I Became The Academy’s Blind Swordsman

p>I pulled out a small, portable lamp from my backpack.

‘A blind man lights a lamp because it’s dark…’

I chuckled at the irony of the situation, but I didn’t care because I wasn’t going to be seen by anyone.

As I wandered through the cave, her tracks gradually became apparent.

‘How many years did she spend in this cave?’

Her seclusion was quite long but why was it so long?

‘Swordsmanship.’

She wanted to create a sword technique to defeat a single opponent.

She had been defeated countless times by Sword Saint, and that was why she chose to train in seclusion.

As I traveled deeper into the cave, traces of her life here began to emerge as objects of unknown use and tattered pieces of cloth were scattered throughout the cave.

‘How many years have passed since her death?’

A rough calculation told me it had been close to ten to twenty years.

She trained in seclusion before she died so there was a gap in time where she could have taken me as her disciple.

Her death was an unfortunate one, as she didn’t tell anyone about her closed-door training, but I knew she was gone.

In the game, there were a limited number of souls that could be sealed in the Spectral Sword, an essential tool for practicing the Ghost Slayer Technique.

Each soul was different, but most of them were powerful sword-wielders in life.

‘To die of a long-standing illness just before the end of her training…’

Moreover, many of them had suffered unjust deaths like hers.

As powerful as they were, their souls would become grudge-bound ghosts, unable to leave the earth and stay where they were.

‘The question is, where is the soul bound?’

In this world, as in the game, everyone’s body contains mana.

When a person dies, they leave behind a corpse, or at least a skeleton, even if their flesh decomposes.  Of course, after many years in the ground, even the bones can disappear…

Mana played a unique role here.
In this world, the mana remaining in the bodies of the dead decomposes even their bones.

In the game, it was said that after five years, the corpses would disappear without a trace.

This was a tidbit of knowledge that I gained while playing as a Necromancer.
Until then, I hadn’t really paid attention to what happened to corpses in the game, and I didn’t have much information.

Of course, graves still existed.

It’s said that the body of the dead disappears completely, but shouldn’t it be honored?

The question is where do these powerful spirits, the ones I’ll be sealing away when I practice the Ghost Slayer Technique, reside since there are no bodies or skeletons left behind.

The answer is the object most associated with the dead.

In the game, it’s called a “memory item”.

As I walked along, thinking about the object, I came to the end of the cave.
There were miscellaneous objects with unrecognizable shapes and what looked like crude bamboo furniture.

She had been a swordsman in life.  Perhaps the object with deep connections would be a sword but in her case it wasn’t instead it was the thing on the table.

I picked it up.

‘…It’s got a soul in it, and it gives me a chill when I pick it up.’

As soon as I picked it up, I immediately felt goosebumps all over my body, but I shrugged them off as it was a normal thing to do.

I took a closer look at the object.

It wasn’t rusted or worn in any way that would suggest it was special despite its age.

The necklace with a gemstone still looked brand new.
The gemstone aside, the chain of the necklace was also rust-free.
It was a pendant she’d worn around her neck her entire life, a pendant that now held her soul.

‘The Pendant of Sierra.’

When this pendant is used to forge a sword, a sword containing her soul is created.

From then on, the soul inside the sword would be completely sealed and contracted, preventing it from wandering off at will, and the sword would be truly complete.

I searched the floor a bit more and found her journal, stuffing it into my backpack and tucking the pendant into my arm.

“Hmph…”

As I walk out of the cave, I can’t shake the eerie feeling that lingers with me.

In the game, the sentence “I felt creepily scared” was simply written and didn’t feel real, but this was different.

‘It’s kind of scary…’

I must be mistaken.

I reached the waterfall at the entrance to the cave and put the lamp back in my backpack then I jumped over the waterfall.

The ground is firm as before.

‘Finally, this is over,’ I thought.

I looked up, thinking to myself……but suddenly   I saw a ‘person’ with her face right up to my nose.

It was a woman with long, dark hair.
Her strange, violet eyes stared back at me.

The dress she wore was plunging down to her breastbone, and the design seemed Eastern but upon closer inspection, her body was half transparent.

No, the lower half was almost transparent.

After staring at me for a while, her mouth opened.

[Why do you want to take the dead’s…precious things…?]

Her voice, sounding somewhat shy, was not coming from the front where she was, but from inside my head.

The white bandage covering my eyes, the Blindfold That is Beyond Reason…seems to have literally pierced a line that shouldn’t have been crossed.

Her name was Sierra and she looked exactly as when she was alive.

She was my ‘fake’ teacher and the soul that would enter the Spectral Sword.