Every Morning, My Mirror Saves the World - Chapter 4

Chapter 4

“…O almighty Lord Xisaluo, thank you for granting me this bountiful dinner. Your most faithful believer, Lars de Praetextatus, offers you his deepest worship and reverence. May your light shine forever upon the throne of the gods. Today, in the name of an Apprentice Knight, I swear that I shall remain humble for all eternity, honor glory, harbor mercy in my heart, fight for loyalty, fight for faith…”

Ruiyin slowly used the last piece of bread to wipe her plate clean, stuffed it into her mouth, and glanced at her watch while she was at it.

Lars continued praying. “…fear no sacrifice, fear no blade, take this sword as my body…”

This guy had been droning on for a full ten minutes already. The fact that he could recite several thousand words of dry text backward and forward, then deliver it with full emotion, earned Ruiyin’s sincere admiration.

At last, Lars finished his prayer and opened his eyes. “Then, I shall begin eating–eh?”

Lars stared dumbly at the empty plate, shocked. “How… how is it gone?!”

Ruiyin chewed with her cheeks puffed out. “Mm, that’s right. I ate it all. This teaches us that there aren’t many good things in this world, so while they’re still there, you have to cherish them properly and waste no time. Once they’re gone, all you can do is sigh at an empty plate.”

Lars, sitting frozen with knife and fork in hand as he faced the empty plate: “…”

Right after that, another piece of bread descended from the heavens onto Lars’s plate. “But see, I did leave you something to eat. This teaches us that the world is full of love, and destroying the world just because you suffer a little setback and darkness is wrong. Even when facing an empty plate, we must believe that some good person will love you in my place. Yours, understand?”

Lars nodded unconsciously. “…”

Ruiyin patted his head in satisfaction. “Good. Now eat.”

While Lars ate this deeply meaningful dinner with tears in his eyes, Ruiyin was tilting her head and studying Lars’s Twisted Chronicle. It really was a strange book. Aside from the first few pages, everything after that was completely blank. Squinting, she picked the character profile out of a heap of deliberately showy, utterly impractical decorative English script. It even included that ridiculously long prayer before meals from just now. After mulling it over for a while, she suddenly realized something. “Lars, isn’t Xisaluo the God of War? Why do you pray to the God of War before eating?”

Lars said proudly, “Because Lord Xisaluo is a god, of course! He is almighty!”

“…Then, if I remember correctly, when you prayed for your comrades who died in battle a few days ago, you used the God of Life Herbotiya. Lord Xisaluo doesn’t handle that?”

Lars answered with perfect confidence, “As a knight, the chief god I believe in is Xisaluo, and my second deity is the God of Life. Of course I can pray to her too!”

“…” Ruiyin understood. In this place, you could only pray to the gods you believed in. So whether it was the God of Death or the God of Fire, the two volunteer slots on your list decided which gods had to take responsibility for every tiny, trivial matter in your life, including eating, sleeping, using the bathroom, and accidental pregnancy. Truly, it was enough to make one weep for those poor gods.

It had been five days since Ruiyin and Lars left that desolate battlefield. Using the excuse, “What a coincidence, I’m going to Kandel Castle too, so let’s travel together,” Ruiyin had smoothly joined the simple youth Lars’s party. The two of them relied entirely on their own two legs to advance, traveling by day and lodging in people’s homes by night. If Ruiyin hadn’t previously shaken some money off the dead, the two of them would have long since died on the threshold of some house that refused them shelter, given the chivalric spirit Lars believed in. These days, even landlords had no grain to spare. Who had the saintly heart to care for a defeated Little Knight?

The one paying was the boss. Economic status directly decided the fate of Ruiyin sleeping on the bed while Lars lay on the floor. This Little Knight, however, had quite a good temper. No matter how he was exploited and bullied along the way, he always looked cheerful. He was a boy not yet twenty, with a small frame still carrying a trace of youth as adolescence stretched him taller and broader by the day. He had a naturally smiling baby face, and his short black hair bounced messily with his movements like a puppy’s fur. Whenever those clear, emerald-green eyes looked at her, Ruiyin could not, for the life of her, understand how such an adorable thing could turn into a middle-aged edgelord who had nearly destroyed the world.

“Hey, Lars.” Ruiyin lay on the bed and asked Lars, who was lying on the floor, “Why do you absolutely have to go back? Your teammates have been dead for days anyway. Why not just pretend you’re dead too and wander off on your own? What’s the point of insisting on going back to tell the king something he definitely already knows?”

“I can’t do that!” Lars objected fiercely. “As a knight, the most important virtue is loyalty. Even if my lord already knows the news, even if he punishes me, I still have to return!”

Ruiyin tilted her head and looked at him. “Then what if he’s been using you from start to finish? For example, using you to do bad things and bully the old, weak, sick, and disabled. Would you choose to be loyal to your lord, or uphold chivalry and firmly disobey unreasonable orders?”

“Me?” Lars froze. “I would… uh, what should I do…”

The knight, who had already been about to fall asleep, rolled up in one motion and began agonizing desperately by the side of the bed. Ruiyin felt a headache coming on as she watched his dazed expression. “All right, don’t overthink it. I was just joking.”

Lars immediately beamed. “Of course! Our lord is the idol of our knight order. How could he possibly do anything that violates chivalry?”

Tsk. You really are young. Not only did he do it, he did it thoroughly. In order to seize the neighboring country’s territory, the king of Kandel Castle colluded with an Undead mage. To activate a certain forbidden art that deserved the contempt of the entire world, he sent a thousand knights onto the battlefield under the pretext of subjugating the Orcs, then collected their souls after they died in battle. Whether Lars was unlucky or lucky, who could say? After surviving and returning home to report, he was arrested by the king as a traitor and thrown into prison to await execution. Although he did not end up dying, this was also the beginning of his descent into madness.
Ruiyin sighed and looked down at the Little Knight, who had been freed from his worries and had instantly fallen asleep on the ground. She was beginning to understand why he would end up trying to destroy the world.

