Like most evenings, Andric was sitting in the tavern and eating a meal while eavesdropping on the conversations around him. A few weeks had passed since he first heard about the planned war between Hochland and Hilzland, and the first bit of news since then was finally arriving in Radegart.
“Recruitment notices are in! Five silver sign-up bonus with one silver for each month served! Better yet, they’re teaching all recruits the Severing Slash Technique!” A man from the town announced the news to the tavern patrons, instantly gaining the attention of nearly everyone inside.
“This is for the war against Hilzland?” and aged patron asked.
“That’s right. The army has already destroyed all of Hilzland’s ports, and now they’re assembling troops for a full invasion! Hilzland is starving without their food imports, so it’s only a matter of time before they invade us or seek help from a stronger kingdom. We need to sign up quickly and win this war before anyone else gets involved,” the man replied. He took a cup of wine from a server and drank the whole thing, then paid for that one and a second.
In many opinions, the war between Hochland and Hilzland looked favorable for Hochland. Without food, Hilzland’s opportunities for growth were limited. The army would need tons of food to keep their soldiers energized, but there already wasn’t very much food in winter. Meanwhile, the winter in Hochland was much less severe, and importing food was much easier. Logistically speaking, Hochland had already won.
The only thing that Andric didn’t understand was why Hochland had stopped their invasion of Baugland after several years, then switched targets to the economically inferior Hilzland. According to Andric’s knowledge, there weren’t any great resources that could be obtained from Hilzland that weren’t more plentiful in Baugland. It had to be known that Hochland had the advantage in the war against Baugland, so pulling out was like abandoning three years of progress.
“Uncle, did you hear that?” Farvald was sitting at a table with his uncle when he heard the news.
Farvald’s uncle slapped his head and replied, “Of course I did! I’m right here!”
“I have to sign up. We could do so much with five silver, and they’re even teaching a martial technique!” Farvald said. Besides the martial technique his parents had taught him, he knew no others. His martial realm wasn’t high, but he knew that a second martial technique would help him bridge the gap between himself and stronger opponents.
Andric thought the name ‘Severing Slash Technique’ sounded familiar, so he put one hand in his bag of storage and looked through the contents. Sure enough, there were several copies of the Severing Slash Technique in there. The reason Andric hadn’t selected it to train in was because the Boulder Crushing Sword Technique and the Bone Splitting Sword Technique were both more powerful and had better secondary effects.
Martial techniques could be designed in many different ways. One way was to have an all-encompassing martial technique that could accommodate the use of any weapon. Another way was to have only a certain weapon usable with the martial technique. The Severing Slash Technique could be used with any bladed weapon, but the Boulder Crushing Sword Technique and the Bone Splitting Sword Technique could only be used with a sword. As such, the spirit energy distribution in each one was more defined, allowing for harder-hitting strikes. The Bone Splitting Sword Technique was very similar to the Severing Slash Technique, except it applied much more force to the opponent's bones, which were typically the hardest thing to cut through.
Thinking about those martial techniques, Andric remembered that he hadn’t learned either of them beyond briefly looking over their books, and he decided to spend the next few weeks mastering them.
“Definitely not. Not until you reach the Novice realm,” Farvald’s uncle declined. After all, he was Farvald’s closest relative and the job of keeping Farvald alive fell to him. If Farvald died in battle, there was no way Farvald’s uncle would be able to face his brother in the afterlife.
The man who came to deliver news still had more to say, and he waited for everyone to calm down before saying, “This war needs to be over before summer. If recruitment targets aren’t met by spring, conscription will begin!”
The tavern turned quieter, but whispers were still had all around. Even Farvald’s uncle started to mutter something that Andric couldn’t hear.
The topic of conscription was heavily debated. In the war against Baugland, no conscription had been used. This was because the kingdom of Hochland could offer various gains from the war to be used to reward the martialists who signed up with the army. However, the war against Hilzland wouldn’t have any great benefits, so there was nothing new to offer potential recruits. The Severing Slash Technique could garner the interest of a few youngsters, but it wouldn’t be enough to pull in the experienced martialists who had already found their own martial techniques.
Andric knew a little about conscription, but it didn’t bother him. He wasn’t living in Einburg or Mahtzig, and there were no records of him in Radegart. If he left the small town that night, nobody would ever know anything more about him than he spent several weeks at the tavern and liked to eat expensive meat and drink expensive wine. If he hid in the wilderness for a while, it was unlikely that a recruiter for the kingdom would find him.
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There wasn’t anybody Andric didn’t particularly want to be conscripted. If it were the youths from Einburg, Andric was happy to let it come down to fate. Currently, Andric had met no humans who deserved to be spared from the horrors of war. In his opinion, every man should experience it at least once in their life. He even supported Farvald going to voluntarily join the war, even if he wanted Farvald to be a little more practical about it.
