In the original owner's memories, that longing for father's love, that pursuit of recognition, and the resentment and estrangement after he was ultimately "exiled," mingled at this moment with Karl's own rationality as a transmigrator coolly examining it all, his analysis of the tangled interests of the family, and the complicated feelings stirred up by Charlotte and Klein. It was like an overturned palette, leaving his emotions impossible to settle.
But he was no longer that boy yearning for father's love, nor was he a transmigrator newly arrived in a noble land, frightened and uneasy.
He was the Lord of Carnford, a warrior tempered through blood and fire, the one who held tens of thousands of lives and a stretch of territory in his grasp.
He quickly pressed down all the churning emotions in his heart, and his face returned to its usual calm.
He removed his helmet, tucked it beneath his arm, and took a few steps forward. About ten paces from the desk, he stopped, clenched his right fist, placed it over the left side of his chest, and bowed slightly—a standard salute of a lower noble paying audience to a superior lord, and also the courtesy of a son to his father.
"Father." He spoke, his voice steady, with little turbulence to be heard, but that reluctant, "unwilling" strain might only have been detected by those closest to him, those who understood him best, as a trace of stiffness almost too faint to notice beneath the overly calm tone.
From the moment Karl stepped through the tent flap, the Duke's gaze had fallen on him, sizing him up carefully and undisguisedly from head to toe.
There was scrutiny in that gaze, assessment, and perhaps also an extremely well-hidden thread of complicated emotion, one even he himself might