1. Transmigration
A carcinogenic dogshit masterpiece.
That was my honest verdict after finishing the final volume of The Princess of Fernia, a novel my sister had foisted on me one bored day. The genre: romance fantasy. True to type, it was stuffed with characters so lovesick they kept pulling stunts that made you want to scream, a Demon King who appeared out of nowhere, the end of the world — and then a rushed wrap-up with a bad ending.
It was trash-tier fiction; using it as toilet paper would have been a waste of perfectly good toilet paper.
How on earth did my sister find this fun...? I couldn't understand it to save my life.
"Yeah, my sister's never making it as a novelist."
I had a part-time job to get to early the next morning — tuition and living expenses weren't going to pay for themselves. For the first time in ages, I fell asleep early.
And then, the next day.
When I opened my eyes, I had transmigrated into the world of The Princess of Fernia.
A world doomed to destruction anyway.
If I'd possessed some noble, I could have burned through the family fortune living it up and died without a shred of regret.
But the kid I'd transmigrated into, Carniel, sat far below average — the third son of a family so rotten you wouldn't blink if someone called them criminals.
From the bottom of a gutter, we scraped up each day's meal with that day's labor.
"Remember this, son. Your hands must always be faster than their eyes."
Thieving was our basic upbringing, and I pulled every stunt there was to survive.
Like any other day, I stole milk and bread. My slow-handed little sister got us caught by the shopkeeper, and the guards came after us. We ran like mad. Gasping for breath, I rounded a corner — and slammed head-on into an old woman.
"Don't you touch my sister! She only did it because I told her to!"
"What, gutter trash can't stand to watch his own sister take her lumps? Hilarious!"
A palm cracked across my cheek.
"Vermin like you two belong dying in the mines, digging ore!"
They seized my ears and my sister's, yanking hard enough to tear them off.
"Please, stop."
The shabbily dressed old woman raised her hand toward the guards. At once, the grip on me went slack. Not one of the guards managed a word; they simply bowed their heads.
Only then did I realize — the old woman standing before me was no ordinary person.
"What is your name, child?"
"...Carniel."
"You carry a talent that any mage alive would covet."
"...Sorry, but I don't put my faith in con artists."
"Heh heh. 'Talent' is too meager a word. One would have to call it a blessing."
The old woman's name was Mahodelne. She was the Master of the Magic Tower.
From that day on, my life changed completely — because I walked into the Magic Tower, a place I'd never dreamed would have anything to do with me.
Life in the Tower was no picnic.
"The essence of mana is the whole of what constitutes this world..."
Magic study, every single day.
"Today's examination subject is paralysis magic."
An exam, every single week.
This was a romance fantasy world, so I'd expected a sweet life at the Tower — the kind of stock romance where you share meals and study sessions with pretty girls and love quietly takes root. Reality was nothing of the sort.
Magic demanded, with vicious stubbornness, that you solve every problem on your own. Having someone hand you their hard-won know-how didn't make you any stronger. You had to attempt it yourself, fail, and carve out a magic that was yours alone.
And so, naturally enough, no such thing as a magic study group existed.
For quite a long while, I believed that.
So they were all just huddling up in secret, giggling and playing at romance...?
Only later did I learn that a few small circles did exist. Well. None of them were the kind a slum-born nobody like me could ever have joined — they were little more than social clubs where royals and nobles gathered under the pretext of studying magic to cozy up to one another.
Then again, a life spent digging into magic might not be so bad.
The beginning was rough, but Tower life slowly grew on me. Perhaps because I'd always nursed dreams of fantasy worlds and magic, the process of learning spells was simply exhilarating.
More than anything, Carniel's life had been rock bottom, through and through. For someone like me, the Tower might as well have been heaven. Study, and food and drink were yours. Clothes, and even a bed to sleep in — everything was provided. Simply living without the fear of starving to death was the finest welfare imaginable.
"Why can't anyone else do this?"
