~-eep!

“Ugh…”

My eyes slowly opened, and the first thing that caught my eye was the white color of the ceiling.

~beeep!

I had woken up normally.

There were no birds chirping or any sunlight hitting my face.

There was just…

~beeep! ~beeep!

The relentless alarm of my watch.

I stretched slightly, then silenced the alarm and sat up, leaning against the headboard of my bed.

The first thing I did… was to look to my left.

And what I saw was… nothing.

I stared at the empty space on my bed for a few seconds, then took a deep breath.

Gone, huh…

I slowly turned sideways, then stood up.

After a shower that lasted about half an hour, I went into the kitchen.

And… I found exactly what I expected.

A breakfast table set for me with a note on the wall.

Enjoy your meal.

“…”

I sat quietly at the table. But I didn’t start eating right away.

I just… thought.

I didn’t do anything wrong… right?

Or did I?

I glanced at the table in front of me, then back at the note on the wall.

If I’d done something wrong, she probably wouldn’t have bothered doing this.

I mean, logically, she wouldn’t.

“Haaah…”

I rolled my eyes, picked up a spoon, and pulled the first plate in front of me.

And that’s when I realized something.

“Huh…”

Celine… has been cooking for me for months. Not every day without exception, of course. I mean, she has her own work, and she’s not my personal chef. But… the times she did, it was usually average. Not bad, yes, but not too good either. Her cooking skills were about the same as mine.

But now…

It was beautiful.

No, it wasn’t something that changed overnight. I ate almost every two or three days from her hands, so I didn’t notice the change… but lately, every table she prepared was better than the previous one.

She’s improving.

After a short while, breakfast was over.

My day began.

And, well… it became one of my routine days. An ordinary day, discussing the potion business with Ulka and Alexander, working on the information network we are starting to build with the Virhen and Bealy Families, preparing for what I have planned for when the second year ends.

And in the evening… my door opened by itself.

The person I had expected to see appeared at the door of the hall.

She glanced at the screens in front of me.

“Were you working?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then.”

She left her bag by the door and hung her coat on the hanger.

Then… she simply smiled.

Enjoy new stories from NovelBin.Côm

“Is there anything you want?”

Actually… I was going to give my usual answer of ’nope’, but then I hesitated.

“There’s some cauliflower in the refrigerator.”

And she immediately understood what I meant.

“Leave it to me!”

Then, she left through the door.

But I… just stared at the place where she had just been, without taking my eyes off from there.

As if nothing had happened, huh…

I sighed lightly.

I turned to the screens in front of me.

Better than any awkwardness between us, I guess.

And… that’s how the day ended. An ordinary day, where we ate the dinner Celine had prepared and then she went back to her room, as she had been doing for months.

Then came the next day.

But that day ended without Celine ever coming by.

And then the next…

…

Two weeks passed in the blink of an eye.

But, this time… there was a difference.

When I woke up two weeks after my birthday… my left side was not empty this time.

She hadn’t woken up before me. Her chest rose and fell slowly as her hair covered a small part of her face.

I raised my hand, reached for her hair… but then stopped suddenly. With a sigh, I withdrew my hand and stood up, stretching.

And… another month passed like that.

The last day of the second year came.

As usual, the school year would end with a ceremony.

And… this time I was to take the stage as the first ranked person, and at the same time the leader, of the second-year students.

And that’s what happened.

Melany gave her speech as a rector. The academic and power rankers took the stage, starting with the fourth year students, and they gave their speeches.

And then… finally, it was my turn.

At the front of the stage, in front of me, thousands of people, all of them looking at me… all waiting for me.

“You all… know me as the Hero of Holar, the youngest count of Cevilian and a successful person in the potion industry.”

I ran my eyes over the crowd.

“But… there are things you don’t know. My failures in my first year, in the Holar War, in this year. There are tiny things, and there are big things that changed my life radically… that brought me back from the brink of death. But all these failures, none of them have ever gotten in the way of my ’successes’. So they have been overshadowed by them, they have become unknown things… simply wounds that only I or a few people know about.”

They were all… silently listening to me.

“You will always have failures on your way to success. Some of them will remain in the shadows of your achievements, not blocking your path… they will only be obstacles that have caused you trouble at some point in your life. But, sometimes…”

I narrowed my eyes slightly.

“Sometimes you will have such failures… that they will not be overshadowed by any success. They may be failures that others won’t care about. But for you, they will be nightmares that will always stay with you, that you will always remember.”

The atmosphere… was much more negative than the previous speeches full of motivation and determination.

“If you can accept these failures, you will be able to move forward. You will learn not to make the same failures again. Experience will be the greatest teacher on the road to success. At least I think that’s how I got to where I am now and that’s the best advice I can give.”

I straightened up a little, breathing lightly into my lungs.

“Fail as little as you can. But when you do… never forget any of them.”

And… that was it.

A short but not too bad of a speech, in my opinion.

At least under normal circumstances.

“That’s… normally the end of my speech. But, with your permission, I would like to do something else. I would like to tell you about one of my failures… and about someone related to this failure.”

There was no reaction. Everybody was attentive.

“My greatest failure, as far as I’m concerned… was the Wiathen tragedy.”

I stepped back a little, then reached for something waiting inside my ring.

“That day… I managed to find all my friends, almost everyone I cared about, before anything happened to them. Who knows, maybe some of you who were there saw me flying around looking for people.”

A chair appeared right behind me, a very ordinary… gray chair.

“I just… couldn’t find one person that day. And most of my time was spent looking for that person.”

My cane disappeared into the air, and I slowly sat down in the chair that came out of my ring.

“I had run out of mana. I was in a state where I couldn’t use the caora that allowed me to fight despite my disability before I even found her.”

But I didn’t immediately resume what I was doing, except talking.

“But… I finally found that person. She was in the middle of an alley, covered in blood. Her lungs burning with every breath she took, her last moments watching the stars in the sky.”

I tore my eyes away from the crowd and turned them to the ground.

“I did my best, I carried her all the way to the city center with my manaless and crippled body. But… I couldn’t. I… couldn’t save her.”

My voice wasn’t shaking.

I didn’t have tears in my eyes.

There was… nothing inside me.

“She was someone many of you had probably heard of but didn’t know who she was. But for me, at that point in my life, out of everyone I knew, she was the person I cared about the most.”

I was just talking.

“Olivia Sue Gemma.”

There was… nothing else I could do.

“And I lost her.”

Taking a deep breath, I lifted my head and turned my eyes back to the crowd.

I was silent for a short while. But then… I continued.

“Sue… had a hobby, something she practiced and worked on before she passed away.”

And I reached for my ring again, this time for something else.

A guitar appeared in my lap.

An old guitar that looked like it had been used for a long time.

“She was composing a short, wordless song with this guitar. She didn’t expect to become a singer, she didn’t plan to impress others with the guitar she was learning to play. It was just… a hobby for her. But she didn’t even finish her first composition.”

I put my fingers in place.

“I… wanted to finish what she didn’t finish. I learned how to play the guitar, I studied how to compose, and I managed to come up with something of my own. And here… I want you to listen to it. I want everyone to see and hear the only trace Sue could leave behind. So… I’m just going to ask you to listen. And then, I’m done on this stage.”

I didn’t wait for any confirmation, I didn’t turn my eyes to the crowd again, I just… focused on the guitar in my hand.

The sound of the guitar was going to be clearly transmitted to the whole crowd, thanks to the runes I asked Melany for.

The beginning of Sue’s composition was… simple.

It started calmly. Slow tempo, low tones. At the same time, it repeated a certain rhythm and followed it for a certain amount of time.

And that’s exactly what I played.

Then, though… it changed.

The rhythm slowly broke down, without the audience fully realizing it… almost by getting used to it. The melody gradually accelerated, the chords hardened.

The timbre became harsher, sharper. High-toned single notes were now interspersed.

But here she would stop again.

As if someone who was angry and confused was calming down. Slowing down, softening… settling into a certain rhythm again. But the quieting and slowing down never stopped. It continued until there was no more sound from the guitar.

That was the end of Sue’s composition.

And in fact, because of this, it might not have been seen as an ’incomplete’ composition.

But it always felt that way to me. Because… every time, I felt like there should be more.

That’s why I was sure that it was incomplete, that it was only the beginning of the real composition.

Sue… had composed it according to her state of mind. It reflected the calm tones of her ordinary life, her confusion and anger after what happened with her brother… and then her calming down with me.

But there was more.

Because she hadn’t just ’calmed down’.

She had found a new purpose after Paul’s death. She wanted to get stronger, she wanted to be useful. She started training, pushing herself every day.

And… I think that’s what was missing.

So, rather than simply slowing it down to the end… I prolonged it.

I deliberately strengthened and accentuated the chord progressions when I wanted to make it sound like it was coming to an end, but I never broke the rhythm, never reflected the anger, like in the middle of the original composition.

I just kept the rhythm going and modified it little by little. I made the timbres more determined and louder. I increased the tempo, gradually hardening the notes… as if I could see with my own eyes that Sue was getting stronger and stronger.

Toward the end… the gradual accumulation of changes made the composition unrecognizable from the beginning.

Whereas the initial composition conveyed sadness and anger… this one completely took the ’failure’ out of it and conveyed determination and effort, ’success’. So much so… that after a while, the chords reached a climax with the rising melody.

It was… a song of victory.

And that’s how it ended. Not abruptly, but as if the notes representing this achievement would remain in the air forever; as if a victory had been won, and that climax turned into an echo.

This echo must have had exactly the effect I wanted, because the crowd in front of me had to wait for a while to realize that the composition was over.

Only after a very short time did they realize it was over.

Silence enveloped everyone, no one made a sound. There was only… the gentle howling of the wind.

After a quite short while, though, there was a single round of applause. A single one, barely audible in the silence.

Then a few others joined in. Soon… everyone in front and even behind the stage was clapping.

I… simply stood up, my cane appearing as the guitar and the chair I was sitting on went back into my ring.

I bowed slightly toward them. But before I stepped back, I said one thing.

“It’s just a continuation of Sue’s composition. Please, if you share it anywhere, don’t forget to add her name. In fact, make her name the foremost one.”

And that was it.

Once I was upright again, I turned around and simply walked next to Alexander, the academic top of the ranking, who had attended the ceremony with me.

The rest of the ceremony… went on and ended quite simply.

The composition I played on stage went viral even for a short while.

And, thus… the summer vacation of 2045 began.

The beginning of the time when I would strike the next blow against Saligia.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep