Our new mansion was a hell, and I was the only sinner trapped here to be tortured for eternity.

  I, alone, had to bear the weight and the pain of the training.

  While it was true that Belfray had increased the supply of cookies and other delights to an all-time high, Mary and other maids prepared different, interesting baths every night, and the gardener, whose name was Paul, gave me lilies and lilacs every morning, these material things could only do so much to motivate a child whose ass got kicked on a daily basis.

  Everyone worked to keep my mood high, except for one person.

  The so-called Butcher of the Dawn, who happened to be my mother.

  The second step of my Bronze Knighthood, the Refinement phase where I had to strengthen my internal energy vessels, took months. I spent each day waking up hopeless and empty on the inside, the wooden sword underneath my pillow the ever-reminder of the inevitable pain I’d have to endure after a rich breakfast.

  At one point, I’d begun to grow a dysfunctioning paranoia toward the house staff around me, thinking I was a pig being prepared for slaughter but first needed a good deal of plumpening. They fed me, bathed me, kept me warm so that Mother could mold me every day with her cruel training regimen.

  It wasn’t that she was beating me with a sword. That would be more than preferable. What she did was worse. She forced me to confront my inner fears, which turned out to be generous in supply.

  I saw during the training the people in high school grouping on me in the back street, taking turns to beat me down, pulling at my feet, dragging me half-bare across and throwing me in a dumpster. I saw the teachers keeping painfully silent against the obvious signs that I carried on my body every day as I sat in that back seat. I saw my own family too busy caring for my twin sisters to give a single flying fuck about my troubles in school. I felt the rage and hopelessness building up in me like I’d returned to those days.

  Control was something of a dream of mine that always felt too distant. I’d slept on a bed made of needles for the better part of my life, catching shadows out of the corners of my eyes in every street, finding troubling details in the most mundane things in life. I’d grown a mind too skewed to see things in a normal light, instead focusing on the what-ifs and what could-bes even during, say, a walk out in a park which should’ve been a happy activity.

  This was similar, but not entirely.

  There were no devils to fear.

  There were no bullies I had to watch out for.

  I had only my imagination to fight against, which I did to the best of my abilities. But as I grew stronger, so did my deepest fears. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that I had the capability to take them on. I couldn’t trust myself enough to justify the progression I was experiencing under my new mother’s tutelage.

  So, I spent every night deep in the Runemaster’s Chambers, with papers and bottles of ink to keep me company.

  That was the only thing that soothed my overstimulated brain.

  I could draw Grade 2 Runes in a single session now.

  It wasn’t enough.

  It never felt enough.

  I had to get rid of this sense of helplessness somehow, but I wasn’t permitted to inscribe runes on my body. Not until I’d become a true Bronze Knight. Mother made that very clear to me, and I had to trust her judgment on this case.

  Right.

  Trust a strange woman who kept many things from me.

  …….

  I dragged myself, wincing, toward my mother, one hand clasped tightly around the handle of the sword, the right side of my chest burning with internal heat, heart thumping wildly in my chest. I lunged at her with a sharp jab, then turned around and took a sweep at her feet, got pushed back by an annoyingly accurate finger to my forehead, blinked twice to clear my blurring vision.

  Taking another step in, I felt the heat of my internal energy channels rising as I tried to corner her with jabs, with stabs, with every single motion this little wooden thing was capable of. I showed myself from the right, changed my grip mid-swing to take a swing at her left.

  She butted me at the side with a swift kick, sending me stumbling sideways as though I was a headless corpse played about by a twisted necromancer. When I took a touch longer to fix my head straight, I got another kick in the butt, which resulted in another painful meeting of my face with the cold stone ground.

  I grunted up to my feet, my lungs burning, fingers of my right hand trembling around the handle, and as I faced Mother with renewed anger, I found her at a distance with a complicated look on her face.

  “Anger is best utilized when you’re out of options,” she said in one of her usual comments on my disposition, which changed frequently during this last week. “It is otherwise a cruel companion to depend on. Don’t let yourself be betrayed by it.”

  What she meant was that anger made me blind. True words, of course. Anger often always made me vulnerable against an opponent as clear-headed as ice. It was a pity then that it was all I had. I was angry for some time, and likely for the wrong reasons.

  I jabbed at her instead of taking the lesson as a silent duty, which took her the split of a second to respond, then soon after I found myself kissing the ground for the third time that day. It wasn’t until I blinked that I realized she basically tipped my left foot with her sword to send me rolling down.

