Chapter 26: Three Years

Three years passed quickly within House Zierghardt, although Sigurd would have disagreed with anyone who described those years as peaceful.

Seasons changed around Sylvia’s estate, servants came and went, younger descendants began their own training, and the enormous ash trees surrounding the eastern grounds shed their leaves only to grow them again.

Sigurd noticed most of those changes in passing because very little of his life belonged to leisure. By the time he turned ten, the small child once carried through the estate in Sylvia’s arms had grown considerably taller, his frame lean and compact from years of physical conditioning.

Ash-white hair fell around a face that had lost nearly all its childhood softness, while black roots remained visible beneath it. His iron-grey eyes had become calmer as well, carrying the quiet focus of someone who had spent far more time holding a sword than playing with children his age.

That was simply life in Zierghardt. Nobody needed to stand behind Sigurd every morning and remind him that talent without work eventually became someone else’s stepping stone.

The Main Line possessed greater resources and opportunities than almost anyone else in the clan, but those privileges came with expectations. Branch descendants trained. Vassal heirs trained.

His siblings trained. Somewhere beyond Sylvia’s estate were countless children born into kingdoms, academies, ancient families, and organizations with resources comparable to his own.

Sigurd had already witnessed enough of Eden to understand that being called the Little Genius inside one estate meant absolutely nothing in the wider world. Osric’s pebble had cured him of any possibility of becoming impressed with himself too early.

His days therefore settled into a rhythm that would have exhausted most adults. He woke before sunrise and began with physical conditioning while the estate remained dark, followed by breakfast and several hours of sword training.

Cultivation occupied much of the afternoon or night depending on Osric’s plans, while technique practice filled whatever remained. Some days changed completely when Osric dragged him into one of the Demonic Forests controlled by Zierghardt and informed him that training would continue there instead.

Sylvia complained whenever Sigurd returned covered in blood, mud, bruises, or torn clothing, but even she understood what being born a Zierghardt meant. Her objections usually resulted in Osric receiving a furious lecture and Sigurd receiving enough food to feed three children.

Cultivation progressed steadily. His First Vis Core had remained at the Nascent Stage when he was seven, already strengthened considerably by the two Demonic Cores Osric gave him after their trip into the forest.

Three years of cultivation had brought him close to the boundary separating Nascent from Ascended. The Core was larger, denser, and vastly more stable than it had been then, rotating within him while drawing in Vis with an efficiency that continued improving alongside his control over the Star Devouring Leviathan.

Sigurd refused to rush the final step.

He could feel that the Ascended Stage was close, but Osric had hammered one principle into him repeatedly: reaching a destination quickly meant nothing if the road behind you collapsed afterward.

His swordsmanship changed even more dramatically. The fundamentals Osric forced into his body from childhood had become instinctive. Sigurd no longer consciously considered how firmly his fingers should close around the hilt, where his feet belonged during a transition, or how his hips should move through a cut.

Thousands upon thousands of repetitions had buried those answers inside his muscles. He practiced with one hand, two hands, exhausted, injured, on unstable ground, beneath rain, inside darkness, and while Osric hurled stones at him whenever his attention wandered.

Some mornings he performed nothing except basic cuts until his palms reopened beneath old calluses.

Osric maintained that complicated techniques became useless the moment poor fundamentals appeared beneath pressure, and Sigurd had never found a convincing argument against him.

Severing Line remained his most practiced Martial Technique. Reaching Initial Understanding had taken three days, but every stage afterward demanded exponentially more work.

Minor Completion came after he learned to execute the technique reliably during actual combat rather than under controlled conditions. Major Completion was different. Sigurd had stopped thinking of Severing Line as one specific sword strike and begun understanding the principle beneath it.

The synchronization of movement and Vis could be applied through different angles, changing footwork, and situations that the battered manual had never explicitly described. His Vis consumption decreased, activation became faster, and opponents could no longer easily recognize when he intended to use it.

