Stone Will

by Kirill Klevanski

  Hadjar got down from the wagon and found himself in a spacious meadow. The coachmen had already arranged the wagons in a semicircle, and a fire had been lit in the center. The craziest freaks, such as the hairy girl or the birdboy, had been left in their cages. They were mindless, so it was dangerous to let them roam.

  The rest huddled around the hastily constructed cesspit. They’d been given a bit of soup with crusts of bread and were now looking at Hadjar enviously. None of them could even dream about talking to Stepha.

  “Why? Don’t you like the part with the transformation?” Hadjar asked her.

  It wasn’t difficult to guess what fairy tale he’d used as the inspiration for his ‘marketing’. His current goal wasn’t only to make as profitable of a story as possible, but also one that was as noticeable as possible. That was the only way he could get what he wanted. He’d succeeded if today was anything to go by.

  That old nugget of wisdom was true—People will follow the path of least resistance if they can.

  “It’s just so... sad,” Stepha took his arm, trying not to touch the skin directly.

  Hadjar really didn’t look good, to put it mildly—he was wearing simple short pants to better show his wooden stumps, along with a shirt with short sleeves, which served the same purpose, and some black cloth, which he would be wrapped in. He wore it when he left the cage. Or, to be more precise, he was made to wear it in order to not ruin the appetite of others.

  “People, even if they won’t admit it, love tragic endings,” Hadjar shrugged. “Compared to those, their own lives don’t seem as bad. Especially if there’s some hope to go along with the sorrow.”

  Stepha looked at him oddly, after he said that.

  “You’re quite good with words, Hadjar.”

  “Possibly.”

  She led him away from the central fire. There, the other circus performers were playing musical instruments, drinking, eating and having fun. They were kind of jealous of the freaks, because they brought more money to the circus, despite the regular performers being more numerous. But no one would’ve let just a crowd of ‘monsters’ into a city, so the owner kept the regular performers around as well.

  Hadjar was given a wooden bowl filled with chowder, that also had a piece of meat in it. It was kind of fatty and far from good, but it was still better than what most of the freaks had.

  This time, the former Prince ate slowly and savored his meal. If he’d planned well and calculated everything correctly, then this would be the last time he’d be eating with these vagrants.

  “Status,” Hadjar ordered. The neural network promptly obeyed.

  Name

  Hadjar

  Level of Cultivation

  None

  Strength

  0,01

  Dexterity

  0,03

  Physique

  0,002

  Energy points

  None

  Hadjar just shook his head and continued eating. Despite everything, he’d continued his ‘training’. His weak, almost disintegrating body hadn’t been capable of much. But, after five years of ‘training’— it was a little stronger than before.

  He did three pushups every day. A trifle, even for a simple child, but for Hadjar, it was a titanic feat. And he often managed to keep going only thanks the neural network sending him messages like this:

  [Physique: +0,0001]

  For the sake of these infinitesimal gains, he would torture himself for weeks on end. It was better than simply waiting and hoping that his plan would work.

  Whatever the case, it was better to do something than to give up.

  “Come on, you can’t be serious!” A knife thrower laughed drunkenly.

  He was a thin, weak-looking man, but he could throw two dozen blades at once and not miss a single target. Hadjar would’ve been happy to scan his level of cultivation, but he was too weak to do so.

  “I swear it! When I was sixteen, I killed a Fierce-Bull!” The broad-shouldered mercenary roared back.

  His name was Brombur or Bromvurd… something like that, and, despite being quite short, he was famous for constantly trying to ‘use’ someone. Both figuratively and quite literally. He was always trying to trick people and take their money and visited the brothels in the cities whenever possible.

  “A Fierce-Bull, even a young one, isn’t below the level of Awakening Power!” The thrower continued to argue. “Which is definitely higher than the middle levels of the Bodily Rivers!”

  “You don’t believe me?” Brom-I-don’t-remember-his-name threw a blade in front of the doubting man’s feet.

  The thrower immediately bent down and picked it up. He was thin, but, nevertheless, was quite powerful. In fact, except for the owner himself, he was the one who visited Stepha the most regularly and stayed with her the longest. Nobody really dared get in his way when he did so.

  “Analyze,” Hadjar ordered mentally.

  Bald Brom, let’s call him that, threw off his shirt, exposing his stomach, which was impressively firm. He held a sturdy, curved sword in his hands and wielded it as if he were a windmill and the weapon itself one of the windmill’s blades.

  Name

  Bold Brom

  Level of Cultivation

  The Bodily Rivers, Stage 3

  Strength

  1,3

  Dexterity

  1,24

  Physique

  1,86

  Energy points

  1,9

  Two ‘cultivators’, and each of them, according to the neuronet, wasn’t below the Bodily Rivers’ third stage. They waved their pieces of iron enthusiastically at each other. The loud hooting of the others, the sound of wooden mugs and the rhythmic music of the lute player encouraged them.

  The company had nothing to do in the evenings. Everyone had been fucking everyone else for a long time now since there weren’t any new people (only the freaks would be new, but no one wanted to go to bed with them). They’d grown tired of frequently getting drunk, so these kinds of scenes weren’t rare. The truth was that the fights were mostly to alleviate boredom.

