Blade and Poetry

In view of Karajan’s caution when he offered me a “gift” before, I wrote the letter in a proper manner this time, and put the letter into the mailbox outside the office door under his smiling gaze.

There are two or three days left before the summer vacation, and I don't know exactly what he plans to do, so I cleared the schedule after class for this day and waited for his reply.

"Come straight to me when the sun is about to go down." His reply was, "I'll take you somewhere."

He took me to a remote grassy slope in a free world.It is far away from the surrounding buildings, and the weeds are about an inch high. Looking around, they stretch very vigorously.

"Have all your old wounds healed?"

At first I wondered if he had seen the part where I was dueling Coleman, but after thinking about it, he didn't ask that.

"The bandages have been removed, nothing serious."

"Ok."

He asked me to sit down on the grass slope, but he didn't sit down; he stood in front of me with his arms folded, and the moonlight fell on his shoulders.

"I didn't plan to give you this gift. Even if you showed your intention to quit once, I can tell myself that you are satisfied with the status quo and grateful for this rare lenient part of fate, so you don't want extravagant things anymore. The so-called ultimate. But the last time you said: 'It's the desire to get it all your life'." He said, a shadow fell under his eyelids, "I can fulfill you—maybe the only one who can fulfill you. "

I quickly understood what he meant, but I was still so stunned that I couldn't believe it: "What is the gift you are talking about—what you are going to give me?"

"A knife of your own," Karajan said.

My heart was beating wildly, like a person with a disabled limb who finally encountered a miracle and learned that he could be grafted.But this ecstasy was quickly overshadowed by a sense of anxiety: I thought of the losers who followed each other in the books I read.

"Is there a price for this?" I watched him look at me and couldn't help repeating eagerly, "Is there a price for you to do this?"

"My price..." He suddenly smiled, "You have to pay the price, Vicente, the price of becoming a 'standard' swordsman."

The pale golden knife appeared in his palm.

"You can think of it as some kind of lost secret method, you can practice it with the blood of the swordsman running in your body. The odds of success and failure are fifty-fifty. When you succeed, you get what you want, with certain inevitable imperfections , but compared to the results, it is enough to ignore; if you fail, you have to die for it.”

He spoke this passage very fluently, as if he was stating a poem he knew by heart.

"Okay." I said, suppressing the trembling in my voice.

He suddenly half-kneeled in front of me, and said word by word: "After the beginning, no matter what I do, don't be surprised. Concentrate on sorting out the fast influx of magic power and physical pain, lead it into your heart, and then lead it into your heart." Limbs. There are only two options: 'everything goes well' and 'death after collapse', and only you can stop the latter. I taught you a special way to run magic more effectively when using a knife, remember to follow it."

Seeing that I seemed to want to say something more, he stopped me from continuing, and then got up and walked behind me.

I saw Asakusa spreading freely downwards in front of me, and his shadow overlapped mine, stretching toward that direction.

From the moment we met, Karajan seemed to be doing his best to be nonchalant, turning a conversation into a one-sided admonition.Until now, when I couldn't see his expression, his voice was mixed with that indescribable gentleness again.

"Don't move, control yourself," he whispered behind me. "If your wish needs a stepping stone so much, let me make it happen for you."

The fingers of his right hand went to the front and unbuttoned my shirt.

The summer wind blew my clothes to the corners following his movements.My chest was suddenly exposed to the coolness of the air, and before I could open my eyes wide, I felt a sharp pain in my chest, and a sharp thing colder than the wind penetrated deep into my body.

I looked down and saw a familiar pale gold short knife slanted into my left chest, and Karajan's pale left hand was holding it on the handle.

Karajan grabbed my shoulders from behind so that I wouldn't tremble too much.

I felt the blood was flowing slowly along the painful place, but at the same time, there was a huge magic power pouring in with a posture that was not inferior to it.They collided against each other's momentum, as if they were being repaired at the same speed while encroaching and destroying.

