Chapter 549

I stand beneath the hot sun at ten in the morning.

It had been only thirty-four hours since I was confined to Charlottenburg Palace. I had been going in and out of the Extra Chapter to get some fresh air and regain my strength, but perhaps the psychological discomfort of being confined had still been weighing on me. After breathing in the outside air of this world again for the first time in a while, I felt more energetic than ever. Maybe it was because I had filled my core with blood. There was so much mana coursing through my heart that it felt like it might burst.

The fact that I could even smile after seeing my negative Reputation value sitting at [-2.8934281] said it all. I felt like I could go out right now and deal with dozens of Rampager reports one after another, so I had to make an effort to keep my voice calm and steady. Looking straight ahead, I spoke at a measured pace, patiently choosing each word.

“First, I imagine that many of you across the continent were deeply concerned by Pleroma’s announcement. I cannot begin to describe how shocked I was myself when I heard that earth-shattering declaration.”

Despite saying that I was shocked, my face showed little surprise as I continued. There was no need for any change in expression right now.

“The first reason is that, even though my name was mentioned, I had absolutely no idea what grounds they had for making such a claim. The second is that I realized their schemes have been growing more sophisticated and strategic by the day. I admit that I was astounded by the lengths to which they had gone to prepare this.”

Only with the final sentence did I close my eyes. Then, with my expression once again devoid of a smile, I continued.

“And then, I lamented.”

Lamented—the ten thousand spectators who had entered with the Imperial Family’s approval now wore expressions of doubt. The slightest changes in their facial muscles came through to me with extraordinary clarity after a lifetime spent learning how to read people’s faces. To them, there was something incongruous about hearing me say that I lamented.

Their usual expectation had been overturned. The moment I did not say, I am not Pleroma, they became wary, wanting to know whether I would make a reactionary statement or say something self-centered. Even Mecklenburg and the representative of the 99th Unit at the edge of my vision were staring only at me.

The atmosphere was beginning to fill with tension, enough to subtly alter even the reactions of those who had been given the speech in advance and had read it beforehand.

Then…

It was time to tell them why I lamented.

“Why did I lament? Because our greatest enemy, Pleroma, was so blatantly trying to divide you, my fellow subjects.”

I raised my right hand to just below eye level and struck the air sharply with the edge of my hand as I spoke. Their wide German eyes made it obvious that I was showing them an attitude they hadn’t expected. The square was growing tense, stiffening under the immediate pressure of the moment before anyone had yet grasped what would come later. Whether it was the tension of my words or my tone, only they could tell. I shifted my gaze from straight ahead and looked at the audience on either side as I pressed on.

“Very well. Their wicked intentions were clear. So what became of their operation?”

I shifted my gaze again and addressed the ‘distinguished guests’ seated in the front row.

“His Majesty the Emperor, His Excellency the Chancellor, the distinguished figures of our Imperial politics, such as my respected older brother, and some of you, my fellow subjects, already know the answer.”

I turned my gaze back to the front, gave a slight nod, and spoke without blinking.

“The operation was a resounding success.”

To ‘put something in simple terms’ often entails distorting its content, whether directly or indirectly. Simplification comes with a disregard for context and a tendency toward generalization. Conversely, elaborating on something with each individual’s literacy in mind—explaining every detail of everything—only makes the explanation more dependent on that individual literacy, indirectly obscuring the context of what is being said. When dealing with a subject that demands careful scrutiny, making it ‘easy to understand’ through simplification is often essential to rallying the public, yet in some cases, it can become an extreme injustice.

As one member of the society I live in—as someone who must reflect on the injustices of my age at every moment—I cannot be disloyal to my fellow citizens, at least when it comes to matters I am conscious of. But today, I have to be careful. The reason is simple: the very fellow citizens I am supposed to move forward with today are trying to kill me, and the basis for that killing is not justice, but the one-sided distortion of a cult.

So I won’t speak in circles. Even if it means distorting things, I’ll put them simply and directly. A forceful tone doesn’t matter.

