to speak up to the king, since he didn’t have the [King] class, and instead only had a [Lord] class. The city never had a [King] in its history, but at some point, the System could recognize it as true and would convert the city lord’s title into a [King].
Edna and Ebon weren’t particularly interested in the city’s politics, as their focus was learning about the details of the hero sword and how they worked.
The world of knights and their glorious accomplishments didn’t spread on their own, and instead, it was the traveling bards and songstresses who amplified the knight’s glories.
The relative ratio of armed warriors to non-warriors was quite low compared to the other worlds, simply because a knight that had a descendant sword could do the work of ten soldiers against the monsters. Due to the limited nature of these swords, Caval’s towns and cities valued quality over quantity. The largest amount in any city were the squires. Squires who were soldiers in training but had yet to receive their descendant swords.
Even in a city with twenty thousand to fifty thousand people, there were only about two thousand actual squires, and about one hundred to two hundred knights. On the other worlds, the military’s strength was at least three to five times the number.
High-leveled knights who were Level 60 to 80 and outfitted with the descendant swords could slay demon champions. It was a virtuous feedback loop, where a small number of strong warriors slaying demons and monsters meant less sharing of experience, which created even stronger warriors.
This specialization also meant there was more resources and manpower for more artistic pursuits and specializations. Bards, woodworkers who made a range of instruments, farmers, brewers, the priest-smiths, and many other kinds of frivolous entertainment.
Here in one such larger city, that was in full display.
Taverns with beers, dancers, singers, and bards were all over the main street. It was common in Caval that the temples and the workshops were often located next to each other. The priests of this world prayed to a range of gods, and unlike the other worlds, Caval’s temples worshiped a pantheon of gods. Hawa, Neira, and Gaya. The Cavalians referred to these gods as the Three Swords of Gods, and they often prayed to all three together as Three.
“She’s around here.” Ebon reached a quiet home located in the workshop district of the city. It was a small, slender home that was probably once a workshop, but the workshop was now replaced with a small garden of flowers. Walls replaced with open windows for the sun.
Their goal was an old priestess and a great sword whisperer. In her youth, the rumors claimed she made powerful descendant swords. But mainly, because she was really old, and thus knew things many didn’t.
Ebon checked. “She’s inside.”
“Got it.” Edna knocked on the door. “Let’s go.”
“Hello, we’re looking for Priestess Shuwan.”
“I’m not a priestess anymore,” the old woman responded.
Edna grinned. “Then we’re looking for Shuwan. We wish to speak to her.”
“Come in.” The former priestess’s home was clean, and well-lit with ample sunlight from the large windows. The living room was fairly narrow, but it didn’t feel that way. Two of the walls were decorated with scabbards, their swords nowhere to be found. “Sit, sit. Do you want some tea? What can this old woman do for you?”
Edna and Ebon smiled, and Edna started. “That would be nice, but we’re here to learn about the past and the hero swords that are all over our world.”
Shuwan smiled, brewed a pot of hot tea, and sat down on the table with three cups. Ebon quickly helped her pour the tea.
“Oh? You want my story?”
“Yes,” Edna said.
“That’s probably the third time someone ever asked, and in the first two times, it was a hero. Are you a hero?” Shuwan smiled.
Edna smiled back and shook her head. “No.” Most of these worlds didn’t have an appreciation of the truth and history. They were busy surviving year over year, and even when they did create documents about history, it often spoke about the glories and achievements of their cities, kings, lords, and knights. Things about the nature of hero swords would be mentioned in passing, but not much attention was given to them. The swords were how things had been, and how things were, and how things would be.
Someone like Shuwan with her long history knew and had seen a lot of things, and interestingly, it was only people like heroes that would think about speaking to someone like her.
The woman was old, and at almost three hundred years old, it was probably the limit of her level-extended lifespan.
“And if you’re not the hero, why should I tell you?” Shuwan said.
Edna smiled. “What would it take for us to hear the truth?”
Shuwan found that funny and nodded. “I jest. I’m an old woman happy to talk about my past. Too bad few want to listen and many have long forgotten who I once was. Where should we start?”
“What are the hero swords?”
“It is what you know. They are the remains of the heroes’ journey. Each hero arrives in our world with a seed, which with their nurturing grows into a powerful weapon. Depending on the Three Swords’ blessings, the swords gain different types of powers. When I traveled with the hero Yoru so many, many years ago, he would visit each old hero sword and he would then imprint a memory of that hero sword into his own. The old heroes gain a wide variety of powers, because they can summon the swords they have met during their journey to aid them.”
“You traveled with the hero?” Edna asked.
“Yes! I traveled with two heroes, actually. Yoru, when I was a young woman, and later Zahar, when I was an older priestess of the sword,” Shuwan said proudly. “But it’s an old story, that was…maybe two hundred years ago. Back when the three or four heroes arrived and I was the one chosen by the lord to accompany the hero and provide my wisdom.”
“But why?” Edna asked. She knew why, but she wanted to hear it from her.
“Heroes need knowledge. They need company. They need someone to be there for them, care for them, and love them,” Shuwan said frankly. “They are fragile men and women, and even if they have strong powers, the temples know they must be cared for, and the temple… Well, the temple wanted children from the heroes.”
“Oh. Did you have any?”
Shuwan smiled. “Yes! My grandson’s now the knight commander of the city! Of course, the hero’s blood is a little diluted, but still!”
“But why?”
The former priestess laughed. “Why else? Our children can draw more out of the heroes’ descendant swords.”
