Stone Will Read online

  And so, he’d expected neither a harem of virgins nor an eternal feast among soldiers, neither Seraphim nor the Golden Gate. Instead, there was only darkness.

  It was warm and tender.

  He was fine with it.

  He didn’t want to leave it. For the first time in his life, he felt neither anxiety nor unease. That's why he’d been so unhappy when the bright light appeared at the end of the narrowing tunnel.

  He didn't want to leave this intimate darkness. But it forced him out, pushing him closer to the scorching circle of the white flame.

  Finally, the light flooded everything around him, and then pouring down inside him as well. He felt a burning sensation in his chest. He shouted. Not from the pain, he knew how to endure that. He’d done it just to make sure he was truly alive. But instead of screaming, all he heard was a nasty squeak.

  “Dat har herieon.”

  He heard an unfamiliar, gruff language. He opened his eyes with great difficulty and saw... An incomprehensible, blurry, clearly inverted, black-and-white spot. Out of habit, he reached out his hand toward the keyboard to type “What the hell”. But instead of the keyboard, he ended up squeezing something soft. At first, he thought it was someone’s hand, but, looking at it closer, he recognized... a finger.

  How huge that finger must’ve been, if he’d held it with his whole palm!

  Wait... Wait a minute...

  [Reconfiguring the interface. Correcting the original error. The host’s age is 35 seconds.]

  What?!

  Suddenly, the black-and-white image was filled with color and returned to normal, changing the perspective back as well. Finally, he saw the face… of a woman. Or even a young girl. She was about twenty. Certainly not any older. Her lustrous, black hair, which was in a thick braid, lay on her narrow, elegant shoulder. Her clear, green eyes glowed with happiness.

  Her round, tired, sweat-covered face was perhaps the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He didn’t see the environment—not the huge stone chamber, decorated with velvet and gold; not the painted walls: nor the girls in light leather armor who were standing around them. He looked only into the depth of her shiny eyes.

  She stroked his cheek gently and said, “Dlahi Hadjar. Dlahi Hadjar.”

  ***

  “Look, Nanny,” Elizabeth smiled.

  She stroked the crying baby’s cheek. She wasn’t alone on the damp sheets now, rocking her newborn son in her arms. The nanny bustled around her. She gave orders to the women and they immediately ran into the depths of the Palace corridors.

  “My dear Hadjar,” the queen lulled the little Prince to sleep. “Dear Hadjar.”

  A kind smile was on her tired face.

  “My Queen,” the plump, kind Nanny came up to her. “Look how tightly he is holding onto you.”

  Elizabeth only then noticed that Hadjar had been squeezing her finger tightly. In his clear, blue eyes, she suddenly saw the reflection of something that the baby should not have been able to feel.

  It was confusion.

  “A son?!” Suddenly, there was an almost bestial roar.

  In the corridor, she heard the tramping of a dozen feet. The gigantic doors opened wide and a tall, broad-shouldered man flew into the hall. Wearing golden, comfortable clothes, with a sash at his belt, he was an impressive man, and he was also taller than his warriors by two heads.

  He had light brown, shoulder-length hair and a leather strap with metal inserts covered his forehead.

  “My King,” the nurse immediately bowed low.

  The armored girls, who had returned to the chamber, did the same.

  “Darling,” Elizabeth’s smile became even brighter than it had been before.

  “I have a son, brother!” The King grabbed the man standing next to him by the shoulders.

  He looked like the King, but was even taller and a little older. His black beard had some gray in it. A golden medallion was fastened to his heavy fur cloak.

  “Congratulations, brother,” the man answered in a deep baritone voice.

  The King shook him a little and almost jumped onto the bed. He embraced his wife and touched his firstborn gently, a little wary of harming him. The baby was warm.

  “Why isn't he crying?” The King asked worriedly. “Call the doctor! Quickly!”

  “Calm down, Haver,” the Queen laughed, and her gaze stopped the knights. “He’s cried. He’s just... stopped now.”

  “Stopped crying?” Haver was surprised. “Is that at all normal?”

  This time, the question was addressed to the nurse that had straightened up.

  “No, Your Majesty. You cried for almost four hours after your birth.”

  Haver wanted to scold the grumpy old woman, but he remembered that his newborn son was next to him, just in time to stop himself. Could he hear him?

  “Don’t worry, brother,” the tall man came closer. “Look at how tightly he’s holding Elizabeth’s finger and how hard his eyes are.”

  The King turned back to his son, and for the first time, a feeling of pride flared up in his chest. He held out his own finger, and the baby grabbed it with his other hand. Tightly. Very tightly.

  “The gods know,” the smiling King whispered, “He will be a great general and...”

  “A scholar, dear,” Elizabeth interrupted him. “We agreed that if a boy was born, he would become a scholar.”

  “But, my love, look at him! He weighs as much as a young ScaryWolf!”

  Elizabeth’s look hardened. The warriors tensed up.

  The King frowned.

  “What is going on here?!” The Nanny suddenly shouted. “You can argue later! The child needs a rest now.”

  After saying that, she went to the Prince and wrapped him in a gold-covered veil, then carried him to a small comforter.

  The Queen fell back onto the pillows with a sigh of relief. Breathing heavily, she stroked her husband's arm. Despite their quarrels, which were legendary throughout the whole country, she loved Haver with all her heart. And he loved her in return.

  “Congratulations, brother,” the man bowed. “But, my Queen, I beg that you forgive us, we need to attend the War Council.”

  “Just a couple of minutes, Primus,” the weakened Elizabeth whispered. “Let me spend a bit more time with my husband.”

  The King’s brother bowed once more, and then went out into the corridor, donning his cloak. He was followed by all the soldiers. Both the knights and bodyguards of the Queen. Finally, the new mother and father were left alone. The royal couple had precious few moments they could just spend with each other, basking in their love and devotion to each other.

  The governing of the country demanded their full attention. It often happened that they couldn’t see each other for several weeks at a time. It was a great mystery how they’d managed to conceive a child in such conditions. But taking into account the timing, it had most likely happened during the feast in honor of the Harvest Festival.

  Haver sat down next to his wife and she lowered her head to his mighty, scarred chest.

  “Stay with me this time, darling,” she whispered

  “The war’s starting, dear,” the King stroked his wife’s hair. Silky and thick, it smelled like jasmine. Untouched by any gray, the same as the day they’d met, almost 70 years ago.

  ”This one will end, another will begin, and so on, endlessly. Wars never stop.”

  Elizabeth put her hand gently on the scars. There were more and more of them marring the body of her lover each time they met.

  “I was born a King and warrior, this is my fate.”

  “That is why I want our son to become a scholar,” the Queen’s voice trembled. “Let’s not allow the martial arts world to touch him.”

  “Will he live a mortal life, then?” The King sighed. “In forty years, his hair will turn gray, in sixty—his teeth will fall out, and in ninety years, if he lives, he won’t even be able to remember your name. And you'll still be young and beautiful.”

  The
Queen had celebrated her 90th birthday last month, but she didn’t look a day over twenty. The King had ruled the country for almost three centuries. By the standards of the cultivators, they were still young. And compared to those who’d reached the level of The Heaven Soldier and had touched the edge of eternity and immortality, they weren’t that different from their newborn son.

  “But it will be a full life,” Elizabeth whispered, falling asleep. ”He will have no hardships, no troubles. He will marry, have children, and live happily, like all the mortals. He won’t know the horrors of this world. About needing to fight for a place in the sun. About the enmity of the practitioners of the Art. He will never be drawn into the endless conflict of the strong sects. He won’t be taken away from us by the Academy of Martial Arts, where he will forget all about the joys of life. He won’t be, like many others are, obsessed with his cultivation. He will live a good, peaceful, happy life. You can make our next son a warrior."

