Immortal's Ascending Path-62
Episode-62< Returned Spring >
After riding west for two days, we reached a field of barley.
Without tall vegetation, the field offered an unobstructed view, tinged with gold as autumn approached. The barley planted in spring had ripened, and the farmers' hands were busy at work on one side of the field.
Roberta, Fritz, and Ulrich passed along the field path, surveying the scenery. It was truly a village with nothing but fields.
Ulrich had said he had business with the former owner of Roslaine, so we left the Duchy of Circap and came to the County of Roslaine, but his horse's head was turned not towards the town where the current owner resided, but towards a manor.
"I entrusted the children here."
Ulrich stopped his horse and spoke.
The children were the Archean and Moira siblings. After losing their birth mother, the two children of the licentious emperor passed through Ulrich and were adopted by a farming couple.
"I heard they were wealthy farmers."
"Indeed. This area was all their land."
"All of it?"
"Hmm," Ulrich made a sound and nodded.
"They may not have had a title, but they were no different from nobles."
Looking at the vast barley field, Roberta clicked her tongue.
Even if they were abandoned children, she thought it was too much to have the imperial children adopted by farmers, but she was mistaken. Considering only the farmland they owned, they were as good as nobles.
"After defeating the Lord of the Dead, that wizard, I told the two children about their birth. Archean immediately went to his father to claim the throne, and Moira followed her brother to help, but soon returned here."
And until her adoptive parents died, she stayed by their side, and Moira inherited her hometown. She received no inheritance from her birth father. That inheritance was given entirely to her brother, and the sister only received the County of Roslaine for her contribution to defeating the Lord of the Dead.
"Even after becoming the Count of Roslaine, she spent most of the year here. It was even more so after the title was passed on to someone else. If she is still alive, she will still be like that now."
Pondering the words 'if she is still alive,' Roberta turned her head. She felt a gaze. There were two people on the hill over there. One was an old woman sitting on a stump with a cane, and the other was a middle-aged woman standing behind the old woman.
To be so relaxed when the harvest was in full swing, judging by their appearance, they were not farmers. Wondering who they were, she tried to take a closer look, but Ulrich continued.
"And that is the house where the children lived back then."
In the middle of the manor, there was a mansion instead of a fortress. It was a stone building and only two stories high, but it was quite large. The wide fence around it was as tall as a person's head. At first glance, it looked like a great noble's villa.
"It doesn't feel very old."
"As time passes, it must have been renovated."
He commented that the overall shape had not changed.
"It seems that nothing has changed since I last saw it."
"You said you haven't been here once since settling in Ditmarsken, right?"
"That's right. It's been half a millennium."
Ulrich drove his horse towards the mansion.
Following behind him, Roberta glanced back at the hill. Had they gone down while she turned her gaze? There was no one on the hill.
#
"What business do you have?"
When we reached the front gate of the mansion, a servant came out and asked our business.
There were no guards. The front gate was wide open, and only several servants were tending the garden between the front gate and the mansion.
"I have come to see the godmother. Is she inside?"
"What is your name?"
"Kirchner, is the name."
Roberta tilted her head at the name.
It was the first time she had heard that name. She thought that if he gave a pseudonym, it would be one of the Eleven Knights, but the name that came out was not the name of the Eleven Knights.
The servant's reaction to the name was the same. After thinking for a while, as if nothing came to mind, he asked us to wait for a moment and went into the mansion. And soon, he returned with a faster pace than when he went in and led the three of us to the drawing room.
An old man with snow-white hair was sitting in the drawing room. Roberta read the bewilderment on his face.
The old man did not tell us to sit down and scanned our faces, and when he heard a whisper from the servant, he fixed his gaze on Ulrich.
"What did you say your name was?"
Suspicion was in his voice.
"I hope to avoid a futile argument. It is meaningless for me to prove myself in this place, or to utter the false name that you and I agreed upon twice, don't you think?"
Ulrich faced the old man calmly.
"I have only come to see Archean's sister, Moira."
Then the old man hesitated and stood up from his seat.
"···Excuse me. My name is Padnan."
Padnan bowed deeply.
"The Count of Roslaine is my older brother. I manage this place on behalf of my brother and serve Lady Moira. I apologize for the inconvenience as I did not expect you to come again, Elder."
"Why did you think I would not come?"
"The last time you came, Elder, was so long ago, and you left as if you would not come again, so I thought so."
"You misheard."
Ulrich shook his head.
"Why wouldn't I come when Moira, that child, is here? As long as that child is alive, I will visit her many times."
He added that he could not promise when.
"Then··· what is the name you are using now, Elder? Should I address you by the same name as last time?"
"Call me Ulrich. Ulrich of Ditmarsken, I am using that name now. Do not use any other name. They may have read your records."
"I understand."
As the group sat down in their respective seats, Ulrich spoke again.
"How is that child doing?"
Padnan hesitated to answer.
"I don't know what you would think, Elder."
"Is there anything unusual I should know?"
"No. There is nothing. In that regard··· she is ordinary."
Ulrich nodded.
"I see."
A moment later, there was a knock, knock, and the door to the drawing room opened.
The two people Roberta knew were standing outside the door. It was the old woman and the middle-aged woman who were on the hill when we walked along the field path.