  Hadjar looked even at this stupid performance with a slight longing.

  Their strikes were slow and inaccurate. They struck at random, without even thinking about it. It was a fight between idiots. A true Master was no dumber than South Wind. Defeating a worthy opponent was only possible if your mind was a few dozen moves ahead.

  The way they moved their feet resembled the process of stomping on grapes to make wine. They stayed in the same place and had almost no control over their center of gravity and balance. They possessed neither the grace nor elegance that was so essential to the art of the Sword. The art that, despite being used for murder, had art to its lethality.

  It was as beautiful as a soaring falcon that had spotted its prey. It was as elegant as a tiger crawling through the grass, lurking, then pouncing swiftly.

  They weren’t swordsmen—they were just practitioners who didn’t see the forest for the trees.

  Most warriors were like that.

  The Master had said that even some of the Heaven Soldiers weren’t able to grasp the ‘peaceful unity’ required to truly be at one with their weapons. It was necessary to have both talent and perseverance, as well as a certain worldview to achieve this. Nobody really needed a lot of intelligence to stuff themselves full of precious resources and rely on others’ expertise.

  Anyway, that’s what his mentors had told him.

  He wondered what had happened to them and the Nanny, as well.

  “What’re you grinning at, freak?!”

  A slight slap brought Hadjar out of his reminiscing. Falling down and dropping his bowl, along with the half-eaten meat, Hadjar saw the figure of Brom towering above him.

  The mercenary could’ve easily killed him if he’d used even a tenth of his power.

  “Nothing, venerable warrior.” Hadjar looked down at the soup he’d spilled and tried to look respectful.

  He could
eat meat that had fallen on the ground. He was hungry, so he decided to try and eat it all.

  “Do you think I was lying?!” The mercenary stepped on the meat, flattening it into the ground and mixing it with the sand and dirt. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, freak!”

  He lifted Hadjar’s chin with his boot. He then staggered back, falling onto his ass comically. For a moment, he’d thought that Hadjar didn’t look crippled, but like an ancient, fierce animal. His cold, blue-eyed glance had been frightening.

  However, when the people who’d witnessed the incident started laughing a moment later, he stopped seeing the rage and determination that had unbalanced him, and instead only saw subservience and meek deference.

  “You think you’re better than me, huh?!”

  Brom made Hadjar get back on his “feet”, then handed his blade to the freak. Someone tried to object to what was happening, but, alas, Stepha was the only one who could’ve stopped what was happening. Since she was already in the owner's wagon and unlikely to come out in the next hour, Brom kept his abuse up.

  “Well, show me what a freak you are, ‘legendary beast’!” The mercenary laughed, trying to conceal his fear.

  “Damn it, damn it!” Hadjar thought, hardly able to lift the sword, despite the fact it would be light even to a common man. “Not now, not when I’m so close!”

  After all, Stepha hadn’t gone to visit the owner alone, she’d been accompanied by a person who could bring Hadjar one step closer to his cherished goal—freedom, and justice.

  But he was now faced with a new problem.

  A problem in the form of an angry, humiliated mercenary who clearly didn’t intend to leave things up to chance.

  Chapter 16

  Despite the absurdity of the situation, Brom had no idea how much danger he was actually in. Despite losing all of his levels and being weaker than most ordinary people, Hadjar was still a threat. His mastery of the blade couldn’t be taken away. He was still ‘One with the Sword.’

  And yet, Hadjar just lifted the blade in a ridiculous manner, almost cutting his own thigh in the process.

  This elicited another bout of laughter from everyone.

  “Stupid freak!” Brom said derisively.

  He took his sword back from the ‘enemy’ and sent Hadjar back to the ground with a light push to his chest.

  Hadjar, however, didn’t care and just kept looking at the now inedible meat forlornly. It was silly, but his humiliation really didn’t matter to him right then. He was more interested in his hunger. He would have plenty of time to add Brom’s name to his ‘list’ later.

  “I want to…” The mercenary swung his blade, but the owner caught his hand in time.

  He was a handsome man in his thirties. He had red hair, arranged into several braids. He wore light leather armor and his boots were polished to a shine.

  “Think twice, mercenary, before you ruin my property.” The practitioner that had reached a high level of the Bodily Rivers said and pinned him with his almost black eyes. The look was so menacing that the man just froze. The sound of laughter suddenly stopped filling the meadow. The music cut off abruptly. It was as if everyone was holding their breath, waiting to see what would happen.

  “Sorry, Darnan,” Brom mumbled apologetically, looking down.

  He pulled his hand back and, literally spitting out insults, went back over to his giggling colleagues. Once he returned, he smacked someone loudly, then yelled at someone else, but no one was really paying any attention to him anymore.

  Stepha was standing next to Darnan, who, according to some rumors, had once been an officer in the army. Her beautiful face was framed by her silky brown hair, bound with two jade hairpins. Those were her entire fortune. A strong gust of wind snatched several ‘fortune telling cards’ from her hands.

