The Seed of Mana
It was a fateful encounter that had come by chance. Or so it seemed. The more I thought about it, the less accidental it felt.
As long as I carried the Third Eye, this was always going to happen—an inevitability waiting to detonate. There was no one to blame. I had brought this on myself. And since things had already come this far, I decided to be a little bold about it.
"Elder, before I become a mage—may I ask you just one thing?"
I was following behind the mage who walked ahead of me. His name was Zorbanof. Just as he had said, he was a mage who stood alone, belonging to no school.
His hair was streaked with gray, and his long robe was embroidered with the pattern of a star. Anyone looking at him would have seen an old man—but the body beneath that robe told a different story. The biceps visible through the fabric were thick enough that you could have mistaken him for a combatant. Hell, I would have believed it if someone told me he was a monster hunter, not a mage.
"What is it."
He was descending the mountain now to turn me into a mage. I still didn't know why, but a mage had said so, and so I followed. Not that I had any way of running from him in the first place.
"Why did you see me as research material valuable enough that you'd go so far as to make me a mage?"
I had already heard that it was because of the eye. But turning me into a mage over that alone still felt strange.
"Hm? Did I not explain that?"
"No, sir. Other than the fact that you could see the eye, you haven't explained a thing."
"Must've slipped my mind."
Mages lived far longer than ordinary people. Given that most of them kept a youthful appearance, I couldn't even begin to guess his age.
"The dragon's eye you saw was something that manifested from a Primordial Fragment."
"The Primordial...?"
"Good grief. I suppose I'll have to teach you every last thing from scratch. The Primordial Mage. The origin of mages themselves."
Zorbanof scratched at his beard as if the whole explanation bored him.
"...Why would the origin of mages manifest in a monster?"
"Why do you think?"
I hadn't expected the question to be thrown back at me. When I just blinked at him, Zorbanof let out a crooked laugh.
"The answer's simple. The monsters tore the Primordial Mage apart and ate him."
"Monsters did?"
Monsters that eat mages. Was that even possible?
"A corpse, to be precise. Picture them chewing away at a body that was already dead."
"A corpse."
"I can see it already. That thin little head of yours is spinning up some image of a monster gnawing on a human-sized corpse, isn't it?"
He was exactly right. Even if this was the origin of all mages, it would still have been a person. What was the point of eating something like that?
"I'll tell you something interesting. Consider it a premium lecture."
A dark smile crept across his face. Curiosity bloomed in my chest to match it.
"The Primordial Mage was infinite. A single, vast world unto himself. That is what the Primordial Mage was."
"...?"
What was that supposed to mean? I stared at him blankly, and Zorbanof's expression said he'd expected nothing more.
"Tsk. What was I thinking, expecting someone who isn't even a mage to understand."
"I apologize for my lack of knowledge."
"Forget it. Wasn't expecting anything anyway. Anyway, here's the conclusion: I am hunting the traces of the Primordial. Because the monsters ate him, some of them occasionally manifest with a Primordial Fragment. But at my age, searching for them alone is exhausting work."
"So you want me to become a mage and bring you Primordial Fragments?"
"Something like that. There's also the question of whether I can mass-produce more like you."
Mass-produce. He wanted to stamp people out like copies. Now I understood why he'd called me valuable research material. I was a baseline sample for mass production, plain and simple.
"If you become a mage, it'll be that much easier to examine the essence of mana. And that makes mass production far more convenient. You might even survive Mana Stone Sclerosis while you're at it. Well? Quite the generous terms, wouldn't you say?"
"Your insight is truly admirable, Elder."
"Kahahaha! At least you know how to grease a man with words."
Whatever else he was, I now knew for certain he was an eccentric mage. And I had picked up an important clue from him.
The Primordial Mage.
That human-shaped mana stone I had encountered inside the monster's body that day. Perhaps that had been a shard of the Primordial Mage. And if so, the Third Eye carved into my arm... this eye might well be a fragment of the Primordial Mage itself.
I had vaguely assumed it might be some kind of parasitic monster. The truth was far more staggering than I had imagined.
Then why have I been able to see and absorb the flames through the Third Eye all this time?
I turned the question over in my mind, and a faint answer surfaced. If I absorbed a life flame, the Primordial Fragment planted inside me would absorb it too. Perhaps the fragment was using that to aim for resurrection—parasitizing me as its host, accumulating power for the day it would return.
The thought brought my gaze down to my arm. The Third Eye—the so-called dragon's eye—lay closed, as if dead. But I could still feel its presence, unmistakably.
...So what?
I didn't care. I had already decided to use this power from the moment I first considered it might be a parasitic monster. A new hypothesis changed nothing. What I had to do remained the same.
"We're here."
Just then, Zorbanof's footsteps came to a halt. The place he had stopped was a vast waterfall, stretching across the mountain as far as the eye could see—an overwhelming curtain of water.
