Chapter 541

At that moment, Lukas’s balance, which had allowed him to surrender himself peacefully to the world, suddenly shifts. His head slowly moves over his shoulder. At last, for the first time, he makes a movement Leonard recognizes.

Without giving him time to answer, he continues.

“How can I make you believe that I can lead you to victory? What can I give you that will make you certain?”

How could he make Lukas believe that he could lead him to victory, that he wanted that victory now and was confident he could make it happen? How could he draw Lukas’s heart back to him? Leonard knows that he must give him certainty instead of a proposal made of nothing but words.

Only then does Leonard realize that he has little to offer. Even the hard-won achievements he had once been content to take pride in, meager as they might be, seem pitiful before Lukas, like a candle flame before a storm. What he wants to give Lukas is so immense and precious that even Leonard himself can scarcely comprehend it, while everything he has accomplished until now feels neither great nor valuable compared to what he feels in his heart.

That does not mean that what he has accomplished was truly meager or futile. Excessive humility can be as poisonous as excessive confidence. Leonard is capable of looking at his own endurance without either overestimating or belittling it, seeing it simply as it is. And yet he despairs and grows anxious because what he wants to give now is immeasurable.

Should he have shown Lukas his victories sooner? Even if only a little more?

Leonard’s patience and innate meticulousness had allowed him to patiently carry out plans that took anywhere from several years to several decades. And that was what was holding him back now.

Perhaps, to his friend, he was nothing more than an inept Crown Prince who had accomplished nothing.

Yet Leonard knew, deep down, that he might be asking for something beyond the power of any human being.

The desire to receive even a single ray of sunlight for one more day was not something he could simply place in his hands and give him. The desire to wait for a comet that would return ten years later, to see the sea glittering with the Milky Way today—he could not give those things even if he plucked the stars from the sky, nor could he give them by scooping up all the water in the ocean.

How could he give someone the desire to do such a thing?

How could he give Lukas the desire to remain here, rather than return to the earth himself?

He is closer to his friend now than he has ever been, yet they have never been farther apart. The warmth of their bodies passes between them, warm enough to feel like this, and yet they are separated by hundreds of millions of light-years.

With nothing to offer in his defense, Leonard tightened his arms around the person held in his embrace. He was afraid Lukas would leave him. To deny that would be a lie…

Even if this confession was a sign of weakness, even if it meant he was too soft for someone destined to become a king, Leonard did not know how to be dishonest with himself. Nor did he know how to be dishonest with the people he loved.

Lukas must have felt the unintended pressure in the fingertips pressing against his back. He must have known that Leonard was only pressing harder to keep his hands from trembling. Leonard’s subdued voice had probably revealed everything with complete sincerity, but he had not wanted to hide anything. If the truth itself was not a burden to them, he did not want to tell a lie by any means.

That desire within him—to be utterly honest in every way—led him here after all those thoughts, to the distant realization he had refused to hear.

“You said you figured out why God gave Cain the mark.”

Leonard asked his friend, who had shifted his head slightly where it rested over Leonard’s shoulder. Lukas had turned his gaze away from the world and was looking at Leonard’s profile with a calm expression.

“Then do you also know why people are so easily swayed into talking about you like this?”

Leonard felt the world he had known changing into something else.

The gradual process of growing up—the kind of change so slow that one might only realize years later that the world they had seen at sixteen was quite different from the one they saw at seventeen—was accelerating before his eyes, right here and now.

The days from the moment he met Lukas until today felt like years to him.

The masses had never seemed entirely positive, just as everything in the world had two sides, but neither had they always seemed wrong. Yet now, they looked like unseen executioners. Leonard had never imagined that people he respected could become something so deeply heartbreaking to him.

He had long since passed the age when he could divide everything into good and evil, right and wrong, so he had not simply flipped his view and branded the masses as a force of evil. But he had never felt such direct sorrow and indignation toward them before.