  They floated around for a while, then one card landed on Hadjar’s knee. It had the image of a squirming dragon on it.

  “Look, Hadjar,” Stepha whispered, helping her friend up and collecting her scattered cards. “It says that fate has something new in store for you.”

  “Go into the tent, slave,” Darnan commanded in a steely tone of voice.

  The tent was always placed between the owner’s and Stepha’s wagons. The circus performers rehearsed there, held meetings to discuss various issues and divided up the money. A strange young woman was sitting at a folding wooden table in the tent as he came in.

  She’d covered herself with a red cloak and her face wasn’t visible to him, but Hadjar already knew, based on the shape of her figure alone, that she was beautiful; incredibly, abnormally gorgeous, in fact. She had the kind of beauty a woman could only attain after studying techniques for seducing and enthralling others.

  [Warning! The host has entered the zone of influence of an aura that affects his perception!]

  She probably hadn’t tried to seduce the freak. Her aura was probably a sort of passive, magical one. And since Hadjar lacked even the resistance that non-practitioners possessed, he’d easily fallen under her spell.

  “Is your name Hadjar, slave?”

  “Yes, Milady,” Hadjar groaned out, his chest still aching from the blow he’d received earlier. It had felt like a blow to him, at least.

  “Play for me.”

  Darnan handed him the instrument quite carefully. It seemed like he was afraid of accidentally touching the ulcers or scabs covering the skin of his ‘property’.

  Hadjar took the Ron’Jah with a bow. He asked for permission to sit down on a chair, adjusted the pegs, and played as if his life depended on it. The fact it was true only made it easier to do so.

  He ended up not playing for long, only about five minutes.

  The stranger stopped him with an authoritative wave of her hand.

  “I agree to your price, Darnan.”

  Saying that she placed a leather pouch on the table. From what he could see, it had no less than forty gold inside it. Wow, Hadjar’s worth had increased eightfold in the past five years.

  “Take off his collar.”

  “Are you sure, Senta?”

  Senta waved her hand vaguely in response.

  “If I can’t protect myself from a cripple,” she said. “My cultivation has been for nothing.”

  Darnan just shrugged in response. He made a quick gesture with his hand, folded his fingers into some odd positions and the collar clicked open. The former owner didn’t dare approach Hadjar. Stepha had to take off his chains for him.

  “Goodbye, Hadjar,” she whispered in his ear.

  Surprisingly, he detected a hint of sadness in Stepha’s voice. Although, it’s possible he’d just imagined it. But he had no time to dwell on that. He breathed in deeply, marveling at how much tastier the air had become. And while it may seem that nothing had changed, that he’d only regained a bit of freedom, that was enough to change his perception of reality.

  In any case, he now felt more comfortable breathing.

  “Let’s go,” the woman, still wrapped up in her scarlet cloak, exited the tent.

  Hadjar ‘hurried’ after her, hobbling along on his sticks. He cast a farewell glance at the circus troupe with which he’d spent the past five years of his life, touring half the Kingdom. They hadn’t been the happiest years, but they were still better than what living in prison would’ve been like.

  Before running off into the night, he threw one last glance at Brom. As if he’d sensed something, Brom turned, then paled and grabbed his sword. But it was too late, the strange creature with the creepy eyes had already disappeared into the darkness.

  “Don’t you want to know where we’re going?

  Hadjar could’ve asked her, but he’d known from the start that he was being purchased for a brothel. And no, not for the sake of pleasuring perverts there. He’d been bought solely because he was an outstanding musician.

  “I’m afraid it might all be a dream.”

  “It's not. I'll take you to the ‘Innocent Meadow’ and you’ll see for yourself,�
�� Senta said.

  They approached the wagon, which was drawn by tall, gray stallions.

  “Are... are these stallions at the Awakening of Power level?!”

  “The fifth stage.”

  Hadjar couldn’t utter a word in response. His troupe also had stallions at the Awakening of Power level, but they were only at the first stage. Even then, they could go up to 25 miles per hour and gallop for almost three hours straight.

  That was the answer to something Hadjar had wondered over for a long time—how armies and ordinary people managed to cross vast distances. It was apparently possible because there were horses in this world that could be ten times faster than the most sophisticated of sports cars.

  Like other animals, the horses could also absorb energy. And they could evolve as follows—first, the simple (or wild) horse. Then a horse would reach the Awakening of Power level, then the Awakening of Mind, then, finally, the Leader. But Hadjar didn’t even want to try and imagine the value of a stallion at the Leader rank.

  “But first, we will have to clean you up,” Senta, the mistress of the brothel, said hoarsely, clutching her nose and not even trying to hide it.

  It was her that Hadjar had noticed in the crowd while playing music in the square. In every city, he looked for the owners of brothels, restaurants, taverns, and hotels. And every time, he made sure to play music that, hopefully, would make them want to buy him, despite his appearance.

  “Please let me know, Honorable Senta, how much did you pay for me?”

  The mistress of ‘Innocent Meadow’ sat down next to him and took the reins in her hands. She calmly responded: