The Shepherd Alone on the Hill is a Genius Wizard

In the play "Hero Keorn" that Turan had seen before, the war between two major houses was portrayed as nothing but honorable.

Knights clashing with weapons while nobles competed for supremacy by throwing fire and lightning beside them.

But the actual war was conducted in much more insidious and despicable ways.

First, Zahar's nobles would secretly approach while concealed, contaminating prepared food and water, or ambushing those who left the main force for scouting and communication.

At night, they would repeatedly unleash magic and flee, making it impossible to even sleep properly.

In contrast, daytime belonged to Arabion.

They advanced slowly but surely while illuminating their surroundings, and forcibly sought cooperation from the houses ruling the regions they passed through to replenish lacking supplies.

Naturally, those who refused were certainly Zahar's pawns and were burned to death with lightning.

Since they couldn't eliminate all the noble houses along Arabion's march route in advance, Zahar changed strategies while the enemy approached slowly.

They dispatched a small detachment of nobles and knights to directly invade the mainland.

The targets of these attacks were mainly small cities scattered throughout the Dakein Plains.

The main houses were too burdensome as the heads might be there, while such small cities were defenseless because their nobles and knights had been drafted.

The detachment slaughtered the few nobles and knights and plundered valuable assets from the central mansions, and during this process, some took interest in those who had been raised to become nobles' concubines.

Turan's mother, Bizela, was a girl kidnapped from Kimel, a small city in the southern Dakein Plains.

"Bizela?"

"Yes. If my memory is correct, that was certainly her name."

Turan pondered while repeating his mother's real name that he was hearing for the first time.

It certainly felt much more upper-class than "Bize."

More feminine too.

"I still remember because that young lady was a very unusual person."

"Unusual how?"

"Well, you see..."

While caring for the kidnapped women, Sarina classified them into two broad categories.

First were the compliant type, second were the resistant type.

The compliant type accepted that returning was impossible and tried their best to escape being just livestock for bearing children by seducing a man.

They tried to receive special treatment by flirting with Zahar's nobles or knights who had killed their families.

And the resistant type were those who refused meals screaming they would kill their family's murderers, or tried to reduce their value by ruining their faces.

Except for a few with exceptionally beautiful looks that would be a waste, they were all disposed of in various ways before long.

But Bizela was neither of these types.

Like someone who had come on a trip to a new place, she spent all day walking around everywhere she could, asking questions to the servants.

Why do people here dress like this?

What's the name of this food and how is it made?

What's the name of the god people here worship...

Once, when another kidnapped lady scolded her about what she was so excited about, her answer was quite something.

'Isn't it interesting that there are people living like this in places we don't know about? At least it's better than being locked up in a house just flattering people!'

Naturally, this was an incredibly insulting statement to ladies educated their whole lives to be nobles' concubines, so Bizela became an outsider among them.

Thanks to this, Sarina, who attended to her, naturally became close and could hear many personal stories.

Stories like how she had wanted to become a merchant traveling the world since childhood but was slapped by her father saying it was impossible, or how the education she received at home was so boring she felt like dying.

"She said that while she was sad her family all died, they never cared what she wanted anyway, and that she was happy to see a different world like this rather than being stuck in that suffocating mansion her whole life."

Hearing Sarina's explanation, Turan imagined his mother twenty years younger, probably around his current age.

A strangely eccentric and positive young lady who proclaimed this much was fine even after losing all her family and being kidnapped...

It didn't match at all with the pessimistic and exhausted woman in his memories.

What exactly had happened to change that eccentric young lady so much?

"What about the man?"

As much as his mother, what Turan was curious about was who his father was.

Since his mother was the daughter of an Arabion knight, his father must have been a Zahar noble or knight.

Given the circumstances, he thought it was likely a noble.

To ordinary people they might all be equally high-ranking wizards, but there's no way the nobles would have looked kindly on a mere knight taking a woman as his concubine.

Moreover, while mana wasn't perfectly inherited from parents, Turan's potential was too high to have been born between a knight and commoner.

"There was exactly one person who looked for that young lady. He was a young man, well, I don't know his real age—"

"He just looked young. What about his appearance or name? Was he a knight or noble?"

"I-I don't remember that much. There were too many people we served at the time, I'm sorry..."

Turan clicked his tongue in disappointment but soon accepted it.

Thinking about it, it was natural.

That former innkeeper was special—normally people don't remember the face of someone they saw in passing a few times twenty years ago.

"However, I do remember some things she said about the man she was meeting. That he was kind despite looking cold, that they planned to travel together someday, she didn't seem to dislike him."

Turan felt great relief at Sarina's words as she quietly added that she seemed like a girl in love.

While the circumstances of their first meeting being kidnapping was problematic from the start, if there had been love between them, that alone seemed enough to help him affirm himself.

Though his mother had said his father was a good person in the past, Turan had secretly suspected that might have just been lip service for her son's sake.

Sarina continued her explanation about Bizela.

From stories of being locked in solitary confinement after being misunderstood as trying to escape when she was running around the mansion building strength for travel, to setting the garden on fire while rubbing sticks together trying to learn how to make fire.

Turan gladly etched these amusing anecdotes into his memory one by one.

"The young lady must have become pregnant about three or four months before escaping, and even then she talked about such things. She said all of this would be useful when the three of them traveled together later. But I never expected her to suddenly escape..."

One night, when Sarina was returning after going outside the mansion for minor errands, she encountered Bizela.

When Sarina hurriedly blocked her path, Bizela was startled and stopped a horse she must have stolen from somewhere and pleaded, she said.

With an incredibly gloomy face unlike her usual cheerful self.

"When she begged me to pretend I hadn't seen her, I asked too. Didn't she say she would travel together with the three of them later, why was she escaping now..."

"And, what did she say?"

"She said she had been seeing the world too beautifully. That there is no true freedom in this world, and we're all just livestock raised by shepherds in the end. She said she couldn't give such a fate to this child."

It was the same thing his mother had said when Turan first awakened his magical power.

In the end, Sarina pretended not to see Bizela escaping, and thus twenty years passed—that was the end of the story.