Yes, from the very beginning, Olubert had vanished without a trace. That was why the royal capital had been defenseless when the rebellion broke out.

  Yet no one suspected he was involved—on the contrary, everyone assumed he was dead. For the mastermind behind the uprising was none other than the Vice Captain of the Royal Capital Guard Knights.

  With the captain missing, the vice captain had become the highest-ranking officer of the knight order. It was like a shield meant to protect you suddenly turning into a sword that stabbed you in the back—no one could have seen it coming, let alone defended against it.

  The truth was far more treacherous. The vice captain had indeed planned to kill Olubert from the start. He’d deliberately set up a drinking feast, spiked Olubert’s wine with poison, and had him carried to a secret location while unconscious, intending to finish him off there.

  But the vice captain had gravely underestimated Olubert’s power. Before his men could strike, Olubert had recovered from the poison, turned the tables on his would-be assassins, and slaughtered them all. What followed was a desperate struggle—he fought his way out of countless ambushes and pursuit parties, cutting a bloody path through his enemies to freedom.

  But by the time he finally made it back to the royal capital, all that awaited him was the emperor’s cold corpse. The knight order he had led with honor was nothing but dust and ashes. He had lost everything.

  Everyone who knew him thought he would be crushed by despair, destined to fade into obscurity along with his fallen knights. But no one could have predicted what came next—

  In the cataclysm that threatened to swallow the Pasara Empire whole, the knight known as the Lone Sword was about to carve out a new future for the empire, armed with nothing but his sword and his unbreakable will.

  No one knew what inner turmoil Olubert had endured amid the ruins of the royal capital.

  All the world saw was a lone knight standing before the rebel army, his sword in hand—and in that moment, they finally understood what it truly meant to be an invincible blade, standing alone above all others.

  Thousands upon thousands of enemy soldiers could not even slow his advance. They fell one after another, painting the ground behind him a sea of blood. Famed swordsmen and renowned mages alike met their ends at his blade, their names forgotten in the wake of his wrath.

  He cut a swathe through the rebel ranks until he stood before the ring of powerful nobles who had orchestrated the entire rebellion. He showed no mercy to their pleas for mercy, beheading each one without hesitation. Then he found the young prince, trapped in the heart of enemy territory, and carried him on his back, walking step by step out of the rebel stronghold. It was only then that the remaining rebels finally realized the true horror of what they were facing—and fled in terror, scattering like birds.

  Olubert, his body drenched in the blood of his foes, delivered the last surviving heir of the imperial family to the loyalist army. Without a single word, he turned and left, vanishing into the distance.

  Three days later, he reappeared. In his hand, he carried a grisly trophy—the severed head of the former Vice Captain of the Royal Capital Guard Knights, the man who had sparked the entire cataclysm.

  The great catastrophe had come swiftly, and it ended just as fast. So fast, in fact, that many commoners across the empire never even realized their thousand-year-old imperial family had been reduced to a single survivor.

  Under the overwhelming threat of Olubert’s unmatched martial prowess, all nobles who had entertained rebellious thoughts quickly abandoned their schemes. Those who had participated in the uprising were ruthlessly purged to the last man. By the sheer force of one man’s will, the Pasara Empire had been saved from the brink of annihilation.

  When the young prince ascended to the throne, he immediately bestowed upon Olubert the hereditary title of Herald of the Realm—a position of honor equal to that of the empire’s highest nobles—and granted him a vast fiefdom befitting his status......

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  The tale of their ancestor that Rezelian told was largely the same as the version Hulim had heard countless times before, and it aligned perfectly with the accounts written in various biographies. The only difference was the inclusion of minor, trivial details that were too insignificant to be recorded in those formal texts.

  Even so, those small additions were more than enough to fill Colette with delight.

  It was then that Colette finally revealed the reason behind her obsession with Olubert. She had once attended the magic academy in the royal capital. During her studies, she had taken an interest in Olubert while working on a research paper for an extracurricular history project, and had delved deep into his life story ever since.

