The Faraway Paladin Vol.1 Ch. 1

The Faraway Paladin, volume 1: The Boy in the City of the Dead.

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Chapter 1.

There was an angel before my eyes.

He was a young boy, his chestnut-brown hair slightly messy, his eyes a deep blue-green, and his face a healthy color.

“So this is me.”

I had found an old hand mirror on a tool shelf in a corner of the temple. Eager for the chance to observe my own appearance, I stretched up and grabbed it with both hands. I found that I was cuter than I expected.

Upon further thought, it probably shouldn’t have been surprising that I was cuter than most people, given that I was a kid. Everyone is 100% cuter during their childhood years. Even tough-looking bearded men are adorable little things when you look through their childhood photo albums.

“Yeah…” I gently put the mirror back. I clenched my hand, then opened it. Clenched it again, then opened it.

A tiny, soft, puffy hand. My hand.

A year and some months had passed.

To my surprise, after the day I accepted my current name and body as my own, the feeling that my body wasn’t working as it should quickly resolved itself. Memories of how to control my body from before my death faded. Now, it was these tiny limbs that I recognized as mine. My mind and body were operating in unison.

It hadn’t taken me long to learn to totter about, and I was even able to speak, albeit in a faltering manner. I had devoted the past year to practicing walking constantly, and learning words and their pronunciations by talking to Mary and the others.

I still fell flat on my face from time to time, though. Probably because of how large my head was in proportion to my tiny body. It might also have had something to do with my field of view, sense of balance, and muscles being undeveloped. As an additional complaint, I still had a low threshold of pain. As you might imagine, I cried my eyes out every time I fell over.

But I was making progress, little by little. Progress expected of a toddler, perhaps, but progress was progress all the same. I had at least grown from the phase of crawling and crying to someone who could have attended kindergarten or nursery school. So, I thought it was time to try my hand at the next challenge.

I had decided to live in this world. I wanted a body I could feel proud of, and I wanted to study and learn, one thing at a time. And so, first on the list was…

◆

“Hmm, you say you want to learn to read?”

We were in one of the many smaller rooms that lay deep within the temple. It featured stonework walls, a small wooden chair and writing desk, and even a comfy-looking bed set into an alcove in the wall.

A crotchety old man with piercing eyes and a hooked nose was before me, arms crossed and stroking his jaw. His vaporous body, covered by a loose robe, was half-transparent and had no substance to it. I guess you’d call him a specter? A spirit, as they say. Y’know, a ghost.

“Yeah. Please, Gus.” His name was Augustus, technically, but Mary and everyone else shortened it.

At the moment, I was asking him to teach me how to read. To be honest, there were plenty of more important things I wanted to ask him about. This world, for instance, or my strange memories.

But any question a young child like myself could have posed would inevitably have been met with an equally primitive response, using a crude vocabulary. Would anyone launch into an explanation of astronomy, physics, and the theory of nuclear fusion after a child asked, “Why does the sun shine?” Not usually. Your answer would be something like, “Mister Sun is doing his best to give us all light and keep us warm.”

I had actually tried asking them a few quick questions about the world, but they all got brushed off. It was still too early for those questions. That talk would have to come after I built up a certain amount of academic knowledge, and after I managed to get the others to see me as someone who could hold a conversation at that level.

“Hmm, reading. Reading. I’ll be blunt. If it doesn’t earn me coin, I’m not a bit interested. You’re too young for it anyway, kid.”

“But I wanna understand.”

“Too young. Shoo, shoo.” He waved a hand at me lazily.

Unlike Mary the mummy, who looked after me at every opportunity, and Blood the skeleton, who spent plenty of time with me, the ghost called Gus treated me with indifference. He thought nothing of snubbing me, and if I asked anything of him, he would often irritably turn me down.

He was obstinate and sometimes arrogant, and usually hard to approach. But for all his flaws, there was no doubt in my mind that he was the most intelligent of the three. From his diction to his turns of phrase, I sensed that he was quite educated.

“But I wanna understand.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“Come on! I wanna understand! Pleeeeease!” I pitched a fit, like the child I was. When was the last time I had pleaded with a parental figure like this? For old times’ sake, I started having a little fun with it. “Please! Please, please, please! Come on, Gus! Pretty, pretty please?!” I felt like such a kid. The age of my body was probably holding back my mental state. That made sense, come to think of it. My brain was a child’s, too. But then, why did my consciousness and perception feel so adult?

Sensing that too much deep thought about this would leave me lost in the maze comprised by my brain, mind, and soul, I decided not to go into that, and just whine some more instead.

“By the gods! All right, all right, fine!” After muttering something about kids, Gus sighed and looked at me. “You’re a real piece of work. So you want to learn to read?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t really understand this world’s writing.

“Hmmm… Well, then, first things first…” Gus extended a hand toward the bookshelf against the wall, and a single book floated toward him.

Psychokinesis? Well, ghosts were a thing, so sure, why not. The paranormal had completely ceased to surprise me recently.

“You’d better learn the letters.” He had opened the book to a list of letters which resembled an alphabet. But—

“No, those are okay.”

“Okay? What’s okay?”

“I can read those already.” I understood this part. I had been living in this temple for more than a year now, surrounded by reliefs, looking at the pictures and text engraved in them as I listened to everyone talk.

Comparing the frequency of the different sounds in speech to the frequency of the letters in the texts had given me a basic understanding. The pronunciation of “E” was the most frequent, followed by “A” and “T,” so I started with those and the rest quickly followed.

So, I could already read these.

“Excuse me?” Gus gawked at me.

“I can already read them.”

“What’s this say?”

“It says, ‘The vibrant petals of a fragrant flower, carried on the wind. The world, like my life, is ever-changing.’ Right?”

Easy-peasy.

“Did Blood or Mary teach you that?”

“No. I listened to everyone talking, looked at the letters, and figured it out myself.” Life in the temple was not very stimulating, and there was a limit to how much moving around my juvenile body could handle. I had endless time to think, so I had been spending it on this, using it like a puzzle to stave off boredom.

“Will…” For a while, Gus seemed to be deep in thought, and then he directed a question at me in a serious tone. “What is it that you’re trying to understand, then?”

“The nice-looking complicated ones on the gods and stuff.”

From what I’d deciphered from the inscriptions in various parts of the temple, this world’s letters were an alphabet of phonograms. However, on the gods’ reliefs and other, similar places, complex pictographic characters suddenly appeared. Those were the ones I didn’t understand. What were they, and how was I supposed to read them? Or were they simply there for decoration?

“Ah, the Words of Creation. They’re used in the ancient magics.”

“Creation… Magic…” Now we’re talking creation and magic, huh.

“Hmm. Where do I begin…”

“The beginning,” I replied.

Too much was better than too little. I was blessed with a pretty good memory. And anyway, if I couldn’t remember everything, I could just ask again, as many times as I needed.

“Get comfortable, then. This is going to take a while. We start long, long ago, longer than you can imagine, when the world was just beginning. Back then, the world was still a thick, boiling pot of chaos, where the Great Mana swirled with heat, and was unable to hold a form.”

I didn’t expect him to begin with the Creation.

“We’re… We’re starting there?”

“We’re starting there.” He was dead serious.

“In the chaos, the First God appeared from a place known to no one, and God said, ‘Let there be earth,’ and mana solidified at God’s feet, and became the earth, and mana thinned above God’s head, and became the skies. And so the heavens and the earth were parted.

“We call this God simply ‘the Creator’ or ‘the Progenitor,’ because a true name was never passed down.”

I felt what I’d heard bore a certain resemblance to the creation narratives of Christianity and Greek mythology.

“After this, the Creator spoke the Words and engraved the Signs, made the sun and the moon, split day from night, and gathered water to separate the oceans and the earth.

“Fire was born, wind was born, trees were born. The gods were born, and people and animals were born.

“And when the Creator had made the world, and was satisfied of its beauty, he said to himself, without thinking, that it was ‘good.’ But to make something ‘good’ is also to make something else ‘evil,’ just as solidifying the ground created the heavens.

“And so it was that malice and the evil gods were born. The Creator tried to take back his word, but not even the gods can return a word to the mouth that uttered it.

“The evil gods that were born into the world killed the Creator, and so life and death were born. And after that began the age of many gods and many legends.” Gus took a brief pause.

“The words and signs used in this creation story are the Words of Creation,” he finished.

Ah, so that was how it all linked up.

“So they’re the words that made the world?”

“That’s right. These Words and Signs… Well, let’s call them letters. Words and letters have power.”

Power. Power, huh?

“What can they do?”

“Hmm, let me see…” Gus’s finger danced in the air. A mysterious phosphorescence dwelt in his fingertip and left behind a trail as it moved, drawing two flowing and complex pictographs in midair. His finger slowed, and carefully, deliberately, added the second symbol’s final dot.

“Whoa!” I scrambled backwards. The letters drawn in midair had suddenly become a leaping flame that burned a brilliant red. The flame hung in midair, and I could feel its heat. It was real fire.

“Enough for a demonstration, I hope?” Gus muttered one or two melodic, rhythmic verses under his breath. The burning flame vanished entirely, as if it had all been nothing but an illusion.

I stared, enchanted.

It was magic. Not some trick! Real magic. This world had magic in it.

Amazing. Amazing. I was genuinely excited by what I had just been shown.

You might ask what’s the big deal after ghosts, mummies, and reanimated skeletons, but I would argue that a proper magic system is an entirely different thing than horror and supernatural elements.

“Was that clear to you? Drawing the pictographs for Ignis defines fire to exist in that place, and the air will instantly burst into flame. If you speak the Word of Erasure for extinguishing fire, the flames will vanish.

“This is what I mean by the Words of Creation, and what is most commonly referred to as magic.”

What came to mind then was not “magic” as I knew it from computer games, but from your more old-fashioned fantasy novels. Not simply another skill to be casually fired off if you had enough points to expend, but one of the world’s most ancient secrets, never to be handled without careful forethought.

That was the atmosphere this hook-nosed old ghost evoked in this dimly lit stone room as he spoke with pride about mysterious powers.

“It’s important to understand that the Words of Creation are inconvenient things. Their power is a hindrance to both writing and speech. It was the Creator’s own use of the Words that led to the evil gods which took the Creator’s life.”

Yeah, no kidding. Even taking notes would be a risky endeavor if the paper could burn up in an instant just by writing “fire.” That would be inconvenient in the extreme, and would have to be an obstruction to the advance of civilization. It would even have to get in the way of ordinary people’s daily lives.

