The moonlight sprinkled its own silvery tenderness on the ground, and the strange rocky ground no longer looked so angular under this favor. Asa leaned against the stones by the campfire, looking at the moon and reluctant to close his eyes.

The moonlight is so beautiful and soft that even the exposed skin seems to be able to feel the pouring strokes. You will never see such a moonlight in Calondo. The clouds and soot that hang over the basin all year round make all eyes desperate to reach the sky.

It's been over a month since Calondo. But as soon as I remembered it, the smell of iron and coal immediately revived in my nose, and the sound of the hammer striking on the iron seemed to have been hidden for less than a minute. The night before he left, the image of his father swinging a hammer was so imprinted in his mind that it had replaced almost all the sensations he had felt in Calondo for twenty years.

The rock-like and gritty face of the wood is like a shrine in the glow of the fire. The muscles were like tree roots coiled around his arm, and the hammer struck again and again, and each shock was transmitted through the knife to Asa's hand, which was a shock from his father, and this touch made him feel a different connection with his father for the first time.

As the shape of the knife became clearer, his father took the knife from his hand and flipped it for himself, and Asa lost this pulse of resonance with his father, and he knew that the connection with his father would also dissipate with the creation of the knife. This knife also symbolizes the beginning of his new life, the beginning of his real life. This expectation also hammered into the knife with the sonorous sound of the collision again and again.

It would be a good knife that even my father's shop didn't have, forged from the refined iron ore that Asa had secretly accumulated over the past five years.

He was the most rebellious of the tens of thousands of children in the Calondo Basin. He wasn't mischievous as a child, and he wasn't as frivolous as everyone else when he was a teenager, so he wouldn't be like everyone else and would not return to life after being rebellious and tired. He is not rebellious in life, but in the whole of life from the beginning.

The Calondo Basin has a centuries-old history of metallurgical casting. The high mountains around the basin are rich in mineral deposits that seem to be inexhaustible, and the dwarves who live in the caves are also accustomed to socializing with humans and even coming out to mingle with people, which makes the metallurgical level here the highest on the continent. People are also accustomed to this tradition, and have been engaged in metallurgical casting for generations. Very few people here go out, and the basin restricts its steps as if it has frozen its heart in it. Since childhood, he has lived in the environment of mining, smelting, and forging, and when he grows up, he has only inherited to be a part of this environment.

Years of habit have led to an unwritten rule in the basin that men from the age of twenty must inherit the trades of their fathers, either farmers or merchants, but more often miners and blacksmiths. Although it is not known when and from whom this rule was handed down, it has been strictly observed, and has become one of the few spiritual symbols in this culturally barren basin.

Asa was no different from any other child until he was five years old, growing up with the sound of fires and banging. At the age of five, he became obsessed with the world outside the basin as told by the old adventurer behind the village. A giant wyvern that can easily catch a cow into the sky and eat it, a beautiful mermaid who bewitches a sailor with her song, a corpse that can move on its own, a clay figure, all kinds of sub-humans, a country that believes in natural elements, strange customs, and the infinite blue sky with a trace of white clouds, the mysterious and boundless sea, and the prairie that can never reach the end even after three days and three nights of galloping.

Unlike other children who are just happy to listen to and fantasize about these stories. Asa felt that that was the real life, that was the real world that belonged to him, so he began to learn everything about the outside world from the old adventurer. How to survive in swamps and deserts, how to identify various plants, various habits of various subhumans, how to fight, how to set traps. His footprints are all over the most desolate and uninhabited places in the basin, and when he stays inside, he is the moon, fantasizing that it is a magical world outside, and practicing his survival skills inside. In order to make himself physically strong, strong enough to fight in front of the orcs, he exercised himself every day, fought with people much older than himself, and at the age of fourteen the hooligans and robbers of the basin no longer dared to go to his village. When he was fifteen years old, he went to the iron mines, and as soon as he found good ore, he tried to sneak it out.

His father was a taciturn and owner of a small arms shop, and his mother had died long ago. In Asa's impression, home is just a place to rest, and his father is just an elder who lives together. He has always lived in the dream of looking at himself from afar, exercising every day, secretly accumulating ores and indulging in the fact that he is getting closer to his dream step by step.

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

The father did not stop him and did not ask him where he was going. It's just that after a long silence, help him send the ore to the smelter and turn the refined iron into a knife. Then, Asa left Calondo with a knife and a caravan of outsiders who had come to buy it.

Fingers slid lightly over the blade, the knife was all he had for twenty years of his life. With a flick of his fingers, he let out a 'hum' moan, like a lament in a certain poem, and like a song.

