The moonlight spread its silvery white tenderness to the ground, and the rocky, strange land did not look so angular under this favor. --Asa leaned against a rock by the campfire and looked at the moon, unable to close his eyes.

  The moonlight was so beautiful and soft that it was as if the bare skin could feel the caresses pouring out of it. You'll never see a moon like this in Calendo. The clouds and soot that hung over the basin all year round made any attempt to reach the sky desperate.

  It's been over a month since we got out of Calendo. But the smell of iron juice and coal revived in my nose as soon as I remembered it, and the sound of hammering on political iron seemed to fade away for less than a minute. The image of his father swinging a hammer the night before he left was so deep in his mind that it replaced almost all the sensations of the twenty years he had lived in Calendo.

  The rock-solid, wooden face was a shrine to the fire. Muscles like tree roots coiled around the tops of his arms as the hammer struck them one by one, each vibration passing through the blade to Asa's hands in a tangible way, a shock from his father, a touch that for the first time made him feel a connection to his father that was different from that of the rest of the world.

  As the shape of the knife became clearer, and his father took it from his hand and turned it himself, Asa lost this pulsing resonance with his father, and he realized that the connection with his father would dissipate as the knife was forged. With it came an excitement that the knife also symbolized the beginning of his full life, the beginning of his true life. This anticipation was hammered into the blade with the clang of the collision.

  It would be a fine blade that even his father's store didn't have, forged from the fine iron ore Asa had secretly accumulated over the past five years.

  He was a rebel among the tens of thousands of children in the Calendor Basin. He wasn't mischievous as a child, and he hadn't been as frivolous and debauched as the others as a teenager, so he didn't revert back into life after being as rebellious and weary as the others. He didn't rebel in life, he rebelled against life as a whole from the start.

  The Calendorian Basin has a centuries-old history of metallurgical casting. The high mountains around the basin are so rich in minerals that they seem to be inaccessible, and the dwarves living in them are also used to interacting with humans and even coming out to mix with them, which makes the metallurgy level here one of the highest in the continent. People are also accustomed to this tradition, generations of metallurgical casting for the industry. People here rarely go out, the basin to the footsteps of the limit at the same time as if the heart also solidified inside. They have lived in the environment of mining, smelting, and forging since they were young, and have grown up to be a part of this environment.

  Years of habit have made it an unwritten rule in the basin that once a man reaches the age of twenty, he must follow in the footsteps of his father's craft, either as a farmer or a merchant, mostly as a miner or blacksmith. This rule, though it was not known from whence it had been handed down from what hand to what, had been very strictly observed, and had become one of the few signs of spirituality in this culturally barren basin.

  Asa was no different than any other child until the age of five, growing up to the sound of hearth fires and banging. At five, he became obsessed with the world outside the basin, as told by the old adventurer at the back of the village. Giant flying dragons that could easily catch a cow in the air and eat it, beautiful mermaids that mesmerized sailors with their songs, corpses that could move by themselves, mud people, all kinds of sub-humans, countries that believed in the elements of nature, strange and bizarre customs, the infinite sky with wispy white clouds, the mysterious and boundless sea, and the prairie that could not be reached even after three days and three nights of horseback riding.

  Unlike other children who were just happy to listen to and fantasize about these stories, Asa thought that was the real thing. Asa thought that was the real life, the real world that belonged to him, so he began to learn everything about the outside world from the old adventurers. How to survive in the swamps and deserts, how to recognize the various plants, the various habits of the various sub-humans, how to fight, how to set traps. He traveled to every desolate and unpopulated place in the basin, staying inside for months at a time, fantasizing that that was the magical world out there, practicing his survival skills inside. In order to have a strong body, strong enough to fight even in front of orcs, he worked out every day and fought with people much bigger than himself, and by the time he was fourteen years old, rogues and bandits from all over the basin no longer dared to go to the village he lived in. When he was fifteen he went to the fine iron mines, and as soon as he found good ore he tried to smuggle it out.

  His father was a quiet man, the owner of a small weapons store, and his mother had long since died of an illness. Asa was under the impression that home was just a place to rest, and his father was just an elder to live with. He had always lived looking distantly at his dreams, working out every day and secretly accumulating ore in reveling in getting one step closer to them.

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  A week before his twentieth birthday, he gave his father all the ore he had secretly hidden, asked him to build him a sword, and told him he was leaving.

  His father didn't stop him or ask him where he was going. Just after a long silence, he helped him take the ore to the smelter and beat the refined iron into a knife. Then Asa left Calendor with the knife with a caravan of outsiders coming to make purchases.

  Sliding his fingers gently over the blade, the knife was all he had lived with for twenty years. Flexing his fingers, he let out a low 'hum', like a lament within a certain poem, or a song of praise.

