Dukedom’s Legendary Prodigy Chapter-6

**Chapter 6**

—

Around that time, eight-year-old **Dale** had three mentors.

The first was **Sephia**, an elder of the Blue Tower, who taught him water-attribute magic.
The second was the **Black Duke**, lord of the Black Tower and Dale’s father, who guided him in the arts of darkness.
And the third…

A pale cloud of breath spilled into the frosty air of early dawn.

*Whoosh!*

In the broad training yard prepared for the knights of the ducal fortress, Dale swung his wooden sword.
The man parrying his strikes was none other than **Sir Helmut Blackbear**, commander of the Duke of Saxen’s elite knightly order, the Night Ravens.

As Dale’s sword came cutting down, Sir Helmut moved effortlessly, adding just the right amount of force to deflect it—

But then—

Dale’s wooden blade curved like a serpent, twisting around Helmut’s sword and redirecting its path off-center.
It was the art of *softness overcoming strength*.

*Ho…!*

A flicker of surprise gleamed in Helmut’s eyes. Yet, one of the Seven Knights of the Continent would hardly be caught by such a simple trick.
He had no need to show his full power—so instead, Helmut chose to *pretend* he’d fallen for it, letting the sword slip from his hand.

“Haha! Well done, young master!”

He laughed heartily, raising both hands as the wooden sword spun away through the air.

Dale puffed his cheeks. “Come on, you went easy on me again.”

Helmut froze for an instant, then sighed deeply.

“…It pains me that someone like you must walk the path of a mage.”

With his wife Elena’s blessing, the Black Duke had formally accepted Dale as his disciple not long ago.
After all, before he was the heir to House Saxen, Dale was the son of the Black Tower’s master. It was only natural that he would follow in his father’s footsteps down the road of black magic.

Yet, to Sir Helmut—one of the Seven Swords of the Continent—Dale’s talent with the blade was far beyond ordinary.

That overwhelming brilliance he’d once felt when dueling the legendary **Sword Saint Badel**, the strongest knight in history—he felt a fragment of that same brilliance in the blade of this eight-year-old boy.

Badel, the Sword Saint slain long ago by the Hero himself… This child might possess a genius that rivaled even his.

But lamenting it changed nothing. The boy was already walking the path of magic, under the tutelage of the continent’s greatest wizard.

*Why, heaven,* Helmut thought bitterly, *must you grant such conflicting gifts to a single soul?*

Though he taught Dale swordsmanship in hopes the boy would not neglect his body even as a mage, a magician’s training meant he could never use **aura**, the energy knights drew from the dantian.

Knights stored mana in their lower abdomen to wield it as **aura**, while mages refined it into **magical power** by circulating it through the **heart’s mana circle**.
The energy’s source was the same—but the organs that harnessed it were different.

Each time Helmut taught Dale, a pang of regret struck him.

Yet above that regret burned a far greater feeling: admiration.

Ordinary mages avoided physical toil. On the battlefield, they always surrounded themselves with bodyguards, relying on others to make up for their own weakness.

So why, then, would this child willingly grip a sword and embrace hardship?

Even for Dale, such grueling training was extreme for an eight-year-old.
But his conviction was firm:

*“I don’t want to rely on bodyguards or defensive spells and neglect my own body’s strength.”*

The logic was simple enough for a child to grasp—
Yet even veteran mages who’d survived decades of war rarely *understood it from the heart*.

Indeed, most of the magicians Sir Helmut had slain in battle were precisely those who had fallen into such complacency.

A single exchange of blows—
That one moment determined whether a mage who’d allowed a knight to close distance would live or die.

And Dale understood that truth better than anyone—
this eight-year-old boy who had never once seen a real battlefield.

Swordsmanship, at its core, was the art of killing.

And to Sir Helmut—who had spent his life honing that very art—Dale’s combat instincts were unmistakably divine.

That was why Helmut’s passion as a teacher burned even hotter.

Even if the boy would never walk the path of the sword, Dale was the “brilliant raw gem” Helmut had spent his entire life searching for.

—

That afternoon—

Deep beneath the Saxen Ducal Fortress lay a vast underground cavern, transformed into a single man’s workshop.

The **Magus Laboratory of the Black Duke.**

There, Dale was engrossed in a new training session alongside his father.

Of course, necromancy did not begin with raising the dead or reanimating corpses.
When Dale had first boasted that he could make a rabbit move, the continent’s greatest necromancer had merely clicked his tongue.

*“So you made something move… without even understanding what it was?”*

Dale, expecting praise, had been bewildered.

The first things his father handed him afterward were enormous tomes—
medical treatises filled with anatomical diagrams of humans and beasts alike, records of how bones, organs, and muscles functioned.
Knowledge so specialized that even surgeons of the 21st century would find it impressive.

