Prologue
—Sasha.
My master, and the one the world also calls the Undead Emperor.
He wields a Level 11 summoning formula, and even four hundred years ago they said he could ride out alone and meet a great nation head-on. The very pinnacle of martial power.
—What is power?
The necessary condition for protecting the people who matter to you.
The sufficient condition for defending your own pride as a fighter.
—And why does anyone reach for it?
The answer changes from person to person, but in Sasha’s case it’s simple to the point of transparency.
—Power enough that no one can ever bind you. The one absolute requirement for carrying your own will through to the end.
She… no, he sought power to live exactly as he pleased, and as a matter of plain fact, he has lived exactly as he pleased ever since.
The cross-dressing habit aside, that he’s a difficult piece of work is something he and everyone around him would grant without argument, and without his power this world would have been a hard place for him to live in.
So he reached for it.
Selfish, certainly, but there’s nothing base in him for all that: he keeps to a strict live-and-let-live and never fusses over anyone who doesn’t concern him.
Let some eyesore of a reprobate turn up in his vicinity, though, and he’ll clear them away too.
The number of villains he’s purged for no better reason than that they irritated him runs well past anything you could tally on fingers and toes.
A mage who stands utterly alone. One of a kind. The strongest there is, no qualifiers.
—A great and beautiful jet-black eagle, beholden to nothing, soaring a sky no one else can reach.
The young me, dead set on becoming the strongest, was drawn to that Sasha with everything I had.
Why I chase the summit myself, if you pressed me on it, I’d be hard put to answer.
But if you pressed anyway, there’d be only one answer I could give.
—Because I had the misfortune to be born a boy.
Other world or Earth, there isn’t a boy alive who doesn’t dream of it.
—The first dream of all. Instinct, right down at the animal level.
The kind of dream most people wake from without ever noticing, somewhere along the way, as they keep running up against reality.
Sasha never gave it up. He made ceaseless training both his wings and his weapon, climbed to a peak no one else could touch, and has reigned over the open sky ever since.
—Level 11: Otogi Fantasia.
Overwhelming violence, on a scale you can only laugh at.
And in the middle of that howling unfairness, there was always that fearless, dazzling grin.
It’s nothing so complicated, really.
When it comes down to it, the last time I crossed swords with Sasha, Merlin and I together still couldn’t force him to go all out.
Point that out and he’d only give a wry smile: between students of the same school, he’d say, Otogi Fantasia is a forbidden move.
At any rate, that man is the highest peak of martial skill I know of.
And the great wall I have to get over.
My goal is to stand at the top. The wall in the way is Sasha.
Which is why I have to do something about the handicap of having no magic aptitude… that was the entire point of my second reincarnation. But—
—that same Sasha has gone missing. And by the look of things, at the hands of violence to match his own, or worse.
I was still lost in all that when Merlin broke in, her expression puzzled.
“What’s the matter, Ephthal-sama?”
“…That Sasha gave it everything he had and still, in all likelihood, lost. Honestly, it’s shaken me more than a little.”
“I can well imagine. That someone who was the very embodiment of the preposterous…”
“By the way.” Merlin turned to the maid who’d served Sasha. “Do you have any idea who might have done this? Or, failing that, anything about Sasha-sama that’s been out of the ordinary lately?”
At the question the maid put a hand to her chin. She thought for a moment, then gave a small nod.
“Now that you mention it, Sasha-sama had been researching magic aptitude theory. Ordinarily he sleeps away most of the day to lengthen his lifespan, so he was grumbling that it was ruining his complexion.”
“Sorry to cut in from the side, but could you wait one moment?”
“Yes? What is it?”
“What did you just say?”
“That it was ruining his complexion…”
“No, before that.”
“Magic aptitude theory?”
“That’s the one. Why would Sasha-sama take up the theory of magic aptitude, now of all times?”
Magic aptitude theory was something the Fire God Emperor had established four hundred years ago. That the theory itself held no errors was plain enough. Even in those days the consensus was that digging deeper would turn up nothing more, so it had long been shelved as a finished thing.
“I wondered about it myself and asked him. All he said was, ‘If I don’t put this theory to bed, it seems my freedom is going to end up bound.’ A joke, naturally. Deflected in his usual way, in other words. In any case, he seemed to be looking into things like a cure for aptitude, which is supposed to be impossible.”
