Chapter 243: Flowers

Having returned to the Empire from Prozen, I made the rounds of studios and ateliers across the Empire.

Artists I had personally recruited for the stage of the World Expo. Though in the history before my Regression most of them had fled into exile to escape the Empire’s oppression, or only returned and saw the light after its collapse, in this life I would claim their genius before anyone else could.

“I’m Max Riefenstahl.”

The middle-aged sculptor introduced himself, chisel in hand, and offered his own.

“I hear you’re a Max as well. We share a name, then.”

An artist with an eccentric temperament. The moment he called me Max, the staff members’ faces stiffened, but I responded gently.

“Yes. A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Riefenstahl.”

I clasped his rough hand. Riefenstahl’s eyebrows lifted, as if my reaction had caught him off guard.

Honestly, it makes no difference to me. As long as it isn’t Ezenheim, anything is fine. For an artist, this much ego could even be called a necessity. And Riefenstahl has talent enough that the attitude is no bluff.

“Only ever had fellows coming around borrowing your name. I figured I’d never lay eyes on the man himself.”

“I couldn’t allow that.”

Right now, of course, Max Riefenstahl was an artist known only to those in the know. But in the not-so-distant future, sculpture would fuse with Mana Stone engineering, with magic and morphology, and blossom into an enormous industry.

In my memories from just before I was thrown in prison, Max Riefenstahl had been a luminary the entire continent looked up to.

“Hm. I’ve done some carving to suit your commission, at any rate.”

He pulled away the cloth.

─Swish.

A still-unfinished stone statue was revealed.

It was an aesthetic standing at the polar opposite of Pablo Sobakin’s contorted abstraction.

The grain of taut, straining muscle, as if a human trapped inside the marble were trying to walk out on his own. Tendons that seemed ready to pulse at any moment. Skin that made you forget it was stone.

A weight bordering on the divine, as if it pressed down upon the very space around it.

“The problem is time. It’s far too short. Two months is no more than the blink of an eye.”

“That’s all right. It can be exhibited after the opening. Even if completion drags on longer still, that doesn’t matter either.”

I looked up at his marble statue. Within it seemed to dwell the majesty of an Empire slowly rising to its feet, the ground-tremor of a war not far off.

“Sometimes an unfinished aesthetic endures longer than a finished one. All you need to show us is the will carried in your fingertips……”

…….

The next person I met was a man holding a camera.

His name was Lenny Rand. His workshop, reeking of every kind of developing fluid, was cluttered with thousands of strips of film and unfamiliar video media stacked in disarray.

“Would it…… be all right if I photographed you, Sir Knight?”

He asked permission cautiously from the very start, and I gladly nodded.

“Thank you! I swear, these will never be taken outside!”

Lenny captured me through his lens as I strolled between the shadow and light of the workshop.

“Right now I’m working out how to capture the Expo on film, how to make it even better. I’ve also finished interviewing the artists who’ll be taking part.”

As he spoke, he carefully brought out a large cylinder wrapped in gold foil.

“And, Sir Knight! Look at this. Color film, obtained thanks to you. It can clothe the footage in true color. Very expensive, and difficult to produce, though.”

I planned to leave behind a film recording the Empire’s greatness at the World Expo.

It would become, in effect, the progenitor of the medium that would one day be called the ‘documentary’.

“It’s fine. A single moment of color will be enough.”

I gazed at him through the lens and added.

“Color only needs to appear in that one instant when light cleaves the space apart. The rest can be in black and white.”

If anything, that would sear the beauty of the moment into memory like an eternity.

…….

The last place I visited was the mansion of the master, Richard.

He was an old man already enshrined as a legend in the Empire’s musical world.

“A piece to be performed at the Expo, is it.”

Richard let out a short chuckle, pipe clamped between his teeth.

“Yes. I’ve come to request chamber music to drift softly through the Expo grounds, along with the Empire’s national anthem.”

What I meant to ask of him was to rearrange the Empire’s anthem into something more sacred, more majestic.

“Nothing difficult about that. It’ll give me an excuse for a little travel, too.”

Whooo…… He exhaled a stream of smoke and asked in return.

“So then, what form of performance do you want, young man?”

A sound that would stop people’s hearts in the moment the pillars of light carved out their place in the sky.

Music is the finest means of elevating the human spirit, and that was why I had sought out this seasoned master.

“On the World Expo’s opening day, we’ll bring in a full orchestra. Please call in everyone who has worked in step with you all these years, Sir Richard.”

“……I’ll need a more detailed explanation. The shape of that venue matters.”

“Yes. First, the musicians will sit in the darkness of the hall. Hidden from the audience’s eyes.”

Richard’s gaze lingered in the air for a moment.

He seemed to be picturing my words.

“The sound will travel through a Mana Stone Amplification Device and spread across the entire Expo grounds. To the hundreds of thousands standing in the plaza, it will sound as though the whole space has become a single instrument, resonating.”

Dozens of orchestral instruments would fill the air, riding the resonance of the Mana Stones.

Music whose source no one could place would soon be indistinguishable from a melody descending from the heavens.

“What I wish is for those notes to reach the sky.”