  “There are Mages who could manipulate one’s emotions. Bad, bad people, those are, but quite crafty in their fields. You, my Leo, might make for a good study case for those that dwell in anger. Get up.”

  I tried to push myself with the tip of my sword, but my body fought with gravity in such desperation that my legs refused to budge. The pain I felt was perhaps not even a quarter of that needle-session I’d experienced months ago, but for some reason it felt worse.

  “Get. Up.”

  Ever the motivator, my mother took an active approach to ensure the continuity of my training by sending a controlled internal energy blast to push me up to my feet. It was with a huff that I felt my body rise in defiance of my own weight, then I deflated like a balloon left with little to no air when she dismissed the blast.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  “Your energy channels are wide enough. Strength, in your case, isn’t a question anymore. The attitude is a problem, however. What makes you so angry? What makes you so scared?”

  “This—“

  “Figure it out,” she cut me off. “I will be there for you only if I’m sure you’re giving it your best. Don’t expect to be cuddled for your lack of effort. Do something about it.”

  I balled my fists and felt the anger cold in my chest. This was beyond the point of being unreasonable. She was doing it on purpose. Humiliating her son so that he could… what, exactly, did she wish to achieve here? Did she expect me to just shrug these emotions off and be a docile, good kid to be trained and sharpened for her purposes?

  By no means was I against this training stuff. I wanted to be strong, but I couldn’t do that when each session reminded me of my miserable self who suffered a lifetime of bad choices.

  Wait, those weren’t my choices to begin with. I was forced to suffer. The only thing that maybe I didn’t do was that I refused to be a better version of myself after college. Instead, I isolated myself from everything and kept to my own. I didn’t want to do anything. Even if I wanted, what could I have possibly done? Extract vengeance from those bastards after a dozen years?

  Spare me the bullshit, will you?

  It was too late.

  The thing was… I wasn’t the same person anymore.

  Why, then, couldn’t I just rid myself of the trouble? Why did I have to think about my old life all the time?

  Hell, this never happened in those stories. A new life should be all about fireworks and a steady way to the top. Granted, you were due some degree of trouble, but often the case was that you could just blast your way through it.

  This, on the other hand, was taking too long. Years of effort, months of suffering, and I wasn’t even a Bronze Knight.

  Screw that.

  I don’t want to play anymore.

  …..

  After one of my nightly medicinal baths, which were supposed to help with my regeneration and also served as the foundational work for The Undying, I found a worried Belfray at my bed’s side rubbing a healing paste on my legs.

  I wasn’t in the mood for one of his motivational talks. Instead, I peered out from the wide windows into the starry night above, finding the familiar little dots in the distance tasteless once again while Belfray kept speaking about the intricacies of the world we lived in.

  Sangdon was a terrifyingly costly city to live in, especially if you liked to enjoy a more pastoral landscape than the usual chaotic mambo-jumbo of city life. So then, one might ask: why go through the trouble if you could pick a village to have the same exact scenery instead of paying a fortune each month?

  The answer was, of course, connections. That and the standing, the honor, the richness, the flamboyant experience every poor man dreamt of. Perhaps it was just that, actually — to give a huge middle finger to the other parts of society in a message that made clear who had the means and the power.

  Anyhow, Sangdon as a capital was huge. About three million people lived here, and not all necessarily belonged to the Palark Kingdom. Turned out the King, who called himself the Lord Master — which was a bit cheeky to my taste — had decided on a whim to make his kingdom a multi-nation filled with different kinds of people, and thus allowed residence to anyone who could actually afford the prices of the capital.

  It was on the smaller side of the kingdoms in this particular big world and had two different planes under its control.

  “What exactly is a plane?” I decided to ask when my inner thinking session brought a long-lasting question before me. I was glad for the distraction.

  “When we’re talking about the worlds and planes, we first have to make the distinction clear. While the word plane refers to every sizeable land present in the space, its use has seen a remarkable change throughout the years. Nowadays, we simply use it to indicate a place worth exploiting,” Belfray said.

  “Worth exploiting? Then you can use it to refer to any world in existence, no? Ones that you can just waltz in and take for yourself if you have the means?”