The greatest strength—and weakness—of populism is that, at times, conveying force can have a more powerful impact than conveying facts. Broadly speaking, the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela tend to differ from those of Roosevelt and Churchill. The former challenge the human spirit. By appealing to the soul of humanity, asking where we stand and showing us the path forward, their speeches can become immortal teachings in their own right. The latter, by contrast, clearly presuppose an enemy that the nation must defeat in their time. The Axis Powers, and the Axis Powers again—that was the enemy these speakers faced. As you know, speeches of the latter kind can also grow into universal insights that endure for centuries when they touch upon the teachings of the former, as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address does. But for the most part, they are more heavily bound to their historical and national context than the former.

The two are rarely so neatly divided. More often, they overlap, but as I said, they can be distinguished by their general tendency. The power to unite a nation by officially declaring the people, groups, or ideologies it seeks to fight against as enemies—that is the backbone of those speeches. The former calls for self-reflection. The latter calls for mobilization.

In today’s circumstances, the latter is clearly the choice I should make. I’ve already lost enough support that I can’t even call on people to reflect on themselves. So for now, I must first seek to mobilize them.

Even if the audience’s hostility toward me hasn’t already faded, taking the speech somewhere they don’t expect makes them focus less on their hostility and more on anticipating what I’ll say next. That’s a good sign. The audience wants to know why Pleroma’s operation was such a resounding success.

I opened my eyes wide enough for three sides of the whites to show and raised my hand once more toward the rigid audience, putting force into my voice.

“Our government, which has fought with everything it has to eradicate Pleroma until now, has become an organization that recruited Pleroma’s Christ. I, who have never colluded with Pleroma or acted on their behalf, was transformed into their Christ in an instant, in the eyes of everyone.”

How are you going to explain that strange ability of yours? The one ability unique to someone who is Pleroma? You don’t even know yourself how you managed to wipe out that many dioceses…

The questions rose in my mind, and I desperately suppressed them.

My throat, raw from drinking blood, produced a lower, rougher voice than usual whenever I put force into it. I’d been worried about it during rehearsal, but not anymore. If anything, it was better for my voice to sound somewhat unstable when talking about a crisis.

I continued, carefully controlling the tension in my throat and around my eyes so that I would appear calm and collected rather than overheated.

“Because of Pleroma’s lies, the peaceful daily lives of the subjects and the German Empire, which had been steadily flourishing without ever losing momentum, have come to a standstill! What happened when Pleroma’s declaration threw the Empire into chaos? The rampage rate across the country has increased by 125% compared to last week. From Easter evening until today, 7,230 of the precious subjects have died as a result of Pleroma’s schemes. Steel and raw material imports and exports have come to a complete halt, and the economy has already begun to seize up in this short span of time. Our currency has also depreciated by as much as 6% against the pound. And what about the stock market indices in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Hamburg? They’ve fallen by as much as 8%. In just three days.”

Did you notice anything strange?

That 125% increase is manipulated information. If I can’t place my hopes for the future in the public’s ability to properly process Pleroma’s claims, then I’ll make use of that very limitation. A 125% increase compared to when? It compares the rampage rate from six in the evening on Easter to six in the evening the next day against the previous week. Sounds convincing at first glance, but…

People gathered for the holiday and enjoying the festive atmosphere would be drinking from evening until dawn. Alcohol often led to heightened emotions. Since rampages were triggered by exposure to the drug and became destructive when accompanied by sudden emotional changes, the rampage rate on Easter night and into the following dawn was naturally expected to be higher than on an ordinary weekday.

But there was no rampage incident on Easter last year, so there was no data to use for comparison. And this Easter was the first major holiday since the rampage crisis began. Besides, could anyone guarantee that the chaos caused by the declaration had not affected the rampage rate, even slightly? When I’m pursuing practical results, why should I hesitate to use the kind of selective presentation politicians so often rely on?

There was no reason to.

I slowly looked around at the audience and continued speaking at a measured pace.

“Everyone, at this rate, our businesses will no longer be able to survive. Are businesses the only problem? No. An economy is like an ecosystem. When one part collapses, the others cannot remain unharmed. When businesses go bankrupt, unemployment rises, and when unemployment rises, households go bankrupt. If we let this continue, we will not be able to avoid a national economic crisis severe enough to be called a Great Depression¹. This is proof that the security and standing of the German Empire on the continent have been placed in jeopardy, and it is a grave challenge threatening the unified Empire that we Germans built through years of painstaking effort.”

The term Great Depression didn’t exist yet, but it was the perfect phrase for rousing the public’s sense of urgency.

I finished speaking and closed my mouth. After a brief pause, I spoke again in a firm voice.