"Good knives. "It's like the ugly sound of two blunt blades rubbing against each other. The veteran by the campfire woke up and looked at Asa with one eye open, the light of the fire reflecting his face, which did not look like a face.

Half of the cheeks of the face were sunken, and the sinew mixed with the broken bones into a puddle of bumpy flesh that had been left behind by hammer weapons. The other half of the face was strung together by a deep and long scar from the forehead to the mouth, and there were a few small shallow scars from side to side, and the facial features were pulled a little off the spot by the scars. It's a strange face with scars, but it's even stranger that this person is still alive after so many injuries.

Asa gave the veteran a friendly smile in return. This is a veteran who has been rolling on the battlefield for decades but has never rolled to death, and it is said that he has hundreds of injuries all over his body. Because he can't die all the time, many people in the army call him 'old and immortal'.

"Where have you done it before?" Seeing that the knife was not standard equipment for regular troops, the veteran thought Asa was a single mercenary.

Asa shook his head, he had joined in Bracada when he saw a force recruiting mercenaries. When he came out of Calondo, he realized that living freely outside was not an easy task. Food, adventure items all need money. When he was about to think about going to the bandits to join the gang or help the hooligans fight, he saw a reconnaissance unit recruiting temporary soldiers and immediately signed up.

Half of this 100-strong force was temporarily recruited near Bracada. There are peasants, there are wanderers, and it seems that there are a few fugitives mixed in, which is not in order, but it is also lively. And this strangest-looking veteran turned out to be a regular soldier.

The veteran probably couldn't sleep, so he accosted Asa: "The young man seems to be very skilled, how can he think of becoming a soldier?"

"Because I don't have anything else to do, I'm actually trying to be a robber. Asa is honest.

The veteran let out a laugh that looked like a pot had been broken, and Asa noticed a scar on his throat, presumably injuring his vocal cords. "The lad is interesting. In fact, sometimes it is better to be a robber than to be a soldier, at least there is no danger of being a soldier. Robbers rob if they can beat them, and flee if they can't. When you become a soldier, you should have fled, and the commander might have asked you to rush. ”

"Then you don't rush, just run away. ”

"If you violate military orders, the commander will cut off your head. ”

"Then the only way to do this is to cut off the chief's head first, and then run away. Asa replied as a matter of course.

The veteran Caracalla laughed again: "How can there be such a soldier." ”

"Knowing that he was going to die, and being commanded by others, how could there be such a person?" Asa felt incomprehensible. "Of course I had to find a way to survive. Tell me to die, why didn't he go up and die first to show me?"

The veteran shook his head, the only remaining single eye showed a blank look, and his distorted facial features twitched, becoming a distorted expression that no one else could understand, and muttered, "Being a soldier, that's it." ”

There was a clattering voice, and Asa knew that it was Captain Sanders who was coming, and that he was the only one who was still patrolling in steel armor.

"Why don't you sleep yet? 'Captain Sanders is still well equipped. Dressed in steel armor, with a steel helmet on his head, a sword on his left waist and a shield on his right waist, these things seemed to grow on him, and he never took them off. The armor and shield had a notch on the Holy Cross, which Asa had heard was the emblem of the Holy Knights, and the Holy Knights knew even the dull and dreary place of his homeland, the strongest unit of the Empire.

"We're exchanging experiences as soldiers. Asa is still being honest.

"Why don't you sleep, Captain? We'll be asleep right away. The veteran was afraid that Asahhu would talk about it, so he quickly took over the topic.

Sanders nodded and said kindly, "I'll make a round." His tone and expression are very easy-going, and even his appearance makes people feel a little inexplicably kind. The young captain had a high prestige among the regular soldiers, and the others hired with Asa were a little unimpressed.

The low-class commoners usually had little affection for the nobles, and the fact that they didn't hate them proved that the young man was very relatable. However, Asa was quite in awe of him, although he had never seen him move, but he could see that this captain was much more powerful than himself.

Sanders looked at Asa and asked, "Are you the recruit who knocked down four infantry soldiers during the call-up?" Asa easily brought down a few soldiers who were much larger than him.

"Yes. Asa replied. Sanders nodded and said in an approving tone: "Your skills are very good, do a good job, you can definitely do a good job." ”

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

It seems that not all nobles are so arrogant and nasty. It's always nice to hear compliments, especially since Asa has forgotten the last time he was complimented.

Suddenly, the whistle outside the camp sounded, and the shrill tone tore the silence of the wilderness night in half.