“In consideration of this, the one-eyed god of knowledge, Enlight, selected twenty consonants and five vowels. In order that the Words of Creation should not exert their power, he simplified the characters and their pronunciations, and created the corrupted language we call the Common Tongue.”

Got it. To draw an analogy with Japanese, the Words of Creation would be the complex kanji characters. Writing the kanji carelessly was dangerous, and could cause fire to erupt and things to explode. To avoid this, a wise god simplified the characters, and made the other Japanese character set: the kana, which represent sounds.

There was a difference in that the Common Tongue used phonemic characters, not syllabic ones. It was more like an alphabet than the kana, really.

In any case, I now understood that those characters were not from an entirely different language family, and had not just been thrown in for symbolic purposes. They belonged to the same language, similar to the way Japanese was a mix of kanji and kana.

“What you were reading was the Common Tongue, and what you could not read were the Words of Creation, written in the Signs of the gods, and used for the great magics of ancient times. The ones engraved around the temple were written so as not to activate. Some struck through, others intentionally mistaken in places, and yet others incorporated into elaborate designs.”

I see. If corrupting the symbols prevented them from activating, then it made sense that you could engrave them in a form just wrong enough to still be able to identify the original.

I wondered why they needed to go so far to record the Words of Creation, but the more I listened, the more I felt like I understood.

“The Words of Creation bring a man closer to God than the Common Tongue, you see. It stands to reason that the Words should be engraved in a temple for revering God and praying to God. Do you understand this?”

“Yeah, I get it.” I nodded repeatedly. It made perfect sense.

“Hmm. All right, Will, how about this. Do you know why the Words carry such power to begin with?” Gus posed the question with a grin on his face.

Uh, so what Gus was trying to make me think about here was…

“So like… why we think a stool is a stool, right?” I asked. “Hmm…” I had the feeling I’d read about it somewhere. It was something I had heard even in my previous world, in a place where they had talked about perceptions, representations, and concepts.

Basically, when we look at a four-legged wooden stool, no matter what color it is, or what wood it’s made of, we think, “This is a stool.” We think that even about stools that aren’t, on the whole, identical. Inside our heads, we categorize it by sticking a “stool” label on it.

We don’t normally perceive it as “four legs and a board,” nor do we think “table,” even though a table has four legs and a board. Moreover, if we see a person sitting on a stool, we don’t think “a combination of wood and a human.” We perceive it as “a stool and a human.”

Of course, it is possible to see the stool as “four legs and a board” instead, if we deliberately try to look at it differently, or even as “a mass of wood fibers.” We’re also capable of distinguishing “this stool” and “that stool,” telling apart different things in the same category.

In any case, what it boils down to is that we affix these labels we call “words” to things. That lets us categorize this chaotic world, conceptualize it, and break it into parts to make perception easier. It wouldn’t be possible for us to survive without that ability.

Language is the power that separates the world from indistinct chaos, just as it was in the creation myth I’d just heard.

It was time for me to sum up my rambling thoughts.

“It’s because Words are what separate parts of the world and set out the way it is,” I said.

Gus seemed greatly surprised by my answer. His eyes were opened wide, and his mouth flapped open and closed.

I looked down guiltily.

Gus’s astonishment made me feel shame more than pride.

Because I had memories from the life I’d once lived, I had knowledge—however shallow—that should have been impossible for a toddler like me to attain. It made me feel like I’d cheated a little.

If a “talent” was a gift you had since birth, then maybe these memories of mine did count as a talent. But it still felt wrong.

Gus flew out of the room, phasing right through the wall. He located Mary and Blood in the main hall, and before even reaching them, he burst out, in a flurry of stutters, “Th-Th-Th-Th… The kid may be almost as gifted as me!”

I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable.

“Goodness. Is there something the matter, Old Gus?”

“Ohh, Mary, that boy! Why, I—”

I watched from a distance as Gus relayed excitedly what had just happened. With his pale blue spectral arms gesturing wildly, he explained how my ability to form an argument was extraordinary for my age, how I was insightful, how the ability to grasp something’s true nature equated to magical talent…

Mary the mummy listened placidly. “Really.”

As for Blood the skeleton, he was leaning against a wall, looking in another direction. He didn’t seem remotely interested.

“If we train him in a few things early, he might actually be good for something! Personally, I prefer not to pick trash up off the ground, but perhaps this kid is different. He could—”

I froze.

“Old man!” The voice lashed at him like a whip, before I even had time to form a thought.

It was Blood, still by the wall. Pale blue flames roared in his empty eye sockets. “Quit running your mouth. The kid’s only a couple years old. What you just said is going too far.” I could tell Blood was glaring at him.

“He was found on the ground! Am I wrong? I didn’t want to get involved with him.”

“Not the point.”

“Now that I know he’s got some talent in him, I’m not saying I won’t teach him a thing or—”

“Still not the point.” Blood took a step towards him.

To me, it seemed like an invisible aura was enveloping his entire body. I hadn’t really been aware of it up until this point, but Blood was very large. What people meant when they said “big-boned.”

“Hey, now…”

Even just watching from the sidelines, I could feel my skin tingle from the sheer force of Blood’s advance.

“Listen, Old Gus. I know it’s your nature to talk like that. I’m not gonna bother trying to change you after all this time. This is what makes you who you are.

“But you don’t call a kid ‘trash’ while he’s in earshot. Even you’ve gotta be able to imagine how hearing that must make him feel.” Blood glanced at me, then stared back to Gus.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

“Mgh…”

Arrogant, bigoted Gus was being overpowered. This despite the fact that it was normally Blood who got chewed out by the other two for his irresponsible, “it’ll do” attitude.

“If you want to stay out of raising Will, be my guest. You can go be a crank where none of us have to listen to you. But if you’re gonna be teaching him, do the kid a favor and cut that stuff out. That sound fair to you?”

Gus was silent for a while. Then, shaking his head slowly and sighing, he accepted the blame, and backed down.

“You’re right. It was a thoughtless remark. I’ll be a little more considerate in future. Sorry, Will.”

“Uh, it’s okay…”

I’d never seen anything like this from either of these two before. Pulling myself together, I decided to say something to defuse the situation. I had to make a show of overlooking it so we could all move on.

“Um, I’m fine, Gus. Don’t worry about it.” I couldn’t think of anything better to say.

Hearing that, Blood cooled off as well, and bowed his head slightly toward Gus in apology. “I was out of line, too. Shouldn’t have gotten aggressive with you all of a sudden like that. Sorry. Can we let it be?”

“Mm.” Gus nodded. “Your lack of refinement is nothing new. Forget about it.”

“Hey, Mary, gonna borrow Will for a sec.”

Mary had been watching over the two of them with her usual peaceful expression. “Yes, all right. Gus, would you mind telling me a little more?”

“Will, come outside a moment.”

“O… Okay.” I couldn’t really grasp the meaning of what had just happened. It had all been too fast.

But I was sure of one thing.

Blood had gotten angry, and he had done it for me.

◆

The city’s ruins were as beautiful as ever.

The morning sunlight was glittering on the lake.

“Uh, so… Will.”

And sitting on the hill, gazing at this glorious sight: a skeleton.

The mismatch was phenomenal.

“You probably don’t know anything about this, ’cause you’ve been here as long as you can remember, but…” Blood scratched his skull, as if hesitating over how to explain. The pale blue flames in his sockets swayed. “You can still tell, right? That you’re different from me and Mary and Old Gus.”

“Um… Yeah. I know. I’m the only one who’s warm and breathing.”

“Yeah, that. It’s, uh, complicated. All kinds of complicated…”

I was obviously aware there were some unusual circumstances behind where I came from. A ruined city, the undead, and in the middle of it all, one single living human child. It was unnatural.

Gus said I was “picked up,” so maybe I was an abandoned child or something. Mary was the mothering type, so maybe she took me in, and Gus was against it or something. I could make all kinds of guesses, but ultimately, I wouldn’t know the truth until it was explained to me. And…

“Now’s… not the time.”

“Yeah.”

It wasn’t surprising. No respectable adult would tell a child my age he was adopted, or try to explain all the complicated background of it to him, no matter how brainy he seemed for his age. You’d keep it hidden.

Blood shrugged his shoulders gently. I suddenly realized that the reason Blood got mad at Gus might not just have been for being so thoughtless around a child, but also because he spilled the beans about my background.

“Uh, and about Old Gus. Don’t be too mad at him, okay? When he gets excited, he’s, y’know, whatever he’s thinking just comes straight out. Even when he’s not excited, he doesn’t do the whole ‘considerately choosing your words’ thing in the first place.”

“Yeah. It’s okay. I’m not mad. It just surprised me a bit.” And the reason his anger had been so ferocious might also have been to distract me.

Before I fully understood what Gus meant by “trash off the ground” and started to think poorly of him, Blood had caused a scene and given me something else to think about.

“Hm. You’ve got a big heart, Will. It’s good to be big. How about this. When your body gets as big as your heart, and you’re old enough to take it all in, I swear I’ll tell you all the things I can’t talk about right now.”

“Yeah.”

It was all for me.

Now that I could understand him, I found that Blood was being surprisingly compassionate towards me.

Blood is amazing, I thought. Had I treated other people like that before I died? Had I managed to be like that? My memories were vague, but I thought the answer was probably no. Almost never? No, straight-up never. The thought made my chest tighten.

“Blood?”

“Hm?”

“Um, thanks. For all this.” I couldn’t word it very well. He deserved better.

“Hahah! Don’t worry about it.” The will-o’-the-wisps in his eye sockets shimmered. I couldn’t read the expressions of a skull, but I felt as if he’d just grinned at me warmly.

He ruffled my hair and stood up. “Okay. Go talk to Gus and learn about writing and magic and all that. At the end of the day, that old man’s a damn good sorcerer. A zeni grubber first and foremost, though.” Rattling his jaw in laughter, Blood added, “Ah, I guess you don’t know what zeni is. Right…” and cackled a few more times.

“Oh, and if the old man’s teaching you, then I’m gonna do my part, too! I’ve got a ton of stuff to teach you! Look forward to that!”

“Yeah! What are you going to teach me, Blood?” Now I was curious. Blood didn’t really look like the scholarly type.

“Hm… Violence.”

Come again?

“Violence. How to really go berserk. And how to train your muscles, I guess?”

“Huh?”

“It’s useful.”

What?

◆

“While Blood was alive…” Mary began, as she sat beside me on a bench in the temple’s main hall.

“Uh, while he was alive? Then, wait, that means…”

“Yes. We weren’t always like this, you know. It was… a lot of things. Yes, a lot happened for things to turn out this way.” Mary smiled a little sadly.

