Stone Will

5

The King shook his head—his Kingdom, Lidus, was very small, almost imperceptible on a country map. Maybe that’s why they had to fight so often.

Maybe Elizabeth was right, and Hadjar’s fate was to be a scholar.

At that exact moment, he didn’t know how wrong his wife was or how right his brother was.

Much had changed in Hadjar’s life over the past year. He wasn’t bedridden now, at least. However—that bed had been so multifunctional that it had even massaged him.

And now he was forced to accept the fact that, in the future, he wouldn’t only have to sleep on a cold mattress, with preheated coals in an iron box stuffed underneath for warmth, but also... that he’d have to pee in a wooden outhouse. Upholstered in velvet, decorated with mosaics, but still wooden!

Life hadn’t prepared him for this…

It hadn’t prepared him for the fact that, after his death, he would find himself in another world, either. Fortunately, he wasn’t a farmer, but a Prince. Still, he wasn’t sure about what awaited him in the future. There were some strange rules regarding inheritance and the throne of his country.

“...but our northern neighbor, the Kingdom of Balium,” a white-haired old man was standing near the huge map which covered the entire wall. He delineated the boundaries of different states with a pointer and explained something to the children of the nobles. They were sitting at their desks and sketching something, using feathers to write on scrolls. “... is under the protection of ‘The Black Gates’, and that’s why we’re not at war with them. It would be tantamount to suicide.”

“Record,” Hadjar ordered mentally.

[Processing the request... The request has been processed. The data has been included in the database ‘General information about the world’]

“Why don’t they attack us?” The owner of the surprisingly beautiful eyes and thin wrists raised her hand to ask.

“What could a vassal of ‘The Black Gates’ possibly need from a small kingdom such as ours?”

Hadjar, lurking in the corner of the hall, tried to roll his eyes, but his body didn’t obey him. In addition, it had taken him almost two hours to crawl from his chambers to the hall with the map, where the lessons for future officials and scholars were being held. Not because he’d crawled slowly, he’d just fallen asleep periodically.

The neural network would inform him about his lack of energy, and then he would fall asleep.

Now he understood why babies loved to sleep; crawling a few yards had taken a lot out of him.

“We’re all within the sphere of influence of The Darnassus Empire…”

The first court Scholar continued speaking, but Hadjar was looking at the map greedily. He’d almost fainted when he’d first seen it. His mother had been holding him in her arms at the moment. Admittedly, he’d probably just gone back to sleep, but it didn't matter.

In general, the Palace alone was larger than several city blocks. The city blocks back in his old world, of course. Furthermore, the ceilings were so high and the walls were so long that he often felt his head spin. And the map, sewn from the skins of various beasts, was stretched along the width of the entire marble wall, which looked like the wall of a fortress.

The seams were the mountains, and the veins were rivers. This didn’t mean that barbarians lived in Lidus, just that the map was very old. It was extremely old, even by the standards of the locals: several million years old. And yes, the lifespan of people was abnormally long here.

And so, new areas would be sewn into the map, to honor the memory of the ancestors. Since Hadjar had been a highly educated man, he’d used his knowledge of geometry to calculate that Lidus was three times larger than the Eurasian continent.

Surely, this had to be a huge piece of land, even gigantic, right? But it was impossible to find the Kingdom on the map, at least without using a magnifying glass. It looked like nothing more than a village, and was just a small piece of land in this vast, titanic world.

Even with the help of his neural network, Hadjar couldn’t understand why the day lasted the same 24 hours, on such a different world. He'd lost most of the functions it had. All that was left after his rebirth was the ability to record and play those recordings back, as well as very basic analytical mechanisms.

Still, he wasn’t complaining, since he shouldn’t even have that much.

“Which sect’s sphere of influence is our Kingdom in?” the impudent-looking boy asked.

“That is a very good question,” the Scholar put the pointer down and returned to the Department. “The sects aren’t interested in us for exactly the same reason that the Kingdom of Balium doesn’t attack us. The level of martial arts in our lands is very low. For example, to become just an outer disciple of ‘The Black Gates,’ one should have reached no less than the 8th stage of the Bodily Rivers.”

The students all exhaled at once, and Hadjar gave the neural network an order to record this. The locals had some strange, fetishistic obsession regarding the subject of martial arts, which the local magic had probably been transformed into sometime in the past.

And yet, he still believed that living in a world of might and magic was better than being a ‘vegetable’.

This strange quirk in the evolutionary path of these people could be explained by the fact that war, and the constant struggle for survival in general, were more common here than a trip to the store on a Friday had been, back in his old world.

“And that isn’t even the most difficult part,” the Scholar continued, “it needs to be reached by the time they turn 16, otherwise the cultivator won’t even be accepted.”

A wave of gasps swept through the classroom again, if this room could even be called that.

“I have to remind you that this path of cultivation is a long and winding one. Each disciple begins at the level of the Bodily Nodes, which is divided into nine levels. Then you advance to the level of the Bodily Rivers with its twelve stages. And only after you step over that threshold, which separates the mortal from the cultivator, will you reach the stage of Formation, when you become a cultivator and a part of the world of martial arts.”

All of them were sitting with their mouths wide open in astonishment. They had certainly already known these facts, but the Scholar was able to convey the information in a manner that made the old subject seem very interesting, especially to Hadjar. Every ounce of knowledge was important for him.

“Can anyone tell me at what level a warrior can become a junior officer in our army?”