The First Divinity
A white book. On its cover, in elegant antique script, ran the title:
The First Divinity
The Saintess knew, by instinct alone, that the answer she wanted lay inside it.
There was no real basis for the thought—and yet the book had caught her eye as if it were calling to her.
She opened it.
—Holy power is, in its original nature, a return to the primordial state…—
Wrong book.
What she was looking for was history—not a specialist treatise crammed with dense jargon about the essence of holy power.
Still, her interest was piqued.
She had time to spare. A closer look wouldn't hurt. There was always the chance that somewhere in these pages lay a way to break past the fundamental limits of holy power itself.
Holy power was, in the end, a force meant to support combat. Wielding it as starlight for direct offense was wildly inefficient.
Inefficient means of attack or not, an inexhaustible resource packed into a single body could turn inefficiency into brute-force efficiency—except the Saintess's body could not withstand it. That was the problem.
Conclusion: she needed a new method.
Weapon arts, black magic, sorcery, alchemy—anything would do. She would devour whatever she could get her hands on, like a starving ghoul, and grow stronger.
She still wanted to live. Even now.
She opened the pure white book in her hands.
—Holy power is the blessing of the stars. The first blessing was Radiant Faith.—
In the beginning, a single star shone alone at the exact center of the heavens.
Just as there was one sun and one moon, so too had the star originally existed alone.
Then one day, the star fell into the desert.
The star vanished, and only Superhumans—those who had transcended humanity and borne epithets—could still draw upon its blessing.
The mages' Scales gave no answer. The priests' prayers met only silence. The knights could no longer borrow starlight.
An age when neither bargains nor prayers would answer.
This is called the Vanishing of the Star.
Scholars, who love to name everything, called the catastrophe Stellar-Less.
And from that desert, together with the fallen star, came a girl. She introduced herself as Stella.
It was an age when mages, knights, and priests had all lost the power of starlight; when the southern half of the continent had turned to Demon Realm; when the Demon King and his Disasters advanced without end toward the north.
In that age, the girl who would come to be called the First Saintess set out on a journey beside a small child who introduced herself as a star fallen into human form.
She named the little one Lys, and laughed brightly as she said that putting their two names together made a Gathering of Stars. Then she began to seek out those who could erase the Demon Realm.
—The first she met was a child wandering the desert, striking for his white hair and golden eyes.
He introduced himself as Sedes.
For reasons unknown, the boy drifted the sands with paper and pen clutched tight, as if they were his only tools in the world.
She invited him to travel with her. He accepted.
There was a strange obsession in the child's eyes.
—In the north there was a black-haired mage who had held the line alone against beasts and Disasters, and still lost ground without end, and still lost countless comrades.
He introduced himself with arrogant pride as Akan, master of the highest tower, and the greatest mage alive.
The Saintess invited him to join her as well. He refused.
He had sworn loyalty under the Emperor's seal, he said. He could not go. He had contracted to hold this front.
So the Saintess made the offer once more.
—Then if the Emperor were to die, you would be free to come with me?
Akan read the words written on the paper and nodded. Within days, word came that the Emperor was dead and a child-emperor had taken the throne.
The contract was broken.
—The child-emperor was a gifted mage and a politician both.
Even with his father dead, he moved as if he had been ready for it, and renewed the contracts one by one.
In this way he took responsibility for his vassals' lives, and drove those who had sworn him loyalty like a murder of crows.
—There was a mage called Lloyd.
Akan's disciple, and a man who had somehow ended up holding the front lines, he somehow ended up joining them this time as well—as a martial fighter.
He was no Superhuman. When magic failed him, he tempered his body instead.
Even after the star returned to the heavens and magic came back, he never neglected that training.
—Last of all, they sought out a human dwelling in the Great Forest.
She introduced herself as the greatest alchemist alive, and it was the truth.
If the heavens held a star, the earth held a tree. She was the only human who had ever spoken with the World Tree—the greatest of all things that exist upon the ground.
To the Saintess's invitation, she answered:
'Sounds fun.'
She pursued amusement.
—A wandering blade who lived in the desert boasted that he had once cut the sea beyond the horizon with his sword.
The star wished for him to guard the library that stood in those sands, and the star's wish was granted.
Even now, remembering nothing, he still wanders the desert.
Promises exist to be kept.
—A spear-wielding mercenary who lived in the mountains had once been called the finest lancer on any battlefield—but now found everything tiresome, and had withdrawn into the hills.
The Saintess set out to find her. After that, the record ends.
Whether she was found or not, the Empire does not know.
What the Empire does not know is not recorded.
—Those who stood against the Disasters were Superhumans.
Spring. Summer. Autumn. Winter.
They killed the four Disasters in turn, and what they met at the end was the King of Beasts.
Master of the Seasons.
The one people called the Demon King.
—The Demon King died.
The night they returned to the Imperial Capital, the people preparing the festival stopped where they stood. Only the moon hung in the sky.
The star took the Saintess up into the heavens, and the veil that had covered the night sky shattered.
What was revealed then was a countless host of stars.
That day, the sky broke open.
—How many years have passed since then?
The Demon Realm forms again. Beasts appear. Disasters rise once more, and Superhumans rise to stop them.
The world has become as it was before—save for one difference. Countless stars shine down upon us now.
—We called that Saintess and that star Stella and Lys, and we named the gathering of countless stars Stellaris.
This is the First Divinity.
Star and Magician—the prequel to Four Seasons.
A story set in the distant past.
It began with a single magician who brought a star down from the sky.
A girl who had devoted her entire life to that star offered the heavens a bargain.
She fashioned a spare body, tore her soul, and poured it into the vessel. She was the first to make use of the system called Erosion Rate, and she wielded necromancy with mastery.
By that method, she cleverly sidestepped the demand that she offer up everything.
But could the self she preserved that way still be called herself?
The magician did not know.
From there, the story followed the girl who set out for the desert where the star had fallen—a classic RPG of gathering companions and slaying the Demon King.
A saintess?
The Saintess found herself puzzled.
Why did this book call that magician a saintess?
A magician who deceived the eye of the Scales with words and tricks, who pretended to cast magic while her true specialty was raising her companions—and they called her a saintess.
This world was subtly different from the one she knew.
Like mismatched gears, the facts she recognized and the facts she did not ground against each other with a vicious, disorienting friction.
She quieted the confusion and moved on to other books.
The archive held countless volumes, most of them neglected. If she had to name a reason, it was that the Emperor paid this place no mind.
He was a Superhuman himself—a walking library who would not die unless someone killed him. He was the recorder and the living witness of history. Why bother writing anything down in a library no one but him would ever use?
The Saintess roamed freely through the dust-choked interior. She came away coated in grime, but aside from her white hair and habit growing a shade duller, nothing about her changed.
And the book she finally found was not a book at all.
A single, extremely thin page.
What was written on it was more than enough to startle her.
—Necromancy, holy arts, magic, even alchemy! All of them use starlight.—
The Saintess thought:
That's nonsense. In the original game, MP types were distinguished by color. Even if you call it all starlight, they were strictly different resources. Strictly by color—
Wait. By color alone?
Something clicked into place.
And she thought:
If I get stronger—stronger, stronger still—will I be able to survive?
The Hero sent troops into the mountains near the Imperial Capital.
His plan was to make a thorough nuisance of himself to the spear-fighter he intended to meet.
For a lancer who found every single thing in existence tiresome, he had devised a recruitment method better than any previous cycle—and he was putting it into motion.