There was one fact I could never understand as a child.
Why did other people not know the moment their memories began?
It was the primordial point.
Just as every line begins from a point, the line called life also begins from a single memory. Was it not the origin and root that formed the foundation of a human being?
Had he been an ordinary child, it would have been a difficult question he might have agonized over for quite some time.
Why am I different?
Why can’t everyone else be like me?
But the child harboring such questions was none other than the man who would bear the Empire’s future upon his shoulders.
The Sword Duke, then called the ‘First Imperial Prince,’ quickly came to an understanding.
Ah.
I see.
So these are the ‘ordinary talents.’
He had been born with the most exalted blood on the continent.
Understanding had never even been necessary from the beginning.
It was simply reality as it had already arrived before him, a truth of life he faced again and again.
He merely pitied them.
How dull must a life be when one had forgotten the first moment of wonder they ever felt?
Even now, the Sword Duke could remember it.
The spring breeze that had tickled his skin that day.
The warm sunlight.
Even the voice of the late Emperor, pressing softly against his eardrums.
“This is a sword.”
The weapon in his hands was heavy.
Perhaps because his body had yet to fully grow.
It was so even though his father, the supreme sovereign of the Empire, was personally supporting it for him.
And what of that pale blade?
It seemed as though something invisible wrapped around it.
Like a flower concealing a secret that…