“A cure?”
“Yes. He’d turned to researching magic aptitude a few times before, whenever it crossed his mind, but this time he threw himself at it like a man possessed… and in the end he settled the theory of a cure as well. ‘Now I can finally sleep in peace,’ he said, laughing.”
My eyes went wide, and before I knew it I’d closed the distance on the maid.
“Wh-what is it? You’re… you’re very close.”
“Please, take me there… to the room where Sasha-sama was researching magic aptitude.”
My heart was pounding, hard. No, I couldn’t get the pounding under control. My breathing went ragged, and too much oxygen left my head swimming.
Fighting to keep some show of composure, I let her lead me deeper into the World Tree, Sasha’s home.
⁂
It was a room hollowed out of the tree itself. Every room in the World Tree is like that, and the color and the grain lend them all a soft, faint warmth. The study itself, though—bookshelves lined the walls, packed tight with volumes, and in the center of the room sat a simple alchemy rig: flasks, a small alchemy cauldron, that sort of thing. None of Sasha’s usual girlish décor, just the things the work required and nothing else. This was where he drew the line, I suppose, between himself as a mage and himself as Sasha, the private person.
I’d had the maid wait outside, incidentally, and laid a sound-blocking spell over the room. There was a real chance that knowing about this would put a person in danger, so I was taking what precautions I could.
“Still, is there really any such thing as a cure?”
“If Sasha-sama said he had established one, then I should think there is.”
“Well, that’s true enough. But magic aptitude is decided by whether the four great spirits favor you or not, isn’t it? And at the level of the soul, at that.”
And there something snagged in my thoughts.
—At the level of the soul, was it.
Spirits are creatures out of fantasy. And my own soul came, originally, from the other side—from modern-day Earth. Which might mean that every reincarnator, all of them… ah, I see. So that was why Sasha had called my having no aptitude a foregone conclusion.
“Ephthal-sama? What is it, exactly, this business of being favored by the spirits?”
True enough, I thought.
A spirit is all but synonymous with a god. And a god is the energy dissolved into the land itself, a thing that is everywhere and nowhere at once. They’re beyond comprehension to begin with… but why should such things exist in this world at all?
By the common sense of modern Earth’s evolutionary and biological theory, anything that lives, lives in order to reproduce. Beings like Sheryl, the issue of a spirit taking flesh and bearing a child, do factually exist. But that only happens when a spirit puts on human shape for a lark; it means reproduction in the sense of borrowing the human species’ machinery to make more humans. I’ve never once heard of spirits or gods increasing in number, and they most likely have no means of reproducing on their own either. That falls clean outside the very definition of life.
“In any case, shall we try the shelves and the desk?”
Feels rather like ransacking the place, which I don’t love. Still, needs must. Thinking as much, I pulled open the lower drawer of Sasha’s desk.
“Of course it wouldn’t be that easy…”
Well, no. This is, beyond any doubt, an important matter with the Fire God Emperor’s hand in it. Even if the papers really were here, he’d have made sure a stranger tossing the room couldn’t turn them up at a glance. To a mage, unpublished research is more precious than life itself, so you hide it, and even if you did leave it somewhere obvious, you’d have it encrypted, or something of the kind.
“The classic hiding places for research are the hidden room, the hidden bookshelf…”
“Yes. Or, if the work is entirely finished, there’s the chance it’s simply kept somewhere else altogether.”
“Not going to be a straight road, is it.”
Then, glancing over the books ranged on the desk rack, I found one with a spine that read—
The Cure for Magic Aptitude and the Lesser Key of Solomon: A Study of the Goddess and Reincarnators.
The thing itself. In the most head-on title imaginable. I nearly toppled over on the spot.
“Why would he just leave it lying out?!”
Merlin gave a small, wry laugh at that.
“Very like Sasha-sama, I’d say. Bold, or however one wants to put it.”
“Well, I’ll grant you it’s like him, all right.”
Thoroughly deflated, I slid the book off the rack and took it in hand.
“Ephthal-sama? What is this ‘reincarnator’ in the title, by the way?”
