Chapter 7
After quietly taking her leave from the painting, the duchess went directly to the duke and said:
"That child is a true prodigy."
"The piano? There is no need to say so again."
"No. The painting."
"Painting?"
"Yes, the painting. He produced a work overnight. When you have time, go and see it yourself. But be prepared to lose a considerable portion of your day to it."
The duke was genuinely taken aback by his wife's words, knowing as he did how exacting her standards were when it came to evaluating art.
Not just the piano, but painting as well. A pleasant miscalculation on my part. The boy was simply born for the arts. I ought to give him something.
As the duke sat with a quiet smile of satisfaction, the duchess spoke again.
"His social debut. I will take full charge of it starting today. You do not mind?"
"Did I not already ask you to handle it?"
"But you never gave me a proper answer at the time."
"Do as you see fit."
The duchess went directly from there to the butler, exchanged a few words with him, and then retired to her room to begin composing a letter.
If that painting were to be shown publicly, it would make a name for itself not only within the kingdom but beyond its borders.
But a fine work was not guaranteed to become famous simply by virtue of being fine. Though a painting of that caliber would find its way to recognition eventually, one way or another. It would simply take some time.
But with a little preparation and the right plan set in motion early enough, the impact could be made far more immediate and far more widespread.
"To the Countess Pegeot. As the greenery fades and the cold of winter quietly takes its place..."
As she wrote, the duchess made up her mind.
I will need to make a trip to the capital. If I am going to support the boy, I intend to do it properly.
The painting was already complete, and the piano required no further proof. What remained was simply the question of how to present it all to the world. And for that purpose, there was no better stage than the capital.
Perhaps it was the combination of three consecutive sleepless nights followed by the expenditure of so much energy on the painting, but when Elliot finally opened his eyes, what greeted him was Vif's morning call. Given that Vif only sang loudly in the moments just after sunrise, that sound could only mean one thing.
Good grief, I am tired.
Elliot wriggled under the covers for a little while longer, making a half-hearted attempt to fall back asleep. But he had slept too deeply and too long, and though his body was weary, his mind was already alert, which only made him irritable.
Did I sleep through an entire day?
He lay there a while longer before finally dragging himself out of bed and reaching for the rose he had set aside.
"Honestly."
Cultivating his bond with Vif was not something he could afford to neglect. That closeness was, after all, the path to one additional life.
"Ko-ko!"
What an eager eater. Elliot was standing there in a vague daze, mechanically offering rose petals to Vif one by one, when an unexpected figure approached.
"Young master."
"The butler? What brings you here?"
"I have come to relay a message from the duchess. It is also the duke's instruction."
"What is it?"
The painting.
The piano.
The social debut.
"The duchess has decided to take full charge of the matter. She also asks that you prepare yourself, as she plans to travel to the capital next week."
The capital.
So the woman had made a real decision about this. In his first life, the two of them had been too busy fighting their quiet war to cooperate on anything.
"Is that all?"
"Additionally, the duke has asked that you select one item from the family's private vault."
Elliot's eyes lit up at the butler's words.
The Nert family's history stretched back a considerable distance, and the treasures gathered under the name of a duchy were not to be underestimated. When he thought back to the items he had inherited after becoming duke himself, he felt his heart quicken even now.
By that time, so much had already been lost to the chaos of war. And yet even those remnants had been extraordinary. The things that had since been destroyed, the items that no longer existed in the future, would still be sleeping undisturbed in that vault right now.
"Let us go immediately."
This was an opportunity.
He had not imagined access to the private vault would come to him this quickly.
"Right this moment, young master?"
"Right this moment."
"Very well. Here is the blindfold. Please put it on."
The butler was briefly taken aback, but he guided Elliot to the door of the private vault without further objection.
"One item only."
"Do not worry."
"I mention it simply out of caution, young master. The vault itself is enchanted to record every item that enters and leaves it."
That was something he had not known.
I had been thinking of helping myself to a little extra.