Only after Dale had memorized those books by heart did the Black Duke begin to teach him real necromancy.

Now, in the middle of the workshop, the Duke placed a mummified **goblin corpse** on the altar.

“Let’s begin with the creation of a *corpse soldier*.”

A “corpse soldier.” It was called a *soldier*, not merely the *dead*, for a reason—
this was no simple spell to make a body stand.

Just as elemental magic could be given unique traits through formulae, necromancy too could alter the form of reanimation according to the caster’s will.

An unskilled necromancer might raise the body of a Sword Master as nothing more than a common zombie,
while a true master could turn even the corpse of a foot soldier into a **Death Knight**.

Dale focused his mana, engraving the necessary formulae.
He recalled every line of anatomy he’d studied, weaving threads of magic through the goblin’s body.

Necromancy did not *truly* revive the dead.
It was closer to the art of a **puppeteer**, manipulating a lifeless doll with invisible strings.

Through those threads of mana, Dale connected the goblin’s body. The formula he engraved was—

**Hardening.**
Inducing postmortem rigidity to strengthen the outer tissues.

The goblin corpse began to rise, its movements stiff and jerky—almost unnaturally so.

*This is different from moving a rabbit,* Dale thought.

A bipedal body like the goblin’s was far harder to control without fully understanding its internal mechanisms.
And necromancy—unlike any magic from his previous life—was a realm of complete mystery to him.

Which only made Dale’s heart race faster.

“Enhancing the corpse’s rigidity to fortify its hide was a good idea,” the Black Duke remarked, a faint smile tugging at his lips.
For a moment, the father’s pride could not be hidden. But only for a moment.

His expression soon cooled into the calm of the continent’s most feared mage.

“However, the *corpse steel*—that is, the muscle contraction caused by stiffness—creates unwanted limitations in movement.”

“Then… is there a better way?” Dale asked.

The Black Duke silently snapped his fingers.

*…!*

A wave of ominous darkness swept across the chamber. The hardening formula Dale had added dissolved instantly, and the goblin’s muscles relaxed.

*Crack!* Something twisted inside the corpse.

“The ribs exist to protect the internal organs,” his father said evenly.

That twisting sound—it was the breaking of bones.

“But the dead have no need for organs to protect.”

He continued calmly.

“So then, what will you do with bones that have outlived their purpose?”

It was the answer of a man who stood at the pinnacle of black magic.

*Crack!*

Even as he spoke, the goblin’s abdomen twisted grotesquely—
and from its belly *sprang a blade of bone*.

A white sword, faintly glimmering with a bluish sheen—
fashioned from the goblin’s own ribs that had once encased its organs.

“Understand the structure of your subject,” the Duke said,
“and reconstruct it to serve your purpose.”

He had transformed part of the creature’s ribs into a weapon.
After all, the dead had no organs to protect.

The Duke snapped his fingers again.

*Crack!*

Once more, the goblin’s bones and muscles warped at impossible angles, like a creature from a nightmare.
But Dale could *feel* the intent behind the transformation.

*He’s eliminating every function necessary for life, reshaping the body purely for battle…*

The goblin corpse born from the Duke’s hands now bristled with jagged blades of bone protruding from every limb—
a body both armored and armed.

This was not resurrection.
The goblin bore no trace of its living form.

It was **complete remanufacture**—a true rebirth.

A monster, its combat power magnified many times over its living self.

“Do you know what principle the Black Tower pursues?” the Duke asked quietly.

Dale shook his head. Not because he didn’t know—but because he *wanted to hear it from his father’s mouth.*

“The pursuit of **Truth**,” came the reply.

“And Truth,” said the Duke, “is found only within **Death**.”

Dale drew in a silent breath.

But the next words that followed were not what he expected.

“That is why,” his father said, “you must understand it.”

“Understand… what?”

“The **weight of life**—the price one must pay to reach Truth.”

The weight of life.

Only then did Dale begin to realize.

The black magic that others feared and whispered of as “death’s sorcery”…
was in fact only possible because it first sought to *understand life itself.*

And to Dale—a man who in his previous life had devoted everything to killing—
that truth was deeply, painfully ironic.

He who had never known the weight of life,
and who had spent his days killing, and killing, and killing again…

—

Months later.

A woman’s anguished cries echoed through the ducal bedchamber.

Outside the room, Dale paced anxiously, glancing toward the windows again and again.

“Young master!”

An elderly maid’s call reached him, and Dale dashed inside without hesitation.

“Dale,” said his father softly, smiling.

Beside him, Elena cradled a small, squirming bundle in her arms.
A newborn child, wailing faintly.

“She’s your little sister,” Elena whispered, smiling through her exhaustion.

“Would you like to hold her?”