I couldn’t bring myself to ask just what had happened. Of course, even if I had, she would probably have dodged the question.

Still, this felt like something important to keep in mind. The three of them hadn’t always been in the forms of a skeleton, mummy, and ghost.

According to my memories from my previous life, the standard for these things was that the dead were being dragged along by their regrets and attachments. Did this follow that formula, or was there some other reason?

Due to my age, I still had very little access to information, and couldn’t say anything for certain. I decided not to engage in conjecture and avoid holding any strange preconceptions.

“While he was alive, he was a warrior.”

“A warrior?”

“A warrior. It means a person who fights in battles with a weapon. Little boys love that sort of thing.”

Then this place had a social system archaic enough for an occupation like that to exist. After seeing the ruins of that city, I did have this world pegged at about that stage of development, but this confirmed that conflict between humans was present here as well.

If I was planning to live in this world, and I was, it looked like it was probably going to be in my best interest to learn how to fight.

“Blood really was strong, you know? He had lots of experience, and was highly skilled. He started with fighting other humans, and moved up to wild creatures, beasts, goblins, the undead, giants, demidragons, demons, ‘whoever wants a piece of me’—like that.”

“Huh,” I idly responded, and then stiffened.

“Um, Mary?”

“Yes?”

“What did you just say?”

“He started with fighting other humans, and moved on up to wild creatures, beasts, goblins, the undead, giants, demidragons, demons—”

Wait, wait, wait. I wasn’t about to jump to conclusions. After all, it wasn’t necessarily the case that these were the same kinds of monsters I’d remembered, right?

“Other humans, I get… What are the others?”

“Oh!” she laughed. “I’m sorry, how silly of me. I never explained those to you, did I? How could you have known?” She thought for a moment. “Let me see… I think there was an illustrated book of them all in Gus’s room.”

She held my hand, and walked with me to Gus’s small stone room. Gus was out, but Mary seemed perfectly comfortable searching the room and borrowing the book without asking.

“Here we are. These are wild creatures. Hungry wolves, lions, giant snakes…” The illustrations depicted a variety of familiar animals. Familiar, of course, only as part of the knowledge I had from before my death, and then only from documentaries I’d seen on TV. I could hardly contain my “joy” at seeing them again.

“Beasts are creatures that are extremely aggressive and fierce.”

“Okay…”

“As for the others… You learned how the legends started from Gus, right? The Creator, first of us all, benevolently made all kinds of beings, but also created the propensity for evil. In the end, it was the bad gods that the Creator made which brought about the Creator’s own demise. Then, the bad gods created different kinds of minions in accordance with their natures.” Mary slowly turned the page.

“The minions of the god of tyranny, Illtreat, are called goblins.”

The page showed something like… I dunno, maybe oni? There were unmistakably crafty and cruel-looking little ones, and large muscular ones that would be better called ogres.

“Then there are the minions of Dyrhygma, god of dimensions. They are the demons, who come from Hell…”

Demons and nightmare-spawn filled the next page. Humans with bird heads, spiders that had grown numerous arms in place of legs—disturbing beings that were a muddled mixture of human and animal parts.

“And the undead, which are the minions of the god of undeath, Stagnate…”

Zombies—and skeletons, ghosts, and mummies.

But I couldn’t get any impression of intelligence from the undead on the pages of the picture book.

“We entered into a contract with the god of undeath,” she murmured. “The strength of our wills at the moment of death led to our contracts with Stagnate, and the forms we have now. We’re traitors to the forces of good.” Her words felt horribly bleak, and sounded so sad.

“What happened?” I couldn’t help myself, even though I knew there was nothing to be gained from getting involved.

“Heheh… A lot. I’m sorry, this isn’t something a young child like you should have to worry about.” Mary smiled. It was forced.

She collected herself and continued. “The good gods also have minions, of course. There are elves, dwarves, halflings… All kinds of races.”

“Mary…”

“There are powerful neutral races as well, like the giants and the dragons. Some are followers of the good gods, and some are followers of the bad gods. It’s a big, wide world, and there are many races out there. The ones listed in this book are just the most well known.”

She had deliberately changed the subject, and I could tell that she had no intention of going back.

So I played along with her. I had no way of getting information from her that she didn’t want to share. There would be no point in starting trouble about this.

“So this world is… pretty dangerous?”

“Yes, it is. Things were comparatively peaceful while I was alive, but I don’t know about now. I think, most likely, things have gotten much worse.”

The lack of sugarcoating shocked me. I didn’t know what had made her think that, but I was already worried. “Do I need to get strong?”

“I would rest easier if you did.” Her words were gentle, but they weighed heavily upon me.

I decided to spare no effort in becoming stronger. By the sound of it, only the tough could survive in this world.

At the same time, I felt it was my duty not to forget what the three undead had hinted to me about their own circumstances. Even now, they were trying hard to build me up from someone completely powerless to someone with the strength to make it through life. My parents had once done the same for me, and what had I ever given them back? As I remembered it, nothing but worries and trouble.

I hoped that this time, when I was old enough, I could return the favor.

◆

Five years passed.

I was now seven, but it seemed that birthday celebrations were not one of this world’s customs. In fact, they didn’t even keep track of birth dates here. Instead, they used a traditional method of counting a person’s age. Newborn babies were “one year old,” and became one year older at the start of the new year.

As for the reason it didn’t start at zero… I was briefly afraid I’d discover they didn’t yet have the concepts of zero or place-value notation. In fact, they had both. Newborn babies being “one” was just a holdover from previous times, before the numeral “zero” existed within their culture.

Old habits die hard.

By this world’s reckoning, then, I was eight years old, with my “one” added to the seven I’d lived through. Simple enough so far. The only question that remained was when the new year actually began. The answer to that, astonishingly, was, “Nobody knows.”

No, technically, everyone knew which day was the first of the new year: the shortest day with the longest night. The day the sun was at its weakest, and one day away from starting to recover its power. In other words, the winter solstice, which marked the beginning of spring’s return.

But we were on the outskirts of a ruined city, far from human society. Not only did none of the three have much interest in the calendar, but after becoming undead, they were now less sensitive to changes in temperature, too. As a result, their perception of time was no richer than, “Oh, the flowers have started blooming,” “The sunlight is strong,” “The leaves have turned red and yellow,” and finally, “A little snow is falling.”

Their lives here had no interaction with the outside world. What was the point of tracking the movements of the heavens? I had no idea how long the three of them had been living here, but it would only have taken one single slip-up or period of laziness to cause them to forget the date. That would’ve been, in any case, the end of accurate time measurement.

Anyway, enough of that topic. I had managed to gather a good amount of information through study and questioning, so allow me to provide a summary of the situation.

I’ve been a bit noncommittal in my choice of words so far. Even now there are still things making me hold back from saying it. Still, all the same, it’s time I came to terms with it.

I had been reborn.

Rebirth, reincarnation, metempsychosis, samsara… It wasn’t important what you called it. In short, my memories were those of a previous life. I had died and been born again. And moreover, into a different world.

Assuming I could trust memories left from before my death, magic certainly wasn’t real in my prior world, and there were no skeletons or ghosts wandering around, either. Those had all been mere products of the imagination. Despite having certain points in common, this world and my previous one were clearly different.

So: reincarnation. Reincarnation into another world, no less.

There were no obvious issues with this conclusion, but I was still uncertain. That was because I could still imagine a number of other possibilities.

Maybe this world possessed some incomprehensible technology that only seemed like magic to me. Maybe my memories were fakes that had been implanted. Maybe I simply had some kind of psychiatric disorder, which caused me to experience strange delusions. Given that there were ghosts, maybe I hadn’t been “reincarnated” as such, but this was a phenomenon like “haunting” or “possession,” where my personality had taken over another person’s body. Or maybe me being here was in fact a hallucination after all, and the brain of the person I remembered myself as was now floating in a tank in some laboratory.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. I could have listed maybes forever. Seriously, forever. As evidence, consider my foray into the classic philosophical thought experiment of the brain in the vat.

It was my opinion that once you started considering unproductive questions like that, you might as well give up. You would never reach a conclusion. That was why I had provisionally settled on the understanding that I had been reincarnated into another world, and I just so happened to have memories of my previous life. It was the most tolerable answer. That is, the one that would disturb my mental state the least.

I certainly didn’t want to find out, for example, that I was actually an evil spirit who had obliterated the mind of an innocent little baby and seized control of his body. I wasn’t going to claim I’d be crushed by the weight of my guilty conscience, but it would at least depress me to discover I was something the world could do without.

And most of all, I was praying, with relative seriousness, that the day would never come when some shocking fact would come to light, and moments later, I would discover that I was just a brain in a vat.

◆

“Flammo Ignis… Waaagh?!” There was an explosive eruption of heat.

As I flinched and staggered backwards, Gus sharply incanted the Word of Erasure, blowing away the flames in front of me. “Idiot! Don’t pronounce it so accurately!”

What a thing to be criticized for.

“You may have talent, Will, but if you don’t get used to adjusting your precision, you’re going to wind up dead!”

Yes, this world, which I had been reborn into eight years ago (by their count), was a dangerous place. There could be no doubt about it. For example, just take the magic and Words of Creation I was learning.

In case anything went wrong, I was practicing outside, on the hill where the familiar temple stood, and I was not having much success.

“Gus, my results are all over the place. Is there really nothing we can do about it?”

“No. It’s just how the Words are. Get used to it.”

I was not finding magic very reproducible. I could get something working, try again the next day, and then never get the same thing to happen again. As for why…

“Let’s review. State the process for casting magic.”

“Umm, three steps. Sense the mana that fills the world, bring it together in resonance with your own mana, and pronounce or write the Word of Creation.”

The arche, the primordial chaos: mana. Sense it, and achieve resonance and convergence. Then, by pronouncing or writing a Word of Creation, define the mana into some form—for instance, fire. On paper, it was that simple. But there was no real room for creativity, and no way to make the results more reproducible.

“What you say is correct. And there have been many attempts through history to seek consistent results from magic. Many sages have bent their ingenuity toward this end, but there is only so much that can be done. Having experienced it firsthand, I expect you can appreciate why.”

“Yeah. The biggest problem is how the mana isn’t consistent.”

For the past few years, I had been sharpening my perception under Gus’s guidance. Fortunately, it seemed I had some talent, and I became able to detect the presence of mana—the thing magic was made of, its fuel. Supposedly, the world was infused with mana, but what I discovered was that mana levels weren’t the same everywhere.