He may still be young and know little about the world, but he knows this much. Words do not usually reveal at once how broad the speaker’s inner world is, but they expose, with painful clarity, how shallow it is. The self-righteousness and self-importance of those who grow into adulthood and old age without ever learning how to reflect make their wrinkles seem meaningless. Beneath the bodies they have grown into is nothing more than the rudeness of people who failed to learn what they needed to learn when they should have.

And what they needed to learn was neither Latin nor theology nor science, not even the alphabet. It was simply how to understand.

Humanity begins with understanding oneself and understanding others.

Someone who has spent their entire life beside a narrow stream and knows nothing of the sea has no reason to fear water. If they do not want to boast to those who have lived through raging seas that water is nothing more than something useful to mankind, then they must learn to listen when others tell them to be careful around it. And the willingness to listen comes from understanding that another person’s words carry just as much weight as their own.

Yet in the world as it is, there are countless people who do nothing but vilify Lukas before even hearing what he has to say.

Leonard had been raised from childhood to study relentlessly for more than a third of every day. Certainly, there was much a ruler needed to know. But it was also meant to plant in him a wisdom that could not naturally come with his age, so that when his innocence inevitably faded, he would be able to become a human being without delay.

Wisdom begins with experience, and a child who cannot accelerate time must inherit experience from everything that has accumulated on Earth over the 4.6 billion years before his birth.

He learned from books. He learned from nature. And he learned from within himself.

Of all the things Leonard had learned in life—from the ten thousand books he had read, from nature that had been almost like a home to him, and from the habit of lying alone on the grass whenever he had no lessons and writing in his journal about whether he had done anything that day of which his future self, his mother, or his responsibilities would be ashamed—the first thing he learned was patience.

Before learning not to make hasty judgments, he first learned not to say aloud the first thing that came to mind.

There had been times when he kept a single thought buried in his heart for years before finally putting it into words. Sometimes it was because the matter was not urgent. Sometimes it was because he loved the present he was living in too much to disturb it.

Even when neither was the case, time would usually broaden his capacity for understanding and acceptance. And sometimes he would realize that his own capacity really had still been too small, and consider it fortunate that he had remained silent.

That had to be distinguished from the ability to say what needed to be said at the right time. Leonard knew that many people confused the two—and that he himself sometimes did the same—so he never forced others to live as he did.

A life defined by restraint had taught him, after learning to be patient with his words, not to be too quick to reveal his joy or sorrow. And yet, the fact that he could lay his emotions bare before his friend today was perhaps part of his nature, but more than anything, it was because of trust. Lukas was giving him a trust like iron, strong enough to overcome the education that had been drilled into him until restraint had become second nature, and the relentless self-reflection he had cultivated throughout his life. Leonard wanted to repay that trust.

In the instant his thoughts began to flow, Leonard became aware of the pain tearing at his conscience and closed his eyes. What had happened in the first year still lived on, never fading for even a moment, and continued to ache in his chest. Though he was always composed in everything he did, whenever he was in front of Lukas, he had always become anxious far too quickly. For some reason, whenever he stood before Lukas, he became an entirely different person.

Even now.

Yet from the day he realized his mistake, he had grown quieter than he had been before. He had been ruthlessly strict with himself, almost to the point of being severe, and as a result, he had arrived at the present sooner than he otherwise would have, on a path different from the ordinary future he might have reached if he had simply let time pass without Lukas—the force that had transformed him—ever entering his life. In other words, the way Leonard saw the world now, the greater understanding and compassion he could see within it, the sheer variety of human life—all of it had also been shaped by the friend who had reached out his hand to him last autumn and made him realize his mistake before it was too late.

If Leonard had not turned back from that mistake while he still could, despite how painful it had been, as though he were grinding away his own flesh and bone, he would not be the person he was today.

And so, when Leonard looked upon his distant former self, who felt as though the river of time had separated them until they had become different people, he genuinely pitied those who still did not recognize their own recklessness and haste. Yet separate from that pity for their foolishness, his cold sense of what was wrong remained unchanged.

Just as he had ruthlessly honed his former self against the blade of self-reflection, examining himself again and again before putting the blade to himself once more, Leonard believed there was a distinction between feeling heartbroken over how painfully foolish the countless people stirring up the entire continent were and making them understand that they were heading down the wrong path. Even if he was far less merciless toward them than he had been toward himself, the distinction remained.