The key was, ‘as if they reach the sky’.

The pillars of light and the sound, shooting upward as one— that is the illusion every last person gathered there had to be tricked into seeing.

“Hmmm…….”

Richard fell silent for a moment, pipe still in his mouth.

Then a smile spread across his face, as if welcoming a worthy challenge for the first time in years.

“……An interesting commission. Very well, I’ll do it.”

He nodded, his face turned boyish.

…….

Afterward, in the car on the way home, I picked up my pen.

─Scratch. Scratch.

I write sentences.

Perhaps an art of my own, drawn from the inspiration of artists across the continent, the Empire included. What I am setting down this time is not knowledge from the future.

I have always sculpted the present by borrowing, or stealing, knowledge from before my Regression.

But Pablo’s brush, Riefenstahl’s chisel, Lenny’s camera, Richard’s staff paper, those belong to them and them alone.

Then what is mine?

……Slaughter?

Listening to the pen tip scratch across the paper, I write something that is wholly my own.

What these drafts, no, these scribbles too crude even to call drafts, will remain as for posterity, I cannot say.

Philosophy, literature, edification, garbage, or perhaps a loser’s last testament.

─Scratch. Scratch.

Only, these days, I somehow feel I have to keep writing without end.

Because inside me live thoughts that devour one another.

─Scratch. Scratch.

The calculus of killing humans for humanity’s sake, and the faces that catch in the pit of my chest each night even as I stand certain of that calculus.

The conclusion that the Empire must be made to win, and the eyes that know better than anyone what that Empire truly is.

A hatred for Ezenheim of the purest grade, and the people who must inevitably be sacrificed to kill it.

Fingertips that had wavered, just for a moment, before them.

─Scratch. Scratch.

I have my justification, and I have my cause. There is a purpose that must be achieved, without fail.

But it does not resolve itself so easily.

It is hard to cut away clean, like a blade would.

That is why I write.

Because unless I pin it down in ink, it is a muddy torrent that will one day swallow me from within.

Scratch. Scratch…….

And then, when I arrived at the mansion.

A pack of Imperial Guard bastards was waiting for me.

* * *

“You must be terribly busy with Expo preparations. Our apologies.”

Imperial Guard Colonel ‘Gehimann’ and two Majors. Once inside the mansion, they walked the corridor glancing about in every direction. There was something oddly peculiar about the looks on their faces as they took in the interior.

“It’s fine. I assume it’s official business.”

This is a space that reflects my aesthetic sensibility in full.

I may not look it, but I am a man who came from the future, and so this mansion holds the essence of an aesthetic not yet born.

“Hm……”

“Mmm……”

The Guardsmen’s eyes rolled about as if appraising the place.

The nobles of this era love ornamentation to the point of excess, love lavish furniture. They consider it an aesthetic to fill a space without leaving a single gap.

The Imperial Guardsmen, steeped in that same extravagance, had no doubt obsessed over nothing but gilding and adornment all their lives.

“But Sir Knight, this is somehow……”

The scene apparently defied their expectations entirely; they picked their words with visible bewilderment.

“Ah, are you in the middle of redoing the interior? It seems the furniture hasn’t all arrived yet.”

It was a question posed with some effort not to give offense.

I answered with a faint smile.

“No. The interior is quite finished.”

“Er…….”

Their eyes swept the space once more.

White walls plastered smooth, without a single decorative molding. The only thing dividing those walls was the shadow of calculated straight lines.

The floor, black stone with its seams erased. With every step, the grain of the stone caught the light in a low sheen.

There was hardly any furniture to speak of. A few chairs a craftsman had spent months carving for the curvature of a single backrest, a solid-wood table born into its form, and by the door, one nameless white porcelain vase.

“Filling is far too easy. Anyone can do it, so long as they have greed.”

I led them to the center of the drawing room.

“What’s difficult is casting away.”

They still wore looks of utter incomprehension.

Naturally. This is a sensibility far too ahead of its time.

But the ‘real thing’ will, in the end, look beautiful even to the eyes of an old era.

As we stepped deep into the drawing room, a waiting servant soundlessly slid aside a wooden panel that covered an entire wall.

The wall vanished.

A single sheet of glass had replaced an entire wall. Beyond that transparent boundary, its pillars and frames pared to the barest minimum, a snow-covered garden and a winter sky hung like a painting without a frame.

Whooosh……

The afternoon sunlight poured deep into the room, filling every corner of the empty space that had seemed so barren.

The white walls were a canvas receiving the ever-shifting angle of the declining sun. Across the stone of the floor, the shadows of tree branches were cast and swayed.

“Only by casting away do we make room for light, shadow, and the seasons to enter.”

A scene redrawn anew with every passing moment, a view that was, in the truest sense, like a painting.

The Guardsmen’s mouths slowly fell open.

“This is how a space is completed.”

I took the seat of honor and gestured with my eyes.

“Please, sit.”

The Guardsmen swallowed dryly and carefully took their seats. Before long, a covetousness that went beyond admiration had crept into their eyes.