The purer, firmer, and more flawless a person was, the easier they were to corrupt. The purer their faith, the deeper the hatred and confusion that would be born when it was overturned. If an ordinary person’s worldview collapsed, at worst they would become a washed-up youth. But for someone with an absurdly powerful mind, absurdly exceptional talent, and absurdly terrifying cheats, destroying the world was not exactly hard to understand.

How was she supposed to straighten out a twisted kid like this…?

Sleepless, Ruiyin stared with bloodshot eyes at the culprit sprawled out on the ground and sleeping like a log. She wanted nothing more than to grab Lars by his baby face and drag him into insomnia with her.

On the seventh day, the two of them were finally forced to sleep out in the wilderness.

“I’m sorry…” Lars roasted a rabbit while gazing at Ruiyin with soft, guilt-soaked eyes.

Ruiyin, hugging her knees and curled into a ball, kept her back to him, looking as if mushrooms were about to start growing all over it.

“I’m really sorry!” Lars abandoned the rabbit and dropped flat to the ground in a tiger-pounce prostration. “Please forgive me! If it will make amends, I am willing to die for my crime!”

“…” Ruiyin looked up, black lines practically hanging from her face. “Listen, you already know I’m not a god, so why are your movements and lines still the same few tricks?”

“Huh? Are they?” Lars scratched his head in confusion, then immediately tiger-pounced to the ground again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t notice. I am willing to die for my crime!”

Ruiyin said, “…Forget it. I forgive you for letting a fake beggar scam us out of all our money because you were possessed by the spirit of a saint, and then proudly bragging to me about it.”

Lars’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Ruiyin, you’re such a good person.”

“…Hey, is your way of repaying me to hand me a Good Person Card? Also, your rabbit is burning.”

Lars cried out and lunged back to the fire to rescue the roasted rabbit.

Ruiyin propped her chin on both hands and faced the campfire, sinking into thought in a Chrollo-like pose.

There were two ways to make this currently pure and good-natured guy walk the proper upright path. One was to deny him any chance of turning evil. The other was to cut off his ability to grow stronger at the root. Since the second method was far too cruel, Ruiyin adopted the first: seedling protection.

Along the way, she had thought of countless methods to drag this child, who was headed straight down a dead-end road, back onto the proper path. Unfortunately, Lars, who was determined to return home and report in, had a head like a rock. She had worried herself into dark circles and a pale face; if she added a pair of lightbulb earrings, she could pass for the troupe leader. Lars, meanwhile, remained optimistic, positive, hardworking, innocent, and lively.

…He had better not force her to use the second method, severing the tendons in his hands and feet so he really could only automatically job-change into a mage after turning twenty-five!

Lars happily ran over with the roasted rabbit in his hands. He gave Ruiyin the better half of the meat while blowing on it to cool it. “Ruiyin, eat!”

“…Thanks.” Her guilt instantly broke through the critical threshold.

“No need to thank me! It is a knight’s honor to serve a lady!”

“…Thanks.” Suddenly, she felt like this guy was asking for a beating again.

In truth, sleeping outdoors was not particularly unbearable. Ruiyin had never been a picky person, and Lars had, with utmost gentlemanly conduct, given all the superior conditions to her. So, leaning against a soft pile of fallen leaves, Ruiyin soon drifted into sleep. It was not until the middle of the night, when she was half-asleep, that she seemed to hear some strange sound.

“So… hungry…”

The voice was not loud. A single crackle from the campfire could drown it out. And yet it seemed to pass directly into her brain, so faint and insubstantial that it made her uncomfortable. Perhaps because she had spent this period constantly thinking about forbidden arts, Undead mages, and the like, Ruiyin was especially sensitive to that voice. Her eyes flew open, only to see that Lars had already taken his sword in one hand and was leaning behind a large tree. Seeing her wake, Lars raised one finger, signaling for her not to make a sound, then held his breath and stared into the darkness of the forest ahead.

“Hungry… Food… Give me food…”

That voice continued, cold and resentful enough to make Ruiyin’s hair stand on end. By the time she realized it, she had already unconsciously grabbed the arm of the only person beside her. Lars was still wearing the knight’s armor he had worn on the battlefield, and through the cold metal, she could still feel the lean, powerful muscles of the arm beneath. She instinctively looked up at the young man, who was a head taller than her, and for the first time realized that this cheerful, silly boy was already a man who had returned from the battlefield.

“So hungry…”

The voice gradually drew closer. Lars protected her behind him with one arm while quietly raising his sword.

“Huh? Wait.” Ruiyin reached out and stopped Lars. She listened intently for a moment, then said hesitantly, “Lars, don’t you think… this doesn’t really sound like a ghost?”

Only after the voice came closer did she realize that it did not really have the sound effect of a wandering spirit. That tone, filled with grief, sorrow, resentment, and pitiful frustration, sounded… more and more like a human being.

While she was desperately trying to figure out what sort of person would make such a sound, a figure had already broken through their surveillance in an instant, rushing from the forest to the campfire at a speed far beyond human limits… and straight to the leftover rabbit.

“Food! Great God Xisaluo, I found food!”

That figure devoutly knelt on the ground, held up half a rabbit in both hands, looked up at the sky, and let out a long howl.

“Thank you for bestowing dinner upon me. I’m going to eat now!”

Compared to Lars, this fellow believer in War God Xisaluo certainly had a concise pre-meal prayer…

Author’s Note: The most insane man in this story, maybe, has appeared! Please call him the man standing at the pinnacle of divinity!