Just as the Great Sage Mahodelne said, I truly seemed to be blessed by magic. Whatever spell I learned, I mastered. Anything taught once was soon mine through and through. The word "fail" had nothing to do with me. Sit me before an exam — written or practical — and I took first place, every time.
"Carniel, your grasp of magic astonishes me every time I see it."
"To think you understand it faster than I do, after decades of research..."
"Carniel, the method you just used could shake the very foundations of established magical theory!"
The professors who'd once sneered at me as gutter trash gradually changed their tune as the years passed.
And in the end... youngest valedictorian ever. Valedictorian in the shortest time ever. I set dozens of records, each one a first in the Magic Tower's history.
The boy who'd stolen milk and bread off the streets had, before I knew it, become the only mage in Tower history to leave such records behind.
Mahodelne offered me a professor's seat at the Tower. I turned it down.
"A pity... Might there be some other reason?"
"Even if I told you, I doubt you'd believe me."
I — a complete nobody — had overtaken Magellini, the one destined in the original story to become the continent's greatest mage, and claimed that place for myself. For all I knew, the world line itself had been knocked askew because of me.
Which meant I had to meet the first princess of Fernia Kingdom, Ardel von Fernia — the female lead of The Princess of Fernia. I needed to confirm her present circumstances and everything she'd lived through. Only then could I calculate exactly when the Demon King of the original story would appear.
Carniel of the streets. There was a time when my name came chained to a modifier that could never be scrubbed away.
But...
Bearer of a magical blessing that surfaced perhaps once in a few thousand years. An unprecedented genius who had rewritten every record the Tower held. The strongest mage on the Solios Continent. Epithet upon epithet had buried the gutter-born tag for good.
Among the nobility of Fernia, almost no one didn't know my name. No — not a single soul. I never had to make the first move; stand still, and people came flocking on their own.
"Lord Carniel, do you think my daughter might have a talent for magic as well?"
"To form even a thread of connection with you, Lord Carniel, would be the highest honor our house could ask."
"A single word of counsel from the continent's greatest mage would be an immense help to us."
Building rapport with the nobles proved easier than I'd expected. Before long, I was invited to a banquet attended only by royalty and nobility. Ardel, the female lead herself, was there.
I had planned to approach her first. As it turned out, there was no need. Perhaps drawn by the title of continent's greatest mage, Ardel came to me first.
"To think I'd actually meet the subject of all those mysterious rumors in person... How surreal."
As we talked, I quietly pieced together the life she'd lived up to that point. Aside from the episodes involving Magellini, it matched the original to the letter.
Ardel was exactly twenty years old. Exactly three years my junior. Roughly five years remained until the Demon King's appearance — ample time to prepare.
Before I knew it, a sigh of relief escaped me. At the sight, Ardel tilted her head and stifled a laugh.
"Carniel. You pry into my whole life story, then suddenly start sighing? You're a lot weirder than you look."
"Am I?"
"I thought mages spoke nothing but dry, boring prose, but you're different. You've got a strange sort of charm."
"You're pretty, too — every inch the female lead."
"...Female lead?"
"Your face is turning red as we speak, you know."
"...I-I don't know what you mean! Look, instead of just standing here, how about we dance?"
Ardel held out her hand and asked me to dance. It was hard to refuse. Not that I had any reason to.
That night, Ardel and I shared a time as sweet as a midsummer night's dream.
What should I have done, back then?
Looking back now, I should have refused her flat out the moment she asked me to dance. Had I done so, all those people would never have lost their lives.
Well. It's all in the past. I can't say I regret it, particularly. I was never the philanthropic type to begin with.
Those five years went by remarkably fast. I invented a Prophecy Magic that had never existed, and pretending to cast it, prophesied that the Demon King would appear in five years' time.
"T-The Demon King...?"
