Rex was in a good mood today.
So good that even Hilda could tell.
He rode on his horse, the curve of his mouth not having dropped since he left in the morning.
The wind of the North was still just as cold, the road just as bumpy, but he was completely oblivious, even humming a few off-key little tunes.
The reason was simple.
Early this morning, as usual, he went to check on the seeds in the field.
He hadn’t held out much hope; this was already the eleventh day.
The previous ten days had been nothing but barren ground, not a single sign of movement.
He had even started planning to ask someone in Frostwind City who knew about farming if this land was truly and utterly ruined.
But as he walked over, he noticed that tiny bit of green on the ground.
Very small, so small you had to squat down to see it clearly.
It had emerged from the soil, a thin little stem topped with a tender leaf that hadn’t fully unfurled yet.
The color was a very, very pale green, almost swallowed by the brown earth.
But it was there.
Rex squatted on the ridge, staring at that sprout for a long time.
It wasn’t just one.
He brushed aside the nearby soil and found a few more.
Both the rye and the winterroot had poked their heads up, though sparsely, one here and one there, as if they’d been scattered randomly.
Well, actually, they had been scattered randomly.
But this at least proved one thing: this land could still grow things.
It wasn’t as hopeless as the old hunter had said, nor as lifeless as those abandoned fields looked.
Rex just squatted there, staring blankly, until Hilda appeared at the edge of the field.
“My Lord.”
She was carrying a lunchbox.
“Breakfast.”
Only then did Rex realize he’d been squatting on the ridge for nearly half an hour; his knees were stiff.
He stood up, stretched his legs, and took the lunchbox.
The two of them found a slightly cleaner rock on the ridge to sit on.
Hilda ate slowly, chewing deliberately as if savoring the taste.
Rex finished the rest of his bread in a few bites, took a gulp of hot coffee, then leaned back against the rock and let out a long sigh.
He leaned there for a moment before suddenly speaking to Hilda.
“Actually… I’ve never farmed before. But today, the seeds I planted in this field sprouted.”
“Because My Lord was very attentive,” Hilda said, turning her head to look at him.
“I learned all this from books,” Rex said.
“When I was little, I found a book about agriculture in my father’s study. It talked about how to till the soil, how to select seeds, how to read the seasons. I thought it was useless at the time, flipped through a couple of pages, and tossed it aside. Who would have thought I’d actually use it over a decade later.”
He laughed, a bit self-deprecatingly.
“The seeds sprouting… I guess I just got lucky.”
“My Lord, actually…”
Hilda paused.
“You could have used magic to force these seeds to mature.”
“Dragon Kind life magic can accelerate plant growth. While I’m not skilled at it, making a few seeds mature within a few days isn’t particularly difficult.”
“I know,” Rex said, putting down his cup.
“But I don’t want to do that.”
“Using magic to force growth treats the symptom, not the root cause. What I want is for this land to sustain itself. Not through magic, not through luck, but on its own. My ancestors once managed it, so I can too.”
He turned to look at the field.
The tilled frozen soil glowed a deep brown in the morning light.
Those newly emerged sprouts were still hard to see, but he knew they were there.
“And,” he added, “if I rely on magic for everything, then what’s the point of me farming?”
Hilda thought for a moment, seeming to find this reasoning quite sound.
She finished the last bite of her bread and brushed the crumbs from her hands.
Rex seemed particularly talkative today.
Leaning against the rock, he looked at the distant snowy plains and suddenly started talking about his childhood again.
“I once found another book in my father’s study,” he said softly, as if telling a very old story.
“Not a magic book, not a swordsmanship manual. It was a… family history. The history of our Klein Family. From the first family head onward, generation by generation, written in great detail.”
“The book said that in the very beginning, the Empire was just a small country. So small it could have been swallowed by a neighbor at any moment. Then, starting from some generation… the book writes very vaguely… a certain ancestor of the Klein Family, for some unknown reason, actually formed a contract with the most powerful Dragon Kind on the continent at that time.”
“With the power of the great Dragons, the Empire began to expand. Taking a city today, annexing a country tomorrow. In just a few decades, it went from a tiny speck of land to an empire spanning half the continent. And the Klein Family’s name was written on the first page of every Imperial history book.”
He paused, not noticing that his fingers were unconsciously playing with Hilda’s long hair.
“After securing the realm, the first emperor enfeoffed his meritorious ministers. The other three families all chose the richest, most prosperous places. Only our Klein Family ancestor chose the North.”
“Why?”
Hilda asked, leaning her head against his shoulder.
“The book doesn’t say why. It just says that ancestor ‘requested the North, and the Emperor permitted it.'”
Rex put his arm around her waist.
“But the book described in detail what the North was like back then. Back then, this place was covered in crops. The wheat grew waist-high, and in autumn, the entire field was golden. The North wasn’t always this desolate. It was once good.”
Hilda looked at his profile.
Rex’s expression was calm, but there was something indescribable in his eyes.
“And then…”
Rex let out a long sigh.
“When I got to that part, I found that a large section of the following content had been torn out.”