It was Elliot's first time seeing the vault in its undamaged state. By the time he had become duke, the estate had already been reduced to ruins, occupied by the demon army, and the vault had been long since ransacked.
"Understood."
"To open the vault door, you need only press a drop of your blood to the handle. I will wait here."
Elliot pricked his index finger lightly with the needle the butler offered, and then reached forward with a quietly racing heart to grasp the door handle. Brilliant light poured outward.
The interior of the vault was not particularly large. But every item within it had been arranged with meticulous care, giving the space a sense of fullness, and the organization by category made everything easy to identify at a glance.
Elliot decided to make a full circuit of the vault before doing anything else. He had already decided what he intended to take before stepping inside, but curiosity had its own momentum. There were also things he needed to verify.
There should be a few things in here that the System will respond to.
Even at a glance, the collection was remarkable.
Indeed.
The vault was said to rival even the royal treasury in quality, if not in scale. As Elliot moved through it, his eyes sharpened.
[Would you like to activate the System? YES / NO]
The first response.
A sword?
It was a style of sword he had never seen before. He had a specific target in mind, so taking this sword was not an option.
I would very much like to activate the System.
Doing so might fill in the gaps where his own talent fell short. But the First-Time Bonus gave him pause. Activating the System on first contact would draw out the full power of the artifact.
It is a sword, so perhaps not all of it would manifest immediately.
But it was a sword, of all things. There was every possibility that activating it here and now would cause him to start swinging it around the vault. There was still too much about the System he did not understand, and he had no desire to introduce unnecessary variables.
It is a waste to leave it, and there is no telling what the duke would say.
Beyond that, there was no strict time limit, but he could not linger indefinitely. If he spent an entire night in the vault the way he had with the brush, what conceivable excuse would he offer?
For now, let me at least make note of everything the System responds to.
The most numerous among them were swords.
One of them I cannot place, but the other two I recognize.
A longsword that allowed free command of the wind.
A bastard sword capable of adjusting its own weight at will.
Both were historical artifacts and formidable weapons in their own right. With the sample size growing, Elliot felt he was beginning to form a rough picture of the conditions under which the System activated.
Best not to assume too quickly.
Beyond those, there was a spear he did not recognize. A dagger that looked entirely unremarkable from the outside. A ruby necklace. A silver ring. Six items in total that the System responded to. Of those six, he already knew the origins and nature of four, the unfamiliar sword and spear aside.
Let me think through the common thread.
The piano and the brush had shared certain qualities as well.
To begin with, each of them had a history deep enough to be called an artifact. Beyond that, at some point in their past, at least one owner had handled them with genuine care and affection over a long period of time. That seemed to be the essence of it. The preservation spells, it turned out, were likely incidental.
The greatest discovery Elliot had made in this vault was not any single object but rather a near-complete understanding of the conditions under which the System activated.
What a shame, though.
To have to leave all of this behind. Still, there would be other opportunities. Taking everything as his own was not something the duke would permit, but borrowing, on the other hand, was a different matter.
Borrowing should be manageable.
He would not need long. A single day per item would be sufficient.
If I can render enough service to the family, the justification will take care of itself.
With the foreknowledge he possessed, earning significant merit on the family's behalf was not a particularly difficult proposition. Elliot turned that thought over in his mind as he reached down and picked up the dagger.
Hm?
But the System responded from an unexpected direction entirely.
What is this?
It was not the dagger. It was the stand on which the dagger had been resting.
Can this also be an artifact?
Elliot picked up both the dagger and the stand together.
"You were in there for quite some time."
"There were so many remarkable things to look at that I lost track of myself entirely. Standing there looking at them, I found musical ideas coming to me, and a desire to paint as well."
The butler understood at once. He had been growing concerned that something had happened, given how long Elliot had been inside. If that was the reason, however, it made sense enough.
"The item I have chosen is this dagger. The stand is included as well, I assume?"
"The stand?"