  “We can’t hide him forever...”

  “But we can do it until he’s old enough.”

  Elizabeth ran a hand over his scarred, powerful chest once again and finally fell asleep.

  Haver sat next to his beloved wife for a short time, and only after he was convinced that she’d fallen asleep did he get out of her embrace. He covered her with a blanket, closed the door and went out into the corridor. His elder brother, Primus, the First Warlord of the Kingdom, was already waiting for him.

  “Does she still dream that he’ll be a scholar?”

  They walked toward the small throne room, where the generals and senior officers had already gathered. A new war was coming, although, admittedly, Haver didn’t remember a time when one wasn’t being fought.

  “I can understand her,” the King sighed and rubbed his numb neck. “Her whole family died when she was little.”

  “Have you seen little Hadjar? He looks like a scholar about as much as a Heaven Tiger looks like a tame kitten.”

  Haver smiled proudly and stopped near the window. He looked at his golden-domed capital, which stretched out for miles around. Almost thirty million people lived just in this city. Overall, more than two billion people lived in his Kingdom, which occupied a large swathe of land.

  The King shook his head—his Kingdom, Lidus, was very small, almost imperceptible on a country map. Maybe that’s why they had to fight so often.

  Maybe Elizabeth was right, and Hadjar’s fate was to be a scholar.

  At that exact moment, he didn’t know how wrong his wife was or how right his brother was.

  Chapter 3

  Much had changed in Hadjar’s life over the past year. He wasn’t bedridden now, at least. However—that bed had been so multifunctional that it had even massaged him.

  And now he was forced to accept the fact that, in the future, he wouldn’t only have to sleep on a cold mattress, with preheated coals in an iron box stuffed underneath for warmth, but also... that he’d have to pee in a wooden outhouse. Upholstered in velvet, decorated with mosaics, but still wooden!

  Life hadn’t prepared him for this…

  It hadn’t prepared him for the fact that, after his death, he would find himself in another world, either. Fortunately, he wasn’t a farmer, but a Prince. Still, he wasn’t sure about what awaited him in the future. There were some strange rules regarding inheritance and the throne of his country.

  “...but our northern neighbor, the Kingdom of Balium,” a white-haired old man was standing near the huge map which covered the entire wall. He delineated the boundaries of different states with a pointer and explained something to the children of the nobles. They were sitting at their desks and sketching something, using feathers to write on scrolls. “... is under the protection of ‘The Black Gates’, and that’s why we’re not at war with them. It would be tantamount to suicide.”

  “Record,” Hadjar ordered mentally.

  [Processing the request... The request has been processed. The data has been included in the database ‘General information about the world’]

  “Why don’t they attack us?” The owner of the surprisingly beautiful eyes and thin wrists raised her hand to ask.

  “What could a vassal of ‘The Black Gates’ possibly need from a small kingdom such as ours?”

  Hadjar, lurking in the corner of the hall, tried to roll his eyes, but his body didn’t obey him. In addition, it had taken him almost two hours to crawl from his chambers to the hall with the map, where the lessons for future officials and scholars were being held. Not because he’d crawled slowly, he’d just fallen asleep periodically.

  The neural network would inform him about his lack of energy, and then he would fall asleep.

  Now he understood why babies loved to sleep; crawling a few yards had taken a lot out of him.

  “We’re all within the sphere of influence of The Darnassus Empire…”

  The first court Scholar continued speaking, but Hadjar was looking at the map greedily. He’d almost fainted when he’d first seen it. His mother had been holding him in her arms at the moment. Admittedly, he’d probably just gone back to sleep, but it didn't matter.

  In general, the Palace alone was larger than several city blocks. The city blocks back in his old world, of course. Furthermore, the ceilings were so high and the walls were so long that he often felt his head spin. And the map, sewn from the skins of various beasts, was stretched along the width of the entire marble wall, which looked like the wall of a fortress.

