Chương 88: Writing Volume 3, and the Disaster of Taking It Seriously

The field lodging room at the border waystation was warm, filled with the crackle of pine logs burning in the hearth. Lucian sat with both feet propped up on the wooden table, a quill dipped in deep-sea beast ink flying across a stack of pristine white parchment. The nib scratched across the page — schk... schk... schk... — fast and relentless, a wicked grin spreading across the ten-year-old's face. His plan to smother the violent fanaticism had officially entered the execution phase.

How do you kill a cult's fever for a novel's cool sword fights? Simple: strip out every fight scene, every triple backflip, every mysterious-sounding line of dialogue. Turn the entire book into a bone-dry manual on supply chain management and corporate accounting instead. Lucian lowered his quill, carefully writing out elegant lines of Old Elvish.

'... The nameless knight sat beneath a dim oil lamp for fourteen straight hours. He didn't draw his sword, didn't gaze at the stars. His eyes stayed locked on the grain inventory ledgers of seventy-two villages, carefully cross-checking every sack of flour, because he'd come to understand the ultimate truth of war: true victory doesn't lie in a brilliant blade strike, but in keeping grain-transport loss under two percent...'

He wrote six straight pages just describing the protagonist calculating horseshoe depreciation costs and negotiating a 5% discount on cart rental rates with a farming cooperative. Lucian set down his quill, leaned back in his chair, and laughed.

"Read that, you overexcited brats! Let's see who still wants to copy-cat assassinating nobles with a sword after this! Thirty thousand words of pure inventory figures and bad-debt provisioning methods — anyone who finishes this without falling asleep would be a miracle!" Ting! Ting! A dim black Unified System v2. 0 notification burst into view before him. [TEXT DETECTED: ANCIENT-LANGUAGE COMPOSITION WITH MACRO-MANAGEMENT STRUCTURE!] [Titan Script progress: PERFECT syntactic assimilation achieved (100%)!] [LEVEL UP!] Level 38 → Level 41! Physical Strength: 369, 440 → 443, 328 (×1. 2) Learning Rate: 863, 952 → 1, 295, 928 (×1. 5) [SYSTEM ASSESSMENT OF THE WORK:] The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. Likely response from readers seeking action: boredom, with a measurable risk of drowsiness. Specialist appeal among finance ministers and bankers: unusually high in current market surveys. Click. Sylvia walked in carrying a tray of hot herbal tea.

She set the cup down at the edge of the table, curiously tilting her head to skim the still-wet-ink manuscript pages in Lucian's hand. Her silver beast ears trembled faintly. Her sapphire eyes scanned line after line of grain-loss spreadsheets and transport contract clauses, her expression slowly turning to fascinated admiration. Sylvia pressed a hand to her chest, voice choked with emotion.

"Lucian... are you using the image of a knight setting down his sword to convey a great truth of our age?

'True peace is built on the full stomachs of the common people, not the blood of soldiers on the front line'... this work... it's a masterpiece of humanitarian compassion!" Lucian, teacup halfway to his lips, froze completely.

"No... I was just writing boring accounting problems to bore them into stopping..." Click. The door opened again. Astra walked in, wearing her modest floral dress, holding two fragrant roasted sweet potatoes. Seeing Sylvia visibly moved, Astra curiously picked up the first stack of manuscript pages and started reading. She got to the part where the protagonist stays up all night just calculating meal rations for the elderly soldiers back home, making sure no one goes hungry through the winter.

Astra wiped the back of her hand across her reddened eyes and whispered, biting her lip.

"A hero... willing to sit in a dark corner, checking sacks of flour, enduring the tedium of dry numbers... so children like me back on the front lines can have a warm loaf of bread... This is even more moving than Volume One..." Lucian's mouth fell open, staring at Sylvia nodding in admiration, then at Astra, eyes welling up as she hugged the manuscript to her chest.

In this world, where every noble house ruled their territory on raw emotion and crude exploitation, no one had ever before written a work teaching people what "logistics management" and "responsibility for the poor's next meal" actually meant. The dullest, most bone-dry corporate accounting knowledge from Earth, once draped in the Nameless Knight's cloak, had instantly transformed into a devastatingly powerful social-enlightenment philosophy.

Lucian picked his quill back up, let out a long, resigned sigh, and carefully wrote the official title across the cover page.

'The Elegy of the Nameless Knight, Volume 3: The Quiet Home Front.' He gathered all fifty pages of manuscript, sealed them into a dragonhide tube with red wax, and waved over the Vance Commerce magical carrier pigeon perched at the window.

"Take this manuscript straight to Evelyn at Floor 1. Tell her to prepare the master plates, then coordinate a ten-million-copy continental release through the Vance regional presses." Lucian watched the pigeon flap off into the snowy night, leaning back in his chair with a long, satisfied breath.

"Pure accounting figures and warehouse audits... this one's guaranteed to flop hard. Nobody's going to want to cosplay a black cloak after reading this." Beside him, Sylvia carefully cleared away the tea tray, a small smile touching her lips. This continent... is about to face the greatest management-theory revolution in its history.