  "Good knife." Like the unpleasant sound of two dull knife blades rubbing and slicing against each other. The veteran by the campfire woke up and looked at Asa with one single eye open, the firelight reflecting off his not-so-face-like face.

  Half the cheeks of that face were sunken in, sinew and broken bone mingling into a puddle of uneven flesh, the markings left by a hammer-type weapon. The other half of the face was skewered by a deep, long scar from forehead to mouth, with a few smaller, lighter scars running from side to side in between, and the features were all torn somewhat out of place by the scar. It was a strangely scarred face, but strangely enough the man was still alive after so many injuries.

  Asa offered the veteran a friendly smile. This was a veteran who had fought on the battlefield for decades but never rolled over and died, and was rumored to have hundreds of small and large wounds all over his body. A lot of people in the troop called him 'Old Undead' because he always stayed dead.

  "Where have you done this before?" Seeing that the knife wasn't the standard equipment of the regular troops, the veteran assumed that Asa was a single mercenary.

  Asa shook his head, he had joined when Bracada saw a force recruiting mercenaries. It was only when he got out of Calendor that he realized it wasn't easy to live freely out there. Money was needed for food, items for adventures. He was almost about to consider joining a mountain bandit or going to fight for a rogue when he saw that a scout troop was recruiting temporary soldiers and immediately signed up.

  Half of this troop of a hundred men were recruited from the temporary Bracada neighborhood. There were peasants, vagabonds, and it seemed there were a few fugitives mixed in there, unruly and lively. And this odd-looking veteran was actually a regular soldier.

  The veteran probably couldn't sleep and struck up a conversation with Asa: "Young man seems to be in good shape, why do you want to become a soldier?"

  "Because there's nothing else to do, I was actually thinking of becoming a bandit." Asa said honestly.

  The veteran let out a chuckle that sounded like he'd broken a pot, and Asa noticed that he had a gash on his throat, probably hurting his vocal cords as well. "Interesting lad. There are actually times when being a bandit is better than being a soldier, at least it's not as dangerous as being a soldier. Bandits rob if they can beat them, and flee if they can't. When you're a soldier, the officer might even tell you to charge when you should obviously flee."

  "Then you don't charge, just flee when you should."

  "If you violate the military order, the officer may cut off your head."

  "Then the only way to escape is to cut off the officer's head first." Asa answered by himself.

  The veteran soldier laughed again, "There's no such soldier."

  "To be commanded by someone else when you know you're going to die, where is there such a person?" Asa found it incomprehensible. "Of course it's about finding a way to survive. Telling me to go and die, why doesn't he go up and die for me first?"

  The veteran shook his head, his one remaining eye showing a blank stare, his distorted features twitching into a twisted expression that no one on the other side could understand, and muttered, "That's what happens when you're a soldier."

  There came the sound of clanking and jangling, and Asa knew it was Captain Saunders, the only one who would now still be patrolling in his steel armor.

  "Why aren't you in bed yet? We have a mission tomorrow." Captain Sanders was still fully equipped. A suit of steel armor, a steel helmet on his head, a sword on his left waist and a shield on his right, all of which seemed to grow on him as if he never saw him take them off. Above both the armor and the shield was an indentation of the Holy Cross, which Asa had heard was the symbol of the Holy Knights, and the Holy Knights were unknown even in that dull and dreary part of his hometown, it was one of the strongest units in the Empire.

  "We were exchanging tips on being a soldier." Asa still spoke honestly.

  "Why aren't you asleep Captain? We're going to bed soon." The veteran was afraid that Asa would talk nonsense and hurriedly took over the topic.

  Sanders nodded and said kindly, "I'll make my rounds." His tone and expression were easygoing, and even his looks made people feel a bit inexplicably friendly. This young captain had a high prestige among the regular soldiers, and the others who were hired together with Asa were a bit unimpressed.

  Civilians of the lower classes usually didn't take kindly to nobles, and the fact that they didn't was a testament to the young man's affinity for them. However, Asa was quite a bit in awe of him, although he had never seen him in action, he could tell that this captain was much more powerful than himself.

  Sanders looked at Asa and asked, "Are you the soldier who beat up four infantrymen during the draft?" The conscripts had to fight a few infantrymen to see if they had enough stamina and fighting ability. Asa easily put down a few soldiers who were much bigger than him.

  "Yes." Asa replied. Sanders nodded and said in an approving tone, "You're a good fighter, do well and you'll do well."

  Although Asa had big doubts about the profession of being a soldier right after talking to the veteran, he couldn't help but nod his head very vigorously.

  It seemed that not all nobles were so arrogant and obnoxious. It was always nice to hear a compliment, not to mention that Asa had forgotten the last time he had been complimented.

  The sound of a guard whistle outside the camp suddenly rang out, its shrill tones tearing the silence of the wilderness night in two.