  The seams were the mountains, and the veins were rivers. This didn’t mean that barbarians lived in Lidus, just that the map was very old. It was extremely old, even by the standards of the locals: several million years old. And yes, the lifespan of people was abnormally long here.

  And so, new areas would be sewn into the map, to honor the memory of the ancestors. Since Hadjar had been a highly educated man, he’d used his knowledge of geometry to calculate that Lidus was three times larger than the Eurasian continent.

  Surely, this had to be a huge piece of land, even gigantic, right? But it was impossible to find the Kingdom on the map, at least without using a magnifying glass. It looked like nothing more than a village, and was just a small piece of land in this vast, titanic world.

  Even with the help of his neural network, Hadjar couldn’t understand why the day lasted the same 24 hours, on such a different world. He'd lost most of the functions it had. All that was left after his rebirth was the ability to record and play those recordings back, as well as very basic analytical mechanisms.

  Still, he wasn’t complaining, since he shouldn’t even have that much.

  “Which sect’s sphere of influence is our Kingdom in?” the impudent-looking boy asked.

  “That is a very good question,” the Scholar put the pointer down and returned to the Department. “The sects aren’t interested in us for exactly the same reason that the Kingdom of Balium doesn’t attack us. The level of martial arts in our lands is very low. For example, to become just an outer disciple of ‘The Black Gates,’ one should have reached no less than the 8th stage of the Bodily Rivers.”

  The students all exhaled at once, and Hadjar gave the neural network an order to record this. The locals had some strange, fetishistic obsession regarding the subject of martial arts, which the local magic had probably been transformed into sometime in the past.

  And yet, he still believed that living in a world of might and magic was better than being a ‘vegetable’.

  This strange quirk in the evolutionary path of these people could be explained by the fact that war, and the constant struggle for survival in general, were more common here than a trip to the store on a Friday had been, back in his old world.

  “And that isn’t even the most difficult part,” the Scholar continued, “it needs to be reached by the time they turn 16, otherwise the cultivator won’t even be accepted.”

  A wave of gasps swept through the classroom again, if this room could even be called that.

  “I have to remind y
ou that this path of cultivation is a long and winding one. Each disciple begins at the level of the Bodily Nodes, which is divided into nine levels. Then you advance to the level of the Bodily Rivers with its twelve stages. And only after you step over that threshold, which separates the mortal from the cultivator, will you reach the stage of Formation, when you become a cultivator and a part of the world of martial arts.”

  All of them were sitting with their mouths wide open in astonishment. They had certainly already known these facts, but the Scholar was able to convey the information in a manner that made the old subject seem very interesting, especially to Hadjar. Every ounce of knowledge was important for him.

  “Can anyone tell me at what level a warrior can become a junior officer in our army?”

  A lot of the disciples raised their hands, wanting to answer the question. Almost half of the two hundred children knew the answer.

  “Please, Viscount Vale,” the scholar nodded.

  A red-haired boy, about ten years old, stood up. Hadjar himself was only a year and two weeks old.

  “At the eighth stage of the Bodily Nodes.”

  “That’s right, sit down,” and the boy lowered himself back onto the stool, looking at his companions rather arrogantly. “And this is considered to be a good level. To become a mid-level officer, you need to cross the threshold and reach the level of the Bodily Rivers. The ones who become senior officers in the army are the few who’ve managed to reach its third stage. Our generals are at the fifth stage of the Bodily Rivers.”

  The children scribbled with their feathers on the scrolls and listened to the mentor carefully. Now, in their crazy fantasies, they were probably dreaming about becoming the strongest cultivators of the Kingdom. Fortunately, there were no inequalities between the genders here. Hadjar saw a charming lady, wearing armor and with the regalia of a general.

  If you can do it, if you know how, if you want to, go ahead—all the roads are open to you. And why shouldn’t you? After all, this lady could not only easily stop a running horse, but also lift said horse with one hand and then throw it a couple of yards away.