Imagine splashing a few drops of ink into water, and then agitating it just a little. The ink would be concentrated in some parts and dilute in others. What’s more, these parts would flow in an irregular fashion. And that’s just your fuel supply.

“Mhm. There have been a number of attempts to create a consistent mana environment. Convergence devices, for instance—precious gems, precious metals, extremely ancient wood. But I’m afraid…”

“The results weren’t worth the cost?”

“Mmm… The mana inside the human body is also in flux, you see. There is a limit to what can be achieved with atmospheric mana convergence alone.”

Even if you managed to maintain a certain level of consistency in the mana outside your body, the magic user’s own mana, which was required to resonate with it, would still be unstable. Just like the external mana, it varied in concentration like the water and ink from our example as it meandered around the body. This aspect was similarly complicated, and even more difficult than the external mana to mess around with.

“That being said, it undeniably has some effect. Staves made with ancient wood, precious gems, and precious metals are the symbols of sorcerers.”

It seemed that the idea of a sorcerer bearing a staff was part of this world’s concepts, too.

“Why don’t you use a staff, Gus?”

I had at least seen him holding a staff number of times before. It was studded with emeralds and had a handle at the top like a duck’s beak.

“A grandiose staff attracts attention. In a battle situation, not only will you be singled out if you allow yourself to be discovered as a sorcerer, but the use of a convergence device makes it easier for the enemy to pinpoint the source of your magic.”

That reason was so grounded and pragmatic that I found it a bit unsettling.

“Hmm, we’ve gotten off track. We were talking about the fluctuations in the Words. The mana that fills the world and the body is in flux and not consistent. Attempts have been made to gather it into something consistent, but there were limits to what could be achieved. And human fluctuations also exist in the speaking and writing. To be strictly accurate, humans can never speak the exact same words twice.”

I understood what he meant. Even if the same person were to speak the same words, the waveform of the sounds would be different every single time. No matter how many times a person were to write the same letter, it would never come out exactly the same way. That was obvious enough, really. After all, we humans were not machines.

“For all these reasons, the general consensus is ultimately that one has to use their intuition to determine when the circumstances are right.”

So the only conclusion that could be drawn was that turning magic into a consistent mass-produced product was impossible. The professional expertise of the sorcerer would always be called upon to fine-tune things to follow however the mana felt like behaving on that particular day.

“That’s frightening.”

“Indeed it is.”

My imagination was correct, then. This was not the magic from computer games, which you could spam by burning your MP. It was far closer to the unstable and powerful magic of classic fantasy.

“You must not brandish the Words recklessly. The use of power brings with it significant danger. Well, I dare say I’ve told you enough stories about that.”

Indeed, this was far from the first time Gus had repeated this to me.

According to Mary and Blood, it was no exaggeration to say Gus was worthy of being called a Grand Sorcerer. They had told me, with full faith, that even though his usual manner didn’t hint at it in the slightest, he was a force to be reckoned with when he decided to show his true strength.

Gus himself never bragged about it. Rather, the tales he told were always cautionary, and intended to teach a lesson. There were many of these stories.

There was the sorcerer who tried to reshape the nearby terrain, triggered a huge earthquake, and was swallowed up into a deep fissure.

Another sorcerer periodically manipulated the weather, and ended up destabilizing the area’s climate and being tormented by hunger.

One sorcerer succeeded in transmogrifying himself into an animal—mental faculties and all.

A sorcerer directed a powerful decomposition magic at his sworn enemy, got tongue-tied out of sheer hatred and anger, and blew himself to pieces.

There was even one about a sorcerer who opened a hole to another dimension and got eaten by something inside.

“Just learn to use small amounts of magic, sensibly and precisely. And if possible, find a way to not use it at all.”

Minor works of magic were useful for getting a fire going, keeping bugs away, manipulating perception (for parlor tricks), or searching for things. Though their effects were small, the risk associated with a mistake was also low. You could fail as spectacularly as you liked, and it wouldn’t lead to anything you couldn’t laugh about later.

According to Gus, a true sorcerer’s ideal was to not use magic at all, and in those situations where magic was necessary, to use the least magical effect to achieve the greatest possible result. Magic was a tremendous amount of power for a single person to possess, and since the possibility of random accidents and human error was ever-present, I felt that his style made a lot of sense, logically speaking. There was only one issue.

“In short—use it like money.”

Gus would twist his logic to reach some incredible conclusions.

“This again?”

“Yes, this again. It’s important,” he insisted, as serious and stubborn as ever. “If you want something done, you don’t have to use magic. You just buy the tools you need or hire some people. Reshaping the terrain is a powerful piece of magic, but if you’ve got money, you can just hire laborers and workmen to do construction for you instead. Make no mistake,” he shifted close to me for emphasis, “the ability to earn money and make it work for you is just as important as magic!”

I flinched. “Whoever heard of a ghost with a money fetish?!”

“You try suffering in my position! I can’t caress gold or treasure, can’t feel it between my fingers…”

“He’s a pervert!”

“Who are you calling a pervert?!”

“You!”

“Right—change of plan! We’re going to spend all of today learning about money and all the wonderful—”

“No! Today was the legends! We were planning to start the legends today!”

“And you don’t think money is more important?!”

“Maybe it is for you, but you can’t just change the plan!”

“Mmmhh… You do have a point. The money talk can wait.”

Gus could get a little crazy like this sometimes. Seriously, was an incorporeal sorcerer supposed to come off like this? Still, there was no doubting the veracity of Gus’s stories. Many of them were a lot of fun to hear, too.

“I told you a little of the story a long time ago, up to the birth of the evil gods and the killing of the Creator, correct?”

“Yeah.”

“That began the age of conflict between the gods of good and evil. If I were to name the most prominent of their battles… Hmm, yes. Will. Have you seen that sculpture?”

“Huh?”

“The one in the temple of a man with a sword and scales.”

I did remember it. It was a statue of a solemn and dignified god, who was holding a sword symbolizing lightning high in his right hand, and bearing a set of scales in the other.

“Yeah.”

“He is the god of lightning, Volt—the ruler of the virtuous gods, who presides over order and judgment. He is also husband to the Earth-Mother, Mater, the goddess to whom Mary shows devotion.”

Interesting. I was wondering which of those gods held the top spot. Come to think of it, gods of lightning commanded important positions in many mythologies from my previous world, too.

“Volt has a brother, also a god, of course—the god of war, Illtreat, whose domain is tyranny. He rides a chariot pulled by two divine horses, Greed and Wrath, who ride with the speed and ferocity of a raging hurricane.”

Gus continued, “The two of them have led their minions in countless battles against each other, but all of their episodes follow a similar pattern. The older brother, Illtreat, maintains the advantage during the battle’s opening stages, but the kindhearted Earth-Mother Mater grants her husband protection in his time of crisis. With his sword of lightning given the protection of the goddess, Volt begins to fight back, and ultimately, drives away Illtreat. However, Illtreat continues lurking deep under the earth, and when he finally regains his power after many moons, he waits for his younger brother to show a moment of peace-addled weakness. Then, he challenges him again to battle.”

Gus spun one finger in a circle. “And so the cycle continues.”

I nodded, then tilted my head in thought. Lightning isn’t always a symbol of the terror and absolute authority of the heavens. When agriculture is prospering, lightning is a herald of blessed rain.

“So… is this a fable about how governments start with violent, tyrannical rulers, but as the farming goes well, law and order slowly spreads through society. But eventually it falls apart again, and violent revolution becomes inevitable?”

Gus’s eyes opened wide. “You’re sharp,” he said, nodding. “The battles between minions under the protection of Volt and Illtreat do roughly take that form. It would make sense for that to have been depicted as a battle between gods.”

“Protection?” I asked.

“Ah… That refers to the power the gods give their minions.”

“Huh? Um, literally?”

“Literally. What’s so confusing about that?”

Gus spoke as if this was perfectly obvious, but based on my memories and perception from my previous life, it was a little hard to picture the idea of a god directly giving power to a person. He could have meant something like giving them courage or luck, but with the way he was talking, I felt that wasn’t quite it.

Besides, I remembered what Mary had once said, that the three of them had formed a contract with the god of undeath. If I was to take those words at face value, it meant that the gods of this world could at a minimum turn humans into the undead. I didn’t know what else they were capable of, but it seemed possible that this world’s gods were capable of physically interfering with reality. But what exactly did that process involve? I had just started to consider this question when Gus cleared his throat and continued talking.

“Well, it’s not very important. The war between the gods culminated in every one of them losing their body of flesh. After that, both forces left this dimension behind, and now, it’s difficult for any of them to interfere with this world in any great way. In any case, I’m sure one particular thought springs to mind after hearing this story?”

“It does?”

“Mm,” he grinned roguishly. “The whole business of labeling the two sides as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is purely a human convenience.”

“Uh?” I made a stupid, confused noise.

Gus elaborated for me. “Think about it. Volt, presiding over even corrupt systems of order, can easily be an evil god, and Illtreat, commanding the revolutions to overthrow corruption, can likewise be a good one. But the reality is that Volt is never spoken ill of, and neither is Illtreat ever glorified. The priests would not take kindly to me saying this, but in the end, the classification of gods into good and evil categories is merely an artifice created by their followers.”

I could tell from his face that he was completely serious as he continued to speak. “The gods are not like us. Their thoughts and actions are concerned with matters of an entirely different scale. My theory is that what makes the good gods ‘good’ is that they have a comparatively similar thought process to normal people, they are cooperative, and their thoughts and actions are more or less harmless to society. Of course this is just between you and me!” he laughed.

This was a world where gods actually existed and had influence. People had to have deep faith in them—yet here was Gus, unorthodox and unbowed.

“Gus, you’re… pretty rock ’n’ roll.”

“Rock ’n’ roll?”

“I dunno, you’re… different. In a good way.”

Hearing this, the venerable sage broke into another wicked grin. “The words kids come up with sometimes… Yes, it has a good ring to it.”

He seemed to like it. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind—he really was rock ’n’ roll.

◆

Blood and I were by a small spring at the foot of the hill, with its glorious view over the lake and the ruined city. The two of us were squaring off.

“Okay. Practice swings done, running exercises done… Let’s do a little swordplay.”

As a warm-up exercise, Blood would give me a stick—either resembling a one-handed sword, or resembling a spear—and make me practice swings or thrusts. Which one we’d use was up to what Blood felt like, but the sword was slightly more common. He said that the spear was a weapon for the battlefield, and the sword was a weapon you carried on you at all times, so it was more important to focus on the sword at first.

