From the moment he woke until now, Bernard had behaved with extreme humility.
He had no choice. The moment he opened his eyes, he discovered so many formations placed on his body that he had no other option. After all, his life and death rested on a single thought from the other party.
On that basis, Bernard had done everything he could. He hoped to survive, to defuse the situation, and to wait for the promise he had been waiting for.
But only now did Bernard finally come to his senses. He was wrong, utterly wrong.
Perhaps his approach would have worked on anyone other than the young man before him.
Yet, put another way, anyone it would have worked on would never have deliberately moved his corpse here from the Palace of Remembrance and prepared everything.
It was a paradox. Bernard had failed to grasp this at first, but anyone who had just awakened from a century-long slumber would have found it difficult to immediately understand everything around them.
The other party had not come for answers, because he knew many of Bernard's secrets. Rather astonishingly, even after a century, his account sounded less like an investigator's and more like that of someone who had experienced it firsthand.
Nor had he come to negotiate. All these formations binding Bernard were not bargaining chips for negotiations; they were there to keep him from rising up and struggling during his judgment.
This was a trial, one whose outcome had long since been decided.
The earlier conversation, the words and the buildup, had merely been a way for the other party to gain pleasure by trampling on him, a humiliation before the execution.
I was such a fool. Truly.
That was what Bernard thought now. If not for wanting something, who would