“Torn out?”
“Mm. About several dozen pages, completely gone. The content after that jumps directly to another matter, with a huge gap in the middle. I don’t know what the torn-out content was, nor who tore it. But the records after that are different.”
His voice grew quieter.
“First, the Dragon Knights died one after another. The book writes things like ‘died heroically for the country’ or ‘fell on the battlefield’—it all sounds very honorable. But for one family, three Dragon Knights who could have been the pride of the nation, all to die in battle… that doesn’t sound normal at all.”
“What are you suspecting?”
Rex shook his head.
“I don’t know. I have no evidence, and I certainly can’t make wild guesses. But from then on, our Klein Family started to decline.”
He didn’t mention the details.
The loss of family power, the reduction of the fief, the encroachment by other families.
Those things could fill several books, but he glossed over them lightly, as if talking about something unrelated to himself.
“My father always wanted to restore the family,” Rex’s voice grew even softer.
“He talked about it so much when I was little that my ears developed calluses.”
“Father said the glory of the Klein Family must not end with our generation. That I had to work hard, become strong, and take back everything the family had lost.”
“Then, when I was fifteen, I went to Dragon Valley alone. I didn’t tell my father. Nor… did I tell my former fiancée.”
Rex said.
“I knew they wouldn’t agree. It was too dangerous. The last heir of the Klein Family, running off to Dragon territory to die. No sane father would allow it.”
“So you ran off alone.”
“Mm,” Rex nodded.
“There was a recorded route in the book. I borrowed a map from Alisiya, and then I just went.”
He suddenly laughed.
“Thinking about it now, I was really bold back then. A fifteen-year-old kid, without even a decent sword, dared to charge into Dragon Valley.”
“And then you met me in Dragon Valley.”
“Yes,” Rex turned to look at her.
“And then I met you.”
Hilda didn’t respond.
Her gaze fell on Rex’s back again.
Those old scars hidden by his clothes, which she had just seen the day before yesterday.
He had almost died there in Dragon Valley protecting her.
Rex didn’t notice her silence and continued.
“When I finally returned, the Empire had completely changed for the worse. The Klein Family’s situation had also deteriorated, and my father’s look towards me had changed.”
“He thought you had become weak.”
“He thought I had given up on myself. A person who disappears for five years, comes back, doesn’t practice swordsmanship, doesn’t study magic, loafs around all day… anyone would think that.”
“But why didn’t you prove yourself to them?”
“I just didn’t want to prove anything anymore.”
Rex’s voice was so light it seemed it would scatter with a gust of the north wind.
“While training in Dragon Valley, I figured one thing out.”
“The glory of the Klein Family isn’t something I can uphold alone. Those so-called great nobles, those smiling faces at banquets, they don’t care at all about what the Klein Family once did. They only care about what they can take from the Klein Family now.”
He stood up, walked to the edge of the ridge, squatted down, and gently touched the sprout of the rye.
“So I didn’t want to stay in the Empire Capital anymore. Those days of hypocrisy and scheming were meaningless. I wanted to find a perfectly reasonable excuse that wouldn’t be questioned. So I chose to slack off, to make everyone think I was beyond redemption.”
“And so you came to the North like this.”
“Exactly,” Rex nodded.
“Back to where our family started. Because the family finances were tight, it had been left abandoned for over a hundred years like this.”
The two of them fell silent for about ten minutes.
“My Lord,” Hilda finally spoke.
“You said earlier that your ancestor formed a contract with the Dragon Kind for some reason.”
“Mm.”
“The book didn’t say what the reason was?”
Rex shook his head.
“No. It just says ‘by chance and circumstance.’ I guess maybe that ancestor was just lucky, meeting a Dragon willing to help him.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t luck.”
Rex turned to look at her.
“Then what was it?”
Hilda didn’t answer.
Her gaze fell somewhere in the distance, looking at who knows what.
She suddenly changed the subject.
“The book you mentioned, is it still there?”
“It should still be in my father’s study. Why?”
Hilda shook her head.
“It’s nothing. I just wanted to know the name of that ancestor of yours.”
Rex thought for a moment…
“Edmund von Klein.”
“The first Guardian of the North. The book says he was an incredibly stubborn man. Once he decided on something, he would see it through. No matter what others said, no matter how many difficulties lay on the path.”
He spoke while standing up and patting the mud off his knees.
Hilda blinked but didn’t respond.
However, the corner of her mouth curved up slightly.
“Let’s go!”
Rex then directly mounted his horse and reached out a hand to Hilda.
“I said I’d take you to Frostwind City.”
Hilda didn’t hesitate and took his hand.
Rex pulled her onto the horse, seating her in front of him.
Her silver hair was blown by the wind, brushing against his cheek, carrying a faint, unknown cold fragrance.
“Hold on tight.”
He nudged the horse’s sides with his heels.
The horse whinnied and galloped towards Frostwind City.
Behind them, the field that had just sprouted grew farther and farther away, but those little green dots were still there, growing quietly in the brown frozen soil.