“That is why they succeeded. This is precisely the collapse of the Empire that Pleroma wanted.”

The audience remained rigid, so there were no jeers. The ten thousand subjects invited here had been admitted with the Imperial Family’s approval, so they likely didn’t dare jeer in the first place. But I doubted things would be much different elsewhere, even in places beyond what I could see.

[-2.6152389]

The Reputation value kept falling and rising, but overall, it was climbing. It had been around -2.9, and now it was -2.6. The last digit was changing at an incredible rate. From experience, changes at this stage reflected confusion in their thoughts more than any growing fondness for me. It would probably continue like this until it reached 0 or the low positives.

In the silence, I could see Mecklenburg swallow even while keeping my eyes fixed straight ahead. He had noticed the change in the atmosphere. So had I. No one had told me anything directly, but I could feel it in my bones.

“This cannot continue. If things go on like this, Pleroma will succeed in isolating Germany from the rest of the continent. They have deliberately assassinated officials from other countries to bring down the German Empire’s standing, and now that isn’t enough for them. They want to divide Germany from within. No—Germany is already divided.”

I continued, looking at the audience, who remained stiff and motionless.

“Everyone, I don’t know what grounds Pleroma has for calling me their Christ. I have no particular sympathy for their goals, nor any reason to sympathize with them. I do not want eternal life. All I want is to live happily with you, my fellow subjects, until the very end, then die with honor and be laid to rest in the earth. I do not want wealth, status, or honor! Sometimes those things have already been within my grasp, and sometimes they have not, but they have no value to me now. I did not become an Imperial mage to gain all those things. I volunteered for the nation’s emergency mobilization, ready to drop out of school if necessary, because all I wanted was to protect you, my fellow subjects, from the threat of Pleroma—and that was how I was selected. The resolve I made on the day I first received my Imperial mage uniform, to remain loyal to you for the rest of my life, has not changed even today, while Pleroma resorts to these petty tricks!”

I had broken through -2.1. They were confused. They didn’t know what to believe. After forty straight hours of using the press and the Prussian-Bavarian secret police to shake up what they knew and what they assumed, making things easier was only natural. I argued with a solemn expression, then let a faint smile touch my lips and slightly narrowed my eyes.

“But now that I have argued against them like this, they will say, ‘There were blood-related incidents and a series of other incidents in Lukas Askanien’s childhood, so he must be Pleroma among Pleroma, someone born with our ability. That is why he is our Christ!’”

I drew my chin in ever so slightly and tilted my head. Then I widened my eyes and asked, “Is that all?”

Silence fell. −2, −1.9, back to −2, −2.1, then −1.9 again… The number fluctuated wildly. I shouted, the veins standing out in my neck.

“I’m asking you. Is that truly all?”

Several people in the audience winced at the volume of my voice. Without hesitation, I held up the blood pack bearing the official seal. At that moment, many eyes widened.

“This is blood I received from the blood bank at nine this morning in exchange for my own blood. It’s human blood, and it hasn’t been processed yet, so it still contains human mana.”

I hadn’t exchanged my blood for it. I was only saying that because the Imperial Family had instructed me to. Even so, the fact that this was real blood remained true.

Only then did the square begin to stir for the first time. Whether they were frightened or shocked, their emotions were plain to see. No doubt it was because they could already tell what was about to happen.

I beckoned to the doctor waiting in the front row and called him onto the stage.

“Doctor, is this blood infused with mana? Make it clear to everyone that our Empire will not be shaken by Pleroma’s schemes any further.”

The doctor let a drop of blood fall onto the dish the government had prepared beforehand, then tapped the glasses he was wearing—an artifact. He, too, looked slightly frightened as he answered, “It is blood. It is still in its original state, before the mana has been removed.”

I nodded, tore open the blood pack, and poured it into the cup someone had handed me from behind. I swallowed once and made the sign of the cross. Then I raised the glass filled with bright red blood and said, “Let’s settle this once and for all.”

The thick blood slid down the back of my throat. The square erupted in shouts of “Oh—” and “Ah—!” The vibrations of their voices reached the stage.

My throat instinctively rejected the blood, repeatedly closing off my esophagus. I couldn’t give up here. At least drinking it myself felt better than having it poured down my throat by force, but—ah, think positively. Think of something positive!