After finishing the practice swings, we would do some long-distance running and short-distance sprinting, and after that, “swordplay.” This was a game where we each held a soft branch or something similar, then tried to slap each other with them. Unlike the relatively boring practice swings and long-distance running, this was actually pretty fun, even though it hurt sometimes. Blood was good, though, and wouldn’t let me hit him easily.

“You’re eight years old now, so I’m gonna start hitting a little harder.”

“Ueeegh?!”

“What’s with that reaction?”

“You’re stupidly strong! If you hit me hard, I’ll die!”

It hurt sometimes already, even with the rule about “barely touching”! If he hit me hard…

“It’s okay, it’s okay. You’re exaggerating with ‘stupidly strong.’ I’m only bones. You’ll be fine.” Blood paused. “Well, probably.”

“P-P-P-P-Probably?!”

Blood’s laughter was loud. “Just don’t get hit, then. What’s the big deal?”

“Stop, stop, stop!”

He advanced on me with the soft branch. “Oh, yeah, you can use magic, if you want. I bet you’ve got something, right? Something Old Gus taught you? Fireballs, lightning bolts… Go on! I can take it!”

Blood was still moving toward me as he spoke. He was already pretty close. Despite saying I could use magic, he had no intention of giving me the chance.

“Ah, you’re so unfair!”

“Fwahaha! There’s no mercy in battle, Willie, my boy!”

As Blood closed in, I shouted the first thing that came into my head. “Acceleratio!” It was a combat Word I’d learned from Gus.

“Oho,” Blood said, impressed.

I felt my entire body quicken, and sprung backward like a shot, kicking up dirt as I put distance between us.

He was watching me with interest, and I wasn’t about to waste that chance. I yelled the Words I’d been holding back as a trump card. “Currere Oleum!”

Instantly, a thick layer of grease covered the grass under Blood’s feet. He cried out, and his feet slipped from under him.

I’d made the grease out of mana, and it would disappear again after just a little while, but it was more than suitable for making someone slip! And while I had the upper hand…

“Cadere Araneum!” I dropped a sticky, spiderweb-like net on him that I’d made out of Words.

“Ah—Hey!” The web clung to him. He fought on the ground to get it off, but the more he fought, the more entangled his bones became.

You could seriously injure yourself if you messed up with fire or lightning magic, but failing at grease or web magic wouldn’t cause any catastrophes. If magic couldn’t be reliably reproduced, then I just had to make the best of it and use it intelligently. Just like Gus said, there was no need for flashy magic. Small amounts of magic, used sensibly and precisely, did the job.

I shuffled forward slowly, so the grease wouldn’t take my legs out, too. After getting close enough, I let out a single energetic shout as I slammed him with the branch. It made a dry thwack as wood hit bone.

“Gwagh! Damn it, I yield!”

“Yessss!” I pumped both fists and yelled with delight. It was a shutout victory I’d never expected.

◆

“Pretty good,” Blood said, impressed. The web and the grease had since disappeared. “Did that come from Old Gus?”

“Yeah,” I answered.

He laughed, his will-o’-the-wisps flickering. “Seriously, you’ve really got it! I feel like I understand why Gus calls you a genius.”

I looked at him, confused.

“I mean… I expected you to play with fire. Go for big flashy fire or lightning magic, you know? Most young sorcerers do.”

“Eh… That stuff’s not for me. Gus says it’s dangerous.” I agreed with him, too, especially when a mistake could lead to me blowing myself up. Risky power that you can’t control isn’t power. It’s just a hazard. Maybe my previous life’s memories also influenced me here.

“It’s great to see you’re taking it in. A flaming arrow or something would’ve been no trouble for me, anyway. I could’ve just dodged it and closed in on you.”

“Y-You could?”

“You bet I could. If I really wasn’t kidding around, I could even deal with that web-grease combo,” Blood said casually. “Not that it’d be easy.”

I couldn’t even imagine how he’d go about that. “Um, how?”

“As the web fell towards me, I’d forcibly wind it around the stick in my hands, and then I’d just have to run through and out of the grease area, focusing hard on keeping my balance.”

One heck of a direct solution. “Wait, you were going easy on me?”

“Of course I was. You’re a kid. If you lose all the time, you’ll start thinking you don’t have a chance, and that sucks all the fight out of you. It’s important to get familiar with winning. And don’t get me wrong, I was fighting serious, just not giving it everything. When an adult like me can’t handle an attack from a kid without going all out, if you ask me, that’s basically a loss right there.”

I had to admit he had a point. No adult could brag about beating a child in a contest of physical strength, and if they had to summon all their power to get there, for all intents and purposes, that’d be a defeat in more ways than one.

“Will, listen. Old Gus is a Grand Sorcerer. They used to exalt him. Called him the Wandering Sage. He slew monsters, he stopped floods, and he rediscovered a number of the old Words personally.”

“Huh…”

I’d heard him called a Grand Sorcerer a few times already, but I hadn’t fully appreciated how incredible he was.

“That method you were using, of focusing on manipulating the situation on the battlefield and impeding your opponent, instead of blasting them with firepower? That’s one of the answers Gus arrived at—the end result of years and years of trial and error. He may be a grumpy old man, but in terms of what he’s capable of, he’s the best of the best. Make sure you remember what he teaches you. He deserves that much.”

“Yeah. Don’t worry. I respect him, you know?”

“All right, then,” he nodded.

“Um, you were a really great warrior too, right, Blood?”

“Sure was. I don’t wanna brag, but they used to call me the War Ogre.” Despite saying he didn’t want to brag, he clearly loved to tell me about it. That was very Blood. “Mary had a title, too. She was called Mater’s Daughter. Actually, there was a period where the three of… uh.”

“What?”

“It’s just, if I start talking about that, it’s gonna lead someplace heavy.”

I could imagine that. Why was my earliest memory of this life here, in this ruined city’s temple, cut off from human society? Especially given that they’d apparently once been tremendously big names, why were these three living here as the undead? These questions had always plagued me, and it was probably fair to suspect that the current situation wasn’t the outcome of a happy ending. Mary and Blood would sometimes let something slip, but they would never speak about it at any greater length.

“Will you tell me someday?”

“You bet. Just like I promised—when you’re a bit bigger. And all in the right order.” Blood stretched lightly, and took hold of the branch again.

“Right, let’s go again! This time, no magic!”

“Whaaaaa?!”

Blood was upon me before I could even protest. I swiped my branch at him in panic, but he dodged it effortlessly, and the pliant branch he was holding swished towards my face. I shut my eyes reflexively.

“Are you stupid?! Don’t shut your eyes!” The tree branch slapped me across the forehead.

“Ow!” I crouched down, clutching my forehead. The branch was flexible and curved like a whip. Even when he wasn’t putting much power into it, when it hit you at a reasonable speed, it was still quite painful.

“And crouching down in pain? Even worse. Now look what happens.”

He scratched the tops of my feet and pushed me over. If this was an actual battle, I’d have been kicked around like a soccer ball. My organs might even have ruptured.

“Even if you get punched right in the face, don’t close your eyes. Replace your reflexes with training. In a contest like this, where a single instant can make the difference between winning and losing, only an amateur would take his own sight away. So when you get hit, put up with it and move in.”

“M-Move in, even when I’m hurt?” Wouldn’t you normally back off and ready yourself for another try? That was what I figured, at least.

“Will, if you step back after taking a hit, what’s your opponent gonna think?”

“I don’t know…”

“I just got a great hit in! And he’s wincing and stepping back! It’s working! I’ve got the upper hand! Now’s my chance to finish him off! Right?”

Ah…

“Of course he’s gonna press you even harder, trying to finish things then and there. Meanwhile, you’re injured, and at a disadvantage when it comes to defending or running. Trying to avoid a bad situation just ended up progressively making things worse. That’s called not thinking things through… hm? Why are you looking at me funny?”

While avoiding risk and keeping your distance, the situation slowly deteriorates into something that can’t be salvaged. I was more than familiar with that concept.

“So… you go forward, and then what?”

“That’s easy,” Blood laughed. “You rush headlong in there and attack like crazy.”

It was an aggressive, brute force approach.

“You’re dead if you step back anyway, so you go for broke. You keep your attacks coming, and bury your sword or spear or fist, whatever you’ve got, in there over and over. The other guy’s thinking ‘I landed a great hit! I’ve won!’ He’s gonna be taken by surprise. If you wail on him right away, you can get in a good hit or two of your own. Then, sure you’re injured, but you’re level again at worst. You might even turn it all around and win on the spot.”

When you take a painful hit, move in. Step forward and give back what you were given.

“Even if he staves off your attacks, you’ll put doubt in his mind. ‘I thought I landed a good hit, but… did he not feel it? Did I just make him angry? Maybe that attack isn’t going to work on him?’ And if you can get him thinking stuff like that…” I felt like a grin had spread across Blood’s skull. “He will back away from you. Switch to defense. Give you breathing room.”

You may be at a disadvantage, but your opponent won’t know that. Don’t be afraid of risk. Take that step into an uncertain future. Snatch the initiative away from the opponent.

“Your instincts when attacking are good, but you get cold feet too easily. We’re gonna have to work on that. Just remember,” Blood flexed his arm. “Get ripped, and you can solve pretty much everything by force.”

All I could see was bone. “Very funny, Blood.”

My comment seemed to shock him, and he looked a bit depressed.

◆

A few months went by. The weather got progressively hotter, and we started having days in a row of scorching sun.

Gus’s lessons meandered from magic and myths to arithmetic, book-keeping, and economics, and sometimes even to law and civil engineering. Blood’s lessons, however, were always extremely straightforward.

“First off, you need to build muscle and stamina. They’re more important than anything else.”

Blood bent his arm, as if to draw attention to his biceps. Of course, there was no muscle there, only his naked humerus.

“Don’t I need to learn technique? You know, moves and stuff?”

“Useless without muscle.”

Instantly dismissed. Was it really like that? I found it difficult to accept such a blunt statement. Perhaps it was the influence of all the manga I’d read in my previous life, where the little guy beat people bigger than himself a surprising amount of the time.

Blood seemed to sense I wasn’t convinced.

“Hmm… Okay, then, Will. Could you knock me over without using magic?” He assumed a firm stance. The sight of that nearly two-meter-tall man of bone in a stable crouch felt incredibly powerful. There was no way a kid of eight years (give or take) could have done anything.

“No.”

“Didn’t think so. Our builds are completely different. You can’t overcome that without a weapon, even with a master’s techniques. Differences in build, weight, muscle—all these translate directly into power. Sure, having a move or two up your sleeve gives you a chance to turn things around. That’s why everyone makes a big deal out of them. We all love to root for the underdog. But you don’t wanna bank on that.”

