Chương 186: Chapter 185: I’m the Author, and This Book Really Is Trash

Five days of authentication, preparation, and increasingly ridicu-lous headlines later, more than five thousand people filled the So-laris National Hall. Lucian could see purple-velvet nobles, decorated marshals, priests, academy students, foreign delegates, and soldiers in worn uniforms. They occupied the steep semicircle of seats with the expectant stillness of people waiting for a revelation. He walked to the wooden lectern in a plain black suit, carrying a bundle of old parchment.

"The Nameless Knight isn't real." Nobody moved. Lucian touched the projection control. A stained page appeared on the screen behind him, enlarged until every crossed-out word and crooked letter was visible.

"The third line contains three basic Ancient Elvish conjugation errors." A silver-bearded linguistics professor stood in the second row.

"In the Academy's standard edition, that inverted grammatical structure has been shown to—""I KNOW. YOU FIXED IT IN THE SECOND PRINTING." The professor sat down. Lucian changed the page."'That day, the sky bled crimson.' I wrote it when I was seven because I had a nosebleed on the parchment. I didn't want to waste the paper." Another page.

"The Knight remaining at the gate? A language exercise. Twelve new vocabulary words. I was doing homework, not inventing a philosophy." A priest in the fifth row pressed a hand to his chest. Tears ran into his beard.

"He debases himself to cleanse us of blind worship…" Lucian pointed at him.

"STOP CRYING." The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. The System chose that moment to report. [PUBLIC DISCLOSURE] Manuscript provenance: Verified against supplied originals. Cultural interpretation forecast: UNAVAILABLE. No reliable model of collective literary meaning exists. [CURRENT THREATS] Armed hostility observed: None. People visibly attached to Host's childhood homework: A disturbing number. Combat solution: None identified.

Lucian opened the manuscript to the passage they had been quoting at Eleanor.

"Look at the rest of it." The original page filled the screen. A block of text at the bottom had been crossed out in his own handwriting.

"In this draft, the man who refuses to leave the gate dies of exhaustion and hunger. His wife and child are left alone. That ending got cut. You kept the impressive oath." His hand tightened on the lectern.

"You took a character being stubborn enough to get himself killed and turned it into a staffing policy. Now you're using it to tell my friends they have to work forever." The hall stayed quiet. He had written the scene to avoid dishes and fill a language quota. He had also written a dead man at the end of it. None of that made the oath divine law. Near the side aisle, a small group of devotees knelt.

"The Nameless Saint has come to destroy false doctrine himself!" Lucian closed his eyes.

"No."

"His denial teaches us to see!" He let his arms fall. The manuscripts could prove who had written the book. They could not reach inside five thousand heads and empty them. From the wing, Eleanor met his gaze. She didn't come out to rescue him. She gave one small nod. Keep going. Lucian looked back at the audience.

"I'm not a philosopher-king," he said.

"I'm not a savior." He looked down at the page on the lectern.

"I was six. I wrote things I thought sounded cool." This silence felt different. He couldn't tell what it meant, and for once he didn't try. A wooden crutch knocked against the floor in the twelfth row. An old veteran rose, slowly. His uniform bore the insignia of the Northern Fourth Regiment. One sleeve hung empty; in his remaining hand, he held a pocket copy of the novel with mud and old blood worked into its cover.

"Mr. Vance." The man lifted the book a little.

"May I tell you what this terrible book did for us?" Lucian looked at him for a long moment.

"All right."