There was no difference.

If anything, I had to struggle to keep my legs from giving out from the nausea. The pleasantly cool day suddenly felt hot. Cold sweat trickled down my body. I could clearly tell where the blood had reached by the way the mana attacked my esophagus as it went down.

I lowered my head reflexively and bit my lip.

The audience, seeing the change in my expression, fell silent with their mouths hanging open.

As for the Reputation value, I opened the window to distract myself. The number that had been at -1.9 hovered around -1.8 and -1.7 before dropping back to -1.9, only to climb to -1.8 again. They were confused and unable to find their way out of it. I forced a smile and raised my head. Sweat trickled down my temples from the disgust. I tried to keep my gaze cold and clear as I reached out to Mecklenburg beside me.

“Look. Take my hand. Everyone, look! If any abnormality in my mana is detected after drinking the blood, I’ll be restrained on the spot. These mages are here to immediately separate me from you and restrain me if there’s anything wrong with me. But if there’s nothing wrong, you’ll have no choice but to believe that I’m innocent.”

Mecklenburg, pale as a sheet, took off his glove and grasped the hand I held out. Trying not to look at me with anxious eyes, he slipped his hand inside my cuff and checked me. Then he let go without changing his expression and clasped his hands behind his back again. The representative of the 99th Unit looked momentarily startled as well, but after checking my pulse and realizing there truly was nothing wrong, he nodded and returned to his place.

-1.8, -1.7, -1.6… Then back to -1.7, -1.5… I gripped the podium again and lowered my head.

“Urgh…”

Damn it. Ah, damn it. I was overwhelmed by the urge to turn off the voice amplification spell. My stomach simply couldn’t adapt to human blood. Honestly, I’d never even eaten blood sausage before. Perhaps the interrogation had been too short for me to get used to it. I covered my mouth and let myself cool down for a moment that felt like an eternity before stepping down. The Imperial Dailies camera followed me.

I held out my hand to the politicians seated in the front row watching the proceedings. Even though they had been informed beforehand, they flinched in surprise and drew back for a moment. But they soon felt that there was nothing abnormal about the mana radiating from my body and took my hand. They kept their mouths shut, nodded with expressions that seemed to say, This can’t be right. Why is he normal?, and let go.

I handed one hand over to the mages while raising the other fervently toward the sky and shouted, “Look! Has anything changed about me just because I drank blood? Am I using vitriol like Pleroma and gaining even more mana from the blood?! I’m in exactly the same ordinary state I was in before I drank it. Nothing has changed about me. It’s just…”

-1.4, -1.3, -1. Then back to -1.2. I climbed onto the stage again and stood before the podium, speaking with force.

“Just… I’m filled with profound anger at the fact that I must now drink the blood of the living to thwart Pleroma’s strategy. I’m filled with anger that the Empire is being shaken by Pleroma’s schemes! Everyone, I—”

I covered my mouth and lowered my head. Then, after barely managing to swallow, I glared ahead and continued.

“I am not Pleroma.”

That was my limit. With no room left to hold it back, I bent over outside the camera’s frame and vomited blood. The moment I let out a retch, I felt exhausted by the fact that I had somehow pushed myself this far, yet at the same time, I was stunned by the numbers changing wildly before my eyes.

-1.2, -0.7, -0.3.

Even through my blurred vision, the numbers were clear. I should have been hearing sounds of disgust from the audience. No—perhaps I really was hearing them…

-0.1, +0.1.

Before the speech, I had secretly hoped to reach zero. Zero, my ass. In less than thirty seconds, the value had increased by a total of 1.3. The audience’s instinctive impression of my vomiting was moving in the opposite direction from their natural human reaction to it.

Just thinking about that made my stomach turn again, though for an entirely different reason.

The image worked. Visual impact was stronger than anything else.

I remained bent over, frozen in place. I had expected this. I had intended for this to happen.

This was exactly what Adrian Askanien had told them to do. He had kindly advised them to make Lukas Askanien drink blood so that I could imprint the ‘image’ of someone who rejected blood onto the public. It didn’t matter what the truth was, as long as I gave them the right picture. So go and focus on clearing your name instead of worrying about your dignity or anything else…

Even if I felt disgusted with myself, the public would ultimately become more obsessed with whether I was Pleroma or not. In the end, that meant an improvement to my reputation.