He had been raised not as an ascetic, but as a ruler, and rightly so. Unlike an ascetic who walked the mortal world with bare hands and bare feet, Leonard had always been required to look down upon the world and pass judgment on reality with the sword and scales in his hands. Whoever insulted someone, whether that someone was Lukas or anyone else, clearly had to be punished in a court of law. And if humanity’s collective refusal to reflect upon itself became the spirit of the age and ultimately drove them toward an era of ruin, then they would all have to bear the guilt of abandoning their humanity.

His friend breaks the long silence and answers simply.

“Because they’re foolish.”

What Leonard wants to know, then, is whether his assumption was correct. Even after hearing that it is, he wants to know how much injustice he will be committing himself. That way, even if he commits the same injustice, Leonard wants it to be a different kind of injustice.

“Even if they are wondrous simply because their very existence is life in its primordial, myriad-hued form, foolishness is still foolishness. Just as one cannot call a sentient being a bodhisattva simply because they are a sentient being, nor can one say that the disciples who misunderstood Jesus’ words and mistakenly thought He was warning them because they had no bread were in a state of wisdom… I cannot say that someone who goes beyond mere misunderstanding and kills people with their tongue is not foolish. And I certainly cannot say that someone who does not even realize that they are killing people themself is not foolish. Because in some distant age to come, that foolishness will function like a poison capable of killing everyone, and even before we speak of the future, it was already the cause that led countless people to their deaths in days past.”

He speaks gently, at an even pace, without any particular rise or fall in his voice. Leonard still finds something unfamiliar in the way he speaks. It is as though the wind itself were speaking; whenever he hears that voice, the words seem to pass straight through his body.

His friend speaks softly, yet firmly.

“Even for the sake of the dead, I cannot say that those ordinary murderers were not foolish. And I know that foolishness cannot serve as some kind of privilege that absolves them of guilt. It’s just…”

At that final word, spoken without hesitation, Leonard closes his eyes. He decides to give voice to the answer himself. Just as his friend had done, he lets his voice drift faintly into the wind.

“You pity them.”

“Yes.”

Leonard cannot even sigh. He feels his heart tightening, little by little.

I figured out why God gave Cain the mark— That realization is founded upon a transcendent understanding. The sorrow that flowed from understanding drove even anger away.

Everything has burned, leaving nothing but ash, and there is nothing left to make him angry.

Upon the ruins where the brilliance of life might have remained, everything is pitiful. So very pitiful.

The brilliant sunlight, the river, and the civilization that existed the day before the ash descended upon the city. The nature that coexisted with them. The possibilities of everything that might have existed in harmony.

All of it is pitiful.

Leonard feels as though his heart is being hollowed out by the realization that nothing remains. His instinctive unease had not been misplaced. His friend knew perfectly well why people were insulting him, and even knowing that, he chose compassion. If he could, he would give countless Cains the mark, just as God had.

But that was not a judgment that offered retribution in the material world. It was a transcendence taking place within him. All that could be seen was a person turning the other cheek to his enemies, a hand reaching down to gently touch those creatures in the lowest places.

What path must a person walk to empty himself and fill that emptiness with the world? What do we call someone who empties himself and descends to the lowest place?

How could Leonard make him rise again? How could he make Lukas lift his head once more after descending so low—not because of infamy, but because he had come to understand what it meant to descend through understanding and love?

Was it right to do so?

Perhaps Leonard was standing in the way of the birth of Jesus, Francis, Buddha, and countless arhats. Perhaps he was stopping and destroying the ascetic, the saint, the love that rises precisely because it has descended so low—the kind of person who empties his own life and spreads the light that pours into that emptiness throughout the world.

Am I committing an injustice against humanity by holding back someone who wants to leave? Because I want you to keep your feet on the ground. Because I want you to walk upon the earth instead of pressing your forehead against it and look up at the sky. Because I want you to boast, as you always have, with that confident face that says you will reach the very end.

This is why I always become a fool in front of you. Why I always end up farther from justice.

Just as he had on every day he had held Lukas back.

But then he asks himself: What is justice?

His friend, who had remained silent all this time, speaks.

“But, Leonard. I don’t want you to go near their darkness.”

For an instant, Leonard senses a change in Lukas’s voice. It is incredibly faint. So faint that even God might not have noticed it…

And he realizes.

Perhaps he is the last bulwark keeping the person who might one day become a saint standing on his own two feet.

His heart begins to pound. Fear, dread, responsibility, being overwhelmed by the unknown—whatever he calls it, it is right.

Lukas continues speaking to Leonard like that.

“I do not want you to face people who think of nothing but that precarious belief that they themselves are human, who cast the patience and prudence you have spent longer honing than they ever could into the back of their minds, who rush to judge others while exposing the ugliest depths of themselves, and who believe they have revealed nothing of themselves, yet declare themselves righteous, victorious, and entitled to rejoice. They may have knowledge, but they have no wisdom. They may have experience, but they have no wisdom. Even as their flesh grows older year by year, they still have no wisdom. The blades they cast from their mouths and hands in their haste to seek justice are not at all as light as the featherlike ease with which they wield them. They have already killed so many, they are still doing so, and they will continue to do so. Wars will continue to break out, the annihilation of the personhood of countless people whose bodies differ from mine will not cease, and people will continue to be crushed beneath the words carelessly cast by those without wisdom. If they believe that all of this has already ended in our age, then that is no different from committing murder once more against the dead and declaring their willingness to remain faithful to the murders yet to come. All these kinds of murder are rooted in the fact that they believe, or try to believe, that what they are doing cannot possibly be wrong. It is beyond our power to change, and it is not easy to hold them accountable for murder, either… The only ones explicitly called guilty are the small number of people who stood trial at Nuremberg and Jerusalem. The rest must be held accountable by their fellow citizens and by history, but I do not know whether either of those will ever truly do so, or whether they will continue to do so in the future.”

As Leonard listened to him trail off, he gradually lost track of what Lukas was saying. Lukas turned his face toward him. The moment those features, which had become the very embodiment of detachment, turned fully toward him, Leonard felt as though he were staring into something impossibly distant.

“So, can you understand why I’m worried?”

Leonard forced his increasingly sluggish thoughts back into motion.

This was the answer to Leonard’s offer to make him win. His friend was worried that Leonard would suffer the same ordeal he was going through today.

Seeing this fragment of the Lukas he knew, Leonard felt a profound longing for him before he even realized it. The person who thought of his friend no matter what hardship he faced was the friend Leonard knew. But the person who no longer tried to stand against whatever hardship came his way today was not the friend he knew.

Perhaps Leonard could let the friend he loved go and help him become Christ, or a saint, or a beacon that illuminated all of humanity.

Even if countless people spat at such a saint for disrupting the world’s murky stability and showing love through his own actions, even if they turned their backs on him, the saint’s life would itself remain as a lasting lesson. Among the hundreds of millions of people who came after him, perhaps thousands, perhaps only hundreds, might come to understand the radiant, tranquil love that passed through the saint’s entire being. That love could then spread through the ages, teaching the world what it meant to love without asking anything in return.

Leonard had been deeply moved by the life of Francis of Assisi, and profoundly struck by the days when Siddhartha became the Buddha. He bowed his head in reverence for the saint and the Buddha who had willingly descended to the lowest places and reached out to ease the suffering of sentient beings.

Leonard pitied the clergy who fixated on the trappings of religion and used reason to suppress others, as well as the believers who used religion to reinforce their own biases and spread them throughout the world, committing what amounted to murder of the mind. And he was angry at what they did.

In an age when the infallibility of Scripture was no longer recognized, if one were to oppress another in the name of religion, then before doing so, anyone who had accumulated wealth ought to distribute all of it among the beggars of the world. And if one were to follow everything in the Old Testament, whose nature is more that of a chronicle built around the ancestors of a people than the New Testament, then there would be very few people who could exist here as they did now…

That was why Leonard held wholehearted reverence for those who had practiced the essence of religion, refusing to be deceived by whispers urging them to repeat all of its historical limitations and trappings, and instead descending to its deepest depths to grasp its foremost teaching, hidden beneath every temptation to misunderstand it.

For those who would have devoted their lives to the suffering of others even if there had been no religion at all. For those ascetics who, in silence and with faint smiles, reached out with rough hands to touch those lying in the lowest places.

And today, Leonard truly does something presumptuous.

Leonard remembers the past, when he ceaselessly strove to become a just person.

That ideal collapses before his selfishness.

If a person had not willingly descended to the lowest place, but had instead been pushed by an uncaring, utterly indifferent fate, rolling farther and farther downward until he finally emptied himself; if the suffering he had endured throughout his life had far outweighed the sum of his happiness, and he had finally decided to stop resisting—then Leonard could not let that person go.

“You asked if I understood.”

Leonard, instead, felt his thoughts settle into perfect clarity. He knew exactly what he had to do. He stepped aside and began to answer calmly.

“Of course I do. Because I’m just as worried about you as you are about me. But this concern of yours is meaningless.”

Lukas looked at Leonard without a word. Feeling his heart sink at those eyes that still seemed so far away, Leonard took a deep breath before continuing.

“If you’re worried that I’ll suffer some unnecessary hardship that wasn’t part of my fate, then I don’t want to know whether I was destined for it or not. It doesn’t matter. From the moment I became your friend last year, I was already bound to face whatever stood against you alongside you.”

Earlier, Leonard had wanted to make clear how much injustice he was about to commit. Not so that he could avoid committing it. He wanted to know the extent of the injustice he was committing so that he would not shy away from bearing it. So that he would not shy away from disappointing himself, from enduring the pain of watching the person he knew himself to be break apart and disappear, and from taking responsibility for that injustice in order to prevent the other injustices it might bring about.

And now, he was thoroughly blaspheming against God.

Leonard felt the injustice he was committing expanding beyond all measure.

He realized he had to make that shameful request once more. There had never been any other answer he could give in the first place. But if this was what he had chosen to do, then this was a necessary pain.

And so, he could now swear it before all creation and say it without a trace of shame.

He looked into his friend’s eyes and spoke.

“I’m confident I can make you win. I’m confident I can take you to the place you wanted to reach.”

He dared to say that he could.

Leonard knew that to Lukas, his proposal might sound childish—the desperate words of a child throwing out anything he could think of just to keep someone from leaving.

But Leonard was giving his answer to a question that had haunted him for a long time.

Justice gained by burning a person alive is not justice.

“You might be happy. For someone who has reached as high as you have, perhaps the long, painful suffering of human life has become something you can bear now. Maybe the suffering that falls upon those living in the shadowed pits of this world pains you more, and caring for them feels more like happiness to you.”

“…….”

“You’ll surely become a light that shines upon the world. I know you’re that kind of person. So if I were to block your path and ask you to be angry instead of letting you devote your whole self to having compassion for everyone, then I would be committing an injustice that would endure for generations.”

Leonard does not look ahead. His vision is a blur.

“But what about you?”

Neither sight nor sound gives him anything he can make sense of. Even so, he continues.

“I can’t turn a blind eye to the injustice fate is inflicting upon you.”

The teachings at the end of asceticism, the glory, all that boundless love—that is justice. But if he can commit even one injustice before the one being driven to the edge gives in, before he chooses to burn himself away and spread his light throughout the world, then Leonard will defy the injustice that fate, embodied by God, is inflicting upon his life.

He has resolved to stand against a fate that would empty one human being of everything and turn him into a saint.

Even if it is a foolish thing to do. Even if it is the greatest folly.

If he could erase only one book of Scripture from his friend’s memory, it would be Job.

The story of a man tested by God who ultimately remains faithful to Him is, at this very moment, an insult to the life of the friend Leonard knows. Pleroma’s scheme is the same. Their arrogance in subjecting a human being to trials in order to create Christ is the same. So is the fate that allowed that arrogance to happen.

Even if this is blasphemy, he cannot help it.

Even if the Catholic faith that had been part of his life were to call him an apostate, he would not regret this decision for even a moment.

If his friend someday chooses of his own free will to become an ascetic, Leonard will not stop him.

But that day cannot be today.

And so Leonard dares to stand in the way of someone who could become a saint.

“I’ve never done this before. I’ve pulled people back from cliffs when they were about to fall to their deaths, but I’ve never turned back someone who was trying to empty himself and submit to fate so that he could reach out and comfort the world. I’ve tried to change the fate of people others thought were mad, but I’ve never seen one of those attempts through to the end. So when I say I’ll make you win against this injustice inflicted upon you by everyone, when I say I’m confident I can make my plan succeed, when I say I’ll overcome fate and prove it—I know it may sound ridiculous to you.”

Leonard lowers his head. Even so, his voice remains steady.

“Even if this is a request that is neither just nor honorable, even so…”

His tongue, which had lingered in the empty air, begins to move again.

“Can you trust me?”

He asks for trust by putting the future up as collateral, when he ought to have put the past on the line. In doing so, he wagers not only his first death, but his second as well.

The first was the death of the person that had to occur for a funeral to be possible. This one is the death of the self.

He stakes the person he is—not the person he once was—on this promise.

A long silence passes between them. It may not truly last that long, but to Leonard, the moment feels as distant as the span between one toll of the clock tower and the next.

“Everyone calls themselves righteous, yet you keep saying that you are not.”

His friend no longer lets his voice dissolve into the wind. His words ring clearly in Leonard’s ears.

“Everyone believes in their own righteousness and does not hesitate to take another person’s life, yet you say that you are in the wrong. You keep asking and asking, pleading to know how you can become righteous, and yet today, as you hold on to me, you are breaking apart your own glory and letting it spill away. The you that you thought you were, the you that made you who you are—it feels as though both are breaking apart along that path and flowing somewhere you can never find them again. So now you’re sitting here, untethered, with your roots torn away, feeling that ache in your heart like I once did, with the world that raised you gone, the self you loved gone, and the dignity you once believed in gone too. Aren’t you?”

You’re lost in an endless sea right now, aren’t you…?

That was what he was saying.

“When a person loses the self they knew and something new takes its place, they realize that they can no longer return to the sunlit fields of the homeland where they once ran free. Some realize it one morning when they rise from bed and look at the rising sun, only to understand that things have changed. Others lose all strength in their legs as though they can no longer stand, collapse at last, and feel a pain that tears their chest apart. It isn’t a transformation brought about by changes in the world. It is a transformation that rises entirely from within you. And today, you chose to trade your own well-being for pain.”

His friend fell silent for a moment, then moved his lips again.

“You’re not someone who never makes mistakes. You’re someone who always realizes them. Your talent and your nature are truly remarkable. They let you accomplish so many things in a single stroke. But you’re never perfect, and even so, you never allow even the slightest crookedness in your heart, like a joiner who devotes himself completely to making every joint fit perfectly.”

“…….”

“I’ve always admired your self-reflection.”

As he said those words, Leonard felt something warm seep into Lukas’s voice.

It was a shock at the same time.

What had seemed distant was drawing near.

Lukas’s eyes, which had been fixed on empty air, slowly turned toward the person beside him.

“You asked if I could believe in you. Even setting aside the fact that I have never once doubted your ultimate victory, even if you believe you have accomplished nothing yourself, you have no reason to think that way. You don’t need to.”

“What do you mean, I don’t need to?”

Leonard sees the emotion beginning to well up in those eyes.

“You’ve already won, Leo. How could I possibly leave you behind after this?”

Lukas’s face returns to the one Leonard knows so well. He wipes away the smile that had seemed to last for eons and twists his cheeks. In that moment, Leonard realizes that his contest with God has come to an end. Wearing the face Leonard knows so well, his friend tries to form a human smile and continues in a cracking voice.

“Every ray of light you give off tells me there’s still so much I want to see…”