  The paper she submitted had earned high praise from her history professor—but the professor had also told her that there were still massive gaps in the historical records about Olubert, and had suggested she travel to Olubert’s former fiefdom to continue her investigation.

  Colette had followed that advice, but her trip had yielded nothing of value. The unresolved mystery had lingered as a regret in her heart ever since. Even though she had graduated many years ago, she still seized every opportunity to dig deeper into Olubert’s story, and remained in regular contact with her old history professor from the academy.

  “I see! To think that Ms. Colette is a scholar dedicated to researching our ancestor! I was remiss in not recognizing your passion earlier. I am Rezelian Heyerar, a descendant of Olubert Heyerar. On behalf of my family, I offer my sincere gratitude to you and your fellow professors for all the work you have done to preserve his legacy.”

  Rezelian spoke with genuine earnestness.

  “Wha—what? Oh! Please, Mr. Rezelian, there’s no need for such formalities!” Colette stumbled to her feet in flustered surprise. “It’s the least we could do. If anything, we should be the ones apologizing for failing to uncover more useful information about him!”

  “Do not apologize for that, Ms. Colette.” Rezelian frowned, a note of shame in his voice. “If anyone should feel ashamed, it is us—the descendants of the Herald of the Realm. We know no more about our ancestor than any outsider does. That is a failing on our part.”

  Colette blinked in surprise at his words, a flicker of confusion crossing her face.

  “Um...... Mr. Rezelian—could it be that the family chronicles and records of Lord Olubert have been lost over time?”

  “No. They were never lost.”

  Rezelian shook his head slowly, then dropped a bombshell that would leave them reeling.

  “Because they never existed in the first place!”

  “What?!”

  Colette gasped in shock. She was not alone—Hulim froze mid-motion, her hand hovering in the air with a pastry halfway to her mouth. This was the first time she had ever heard such a thing!

  How many noble families would neglect to record their history? Hulim had no idea. But in the Pasara Empire, it was a time-honored tradition for nobles to have their life stories documented by scribes, passed down alongside the family tree from generation to generation. It was a way to ensure their descendants understood the hardships their ancestors had endured to build their legacy.

  In fact, it was not just nobles—many wealthy, influential merchant families followed the same custom.

  By all rights, Olubert should have had volumes of chronicles written about him, starting from the day he became Captain of the Royal Capital Guard Knights. Even the Heyerar family, now reduced to a minor rural noble house, had maintained this tradition—Rezelian’s father, his grandfather, and Rezelian himself had all kept detailed records of their lives.

  “N-never existed? What do you mean by that?”

  “Exactly what I said. And it is not because no one ever bothered to write them, or because our ancestor forgot to have them made. It is because Olubert never once set foot in his fiefdom after receiving it!”

  “What??!”

  Colette’s eyes went wide with disbelief. Hulim was equally stunned—she had lost all interest in her pastry now. This was another bombshell she had never heard before!

  Wait a minute—did Father intentionally leave out all these crucial details? He only ever told the glorious parts of the story, never mentioning anything this important?

  “Yes. When my father first told me this, I was just as shocked as you are now. But it is the unvarnished truth. After the great cataclysm came to an end, Olubert did not retire to his fiefdom as the world expected. Instead, he left the empire entirely, vanishing from the public eye for twenty whole years!”

  “......”

  A heavy silence fell over the drawing room.

  “F-father...... What happened next?”

  Hulim broke the silence, her voice brimming with curiosity. If Olubert had disappeared from the empire back then, how had the Heyerar family come to exist in the present day?

  “Well...... That is precisely where the mystery lies.”

  Rezelian wore a look of genuine bewilderment as he continued his tale.

  “The emperor at the time—the young prince whom our ancestor had saved—never forgot the debt he owed Olubert. Even after learning of his disappearance, he continued to appoint officials to govern Olubert’s fiefdom in his absence, hoping against hope that one day his savior would return.”