Perhaps because the words came from the continent's strongest mage, the kingdoms of the Solios Continent steeled themselves for war against the Demon King, half believing and half doubting. National budgets raised armies and trained troops. Weapons were forged, defenses expanded. And at last, the Demon King and the demon race revealed themselves. From that day, a war that would shake the entire Solios Continent began.
"All forces, fall back!"
In the lore of the original story, the demon race were the originators of magic itself. Even with the war prepared in advance, the tide did not favor us. As victory and defeat traded places again and again, the cities and villages turned battlefields crumbled into ruins. The longer the war dragged on, the worse our position grew. Cut off the head, and an army falls apart — that's simply how it goes.
So I proposed a small, elite unit to assassinate the Demon King: the Hero Party.
"My name is Sieghart! It's an honor to meet the continent's strongest mage."
"I'm Carniel. The hero blessed by the Goddess, is it? Nice to meet the male lead in person."
"...Male lead?"
Sieghart, mightiest of the heroes. The party was built around me, the continent's strongest mage. And so, after a full year of every hardship imaginable, we succeeded in killing the Demon King.
Three months had passed since the Demon King's death. On the Solios Continent, the horn — the symbol of the demon race — could no longer be found anywhere. The war was finally over. Peace had returned to the world.
Sieghart. We'd grown close enough that I simply called him Zick.
Before the victory parade in Fernia Kingdom, Zick came up to me with a gravity that held no trace of play.
"Would it be all right with you if I took the greatest credit for slaying the Demon King and the demons?"
"Do as you like."
I'd never had much interest in anything beyond magic to begin with. And... maybe because I'd lived in the spotlight since childhood, being the object of everyone's gazes and attention had grown tiresome and dull.
"Carniel, thank you, truly! You see, there's someone I want to look good in front of. That's why."
"I didn't ask for a reason, and I'm not curio—"
"What exactly are you and Ardel to each other?"
"Nothing between us, really?"
Zick studied my face closely, as if checking whether I was lying.
"You mean that?"
"To be precise, ours is the kind of relationship where Ardel comes up and speaks first, and I answer."
"Carniel! You are unbelievably dense. How can anyone be that blind to a woman's heart?"
"My ears. Don't shout right beside me."
The night before we left to hunt the Demon King, Ardel had come to my room.
"Carniel. What are you and I?"
"Friends."
"...I-is that so? I like you, you know. Do you like me too?"
"Of course."
As a friend, that is.
And if you asked whether there was any prospect of things developing into romance, my answer would be: "Not a chance."
Ardel's beauty counted among the finest the Solios Continent had to offer. There's a saying that a woman who's young and pretty has it made. But that saying isn't the truth. A woman must be young, pretty, and big of heart besides. Ardel was young and pretty. But her heart was perfectly ordinary in size. And so I never once felt anything romantic toward her.
"What're you suddenly thinking about? You didn't catch a word I said, did you?"
"Catch what? Wait — don't tell me you were just launching a confession attack at me. And why's your face all red? It's gross on a guy."
"Carniel. The thing is, I'm crazy about Ardel. That's why — help me and Ardel end up together."
"Sure."
"Really?"
"The male lead and the female lead getting together makes for a fine sight, doesn't it?"
Zick laid a hand on my shoulder and thanked me over and over. He said he'd give me anything I needed and asked what that might be.
I told him the Demon King's Heart would be plenty. Zick turned straight to the party members and asked whether the heart could be mine. Since I had, for all practical purposes, slain the Demon King single-handedly, everyone handed it over without a word of objection.
"Let's go! To Fernia Kingdom!"
Heads in the clouds, we set off for Fernia Kingdom. On the way, Zick kept hitting me up for romance counseling — what he should say to Ardel, what he should do to make her fall for him. He asked about everything, and he asked without pause.
Zick's face made it plain as day: he was already dreaming of a happy future at Ardel's side. I wanted my friend to be happy too, so I answered every question with the utmost sincerity.
Before long, we arrived in Fernia Kingdom. A grand victory parade was held, and a banquet after it.
And that night...
Ardel got pregnant.