Who would have thought that deliberately drinking blood and throwing it back up would be a way to save face?

That was why Mecklenburg had kept hesitating. Unless you were a truly cold-blooded person, it was difficult to recommend a strategy like this to a third party. If I had come up with it and carried it out myself, that would be one thing…

And in fact, I had come up with it and carried it out myself.

My head was growing clearer by the second. The Reputation value had firmly settled into positive territory.

If something like +0.5 could already be considered meaningful, then this was a success.

Mecklenburg lightly tapped the toe of his shoe against the ground, letting his mana flow out. It was probably a signal telling me to get up already. I took out my handkerchief, wiped the blood from the corner of my mouth, and spoke in a slightly hoarser voice. I had already said, I am not Pleroma. Now it was time to continue.

“I have never drunk blood like they have.”

The government’s test doesn’t count. There was no reason it should. The government didn’t want the confidential interrogation to leak, either. +0.6, +0.7. I had no idea what expression was on my face in front of the public right now. But the Reputation value would still be influenced by the visual image I presented. And by image, I mean the emotions showing on my face.

I said it again.

“I intend to take this one step further.”

What Mecklenburg had tipped me off about at the end was about to happen. He had told me what the Emperor had been hiding, despite how difficult a decision it must have been—difficult enough that I wanted to pat him on the back—but in truth, I had already anticipated something like this and had long since had Bavaria deliver an ultimatum to Prussia. From this point on, this interrogation would work in my favor as well.

“What you’re about to see may be difficult to watch. This is an interrogation method that temporarily puts the subject’s consciousness to sleep in order to obtain an accurate answer from the interrogator. I don’t intend to avoid any means of swearing to the truth in the name of Christ.”

In 19th century Germany, you couldn’t take Christianity out of the picture. Even with atheism spreading as widely as it was, that was still the case. People’s way of life couldn’t change overnight.

So I was prepared to use whatever means were available to me. Even now, with the Reputation value hitting +1.0.

I waved to the attendants waiting behind me and had them bring over a chair. Then I sat down. I waited in silence, and before long, a familiar face appeared onstage in his cassock.

Narke looked at me without a trace of expression, as though he were meeting me here for the first time today. I closed my eyes, and he placed a hand against my forehead.

― Enter through the narrow gate.

A sound like my heart dropping out of my chest rang loudly inside my head. Backlit by the sun, Narke briefly narrowed his eyes. His lips twisted.

But he quickly regained the composure he had shown earlier.

That was because we were putting on a performance.

Both of us were acting, and we had to show the results of that performance in a way that would make it seem more real than anything else.

— For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.

The camera had turned back to face the front, so it would eventually catch me from the side. I swallowed as I slowly felt myself growing short of breath. The hand against my forehead was cold, while the sunlight was hot.

— But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

When I came to again, I was leaning against a one-person sofa, looking up at the sun. Narke was dabbing holy water onto my forehead. I couldn’t read his expression.

As planned, Narke left the stage as soon as his task was finished without saying a word to me. The divine power mage who had been stationed there for verification followed him.

There was nothing to be gained from letting people see Narke treating me kindly for too long. He had asked the carefully prepared questions, and I had answered by using the part of my consciousness he had left awake. That was how the plan was supposed to go, but for some reason, I couldn’t remember any of it.

I accepted the water a staff member handed me and drank, relieved to find that I still looked presentable. Then I slowly rose from my seat.

So.

“Fellow subjects.”

Had the verification worked?

My heart was pounding, but the number told me the reality. My Reputation has already risen to +2.1.

Visual persuasion was usually more effective than a hundred truths.

I blinked several times, trying to bring my slightly unfocused eyes back into focus. Once my vision had cleared, I faced them again and spoke.

“You have seen everything now. You know what the truth is. According to information from our government, Pleroma had already established another Messiah publicly. And yet now, out of nowhere, they claim that I—not that person—am the Messiah. Why? Because among all the mages His Majesty the Emperor so graciously selected, I happen to have a past that makes me useful for sowing confusion among the subjects. They chose me as Christ for one reason above all: the troublesome past of Lukas Askanien was useful material for dividing the Empire. But that past needed something more sensational added to it.”

I naturally raised my outstretched hand over the podium and twisted the corner of my mouth.