Before I knew it, he had closed the distance on me, and with a nimble flick of the foot, he took my legs out from under me. Just before kissing the grass, I reflexively curled up my body and impacted the ground, breaking my fall with a technique Blood had drilled into me.

He’d sometimes test my falls like this by taking me by surprise. If it wasn’t good enough, I’d be put through endless practice again, and spend the next few hours rolling on the grass.

“Okay, great job. Well, uh, this is what reality is like, most of the time. The big guy always has the upper hand. Being big is that much of an advantage, and a strength. Though, I guess, you can’t always say that, not when weapons and magic get involved.”

Blood explained that wielding a particularly deadly weapon helped to reduce the importance of physique. Certainly, if an adult and a child were to fight either bare handed, with knives, or with guns, the guns would come closest to leveling the playing field.

“Still, that doesn’t change the fact that physique and muscle are important. You need to work out a lot, eat large meals, and get bigger.”

“Yeah.”

Obviously, for your workout to turn into muscle, you have to eat more calories than you burn. If it doesn’t turn into muscle, all the exhaustion of the workout counts for nothing. Blood always called that a waste. In my previous life, I’d had an unbalanced diet. I ate very little, at irregular times. This time, I wanted to eat regular meals, and I wanted to eat a lot.

“So, about muscle. What’s great about muscle is it’s good in any situation. Let’s say you’ve got… I dunno… someone light on their feet, who can throw real sharp, accurate punches.”

I imagined a boxer.

“He winds up in a slow, draggy grappling situation. How useful are that fighter’s techniques gonna be?”

Even at close range, he could probably punch a little at his opponent’s sides, but it’d probably do significantly less damage. I remembered that in boxing, there was an actual technique like that, called the clinch.

“Okay, now let’s say that instead you’ve got a guy who’s good in a grapple. He’s got throwing techniques and choking techniques. But his opponent’s got quick feet, and cleverly keeps his distance, and keeps darting in and punching him. How useful are those techniques gonna be?”

“Hmm…” The techniques didn’t seem much help in that situation, either.

“There’s plenty of situations where you won’t be able to use your techniques to their full potential. But ‘having strong muscles’ is gonna be useful in pretty much all situations. It’s almost never gonna work against you. If you’re in a tiring grapple, muscle’s gonna let you pin down your opponent. If you’re trying to keep your distance, it’s gonna give power to your punches. Same thing if you’ve got a weapon. If you have good muscle strength, you can swing it easily, again and again, and you can keep your opponent’s weapon pressed back.

“Your techniques and moves, on the other hand, I’m not saying they’re useless, but they’re not gonna do anything for you outside the specific situations you can use them in. Same thing with weapon skills. You’re not necessarily always gonna be carrying your favorite weapon—but your muscles, they’re not gonna leave you, not so long as you keep up your training.”

His analysis was very realistic, and what he was trying to tell me was simple. Muscle strength and physique were the basic parameters, and moves and techniques were nothing more than a bonus, added on top if and only if the situation permitted it.

“So it should be clear which one’s more important to do first. First the muscle, then later the moves. Got it?”

“Yeah, got it. You’ve really thought all this through. I didn’t expect that…”

“You thought I was an idiot, didn’t you? Come on over here. Blood’s got a present for you.”

I let out a fake scream and ran off, and Blood chased after me, laughing. Even when we played around like this, it was an opportunity for Blood to help me train my body and teach me all kinds of things.

Like how to throw stones. Not barehanded, like skipping stones over water. Something more useful in a battle situation.

Down the hill, on the opposite side to the city, past a field with rows of gravestones, was a dense forest. Blood and I were moving through it in a low crouch, each of us holding a long rope that we’d made by braiding together many long blades of grass. At one end of the rope was a finger-sized loop to prevent it from slipping, and in the middle, we had woven a pouch just big enough to fit a ping pong ball.

It was a weapon called a sling. I remembered from my previous life that it had been used by people like the Old Testament’s David and the Irish hero Cú Chulainn. It existed in Japan, too, where it was called the inji-uchi.

There was a good-sized gathering of wild birds near the edge of the forest.

I put my middle finger into the rope’s loop, found a suitable-looking stone, and put it into the pouch. Then I lightly pressed the other end of the rope between my index finger and my thumb. After swinging the sling around a couple times to build up speed, I released my fingers with precise timing, freeing the stone held in the pouch. While the rope stayed attached to me thanks to the loop around my finger, the stone whipped through the air, straight toward the bevy of quail pecking at something just outside the forest. It hit one directly in the side. An instant later, there was a tremendous flapping of wings, and the birds all flew off at once.

“Okay! Great job! Check it!” Blood called out.

I glanced over at him to see him launch his own stone into the middle of the escaping flock. One of them dropped from the sky. I ran the ten meters to the quail I had taken down while wondering how I was ever going to get that good.

The quail was twitching; there was still life in it. It was struggling unsuccessfully to get away from me, and I thought its wing might have been broken. It looked so pitiful that, for a moment, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for it…

“Will, don’t let it suffer! Break its damned neck already!”

Spurred on by his voice, I held the quail down with the thick cloth I’d prepared. I could feel it fighting through the cloth. After stopping it from resisting with its beak and claws, I applied full pressure. I felt the horrible physicality of its neck breaking, and the quail went instantly and completely limp.

A short distance away, Blood was recovering his own bird. It must have died on impact, because I never saw him finish it off.

My quail’s big, round eyes had now lost their light completely. As Blood made his way over to me, I put my hands together as Mary had taught me, and prayed for the bird to rest in peace.

“Used to killing yet?”

“Not really.”

Hunting and killing animals—this, too, was part of Blood’s lessons. But killing weighed heavily on me. I couldn’t get used to it. I couldn’t kill without emotion, without hesitation. I wondered if my memories from my previous life were holding me back.

“I don’t want to kill.” Was I just being a baby?

“Hm? You think I do?”

“Huh?”

Blood gave a light shrug. “Look, if I let myself think about it too long, I don’t wanna kill, either. Of course I resist the idea of killing, whether it’s a person or a bird. But you’ve gotta understand—”

Blood paused there, and poked my chest with a fingertip. “If I need to, I can put that aside and kill by reflex. That’s the way of a warrior, and that’s what I’m trying to teach you. ’Cause on the field of battle, that’s a matter of life and death.”

Then, he took the quail’s dead body out of my hands. He tied its legs together with the other’s, and hung them over his shoulder.

“Okay. Let’s bring down a few more.”

“Yeah.”

I could feel so much care in Blood’s words and actions. Once again, I thought, What an amazing person he is.

◆

The birds we killed were, of course, destined for the dinner table. I came back after being worked into the ground by Blood and Gus to find Mary already done with setting out the food.

The quail, feathers plucked and innards removed, had been rubbed with salt and herbs from the garden beside the temple. Then they were roasted and set onto a plate. They were still steaming hot, and fat was dripping off them. My mouth watered as the delicious smell of cooked meat permeated the room. In addition, there was a soup with all kinds of vegetables in it, and thick, beautifully colored multigrain bread. I couldn’t wait.

Mary laughed softly. “Don’t worry, the food isn’t going anywhere. Say grace before you eat.”

“Okay!” It was Mary’s policy that I should always sit down properly and pray before eating. I put my hands together as I always did, and spoke the words that I had been taught. “Mater our Earth-Mother, gods of good virtue, bless this food, which by thy merciful love we are about to receive, and let it sustain us in body and mind.”

I was living on a regular schedule in my new life, waking up in the morning, working out with Blood, learning from Gus, and eating the food Mary made for me. It was a great departure from my past life, in which I woke up whenever, ate whatever, and sat in my room forever in front of my monitor. My biological clock became disrupted, and my messed-up lifestyle sent my health into a slow decline.

Only now, having been reborn, did I finally understand how great a mistake that was. A weakened body led to a weakened mind. I wasn’t about to let it happen again.

“For the grace of the gods, we are truly thankful.”

The quail we had captured were rich in flavor and just chewy enough. The fat made them truly delicious. There was a lot of bone and not much meat, but it was so good, I didn’t care. Too engrossed to talk, I endlessly picked the meat off the bones.

Every so often, I went for the bread, whose simple taste perfectly cleansed my palate of the meat’s strong flavor. Sometimes I mopped up the juices from the meat on my plate with it, which tasted great as well. The soup, too, was salted just enough, and felt like it warmed every part of my exhausted body. It truly was a blissful dinner.

“This is really delicious, Mary.”

Another little laugh. “I’m glad you’re enjoying it.”

A mystery remained, however. A big mystery.

Mary, Gus, and Blood were all undead. They didn’t eat. Couldn’t eat. Therefore, there was neither a need for them to produce food, nor to keep any in storage. In fact, I hadn’t seen any sign that they’d cultivated any large fields. Even the small garden had apparently been restored after my arrival, and while it contained vegetables and herbs, no grains were growing there.

The ruins of the city to which this temple belonged were clearly cut off from human society, so there wasn’t anywhere you could buy things. Other than things like salt and honey, which didn’t spoil in the first place, any food that had been in the ruins wouldn’t have just rotted by now, but would have become nothing more than a dry powder or stain on the floor.

All of which raised the question: Where had this bread come from? Where did they get the grains? The kiln?

Of course, I thought of the possibility that they could have made the food with magic. I’d already proven that grease could be made, so if you said “bread” or “pork” in the Words of Creation, perhaps the mana would assume that form?

After some investigation, the answer was “no.” You could, Gus told me, make something resembling food, and it would make you feel full if you ate it, but it was beyond human ability to create nutritious food with magic.

I found Gus’s quote about it, “No man can fill his stomach by swallowing his own Words,” to be pretty amusing. But I felt the real heart of the issue was we didn’t fully understand the Words of Creation, and didn’t have enough information about the creatures of this world. Proteins, vitamins, and the other details of what constituted nutritional value were still undiscovered here, so there hadn’t been any progress on analyzing the Words relating to those things. As a result, attempting to create bread would only give birth to the ultimate diet product, which looked like bread, but contained zero calories.

This explanation seemed to make a lot of sense to me, anyway. I’d heard that putting the ancient language of magecraft to medical use, which of course involved fiddling with the complicated human body, was a difficult field in which little progress had been made. That seemed to support my theory.

Getting back on topic, my point was this. The fact that there was enough food for me to have something to eat every day was, by itself, abnormal. And yet, the fact of the matter was that some kind of food was always here, every single day. Which meant that there must be some other factor I hadn’t considered.

“Hey, Mary. This bread… Where do you get it from?”