"I heard we have guests."
The middle-aged woman supported the old woman as she came inside.
"Ah, yes. Greet them."
Padnan introduced the two to Ulrich's group.
"This is my mother, Anna, and this is my younger sister, Miriam."
"Nice to meet you. I am Miriam."
After exchanging greetings, Roberta took a closer look at the old woman. Her face was full of wrinkles. Since she was the mother of an old man with snow-white hair, she looked at least eighty years old.
Also, due to aging, her arms and legs were like the gaunt branches of an old tree, and her eyelids were drooping, making it seem like she could not see well. She had few teeth left, and even her lips were twisted.
But more than anything, what caught her eye was her behavior.
"Sleepy."
The old woman tugged at the middle-aged woman's sleeve, whining.
"Mother, are you tired?"
"Yes. Tired. Want to sleep."
Saliva dripped from her mumbling lips. The middle-aged woman wiped the saliva with a handkerchief and soothed her in a gentle tone, telling her to bear with it a little longer. But the old woman turned her body, saying she didn't want to, and screamed.
"I'm sorry··· my mother is old."
Ulrich nodded.
"It's alright. It's enough to have seen her face, so go in."
The middle-aged woman took the old woman and left the drawing room.
Roberta sat down and recalled the old woman's appearance. It was unmistakably the appearance of a senile old woman who had regressed to infancy.
The old woman did not react even after seeing Ulrich. She acted as if she had never seen him before, or rather, as if she had no interest in the fact that he was in front of her.
'He said she was neither immortal nor immortal.'
Ulrich said that Moira was neither immortal nor immortal, but alive. Could that be what he meant by that appearance? If so, why? Why did she become like that?
In Ditmarsken, an old knight named Rashid poured The Alchemist's Elixir on his son's corpse. As a result, an unnamed parasite devoured his body.
The characteristic of that parasite was its low intelligence. Even as the boy's father became an old man, the worm continued to degenerate in intelligence even as it grew. It was no different from a beast.
Could Moira have gone through a similar process? Could her regression be due to a similar cause as Rashid's son? But she couldn't guess what it was at all.
If it was the same reason, she would have become a demon, so Ulrich would have done something about it, but since he didn't, there was another reason.
"Since when has she been like that?"
"I heard it's been like that since my great-grandfather's time."
Roberta listened to the conversation, touching her dry lips.
"That's only when she lost all her memories. It is recorded that she had virtually no memory of anything even before that."
"That's when it reached its extreme, which is when you mistakenly thought was my last visit. From that time on, there was not a single memory shared between me and that child left. Even though I tried so hard not to forget, in the end, I forgot."
"Still··· at that time, she had many other memories. She led us with those memories."
The old man smiled bitterly, saying that even that was forgotten now.
"She will continue to forget in the future. You wanted to embrace eternity like the Elder, but in the end, all that remains is the body and the records."
"That body is not immortal either. And although she has great talent, she is no different from a mere child unless you teach her."
"Yes. I know. I've seen it myself."
Padnan nodded.
"I have seen her become a child at the end of her aging. I have seen someone who was like a grandmother to me babbling without remembering anything."
"Don't you think it's futile? It will be repeated in the future. As long as your descendants keep that child as they do now, they will witness it generation after generation, don't you have any other thoughts?"
"How could we?"
Roberta felt sadness and respect in the old man's tone.
Although she was a human who had lost her memory and regressed, the years she had lived were close to a thousand, and it had only been about a hundred years since she became like this. Then what did she, who possessed wisdom, do in this land before that?
"The Elder gave the County of Roslaine to our clan, but we have never once thought of ourselves as the owners."
The old man asked who was the one who revived the ruins swept away by the messengers led by the Lord of the Dead.
"Who was the one who brought back the people who had left, cultivated the barren land into fertile land, and bound our clan and neighbors together to maintain peace? The owner of this land has always been Lady Moira. For nearly a thousand years, we have merely been the outer shell for her."
Padnan argued that the current Roslaine County family only started as Moira's servants and remained servants, serving one person for generations.
From the words without a hint of hesitation, Roberta felt a familiarity as if she had heard them many times before.
"A person who has lived for a very long time has taken care of our clan with wisdom and compassion··· would it make sense to have other thoughts just because she has lost her memory and become a child?"
And the source of the emotions that their clan felt was not only because of her wisdom and compassion.
"Above all, she was a mother. She was also a sister and a younger sister. She was not only someone we had to serve and were indebted to, but also an unbreakable relationship as if we were of the same blood."
Ulrich stroked his chin and muttered to himself.
"Sister, younger sister···."
Roberta and Fritz did not say the words out loud, but they both repeated them inwardly. Recalling the old woman's appearance, they wondered how she could be the clan's sister and younger sister.
Was it a metaphor? At first, they guessed so. Just as Ulrich called Moira his godmother, they thought it was an expression of the clan's respect in other words.
"There is a very small jellyfish living in the southern sea."
But it wasn't. As if he had read their thoughts from their expressions, Ulrich said.
"It's called a crimson jellyfish, and under certain conditions, it regresses its body and returns to a young individual. It once gave hope to those seeking immortality."