“Why? Because the fact that I was at the center of a series of incidents in my childhood is no longer enough to make the people of this empire fall for Pleroma’s schemes. That is why I suddenly became Pleroma’s Christ. That is what this is, everyone! It seems the new Christ of this age was born in a truly strategic manger—at Pleroma’s strategy table.”

I raised an eyebrow and scoffed. +2.3, +2.4. Only now did I begin to hear a faint response from the crowd. Real voices from real people. I was surprised inwardly, but I put on the crooked smile I had prepared and shouted, “Do you believe in this unholy Christ? This so-called birth of Christ?”

I cleared my throat, then looked around at my fellow subjects with a cold smile and spoke clearly.

“I do not believe it. I refuse to believe it—for the sake of our German Empire, our continent, the universal values of humanity, and our religion, which is inseparable from the lives of our ancestors. The Christ proclaimed by a criminal organization is no Christ at all! They have no right to even speak the name of Christ! To accept the words of people who have abandoned all reason is no different from allowing their absurdity to become reality.”

When the person proclaimed as Christ thrust his hand forward and delivered these words with force, applause and shouts of agreement broke out among the crowd. No, saying they poured forth would be an exaggeration, but compared to the knife-edge tension at the beginning, it was a tremendous change. Sometimes a response from a few gradually spreads like wildfire until it comes to dominate the whole.

Feeling what little remained in my stomach churning under the effects of mana, I turned my head again and silently gagged. Disgust surged up alongside the Reputation value that was shooting upward like something out of a ghost story, but by now I had enough presence of mind to turn even this into an opportunity. I widened my eyes, meeting the gaze of one person after another as I said, “Pleroma must drink blood again and again just to survive… That is because blood is the only medium through which they can absorb mana. They need it to sustain their bodies, which have died and returned to life, and to wield vitriol with even greater power. Therefore, they can have no aversion to drinking blood.”

I didn’t want to gag a second time, so I closed my eyes for a moment and stopped speaking until my stomach settled. Then I looked back at the crowd with my usual gaze.

“But that is not the case with me. I simply cannot get used to blood. Contrary to their claims, contrary to what you believe, it is because I am not Pleroma. I know that some of you believe I am Pleroma based on what happened to me as a child. But I have no memory of those events, so I cannot speak carelessly about them. Yet from the moment I can remember, I have never lived as a member of Pleroma—not for a single moment. Instead of them, I pledge my loyalty to you, my fellow subjects.”

I wiped every trace of mockery and every hint of a smile from my face as I spoke. As I grew solemn, so did the crowd.

“Fellow subjects, I want to set the record straight. I want to be of help to you, not to Pleroma. That single conviction is what has driven me all this way. So, in that light, I ask you to think again. Pleroma has thrown the Empire into chaos, innocent subjects have lost their lives, and our economy has contracted at a rate no different from that of a nation at war. Our homeland, which had been striving toward the greatest heights, has been turned against the continent by the machinations of a false religious organization.”

+2.9, +3.1, +3.4. The numbers keep climbing without end. Once the upward trend gets going, it only grows steeper. I paint the image of the strong leader they want to see across my face. Whoever the public sees reflected in me, they have to trust me instead of Pleroma.

“Believing their words, and mistaking me for Pleroma’s Christ because of them, is only giving strength to the lying tongue and pen Pleroma wields. That is why I lament! To those who slaughtered innocent lives across the continent and now seek to drag our homeland and our continent into the mire by using such inhumanity to seize them by the throat—!”

I raised my hand above my forehead and raised my voice, then stopped. Silence fell beneath the blazing gazes of thousands of people, their eyes burning like the sun. Amid that tightly gathered attention, I delivered my final words with all the force I could muster.

“Please do not give them the chance to shake the Empire.”

A brief silence.

Then came a faint sound, like a couple of stones dropping onto the surface of still water. It spread across the square like raindrops striking waves, growing into a sound that filled the entire square. No one spoke. Only the sound of applause rang out.

Amid the endless roar of human voices, I finally saw the number +4.0.

At the edge of my vision, I saw Mecklenburg exhale rapidly, the strength draining from his body. I had no idea what he thought, but I was calmer than I had ever been. I deliberately drew up the corners of my mouth and smiled.

“May our homeland and all of you, my fellow subjects, be blessed.”

Translator Note

1. The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn that lasted from 1929 to 1939. ↩︎