“That’s a secret.”

So many mysteries.

◆

It was simply baffling. No matter how I thought about it, I could reach no other conclusion.

Their three histories were baffling, the origin of the food was baffling, and above all, I myself was an enigma. I’d once made the simplistic guess that I might have been an abandoned child, but even that was now looking suspicious, and for one reason. I never saw any smoke.

The thought had come to me recently that at this level of civilization, wherever there was a human settlement, there should also be smoke from cooking fires. So I’d been paying extra attention to my surroundings looking for some, but no matter what time of day it was, and no matter what direction I looked in, I couldn’t see any such thing.

Of course, I didn’t actually know how visible smoke from a cooking fire would be at a distance, but I was able to recall the rough knowledge that there was a method for calculating the distance to the horizon. You were meant to make a right triangle with one side equal to the radius of the Earth, and another equal to the radius of the Earth plus the height of your eyes, and apply Pythagoras’s theorem. If I remembered correctly, it came out at four to five kilometers or thereabouts. Of course, whether I could apply that directly to this world or not seemed iffy, but it would be good enough for reference.

Those four or five kilometers would be even longer with a higher viewpoint, which was why ships in search of land had a lookout with good eyesight stand at the top of a mast. Similarly, things higher than the ground beyond the horizon could be seen beyond it. Mountains, for instance—and smoke.

So if a child whose eyesight wasn’t bad were to look for a tall column of smoke from the top of a hill, he should be able to see at least a few dozen kilometers. But there was no smoke to be seen. In other words, I couldn’t find any signs whatsoever of human habitation.

As for how all of this was related to the “abandoned child” theory, it was quite simple. If I was an abandoned child, then there must have been a biological parent or someone else who couldn’t continue to raise me. Someone had to be responsible for abandoning me.

I hadn’t even been one year old when I became aware of my memories of my past life, and babies’ bodies were fragile. If you were going to abandon a baby, you probably wouldn’t take them a terribly long way before doing it. There was certainly no need to bother journeying all the way here, to this ruined city inhabited by the undead, clearly dozens of kilometers away from any human society.

A normal adult male could walk an average of about thirty kilometers per day on a reasonably maintained road. Include the return trip, and that meant that to drop a baby off fifteen kilometers away would take an entire day. Any further than that would require camping out somewhere remote.

This made no sense. If I really had been abandoned, I would have to ask: what the heck kind of parents would waste more than an entire day, even camping out overnight, just to get their baby as far away from them as possible?!

Given this, I was forced to think that maybe the likelihood of me being abandoned was lower than I thought. But then where had I come from? I spent some time contemplating other likely possibilities, but I couldn’t come up with any good ideas. I surely hadn’t simply sprouted from a cabbage patch, so my real parents had to exist somewhere, and must have had some history with this ruined city.

I couldn’t be the kid Mary and Blood had before they became undead? Nah, no way. Those three most likely became undead around the same time the city fell into ruin. I was virtually certain of this, because of the occasional mentions they’d drop in daily conversation about what the city was like before.

The city showed signs of deterioration over a considerable stretch of time. It wasn’t something that could have happened in just ten or twenty years. The time periods didn’t match up. If they became undead fifty or a hundred years ago, it was impossible that their child could have been born just eight years ago.

The only other scenario, that Mary could have had intercourse with Blood and gotten pregnant while both of them were undead, felt… even less plausible. Which meant that any of the three of them were definitely not my real parents, leading me all the way back to my original conclusion: that I had no clue about my own background.

Maybe it made the most sense to think that an irresponsible couple living on the road left me here? But no, that too felt wrong. After all, not a single human traveler had passed through this place for the past seven years. I thought and thought, but no answer came.

Who was I?

“Will?”

“Wagh!” I almost jumped. I’d gotten lost in thought.

“Is something the matter? You stopped.”

“Sorry, Mary. I was doing some thinking.”

Mary didn’t scold me. She just smiled gently. I’m sure she would have looked beautiful if she’d still been alive, but now… I couldn’t help but feel a modicum of fear from an expression like that. I’d mostly gotten used to the feeling by now, though.

“Some thinking? But don’t you think it’s hot today? Why don’t we get this finished, and then you can think inside, where it’s cool.”

“Okay.” I nodded and swung the grub hoe upward again.

I’d discovered that soil tended to be pretty heavy and hard. Tilling was hard work for a child like me. At first, I couldn’t get the hang of the hoe at all, and could only get the blade to penetrate a short distance into the ground. Now, though, it was going in quite deep, given my size.

We were in the temple’s vegetable garden. It was summer, so brightly colored tomatoes and eggplants were growing there. The garden had apparently been neglected for a long time, but they had gathered up some wild vegetables and the like, and started maintaining the garden once more for me. Herbs such as thyme, lemon balm, mint, and lavender had been planted at the garden’s edges, where they also served as a bug repellent. Their individual strong aromas mixed with the smell of the soil.

An area of the garden had been left unused up until now, and it was this that I was currently helping Mary to plow. She wanted to use it for carrots, which needed to be sown during the summer, and also for autumn’s potatoes and onions.

The names, appearances, and planting seasons of all these vegetables and herbs, as well as how to harvest them, were all things I had learned from Mary.

I was receiving my scholarly education from Gus, and learning how to fight from Blood, but I had the feeling that Mary was the person I had learned the most from. How to dress appropriately, how to use the toilet, proper etiquette, classic children’s fairy tales, stories from the past, how to grow vegetables, how to maintain farming tools, how to fold cloth, how to wash it, and how to clean a room. And when I hung around Mary, she would explain everything patiently, politely, and properly, from the beginning.

In my past life of conveniences, I led a failure of a lifestyle, and therefore, I had almost no proper knowledge about life, as embarrassing as it was to admit. In that respect, Mary had a firm grasp on things. She was clearly more suited to make it in the world, more so even than Gus and Blood, who were out of touch and a bit too savage (respectively).

She went to bed and got up at regular times, and every day, she would weed the garden, air out the blankets, clean around the temple, and perform a litany of other tasks. And she was educating me to be able to do them, too. If Mary hadn’t been here in this temple, I may have turned out to be good-for-nothing again.

However, even Mary had a mystery about her. A few times a day, she isolated herself in the temple’s main hall. I’d been told not to go in there during that time. She told me she was praying. While that was going on, Gus and Blood would not-so-subtly hang around me, and make sure not to let me into the hall.

Maybe she really was just praying in silence, and wanted to be able to concentrate. But there were so many mysteries piling on top of each other, part of me couldn’t help but think this had to be related to one of them.

While turning up the ground with my hoe, I decided: I was going to check. There was a chance that I could find a clue toward solving all of these mysteries.

And finding a way to solve the mysteries was the only thing inside my head.

◆

I decided to pretend to be ill.

During my training with Blood, I acted like I wasn’t feeling well, and said I wanted to rest for a bit. Perhaps because of how diligently I’d been training before then, Blood believed this without any signs of suspicion, and told me to go rest in my bed.

For a while, he watched over me as I lay there, but before long, he muttered something about going to catch something invigorating, and disappeared in the direction of the forest. I’d figured that Blood’s personality wouldn’t allow him to loiter beside the bed for long.

I tiptoed out of the room, taking care not to be found by anyone, and secretly headed toward the hall. Trying not to make any sound, I opened the door as slowly as I could, and peered inside. The instant I did, I caught my breath.

Mary was engulfed in flames.

With a silver tray on the floor in front of her, she was kneeling there, in the middle of a band of faint light streaming from the skylight, facing a sculpture of one of the gods, her hands together in a posture of fervent prayer.

She was oblivious to the white flames covering her body and the thick cloud of smoke surrounding her.

My mind went blank.

I ran inside screaming, but Mary didn’t show any signs of having noticed me. Her posture absolutely unbroken, as if she had become a stone statue herself, Mary continued praying.

Panic shorted out my brain. Sweat was beading on my face. My ears were pounding. My throat hurt, and only then did I realize how loudly I was shouting. But even from right beside her, it elicited no reaction.

Desperate to do anything, I extended a hand towards her. She was still blanketed in flames. Her body was horribly burned, and had the appearance of red-hot charcoal. I touched her with my palm. It sizzled and burned.

Intense pain almost pulled my hand back by reflex. I suppressed it, internally screaming at my body that I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I hurt myself. Mary was in danger. She was in danger!

The panic frying my brain paralyzed every other sensation. I shrieked as I shook her over and over. “Blood! Gus! Help! Mary, Maryyyy!”

◆

“How many times did I tell you…” Gus said, scowling at Blood and Mary.

“My fault. I was careless,” Blood said, his head lowered in apology to the other two.

“No… I’m the one to blame for keeping it a secret from him for so long.” Mary was hanging her head dejectedly. Her body, which had been so badly burned, was now, somehow, completely back to normal.

I was in my room, lying on the simple but functional bed, surrounded by stonework walls. My head was spinning, and my hands hurt. Really hurt. I groaned, hugged the blanket, and tried as hard as I could to put up with the pain.

My memories of the event were a little vague, but I gathered that Gus had heard my screams and come flying in through the wall. Apparently, I’d been shaking Mary as she refused to move, and screaming frantically, not even caring about my burning arms. Gus had torn me away from her immediately, and given me some magically augmented first aid, but as you’d expect, I ended up with burns on the palms of my hands and all up my arms.

I’d heard that full-blown burns hurt a lot, and whoever had said that wasn’t kidding. Both my arms were throbbing and intensely painful. Sometimes, people receiving medical treatment for serious burns all over their body beg the people around them just to kill them. I felt like I could understand those people now. I felt like saying it myself.

“Uh, about Will’s hands… Think he’ll make a full recovery on his own?”

“A tricky question. Fortunately, his fingers didn’t stick together, at least. If he got away without some degree of scarring, I for one would be very surprised.”

I could hear a frightening conversation going on around me. Scarring? Yeah, I guess so. At the time, my hands had felt like I’d grabbed a lump of burning coal, and on top of that, I hadn’t let go. They were currently wrapped in clean cloth, but I could tell that some kind of fluid was oozing out of me and being soaked into it. I was certain that if I unwrapped it, the horror inside would make me want to cover my eyes.

This might even interfere with my ability to properly open my hands or grip things. The thought was honestly scary. But for some reason, I felt strangely calm about it.

“Will… I’m sorry, Will. I should have… I should have just…”

“No. It’s my fault for lying and peeking.”

The fact that Mary was back to normal probably meant that was a regular occurrence, and she had been keeping it hidden from me so that I wouldn’t worry. And I had gone and injured myself, badly enough to leave a scar, trying to help her when she didn’t even need it.

