Chapter 3: Chapter 3

Rubica’s aunt considered dressing up as extremely important. When the ladies of the neighborhood kindly pointed out her excessive dressing code, she just dismissed it as jealousy of the poor people. Therefore, she only met guests when she was perfectly dressed up.

Additionally, she would only let Rubica do her hair, saying she was good at it. But now, she skipped the morning dressing up session to meet a guest… Rubica couldn’t understand. She stopped and blinked her eyes.

But then, the maids looked uncomfortable for Rubica still lingering around after Angela told her to leave. She had no choice but to give up asking and left the room. She wanted to know who the guest was, but she was the Cinderella of the Berner Family. She didn’t belong in that meeting.

She used the back stairs for the servants to go up to her room in the attic. Then, she asked something to a servant she ran into.

“What year is it in the kingdom’s calendar? I suddenly can’t remember.”

“It’s year 473.”

The servant, who was carrying food, answered without giving much thought to it. Rubica could now feel the goosebumps appearing on her skin, and she held the ring even tighter.

The ring was the only thing that told her she wasn’t crazy, that what had happened in the past wasn’t fake.

‘Oh my!’

Rubica had died at the age of seventy and come back to herself at 22.

***

‘Am I crazy? Am I not crazy?’

Rubica asked herself, lying with her face down on the old bed in the small attic. What had suddenly happened to her was enough to make her lose her mind in shock. It wasn’t like she had died and resurrected. She had gone back in time, it should have been impossible.

Still, she couldn’t think that the life she lived until reaching 70 years old had been fake, and it was all a brief dream. She could clearly remember what had happened just before her death and the famine she had suffered when she 69. However, everything that had happened this year, at the age of 22, was foggy and faint, and the memories were jumbled up together as if she was trying to recall things that had happened 40 years ago.

Most of all, she had a reason to believe she had come back in time because…

She looked at the ring on her chest with sad eyes. The blue stone that decorated it was beautiful, but it was neither sapphire nor blue topaz. It was just stone. However, Arman had never parted from it as if it was something precious.

The ring had been one of the reasons Rubica hadn’t been able to tell him she loved him. She thought he still couldn’t move on from his former lover.

‘This is Arman’s, it has to be.’

She had a good reason to be so sure like that. On the day of her birth, her mother had been very delighted to see that her child’s eyes had a red hue.

-Hue will bless you.

People with red eyes were blessed by Hue, the god of love. They will always meet good lovers and live happily. The mother hadn’t known that those red eyes would just become normal reddish-brown eyes as the girl grew up. Therefore, she named her Rubica.

Ever since then, ruby had been the only type of jewel Rubica wore. Although her aunt had taken all of it from her because of debt, there was a time when her accessory box was full of red gems. Even after that, she never wore any accessory that wasn’t red. The color fitted her the best and her late mother had liked it.

‘Arman…’

She had felt something cold being dropped on her breast as she died. Was it this ring? The ring had come to the past with Rubica. So, she held it tight. Arman had always been there for her. It was as if he had sent the ring with her so that she wouldn’t go crazy.

Everything was taken from me, but I will never lose this!

Rubica had never been obsessed with things, but Arman’s ring was different. It was the one object that let her stay sane and was a clue at the same time. She suddenly got worried. What if her aunt tries to take it away like the other things? For now, she carefully wrapped it in a cloth and hid it deep in her dress.

Then she sat down on her bed, wiped the tears, and decided to try to make sense of everything one by one. First of all, year 473 of the kingdom. Rubica was 22 years old, already way too old to get married. She bit her lips hard at that point.

‘If it only has been 6 years earlier…’

Then, she would have been able to see her mother, although she was sick. At the time, she hadn’t known her mother would leave her so soon. She had been so young. She had even slightly protested about how her friends went to balls, and she had to take care of her mother all day within the smell of medicine.

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That time had been precious. Everything she had enjoyed was only been possible under her mother’s kindness. She realized that only much, much later.

-Sister Rubica, thinking of what cannot be undone and blaming yourself will only make you miserable. Now, let’s use our time to think about the present that we can change, the time Hue gave to us.

Rubica recalled what the priest had told her when she had just arrived at the abbey and was just despairing at the reality. The world is like a fine-meshed net. There are things you cannot fix, no matter how much you regret it.

The priest had told her she had to focus on what was in front of her, the things she could do and fix. Only then a new net will be knitted. He just said that to comfort her, but it had changed Rubica ever since. She decided to think of the things she could do now in this new reality.

‘The war will break out after four years.’

Rubica’s land, the Kingdom of Seritos, was in the harsh Seris Mountains. It had no decent specialty and the land wasn’t good for farming. It was a poor land. However, that changed the moment the founder of Seritos found a mana stone mine deep in the mountains.

Mana stones had great energy. At the time, few knew how to use that energy.

However, there was a great inventor next to the founder king. The inventor, who later started the Claymore Family, made weapons using the energy in the mana stones. His weapons were very powerful.

Everyone started buying weapons from Seritos to get rid of the monsters that infested the continent. Seritos bought wheat with the money it earned from the weapons and it started flourishing.

For more than 400 years, the Family of Claymore kept inventing, and kings used the messy situation of the world to sell mana stones and weapons. Apart from the kingdoms, dragons’ territories were the only other places where such pure mana stones could be mined.

However, after 4 years from now, in the year 477 of the kingdom’s calendar, the same thing that had made Seritos flourish destroyed it, as if collecting the debt people owed to it.

***

“Have you heard that? Duke Claymore has invented a weapon that flies up in the sky!”

“Weapon that flies? Well, is it as big as a baby’s finger?”

“No, of course not. I heard it is almost as huge as a ship.”

“Something that big cannot fly!”

“Hey! You know Claymore turns the impossible into possible!”

At the age of 26, Rubica had been working in the Berner’s house without getting married as she had no dowry. She diligently picked up grains to be sowed while listening to the servants.

“Now it’s the time to fight the dragon.”

“Why should we mess up with the sleeping dragon?”

“If it weren’t for that dragon, we would be eating meat instead of potatoes!”

Rubica had to restrain her laugh at this and continued carrying out the bucket full of grains. Actually, there was a large plain right next to the Kingdom of Seritos, and that plain belonged to the greedy dragon Ios.

‘Will they really attack the dragon?’

Nonsense. Rubica muttered so as she sowed the field. Then, a huge and black shadow went over her. At first, she thought it was the dark clouds that were about to rain. However, when she looked up, there was something black floating there, huge enough to block all the sunlight.

She learned its name only later. ‘Stella’. The only thing she had seen that flew had been birds, so she opened her mouth in surprise and so did the others.

-What is it?

-I don’t think it’s a bird.

-Wait, something’s coming out.

Its smooth surface seemed to be made of black iron. A hatch opened, and something came out. Rubica thought it looked like cannon, and soon an ominous feeling overwhelmed her.