The Insane Regressor: Throne of Pride

"I refuse," Ravian said without hesitation.

"Huh?"

The Earl was stunned by how absolute and unhesitating Ravian’s refusal was, and it didn’t sit well with him at all.

"May I ask why you would refuse something like this? Do you not understand that you’d go from being a brilliant young man to a noble genius without equal in the imperial capital, the City of the Black Rose?" the Earl said, laying out the enormity of the offer in the hope of changing Ravian’s decision.

But Ravian didn’t need any of that laid out for him; he knew perfectly well what the Earl meant.

"I know exactly how much I’d gain from it, but with all due respect, my lord Earl, I still refuse," Ravian said before continuing. "Even though it would bring me any number of benefits and opportunities, I have no ambition for the spotlight... My ambition is for results that bear fruit, and results that bear fruit don’t need noise, only serious work," Ravian explained, hoping the Earl would understand what he was trying to say without jeopardizing their agreement.

The Earl continued staring at him for several seconds without saying a word, while not a single sound could be heard in the room.

A silent staring contest between the two of them, and nothing else.

"This is impossible," the Earl said, at a loss.

"Hmm?" Ravian didn’t understand, so he let the Earl continue.

"You don’t care about money, political influence, a beautiful girl like Larette, noble standing, or even fame and the gratitude of the people..." the Earl said, walking out from behind the desk until he stood face-to-face with Ravian.

"So what the hell do you care about?" Earl Patrick asked, his eyes filled with an unmistakable hunger to understand the man Ravian truly was.

Ravian met his gaze with a calm like the stillness of night and didn’t answer immediately, instead looking around the room as though searching for something that might help him explain; when he found nothing, he returned his gaze to the Earl.

"I care about the mark I leave wherever I set foot," Ravian said simply, then turned and left the study to wait outside for Shmichael, while the Earl remained standing where he was, staring at the door Ravian had gone through.

"The mark?" the Earl repeated in open disbelief.

The sentence might seem ordinary at first glance, but when one thinks about what a mark actually means, one will understand a part—only a part—of what Ravian meant.

A mark isn’t only what you did; it’s how everything around you was altered by what you did, and how people were altered by seeing you, hearing of you, and imitating what you had done... But there are marks of a somewhat different kind, and they are rare.

They are the marks that change the order of the world and the hierarchy that runs through it, leaving their trace across all of it.

Was that the kind of mark Ravian was reaching for? One could only wonder.

...

Outside the room, in the corridor leading to the study where Earl Patrick still stood, Ravian waited with a strangely absent look, his gaze fixed on nothing at all.

He hadn’t lied about anything he’d said to Earl Patrick. That really was what Ravian thought about most of the time.

Ravian didn’t want to be an ordinary person; that was the worst thing that could ever happen to him.

Ravian wanted change; he wanted to make a difference... He wanted to stand apart, side by side with his pride.

What about power?

Had power stood in his way, he would have abandoned it, but because it helped him, he made it a priority.

What about immortality?

Ravian had thought about that matter over and over again, but his conclusion always remained the same.

No one is immortal, and no one will attain immortality in this world; everyone will die one day... even him.

Frankly, Ravian had known from the very beginning that immortality was impossible, and that anyone trying to force it into existence was nothing more than a clever person who had grown drunk on his own cleverness and convinced himself he was capable of achieving it.

Ask him what gave him such confidence that he could attain something he wasn’t even certain existed, and he would tell you that the joy lay in the journey, or that he would at least have the honor of trying without regret. Ravian didn’t disagree with that in the slightest.

Trying is the most important thing of all, but... you try to achieve something that exists, whereas immortality itself is something no human being will ever attain, no matter how far their power and might may reach.

Why?

Simply because they don’t know how they came to exist in the first place.

Imagine a creature that doesn’t know how it came into being, trying—with the very body and form whose origin it doesn’t know either—to attain immortality...

The whole business seemed to Ravian like a desperate attempt to run away from reality.

Even in those novels, when the hero believes he’s attained immortality, you find him fighting other characters in a "life-or-death" battle.

Life or death?

So you can be killed? Then how can you call this nonsense immortality?

It’s nothing but the postponement of a fate decreed for you, just as it was decreed for your parents and everyone who came before them.

Wake up to reality.

If a person strays from the true purpose of life and starts chasing the impossible, he is simply torturing himself, and in the end, he’ll find that the end is one and the same for everyone, and that he is only one more among all the rest.

So what is it that sets one person apart from another, and what is it that a human being ought to do?

The mark is what sets one human being apart from another.

And as for what a human being ought to do?

It is simply to build that mark until it stands as the greatest of them all.

Life isn’t hard—no, in fact, it is hard—but that is exactly what makes it worth living, because if it were easy, it would consist of nothing but happiness, and happiness without sorrow would have no taste at all.

’So go and find your purpose in life, and live your life with greatness, Ryan.’ Ravian remembered the words his mother used to tell him in his previous life.

’Life lost its luster after you were gone, Mother...’ Ravian thought, his eyes gleaming quietly in the light of the corridor’s oil lamps.

"Ravian?"

Suddenly, Ravian heard a voice call out to him, and his eyes widened in terror.

Not because of the voice, but because of the name it had called him by.

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