  “Yes and no. There are certain planes only accessible through dimensional portals that appear without an actual systemic conjuncture. As in, they’re natural occurrences that can happen anywhere and anytime. Then there are what we refer to as big and small worlds, but it is often frowned upon to simply seize these worlds by relying on the sheer difference in power.”

  “I thought we were in the Age of Chaos? Why make the distinction if there are wars everywhere?” I asked. This whole plane stuff was a little muddy to me.

  “We make the distinction simply because it’s more convenient this way. Hence why when you hear the word plane, you should take it as a dimensional world that may or may not have the size of a real world. There are those that are bigger than small worlds, after all,” Belfray said, and took a breath. “About your first point, it is true that we are in an era of chaos, but it’s been thousands of years. Most of the worlds that are available in supply have already succumbed to this invasion or that. There’s hardly any world left that isn’t a plane for taking without involving a set of complications.”

  “You mean there are no pieces left from the pie,” I muttered. “I guess it makes sense. Thousands of years sounds a lot, after all.”

  Belfray nodded, then continued with a serious face. “Young Master, you have to understand that invading a world isn’t as simple a matter as taking, say, a castle, no matter how strong you are. There are bound to be certain variables you’ll have to face. The local intelligent species always produce some degree of chaos. Then there’s the climate and the natural codes. The workforce you have to deploy in case it is an undeveloped world, and so on. Compared to that, taking a plane under control is indefinitely more simple and cost-efficient.”

  “Because you can reach those planes through… dimensional gates?” I theorized.

  “Indeed.” Belfray had that look of slight shock about him as he nodded. “That, and the fact that these planes are often primal in nature, controlled by a variety of magical creatures that lack the certain sophisticated thinking a human strategist might have. Killing these off would usually be enough to clear that particular plane from unwanted threats.”

  “Then you do… what?” I asked, curious.

  “Depends on the natural sources available in hand, but generally, you’d plant your seeds or raise livestock. Do both if there’s plenty of space.”

  “Natural sources? You mean the ambient mana?” I’d read somewhere in the books that mana was involved in raising pricey plants and cultivating other resources.

  “Yes. A Grade B plane, for example, would be feasible for quite the collection of magical plants, and some good-quality livestock.”

  “What about Palark’s planes?”

  “I’m afraid their planes are on the lower end of the spectrum. Both are Grade D, to my knowledge, which might be just enough to feed their high-class citizens, but ultimately lacking for any possible leap in power. Let alone Heralds or Celestials, they can barely support Diamond Mages and Knights.”

  Belfray took a sip from his cup as I nodded. It was basic knowledge. The stronger you got, the more you needed resources. In this Planary System’s case, feeding a Diamond Knight alone was a headache.

  I could relate to that since even though I wasn’t yet a Bronze Knight, my food intake had already doubled after I started my training. Half of it went to my internal energy channels widened through following a strict systemic torture. The other half I needed to keep my bodily functions active.

  Now, think about a Diamond Knight. Supposedly, they could cleave a house clean from the middle with a single swing of their swords. Their channels must be huge and wide. To further strengthen them, simply moving some muscles wouldn’t be enough. They had to eat mountains’ worth of magical food, and then some.

  Which was precisely why the number of planes directly affected a kingdom’s general strength, and why there was a thing called adventurers.

  This was all exposition from my history lessons, but it helped me get a clearer view of the place I lived in. To my understanding, Mother and the rest of the staff now belonged to the adventurer part of the equation, meaning that they didn’t serve a particular entity.

  “When do I get to explore the outside world?” I couldn’t help but ask.

  During our training, Mother made one thing very clear to me. I wasn’t to be cuddled and held tight throughout my life. There would come a point when I had to experience the outside life on my own.

  Which sounded scary.

  “The Grand Marshall will be the judge of that question. Your other identity makes your situation unique. We can’t simply let you walk away on your own. It is too dangerous.”

  “Runemasters have it rough…”

  “They do, indeed, which is why they tie themselves to bigger entities to ensure their safety. This could be limiting in certain ways, of course, but fret not. Grand Marshall has a plan.”

  “You mean that guy who is supposed to be the best Runemaster in existence? I have to become his disciple, right?”

  “Right…” Belfray muttered heavily but seemingly decided to stop at that. He didn’t elaborate further, nor did he give me a name to work with.

  Some disciple of a mysterious master, huh?

  I guessed it couldn’t be worse than being the pupil of the feared Butcher of the Dawn.

  …..

  Here!