"Jump."
"Excuse me?"
"Tsk. Mana only takes its true form when one becomes one with nature. That is the seed of mana."
I had heard that mages possessed a seed of mana. But jumping off a waterfall?
"Do you know the easiest way to become one with nature?"
"That would be..."
"You surrender your body to nature itself. Of all things, a waterfall and its waters are the easiest to surrender to. So."
Zorbanof flicked his fingers lightly. In that instant, my body lifted gently into the air. Before I could even thrash, I was hovering above the falls, and a chill ran through me. The roar of the water below sounded ready to swallow me whole. It was a terror greater than any large monster—the raw fear of nature itself.
"The spirit you showed me earlier left an impression. Don't disappoint me."
"...Yes."
In the end, all I could do was quietly close my eyes.
"Off you go."
Zorbanof's fingers snapped, and my body began its vertical plunge. This was a step toward my future. I would accept it quietly.
Splash!
The flow of water is simple. From above to below. That is how water always moves. And I, drowned in it, was no different. From above to below. Caught in the waterfall's violent torrent, I was being swept along like a thing gone mad.
"Khah—! Ghk!"
How was this supposed to be the process of becoming a mage? The thought crossed my mind that Zorbanof might simply be trying to kill me. Water shoved its way into every opening it could find.
Drowning. This was drowning, one hundred percent.
I thrashed my arms and legs like a man possessed. Maybe it was the training I'd put my legs through—even in a current this savage, they kicked furiously enough to drive me toward the surface.
"Hahk!"
Air rushed into my lungs for a single precious instant. Thank god I'd trained. Without that, I'd be dead.
I was clinging on with everything I had when a voice drifted down from above.
"What do you think you're doing? If you want to feel the water, you have to be in the water."
Looking up, I saw Zorbanof strolling leisurely across the sky. Were all mages this proficient at flight? Every last one of them seemed desperate to take to the air.
"If you're flailing around on the surface, how is that any different from just falling in?"
I was too stunned to speak. Whether you were on the water or in it, you were still drowning, weren't you? But Zorbanof intended to make me a mage.
"Get back under. Or I'll shove you in myself."
In the end, his word was law. Damn it.
I squeezed my eyes shut and dove. Water rushed in and wrapped around my body in an instant. The waterfall's force was still fully intact, and the river shoved me along with brutal strength. My body whipped and spun. Driftwood and stones slammed into me again and again. Death felt close enough to touch.
Even if I surfaced, Zorbanof would just push me back under. Was I going to die? Was I really just going to die like this?
No.
I refused.
I forced my eyes open in the murky water. Zorbanof had told me to become one with it. There had to be a hint in those words.
Don't fight the current.
I stopped swinging my arms and legs against the river that crashed into me. Instead, I surrendered my body to the flow and let the tension drain from every muscle.
It flowed. The water kept flowing. I felt that current with my entire body. No matter how violent the torrent, the fundamental direction never changed.
From above to below. Downward. Always downward.
My breath began to feel distant. The lungs that had been screaming for air grew strangely calm. My mind drifted with them, growing faint.
Was I on the verge of drowning?
But the sensation was subtly different. Deeper inside my body, I could feel something settled there.
A light. A flickering light. The light of life. A flame, burning.
And yet today, that flame felt different. Why should a flame stay fixed in one place? Couldn't it flow—just as water flowed, from above to below?
The moment that thought took hold of me, I moved the flame without thinking. It stretched out at my will. Starting from my heart, it slowly spread through my entire body.
A flame that, left bound in one place, would have seen its heat fade and hardened into ash. That flame began to move, and it did not stop. It spread through me. Once the current had started, it did not halt. It kept going. And the more it repeated, the wider a new path opened inside my body.
It was strange. Strange—and yet the power dwelling in my flesh felt utterly different from before. It was the feeling of being newly born, like a hatchling cracking free of an egg it had occupied for far too long.
Mana. This was mana.
The instant I finally understood—
"Gahk!"
My body had truly reached its limit. My breath would not hold. Ah. I was actually going to die.
Whoooosh—
In that moment, the water surrounding me vanished all at once. I found myself lying on the riverbed, alone. My soaked body, the waterweeds, the wood, the fragments of stone—all of it told me I had been underwater until a second ago.
"Hahk—! Khk!"
I was still coughing up the water that had forced its way into my stomach when Zorbanof descended from the sky.
"Good. You've passed the first stage."
The first stage. This was the first stage? I had no idea what came next, or whether my body could endure it. But I forced myself to my feet somehow.
Zorbanof raised one eyebrow. I looked at him and said,
"...Let's move on to the next stage."
I had decided to become a mage. That meant I would see it through, even if it killed me.
"Huh."
Zorbanof let out a breath of disbelief, then flicked his hand.
"Fine. Let's see you become a mage."
What a brutal journey this was going to be.