By ten, Severing Line had firmly reached Major Completion.

Perfection remained beyond him.

That frustrated Sigurd more than he liked admitting. He could feel the boundary sometimes while practicing, especially during moments when his sword, body, and Vis seemed to move without conscious separation. Yet whenever he attempted to grasp that sensation deliberately, it slipped away.

Osric told him to stop chasing it. Perfection wasn’t another sequence to memorize or a threshold reached because someone repeated a technique ten thousand additional times.

Sigurd needed to understand Severing Line so completely that the technique became indistinguishable from his ordinary swordsmanship.

He suspected he required an opportunity, perhaps another battle or moment of enlightenment, to cross that final distance. Until then, forcing it accomplished nothing.

Osric certainly gave him enough opportunities to try.

If Sigurd had once believed his instructor might become gentler as he grew older, that misunderstanding died quickly. Osric seemed to regard Sigurd’s increasing strength as permission to invent progressively worse training methods.

He made him climb mountain paths carrying iron weights while circulating Vis through exhausted muscles, stand beneath freezing waterfalls while maintaining sword forms, sprint through forests with weights attached to his ankles, and practice footwork across wooden posts driven above ravines.

Whenever Sigurd successfully adapted to something, Osric increased the difficulty until failure became possible again. The man possessed an almost artistic talent for discovering the exact point between productive suffering and attempted murder.

Combat training became particularly unpleasant. At seven, Osric had thrown Sigurd against an Armored Bloodfang and watched him struggle through his first battle with a Ferocious Beast.

By eight, Sigurd was entering Demonic Forests regularly under supervision. Osric initially selected individual Ferocious Beasts near Sigurd’s level, then stopped choosing convenient opponents altogether.

Sigurd fought wolf-like predators that attacked in packs, scaled reptiles whose hides could deflect ordinary steel, enormous insects that ambushed from beneath the ground, and creatures capable of moving through dense forests without making enough noise for him to hear. Every species forced him to solve a different problem.

Eventually Osric removed his sword.

The first time it happened, Sigurd assumed his instructor was joking until a Ferocious Beast emerged from the trees and Osric calmly climbed onto a branch with his wine flask.

Sigurd spent the next half hour discovering exactly how unpleasant fighting something with claws using bare hands could become. After that came blindfolds. Osric forced him to rely upon hearing, air displacement, vibration, smell, and the killing intent of approaching creatures rather than depending entirely upon sight.

Sigurd was bitten, thrown, scratched, trampled, and once chased halfway across a valley after incorrectly identifying the direction of an approaching beast. Osric laughed about that incident for months.

The results justified the suffering.

Ferocious Beasts that once represented dangerous opponents gradually became training targets. Sigurd learned to read their anatomy within moments, identify how they distributed weight, determine their preferred attack range, and manipulate their aggression. His previous life’s battle experience combined naturally with three years of martial training.

He didn’t merely react quickly; he arranged exchanges several movements ahead, deliberately offering openings to provoke predictable attacks before punishing the response.

Where the Armored Bloodfang had forced him through a prolonged battle at seven, an equivalent Ferocious Beast at ten rarely survived his first committed strike.

That morning demonstrated the difference.

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Deep within one of Zierghardt’s forests, a massive black boar burst through the undergrowth, tusks tearing apart shrubs as it charged. Sigurd stood directly in its path with his sword still sheathed.

Three years earlier he might have studied the beast cautiously, tested its speed, and created distance before committing himself. Now his eyes moved once across its shoulders, forelegs, tusks, and exposed throat.

He understood enough..Sigurd stepped forward as the boar reached him.

The sword left its sheath. A pale line crossed the forest..The Ferocious Beast continued running for six steps before collapsing, its head striking the earth separately from its body.

Sigurd flicked the blood from his sword and calmly returned it to its sheath.

Behind him, Osric lowered his wine flask.

The instructor stared at the corpse, then at the ten-year-old standing before it, and smiled.

The Little Genius was growing up.