Now that’s a hard one to answer. I thought about it a moment.
“Someone like me, born again into a new life, I’d imagine.”
Half a lie, half the truth. Sasha knows about reincarnation from Earth, but telling Merlin that would only muddle her. With the contents still unread, there was no sense saying it here and now.
“…Right. First order of business is to see what’s inside.”
Whatever else, everything I’m after is surely written somewhere in this book. Sweat pricked down my back, and an excitement I couldn’t name filled me up. My previous self died in despair for lack of magic aptitude, and I have not forgotten, even now, how bitter that was.
I opened the cover, and there was a table of contents. The foreword, it seemed, began just beneath it.
The out-of-place artifact chiefly treated in this volume is the Key of Solomon; for the relationship between reincarnation and the goddess, refer to the previous volume.
The Key of Solomon serves as the key that opens the Root of Roots, and it is posited that, to a greater or lesser degree, the Scarlet of Hades may stand in for it when opening a dimensional singularity.
The Key of Solomon? Some sort of key that opens the Root of Roots, the way through to the goddess?
Whatever else, the cure for magic aptitude had to be revealed at last. I turned to the next page—
“Ha, hahaha! Hahahaha!”
The laugh burst out of me before I could stop it.
“What is it, Ephthal-sama?”
“No, Sasha really is a piece of work.”
I handed the closed book over, and when Merlin opened it to the page, she too let out a weak little “hahaha…”
“So that’s how he plays it.”
“Yeah. The middle’s been carved clean out.”
We hadn’t exactly expected a mage to leave his research where anyone could flip through it, so on that score there was no real disappointment. But, even so, this is in rather poor taste, don’t you think, Master?
“Well. Looks like it’s finally come to running Sasha down and making him talk. By the way, Merlin?”
“What is it, Ephthal-sama?”
“I still think the surest way for me to grow stronger is to cure my magic aptitude. I’ve no idea what the Fire God Emperor is thinking, but to stand against him I need this problem cleared as fast as humanly possible.”
“Yes. Clear the matter of your magic aptitude, and the Thunder God Emperor is the strongest thing on the earth.”
“Well, I don’t know about that… but there’s no harm in being stronger.”
Then I called a “Sorry, excuse me?” out to the maid, who’d been waiting outside the room.
“Yes? What is it?”
“About these papers, do you know where Sasha-sama keeps the originals?”
She thought a moment, then gave a small nod.
“For research of that sort… I can’t say whether it’s exactly what you’re after, but it should be kept in the Dragon’s Treasure Vault.”
At the words, Merlin and I looked at each other.
“You’re all right telling me so easily?”
“Merlin-sama is Sasha-sama’s grand-disciple. And even should the two of you go there, what becomes of the papers is for the keeper of the vault to decide, in any case.”
A fair judgment, that. Sasha entrusting his papers there means, in effect, that he’s left them to the keeper’s discretion.
The keeper of the Dragon’s Treasure Vault: a contract with the dragonkin. What it comes to is a promise to have your most precious thing guarded as a dragon’s treasure, ownership whole or in part ceded to the dragon in exchange. In concrete terms, in most cases the original owner keeps the right to borrow the item back freely for short stretches, and in return it’s kept as one piece of the dragon’s hoard, under the safest guardianship in the world. That’s the shape of the contract.
“By the way, the keeper of the Dragon’s Treasure Vault would be that acquaintance of Sasha-sama’s, the Dragon Princess, I believe. Which means it’s in that region, isn’t it?”
“Yes. In the mountains of the Alcott ducal domain.”
Well now, I thought, and let out a sigh.
That every last thread runs back to the domain where I was born and raised this time around, the land Fraser nii-san now governs as duke, has a distinctly suspicious smell to it.
But, I thought. Until now, anything touching the Fire God Emperor had promised nothing but upheaval. This, though, is good news. And the reason is—
—if this body of mine had been blessed by the spirits rather than born without aptitude, what would the truth of it have been?
Would I have been the strongest thing alive, as Merlin says? Would all my old effort, handicap aside, have carried me to the summit of martial skill?
Every answer is in Sasha’s research… in the Dragon’s Treasure Vault.
And thinking about that, I found myself standing there, unable to keep down a thrill of pure excitement.