“Ah.” Edna chuckled. “So these hero swords, what else do you know about them? What’s something we don’t know?”
“Hah. Such a hero-way of asking questions, I’d almost think you came from their world.” Shuwan laughed but talked anyway. “The heroes—well, Zahar—gave away one of his hero swords when he was Level 90 or so, just because he saw a village that was really vulnerable and wanted to protect them. So he planted his hero sword there and then.”
“Must a hero plant the sword?”
“Not always. That’s what I’m for, as well. If the hero falls in battle, I’ll retrieve his hero sword. The hero swords actually contain a fragment of their being, a part of their soul, and it resonates better with me than anyone else because I was their companion on the journey. The companion is always a priest-smith, because we can work with the sword he left behind. We can speak to it, better than anyone else.”
But eventually, they too died, and so lesser smiths must learn to pick up the slack.
“Is it always a girl?” Edna wondered.
“Not always. A man is fine, as long as the two have a strong friendship. Sending a woman to be a hero’s companion has its challenges, since a woman may find the hero less appealing and there’s a lot of complicated feelings that don’t make us a good companion. I was lucky that I liked the two heroes I was assigned to, but it’s not always the case. Romance and love aren’t necessary. All that is needed is a strong connection that the hero sword inherits. Are you two trying to be the next hero companion? There should be a demon king in another five or so years, but it’s hard to say whether there will be a hero.”
Edna just nodded. “You can say that.”
“Ah. Hopefully they send more than one. It rarely ends well with only one hero,” Shuwan said with a sigh.
“So a hero can create a second hero sword?” Edna tried to redirect the discussion back to the earlier question. “Why not create more? The world clearly has space for many more.”
“Each new hero seed costs levels—five to ten levels of the hero’s [Hero] class, and the new hero sword starts from scratch,” Shuwan said.
“Starting from scratch?” Edna asked. “Do the hero swords have levels?”
“Yes!” The old woman smiled. “They are special like that. They are a part of the hero, and so each hero gains two sets of levels. One for himself, and one for his sword. Once given away, they stopped growing, the swords transformed into the objects you see out there, but they gained some other abilities to protect their new home.”
Edna’s mind immediately thought of Aeon’s idea of creating a living weapon. That was possible with a titan soul, but here, the hero’s sword was doing something else altogether.
“Do you think we can do something similar? A living weapon that’s so powerful that we could use it on the demon Sun-Rings?” Edna asked. “Something that outlasts even the heroes.”
If the hero swords were living weapons, then the natural idea was for a hero from Caval to gain power across many, many worlds to create a super-hero sword. Or whether they could make something with a titan soul, and push the living aspect to its limits by cobbling multiple titan soul–like weapons together.
“This makes this world a dilemma for us. If we stop hero summons, we’re fulfilling our end of the bargain, but we wouldn’t be able to experiment with the heroes,” Edna said. “I’m being a little selfish, but I really want to see what it’s like to have these living swords pushed to the limits. Could they be more powerful than the heroes themselves?”
“Then we should let Aeon know to just hold off on this world. I think we could afford a delay to our plans?” Ebon wondered. “Skipping one cycle is what, ten or twenty years? Aeon could wait that long, no problem.”
Edna agreed. “Aeon won’t be the problem. Time is hardly a concern for him, and waiting a decade more or two is indeed nothing. I am more concerned with my peers. Would my peers be willing to hold off for twice as long? Alka may be on my side, since he’s willing to experiment, but will Stella let me do this? Are we playing with the lives of my fellow warriors?”
“We could let the demon king appear but don’t kill it? Leave it incapacitated and allow the summoning of heroes to trigger?”
“Agreed. That’s possible with Lumoof’s powers and my swords. Now, I’ll have to convince the rest of my domain holders to hold on for a little longer.”
YEAR 280
“Hawa, how long do we have to wait if we plan to hold off on rescuing one of the worlds?” Lumoof asked the object in his hand. Edna’s encounters with the hero swords made me wonder whether we could replace it with another world.
There was silence at first.
“If it’s one world, perhaps another five years, so all in, you may have to wait and hold these worlds for up to thirty-five years before I gather enough faith points.”
Thirty-five years. In a way, that wasn’t a bad amount of time, since we could reinforce our hold on these peripheral worlds and replenish the strength of the Valtrian Order and Valthorns. Thirty-five years was enough for one to two generations of new warriors to join our ranks.
Though a part of me wondered whether it was enough to attack the demons, I realized that at this moment, it didn’t matter. We’d just have to get ready. If we were not, we would take a step back and rebuild.
“Do you have domain holders under you?” Lumoof asked.
“Yes. A few, they care for some of my Core worlds. They serve as my voice to my people.”
“What do you do if they get too strong?”
“Why would they? It gets progressively harder to get stronger under the old system, and they would have to constantly seek out battles. My Core worlds are safe. They do not get invaded by the demons frequently.”
Ah. It was so easy to plateau, and I noticed this, too, even in my domain holders. There was always a point where progress seemed incredibly slow. Years passed by without a level gained.
Even for me, my level gains had been so slow that I hadn’t expected more levels unless I did something big. The last significant gain I had was during the demons’ comet. So far, our expeditions to the peripheral worlds hadn’t led to many levels for me.
“Have you started to save up some faith points?”
“Yes. It will take some time, but faith points accumulate slowly over the years.”
“Yet you do not want to send your priests and prophets to these worlds to convert them to your faith?”
“Distant worlds generate the least amount of faith points. I much prefer to create new planets in my Core realms and populate them with even more believers. There is more progress that way.”