Elliot asked the butler about the stand, wanting to be certain. It was better to be clear about these things from the outset.
"The dagger I selected was resting on top of this stand."
"One moment, please."
The butler stepped to the vault door, examined something, then turned back and said:
"Yes, I have confirmed it. Only one item is recorded as having left the vault, so there is no issue."
After seeing Elliot off, the butler went directly to the duke and made his report. The gift was a gift, but the duke had also intended it as a test of Elliot's discernment, which was why he had deliberately withheld any information about the vault's contents.
"Well then. What did he take?"
"He selected a dagger of unknown nature, Your Grace."
It was the one item in the entire vault about which nothing had ever been established. It was clearly enchanted with powerful magic, and clearly very old, but its purpose had never been determined.
Out of curiosity, I looked into it myself after becoming head of the family, and nothing was ever uncovered.
There were other items in the vault whose origins remained unclear, but the dagger was the only one whose very function was a mystery. Everything else, at minimum, had some known purpose.
"Unexpected. Or perhaps a prodigy sees what the rest of us have been unable to."
The duke was genuinely curious what Elliot had seen in that dagger. The truth, had he known it, would have been something far removed from anything he might have imagined.
Elliot stood before the dagger where it sat on the table, wearing a quiet expression of satisfaction. Even if the System had not responded to it, he would have chosen this dagger regardless. It was that significant a find.
I did not expect to get my hands on this so quickly.
The dagger's true nature was that of Ridil, a weapon with a higher water spirit named Endairon sealed within it. With nothing more than a simple binding ritual, the full power of that sealed spirit could be drawn upon, making it an extraordinarily potent magical artifact.
Even without any affinity for spirits, even without a trace of mana, an ordinary person could make tremendous use of it, because the power it contained was entirely the dagger's own. In that sense, it was perfectly suited to Elliot's current circumstances.
Approximately ten minutes.
The reason the dagger's identity had remained undiscovered until now was that spirit users had long since vanished from the human world. Without a spirit user, the dagger's purpose was simply unknowable.
There are no human spirit users at all in the present age.
Humans were not, by nature, able to form contracts with spirits independently. To be more precise, almost no humans possessed the spirit affinity required to enter such a contract through their own ability alone. The last recorded instance of a human appearing with such affinity was a hero from the history books, some five hundred years ago.
For a human to become a spirit user, an elf must serve as intermediary.
But it had been far too long since the elves had withdrawn from the world of humans, concealing themselves from human eyes almost entirely.
And so spirit users simply vanished at some point.
Their numbers had already been small to begin with, and spirit users tended by nature to be free-spirited individuals who formed no guilds or organizations. The knowledge had died with them.
The return of human spirit users would come only when the elves joined the human alliance to fight against the demon race.
Which was precisely why the ancient etiquette had to be learned with such desperation.
Elliot recalled those days and smiled bitterly to himself. Elves harbored a fundamental dislike for the human race, which made forming any genuine connection with them extraordinarily difficult. The problem was that even in the face of the demon threat, an elf would not serve as intermediary for a spirit contract unless a certain degree of genuine relationship had already been established, regardless of whether the person had spirit affinity.
But with this dagger alone.
Ridil was also a token of goodwill extended to humanity. With spirit affinity and the proper knowledge, a person could become a spirit user entirely through their own efforts. Elliot's spirit affinity was, in fact, reasonably strong. Spirit affinity was something one was born with, entirely separate from learned talent.
Though one could argue that too is a form of talent, and there is little to be said in response to that.
After dwelling briefly in the past, Elliot decided that before performing any binding ritual with the dagger, he should first examine the stand.
What could this be, exactly?
The System had responded to it, which meant it was certainly an artifact that had been handled with care and affection by someone, and that some story was contained within it. Of that much he was certain.
I will activate the System. That should tell me everything naturally enough.
Elliot drew a slow breath, placed his hand on the stand, and turned his thoughts toward the System.
[Would you like to activate the System? YES / NO]
Elliot selected YES.