“Why are we invading Hilzland?” someone asked the question that everyone wanted to know. Few would admit it, but even fewer knew that Hochland had to gain by invading the Frozen North.
“This…” The messenger seemed unwilling to explain. Instead, he drank the rest of his cup of wine.
“We wanna know!” a second person shouted.
Then, a woman from across the tavern whispered to her tablemate in a slightly loud voice, “I heard that an enchanted castle was found in Hilzland.”
“What?!”
The reactions from everyone inside the tavern were similar. The messenger’s face slightly paled as someone asked the woman, “Where did you hear that from? Why haven’t you told anyone else?”
“I didn’t think it was true. I heard it from one of the caravans that came near the beginning of winter, but I thought it was just a guard trying to impress me,” the woman defended herself and moved her seat closer to the tavern wall.
‘What’s an enchanted castle?’ Andric wanted to ask, but he stayed silent.
“If it really is an enchanted castle, won’t the Chaotic East get involved? The martialists from those high-realm places are always the first ones to explore ancient ruins.”
“Leifgard won’t stand by and let a southern kingdom attack their neighbor when it has an enchanted castle inside it. No, then entire Frozen North might make a move!”
“It’s no wonder Hochland pulled out of Baugland. The difference between a few gem mines and an enchanted castle is like the difference between the lowliest slave and the mightiest emperor!”
A consensus was had between all the patrons of the tavern: if there really was an enchanted castle in Hilzland, the sudden war with them was completely justified. In fact, many people wanted the war to speed up, to take control of the enchanted castle before any other kingdoms could claim it. If they were slow, a high-realm martialist from the Chaotic East would be attracted to the enchanted castle and all the good loot would be taken.
“Uncle, what is an enchanted castle?” Farvald asked his uncle.
“It’s normal for you to not know this kind of thing. In fact, some people say that enchanted castles are pure myths. I know I’ve never seen one, and you’re parents weren’t so lucky, either. Apparently, enchanted castles are where mysterious items that transcend the martial way can be found. According to my grandfather, the royal family in Mahtzig owns a bowl-shaped mysterious item that is always filled with water. He said that even if you turned it upside down, it would continuously pour out water until you flipped it back upright, and it would still be full,” Farvald’s uncle explained with a strange look on his face. He wasn’t sure if he believed the tales his father and grandfather used to tell him, but it was impossible to not see the change in the messenger’s expression when the woman brought up the enchanted castle rumor.
If enchanted castles were real, whatever could be taken from them would undoubtedly be worth several times what the entire kingdom of Hochland could produce in a year.
‘A bottomless bowl? Sounds like an enchantment. Indeed, the names are a match,’ Andric thought. In the age of magicians, the most prestigious magicians were those who had the ability to enchant objects. There were very few magicians who had the ability, but all of them were famous. Unfortunately, Andric wasn’t able to learn the art of enchanting in his previous lifetime, even after hundreds of years of practice and countless wasted resources.
Enchantments could be considered powerful when they were used against ordinary humans or low-realm martialists, but they were useless against high-realm martialists. Most enchantments had complicated activation sequences, or they could only be used a certain amount of times before the mana inside them ran out. Enchantments could gather mana from the atmosphere, but it was a slow process. In terms of efficiency, enchanted objects were far below magicians for the same amount of power.
Andric would’ve been completely uninterested in the enchanted castle if it only had enchanted objects, but there was a piece of loot he could do quite a lot with: a wand.
Magicians needed to have open hands to use spells, and the only exception was using a wand. With a wand, a magician could fire off spells much faster, but the material of the wand needed to be able to endure the intense pressure from the spells running through it. If a magician’s skill was too high for their wand, the wand would break. In the heat of battle, it was easy to forget the limits of a wand and end up wandless.
In Andric’s previous life, his wand came from a powerful magician he had killed in his youth. Part of his success as a magician was owed to the superior wand he had owned throughout his lifetime, and it wasn’t an exaggeration to say that he would’ve died multiple times without it. But, in the present, he was wandless. He could make himself a wand if he had the right materials, but he currently had no idea where to find materials that could build a wand that would increase his spell casting speed. If he picked up a random piece of wood and crafted a wand from it, it would make his spell casting speed much slower than if he forgoed the use of such an inferior wand.
A strong wand could be used by a weak magician, but a weak wand could not be used by a strong magician. The chances of finding a superior wand in the rumored enchanted castle were low, if the enchanted castle even existed, but a chance was still a chance. Unless a better opportunity presented itself, Andric needed to see what he could gain.