“There’s nothing for you to be sorry for,” I said. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

It was reckless behavior, borne of ignorance. I was sure that some people would have called me a fool for it. But all I felt was relief. What I did may have been completely pointless, but the fact remained that Mary was safe. The woman who had so kindly nurtured me in this world since birth was safe.

And as for me, I had managed to take action. I had taken action for Mary’s sake, without ever looking back, without ever letting selfishness or self-preservation get in the way. I didn’t do what my past self would have done. I didn’t let fear get the better of me, and make any kind of excuse to stop in my tracks.

So—

“Don’t worry about it so much, okay?” I could smile at Mary from the bottom of my heart.

You have nothing to apologize for, I thought. I’m so glad you’re safe.

“Will…” Mary was looking at the ground and trembling. I wasn’t used to her looking like that, and found it hard to guess what she was thinking. “Thank you, Will… Thank you.”

She held my head tightly as I lay flat on the bed. I could smell her smell, like fragrant wood burning. It was soothing and pleasant.

“So.” Blood had clearly been waiting for Mary to calm down before questioning me. “You want to tell me why you went and faked an illness just so you could snoop on her in the middle of her act of worship?”

It was his serious voice. Apparently, I was in for a lecture.

I couldn’t blame him. It’s a bit weird for me to say this, I guess, but whatever the circumstances might have been, I’d gotten myself injured doing something I’d been prohibited from, so I deserved to receive a proper scolding for this.

“I’ve always been curious why the three of you are here. And why I’m here—why I’m the only one alive here. And… I thought if I peeked on her worshipping, even though you told me not to… I might find some kind of clue…”

It brought to mind the phenomenon of “reactance” in psychology, and what we in Japan called the “don’t look” taboo, which often appeared in folktales. There are times when something being forbidden is precisely what draws you to it. That being said, I had intended to just take a little peek and nothing more. If Mary hadn’t been in the state she was, I wouldn’t have—no, that was just an excuse.

“Didn’t I tell you that I’d talk to you about it one day when you’re bigger?” Blood’s posture changed, as if he was sighing. “Do you think we’re the kind of people to ban you from doing something without a reason? Do you think we’re liars? Will, you’re a smart guy. You know that if we’re banning you from doing something, there’s a good reason why, right?”

Yes, absolutely I did. I just lacked patience. There was no other way to put it.

“U-Um, Blood, I don’t think you need to be quite so hard on Will. It was just his child-like curiosity.”

“Mary, you keep quiet for a minute.” He stopped her hesitant attempts to cover for me, and asked me again as he looked down at me. “Will. Do you have any other reason or excuse?”

“No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”

I had barely finished saying it before Blood raised his bony fist and slammed it powerfully onto my head. The blunt force of the impact shook me. My head swam. Tears welled up in my eyes. I didn’t want to cry, but it happened by reflex.

“Next time, you talk it over with me or Mary or something before you go thinking about doing something like that. I won’t stand for you randomly wandering off without telling us. There’s ruins around here, and… well… it’s just dangerous.”

I nodded meekly. The thought crossed my mind that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been reprimanded this harshly. It must have been early in my past life. After all, everyone had given up on me by the end. They knew that lecturing me would achieve nothing, and were careful not to get involved.

But here, Blood was making himself the bad guy to help me. By getting angry with me, he was doing what was best for me, while fully accepting the risk that I might develop a fear of him or want to stay away from him as a result. It felt kind of strange to be happy about being scolded.

“Oh, and Will?” Blood unclenched his fist and ruffled my hair. “I’m proud of you for flying in there and helping Mary. That injury is a badge of honor.”

I could feel the corners of my mouth curving upwards. “I am your apprentice…”

“This little guy… C’mere, you!”

Mary had a relieved smile on her face as she watched us laughing and playing together. Gus shrugged his shoulders and sighed.

Once things had settled down a bit, Gus made a suggestion. “Incidentally, Mary. Perhaps it’s time we told Will about the worship? I’ll admit that it’s difficult to reveal things about our histories to this boy. Say the wrong thing, and he’ll connect the dots and have the full picture drawn on his own. That said, I would prefer not to have to endure this more than once.”

“Yeah, I’m… Gotta say, I’m with Gus. Feels safest.”

“Yes, all right,” Mary nodded. “This has taught me that keeping too many things secret can actually be more dangerous.”

Gus turned to me with a solemn look on his face. “Will. This… may disturb you a little.”

Disturb me?

“It’s about your food. Mary has been using that act of worship to summon it all this time, and she burns during the act.”

Wait, what?

“You must have seen the silver tray? When her act of worship is over, the food appears upon that tray.”

“Is this… a joke?”

“Do you honestly think I would joke about this?”

Wait. Slow down. This is too much to take in.

“T-Tell me more,” I said, barely managing to get the words out. Gus explained for me.

The art of “benediction,” sometimes called “divine protection” or simply “miracles,” was a method for borrowing the supernatural powers of the gods, who had lost their bodies in battle in the age of myth, disappearing beyond this dimension. Gus had touched upon benediction very briefly in one of his lessons, when he’d talked about the “protection” that the gods gave to their minions. But this was the first time he had called it by name.

Benediction was the art of manifesting those gods’ powers into the world through one’s own body. It was the glorious work of the gods, which could heal illness and injury, create food and drink such as holy bread and wine, and carry out other feats that could not be performed by means of the ancient language of magic. The gods could deliver revelations to the people blessed with their divine protection, helping them in risky situations. When mastered, benediction could even bring the gods themselves down into one’s own earthly body.

However, it also imposed greater restrictions upon the user than magic, which used the Words of Creation. Since benediction involved borrowing the power of a god, it couldn’t be used unless the user and the god were on good terms. It required strong devotion, and the kind of spiritual nature that could find favor with that god. It also couldn’t be used to do anything the god disapproved of. For instance, benediction would not allow you to use highly aggressive attacks against the minions of another benevolent god, and if you were wicked and unrepentant, the god would withdraw benediction entirely.

So that was benediction, a mystic art that could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with magic, and with its own advantages and disadvantages. As for why hadn’t I heard about it before that point…

“I never told you,” Gus explained, “and I hid all the books relating to it. If you had heard about it and learned about it, you would have guessed that Mary could use it. You’re clever like that.”

Mary was devout and virtuous, and now that I knew about benediction, she seemed exactly the kind of person to use it. Gus was right. I probably would have guessed.

“Before long, you would have read my books and so on, connected the dots as you do, and discovered that Mary was bursting into flames. Then, you would have said that you didn’t want her making food for you if it meant her turning into a ball of fire. And I am sure that your mind would not have been changed, not even by us telling you that we are high-level undead, and our bodies recover easily from such a minor thing as being burned.”

“Well, yeah, I wouldn’t like it, but… why does she set on fire in the first place?!”

“Well, uh…”

“Because I became undead,” Mary said. “Because I betrayed Mater our Earth-Mother.”

“Mary…”

Her eyes were lowered, and her head, too. Her expression was one of deep sorrow.

“We became undead by entering into a contract with the unhallowed god of immortality, Stagnate,” she continued. “The god of undeath is a foe to Mater our Earth-Mother. The tainted undead burn at the slightest touch of her divine energy.”

I remembered the sculpture in the temple. Mater, the Earth-Mother, was the woman with the loving smile, who was holding a baby in her arms, and standing in front of a background of growing rice plants.

“What I did was beyond forgiveness. I betrayed her, and this is my punishment.”

Then why did she keep praying? “For me?”

Was she praying like that just to make bread for me to eat every day? Becoming consumed by flame every time? If that was the case…

“I… I’ll work in the fields more! I’ll hunt! So—”

Mary smiled gently. “It’s not like that, Will.” The soft embrace of her voice put my fears at ease. “Offering regular prayers to Mater has been a routine of mine since well before I met you.”

She wasn’t lying. Mary couldn’t lie with a smile like this, with a voice like that. Seven years spent with her had taught me that.

“Mater our Earth-Mother is the guardian deity of children. After meeting you, I also began to pray for a little food from her, but my habit of praying itself is no different now than it ever was.”

“Mary speaks the truth,” Gus said. “I guarantee it myself.”

“I told her a few times that maybe she should pack it in now, but she won’t have it,” Blood added, making an expression that I thought looked a little displeased.

Gus, too, gently nodded.

“Why?” I asked, confused. Not even my past memories were helping me to make sense of this. If what they were saying was true, then before I was around, Mary had been inflaming herself every day in return for absolutely nothing. “Doesn’t it hurt?”

“It does. I’d cry from the pain, if I still could.” She smiled.

Her reason was simple. Even after betraying her, even if pain was her only reward—

“I still revere Mater.”

To be able to smile through all this… She’s beautiful, I thought.

Mary was a mummy, and looked like a dead tree, or a monk who’d starved to death. Anyone’s first surface impression of her could only be to find her horrifying or grotesque. But to my eyes, she looked absolutely beautiful.

She had betrayed the one she revered—probably not willingly—and was now rejected by her, roasted by flame every time she tried to come close. Undeterred, she kept trying again and again, and was rewarded every time with terrible pain.

With my lack of religious faith and flimsy life experience, both in this life and my previous one, I couldn’t begin to understand her suffering, and could only imagine how difficult it must be for her. All I knew was that it had to be hard. It had to be painful. It wouldn’t have been any surprise if undirected feelings of hatred and resentment had built up within her. They would have in me. At least, the old me. I was sure of that.

But Mary accepted her suffering calmly. I had never once seen her speak badly of anyone or show hatred toward anyone. That was what made her look so beautiful to me.

“Even if my prayers aren’t accepted… Will…” She added my name softly. “I still believe that prayer has meaning.”

I wondered if that was true. I hoped that it was.

“And even though Mater doesn’t speak a word to me… since I met you, she has been blessing me with holy bread.” Mater the Earth-Mother was holding a baby in her sculpture, and Mary had mentioned that she was the guardian deity of children, too.

“Even if I cannot receive her forgiveness… just that little bit of assistance has been a great salvation for me. That’s all thanks to you, Will!” she added in a mischievous tone. “I’m really sorry for keeping quiet about it. I hope you’ll still eat the bread I give you.”

My arms were covered in burns, and Mary was regularly being set ablaze. That was more than enough to make that bread impossible to swallow. But I felt… I could still manage it.

“Yeah… I will. But can you do something for me?”

“What is it?”

“Let me pray with you from now on.”

If at all possible, I wanted to understand Mary even a little more.

How things looked to her—and how things felt to her.

Diamond. diamond. diamond.