Guard bastards are loose-lipped and quick-tongued by nature. Big on showing off, greedy for much, and experts at envying what belongs to others. Plenty of them live for nothing but envy.

The scene they saw today would no doubt spread through their circles in no time.

Which was also part of why I had bothered to show them this drawing room.

To tell them to try living with a little emptiness, instead of all that pointless luxury.

“Er, Sir Knight. If it isn’t too much of an imposition, might we take a few photographs? I’d dearly like to show this view to the Major General as well…….”

The Major fidgeted with the camera hanging at his neck. I gave a small laugh and allowed it.

“This drawing room only.”

“Yes! Of course! Thank you. Truly, it’s just so beautiful…….”

The shutter clicked several times.

Develop those and send me copies- print a few dozen- good thing you brought that camera- I listened to them chatter among themselves for a while, then brought the mood back down.

“So what did you come to say? I doubt you’re here for a house tour.”

Only then did the Guardsmen come to their senses, their expressions hardening stiff.

“……Sir Knight. Have you, by any chance, heard of the ‘Blue Rose Society’?”

* * *

One month before the World Expo’s opening.

“The air’s poor down here, being underground, so perhaps a mask at least……”

“I’m fine.”

Guided by the Imperial Guard, I descended into the underground prison.

A space of nothing but rusted iron, without a trace of aesthetics.

“To continue where we left off. Why ‘blue rose’, even we don’t know, but…….”

The ‘Blue Rose Society’.

Their beginning was Zestfall.

A group founded by intellectuals, university students, and scholars, styling itself the so-called conscience of the Empire. Seditious seeds advocating freedom and equality from within the Empire itself.

Truly, Zestfall is such a problem city.

“Here it is.”

[Evidence Storage Room]

Creeeak. The Colonel opened the steel door to the evidence room.

“Take a look. Leaflets the Blue Rose bastards scattered everywhere. There’s an ungodly amount of them, truly.”

Across the table lay the collected printed materials in a heap.

I picked one up.

[ What is an Aran? Does being Aran give one the right to persecute others? ]

Sentences denying Aran Supremacism, opposing discrimination, championing equality, and asking, ‘Do you not fear the judgment of history?’

They aren’t wrong. In fact, it’s the height of moral correctness.

But crying out such morals in the face of the reality before us is nothing but the act of a moron with a head stuffed full of flowers.

“Did you call me here just to show me these scraps of paper?”

“Ah, well…… in truth, a prime suspect has already been identified.”

“Identified?”

“Yes.”

I sat down in a chair set to one side of the evidence room.

“His personal file.”

I skimmed the documents the Colonel handed over.

The person in the photograph was a young man.

A face shedding the look of a university student, growing into a scholar in his own right.

“Joshua, son of the Zestfall University Chancellor.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

So the man has backing, and they want me to crush him with rank, is that it?

Catching the meaning in my gaze, the Colonel cleared his throat.

“Ahem. The truth is…… the man’s custody already rests with Sentinel.”

My brow twitched.

“Sentinel?”

“Yes. Knight Julian Ascar. You know him, of course?”

Julian.

The moment I heard the name, memories from before my Regression, of the connection between the Blue Rose Society and Julian, flashed through my mind.

“……In truth, this happened while you were away in Prozen, Sir Maximilian. Georgen secured a witness to the leaflet scattering first, and the investigation proceeded properly toward an arrest, but.”

The Colonel continued, straining to hide his discomfort.

“Knight Julian took transfer of the suspect’s custody, all but snatching him from our hands.”

“And by ‘snatching’ you mean?”

“……He invoked his ‘Detention Authority’.”

The authority Senior Knight Adria had once wielded wrongly, costing her her place in Sentinel, and the one I myself had used during the「Brain-Eater」incident, shouldering enormous risk.

Ah, of course, Detention Authority these days doesn’t carry the weight it did back then. Sentinel’s authority has swelled in proportion to my every step forward.

Nowadays even a knight like Hannah can pull it out once or twice a year.

“For the moment, Knight Julian appears to be conducting the investigation alone, but…….”

Watching for my reaction, the Guardsman held out one more leaflet.

“Look at this one. It openly denigrates your book,「Under the Moonlight」.”

Drawn on it was a mocking caricature, a hideous lampoon of me, Maximilian.

Not under the moonlight, but some pig-bastard grabbing a great moon shaped like a Mana Stone and stuffing it down its gullet. A pig with golden hair and golden eyes. And even a silver longsword strapped across its back.

“…….”

An attempt to drive a wedge? Or do the Guard bastards genuinely want the culprit caught, and are putting me out front to do it?

Well, either way, it doesn’t matter.

“A man who needs killing, then.”

The Guardsman’s face brightened in an instant.

“……Yes, yes! That’s exactly what I’m saying, Sir Knight!”

The Blue Rose Society.

These people within the Empire who speak of conscience, peace, and equality do nothing to serve humanity’s cause.

Regrettably, they are the group that must be sacrificed first of all.

Because their ideals are the kind humanity can only afford to emulate ‘after victory’.

“I will go meet Knight Julian myself.”

So the sooner they were cut away, the better it would be for the Empire, and for Julian as well.

~~~

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