The methods he taught me were awakened like instinct, which was originally to solve the magic overload.I used all my strength to gather the magic power to the heart, and then let it flow down to the veins in my body.My skin was as cold as frozen lime.But the inside was extremely hot, and there was even the sound of bursting blood vessels in the auditory hallucination.I feel as if I have been transformed into a dilapidated house, full of holes and cracks, constantly being pulled by the wind and rain, struggling to keep the walls up;

Karajan didn't say a word the whole time, and all I could feel was his hand on my shoulder.When at last I was so dizzy that I nearly fell, head shaking, I could still see the hilt of the knife in my chest, and the firm hand that held it tightly.

I don't know why, but the knife seems a little short to my eyes - I think according to its original length, it could have pierced me through...

"The last step." I heard a voice in my ear, "Vincent Xiao, keep going!"

I woke up suddenly and found that I was leaning on Karajan, with my head drooping in the socket of his shoulder, and my brow was covered with cold sweat.

"The last step." He probably sensed my moment of sobriety and repeated.

Then the knife in my chest was jerked out.

A large amount of blood spurted out with this action, but the wound was healing at a speed visible to the naked eye.I can't explain how it works, maybe some kind of healing magic is at work, maybe... a miracle?

Too much magic buzzed excitedly inside me, circling endlessly in my limbs.They finally all rushed towards my left hand.I instinctively spread my palms.It seems that something is gradually condensing above it.

"Hold it!" Karajan yelled behind me, his voice low, but I thought it was hoarse. "Release it!"

At this time, I don't need him to speak more clearly, and I know what to do.

Something hot and heavy fell on my hand, and I saw the reflection of the back of the knife under the moonlight; there was a golden shiny line on the knife body, extending from the blade to the tip.All the magic power was poured into it through my hand, along that line, and finally a golden-red light exploded at the tip of the knife, as if a ball of fire burst out vigorously.It was sprayed into the air and turned into small golden-red petals.

I stared blankly at them, or rather its appearance, dazzled.

"This is—" I found that my voice was not much better than Karajan's, "—is it a flower? My soul of the sword..."

"No." Karajan seemed to cough lightly.Those fluttering petals seem to be extremely light, floating in mid-air and slowly falling down.

He pulled me up vigorously without hesitation, clamped me by his side when my center of gravity was still unstable and shaky, and quickly moved away from the original place after a few vertical leaps.

Karajan took me all the way to the roof of a certain building by using several raised structures on the building in the free world.I saw his pale complexion under the moonlight, and followed his gaze, looking down at the place we came from.

The petal-shaped things of the knives from which I was born were falling to the lower ground, and finally a small piece in the middle of them touched the ground first.

At that moment, a raging wildfire engulfed the spreading grass.As more petals fell to the ground, the fire grew bigger and bigger, and the fire reflected half of the sky on the wasteland red, making it a color between orange-red and pink; the dense weeds gradually withered in the fire, until Turned into a pool of ashes.But in that seemingly destructive fire, another vegetation was growing.They sprang upwards, blooming golden-red flowers, and within half a second they were burned in the fire—continuously being burned into a mass of floating ash, and constantly growing and blooming again, one moment of death represents another moment of new life .

"I should have known," Karajan whispered behind me.

I really want to release my knife again, but my body is exhausted, my magic power has dried up, and I can't say those long words... I rely on his arm to barely stand on the roof of the building, and my whole body is limp. On him, looking up; only then did I realize that my eyes were full of tears.

"I have my own knife, Karajan." I moved my lips and said repeatedly, not knowing which words were actually passed into the slightly hot air, "I have my own knife soul."

He put one arm around me and put one hand in my hair.

"You have a very powerful sword soul. I'm very happy. But you can't control its shape yet, so I can only take you out of there as soon as possible." Karajan said. "As for the impact of the birth of your sword soul on the environment...have you heard the name of your sword?"

"I think," I tried my best to support my neck, and squeezed out a little sound from my throat, "it should be called 'Charon'."

The fire gradually died out in the ashes.Karajan led me in the original way and jumped down from a high place.I hugged him, looking at my white and bright hands, I only felt that I was holding the moonlight in my arms.

I didn't think about how to finish the academy tomorrow.

The author has something to say: Note:

Alvin. Carayon - Alvin.Carayon

Caron flower - Caron