A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 728: Ideas of Gold - Part 2

His life was changing, that was safe to say. He couldn’t bring it to a halt now. He was on the lead horse in a procession that seemed to be bringing in the wave of the future. As he grew stronger, and more powerful, the slightest mistake from him was liable to affect the lives of many. Already, that was the case.

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Already, he had hundreds of villagers living under him, through the course of a single transaction that he’d done on paper.

Those lives weighed heavily. As he was now – they weren’t too heavy. They added to him, and gave him more strength. He felt less a man, and more a legion, it was an almost worrying sensation.

But given that power that he now had, a part of him was urging him to consider the position he was in more greatly. He had a feeling that part was likely connected to Claudia, and her benevolence, but Ingolsol seemed to have no shortage of interest in power either. He approached it like a greedy scholar approached information – he wanted more of it, power in all its varieties.

With power came the ability to choose, and in that choice, there lay a problem, who did Oliver want to be?

When someone came for his head, it was an easy choice to make – he wanted to be the victor. When he was the one to make a move, however, it was more difficult. He wanted to be a good man, but he’d seen good men, and they were no different from the rabbits that ran about in the woods. They weren’t capable of even an ounce of bad.

Of everyone in the world, Dominus Patrick likely came closer to what Oliver wanted to be, despite their paths being so different. Dominus never wanted to lead, but he’d pursued progress to the very end, and he’d achieved a pinnacle in it.

Oliver wanted to trust in the ripening of the same fruit, and throw himself entirely into the realm of progress, to raise his army as he intended to, to sharpen his sword to realms that the swordsmen of times past could not even imagine.

He wasn’t completely crippled by such questioning, but he was intrigued by it. Being able to progress as smoothly as he had in recent times brought with it its own doubts. They were the doubts of a man that had spent the largest chunk of his life struggling to achieve what he wanted.

Some might call him paranoid for them, and perhaps he was, but if some sort of vague answer was pointed to him, Oliver would not ignore it.

Even if that answer came in the form of an almost girlish interpretation of something that could easily have been a coincidence. Your journey continues with novelbuddy

"The Gods delight in coincidences," Claudia reminded him. "That is our very bread and butter."

"We are not Gods. We are fragments, wench. Don’t promote yourself too highly," Ingolsol responded pointedly.

Verdant was there to welcome Oliver as he arrived, despite the late hour, though the man asked nothing from him, knowing that Oliver would likely want his pillow before delivering any reports. It was now well after midnight, after all, and even though his schedule was vastly different to that of a typical student, he still had lessons on the morrow that he would be forced to attend.

Feeling a little bad for taking advantage of Verdant’s understanding, Oliver went to bed with thoughts of his future on his mind.

…

…

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"Well, why are you looking like you’re plotting the conquest of some three-walled fortress or other?"

"They have those?" Oliver asked.

"In the Syndran Capital, they have as many as nine walls, each hosting separate districts in their extremely hierarchical society," Professor Volguard told him.

"Huh… They must be a rich people," Oliver said.

"Their wealth is even more concentrated than ours. Their royalty bears a treasury the size of a town, though that wealth doesn’t always trickle down," the Professor told him. "Now, what puzzling little problem is my student attempting to solve that he would rather sidetrack me with Syndran politics than give me a straight answer?"

"Ahh, sorry. I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular," Oliver said. "I suppose I’m just having trouble concentrating because of the lack of sleep."

"You went to Solgrim, did you not? I imagine that gave you a wealth of things to think about. Well, I’ll at least have two problems to be solved out you today, if you’re still intent on matching your classmates as quickly as you possibly can. First, Joshua’s Proposition. He states that, for any army advancing in an invasion, there is a certain critical point in which they are at their weakest.

That’s a brief extract, lacking its context. What do you think Joshua was getting at?" Volguard asked.

"An invading army, you say?" Oliver mused. "And what are they doing, just going in, conquering town after town?"

"Invading a country, you’d be wiser to target castles than towns – for they give you something to defend. Of course, that too is circumstantial, but regardless, let us assume in this particular case Joshua meant castles. What did he mean by a critical point when they’re at their weakest?" Volguard said, patiently.

That day’s lesson was different. After last week, when Volguard had decided that he would teach Oliver in a different way – trying to provoke him into deriving material, rather than memorizing it – he’d brought considerably more books with him.

Oliver had been put off by the sight, expecting that he’d have to read through them all, but Volguard hadn’t pushed a single book on him, or a single exercise.

Instead, he’d merely plucked different ideas from the books, feeding Oliver as little information as possible, and trying to see if he could develop some sort of understanding from it. It seemed to be as experimental a process for the Professor as it was for Oliver.

"A critical point where they’re at their weakest?" Oliver repeated, frowning. "That sounds like something they’d teach us in mathematics," he said with a sigh. "Why can’t they phrase their theorems a little differently? Why does it all sound as dry as sticks? It’s like a different language."