An Obvious Reason
While converting the mana stone through Spirit Manifestation, I saw something strange.
Whether it was a memory of the possessing spirit or a memory held within the mana stone itself, I couldn't say — but one thing was certain: it was absolutely no ordinary memory.
A golden city that called to mind the Empire's capital.
Countless students in academy uniforms. A massive mana stone.
And then...
'Something pure white, shaped like a human.'
"I think I saw Lily."
She couldn't be certain it was really Lily.
It might have been someone else, or she might have simply been mistaken.
The moment had flashed by so quickly that she hadn't managed to make out any faces, but judging by the atmosphere and the situation, it had looked as though someone was teaching students around a mana stone.
And that scene bore an uncanny resemblance to Lily as she was now.
"...Could you explain in detail?"
Leo described the scene to Lily as best as her memory allowed. When the story was finished, Lily gave a small nod, took hold of the stone-turned condensation stone, and channeled mana into it.
Zzzt. Zzzt.
By now, the lines of mana that she could more or less read were tracing the interior of the condensation stone Leo had broken.
"Hmmm..."
Fwoosh.
The mana went out.
"It's magic corruption."
"Corruption?"
"You dealt so much magical damage that part of the spell formula warped. Once the formula warped, it produced an unintended result."
In a word...
"It bugged out."
"...DeoEn has bugs?"
Think about what kind of place DeoEn was.
From the moment it launched, countless people had doubted or outright denied the existence of the virtual reality and scrambled to find bugs or flaws — only to come up empty-handed and end up singing its praises instead.
The only game with no bugs and no hacks.
There was a reason DeoEn had become the world's unshakable number-one game in a mere three years.
"I'm not saying DeoEn has bugs. This is magic that I made, after all. Even spells can develop errors."
"......"
Was that really all it was?
But the memory from that moment was far too vivid to write off as a simple glitch.
"Then what kind of error is it? It seemed somewhat connected to you, Lily..."
"When you dream, strange scenes drift past, don't they? Memories that feel like you saw them somewhere, all jumbled together — who's to say that's so odd?"
"...?"
An out-of-nowhere mention of dreams.
Lily continued on with the same earnest tone she used during lectures.
"Most of the time you wake up and the memory's gone, but now and then it stays razor-sharp. And then you think."
How strange.
Why didn't I ever notice how strange it was?
"...So what I saw was something like a dream — an illusion?"
"Something like that. But it isn't pure illusion, either. Magic corruption never creates something with no connection to anything at all. It just takes what already exists, mixes it together, and builds something new out of it."
Flash.
The stone condensation stone regained its blue glow.
"What you saw, Leo, was something like a short compilation reel made of the people entwined with the magic."
"...I feel like I'm learning something I'm not supposed to learn."
"Oh? Well, it's a domain you'll master eventually anyway."
Lily smiled and handed over the restored condensation stone.
"It's next week's homework, but I'll give it to you early. The error won't appear again, so don't worry."
Taking the condensation stone, which now gleamed brighter than before, Leo asked with an expression that still hadn't wrapped itself around anything:
"So is it fake, or real?"
Lily rose from her seat.
"That's the homework. Figure it out, and you won't need me to tell you — you'll just understand."
Of course, that was still a long way off.
'Privately, though, I think I'll enjoy it more that way.'
"Magic corruption, huh... That's unexpected."
So my magic was an 'error.'
'Technically, it was the academy professors of that era who created it.'
It had been serviceable enough that I'd never bothered to revise it — I'd had no idea it was capable of producing an error this severe.
I'd told Leo it was just an edited mash-up of various clips, but the truth was that the contents really were directly connected to me.
Because it matched, almost exactly, the scenes from my lectures at the Imperial capital's academy.
That said, the Empire back then was nothing like the current Imperium — there was no golden city, and no condensation stones identical to the ones used today.
The reason Leo nonetheless took it as the same thing as this place was that 'Leo' had also become deeply intertwined with the spell during the process of converting the mana stone.
The 'Empire' and the 'condensation stone' as Leo remembered them had been processed and rendered as equivalents to my past.
"I doubt anyone else would dig this deep..."
Leo had torn into the spell formula through Spirit Manifestation, becoming half nymph and half spirit in the process.
Even with over half her body composed of mana, the traces had been faint. Anyone else would most likely have failed to glimpse even a shadow of the past.
Not the faces — at most, a fleeting look at the city.
"The ones who passed are Leo, Candy Star, Beriad... Oh."
Somewhere in Roton, in the southern reaches of the Imperium.
Inside an enormous building — not quite the scale of a ducal fortress, but impressively large all the same — there stood a spacious lecture hall. Elegant, refined pillars adorned its walls, and a broad green chalkboard and desk waited for whoever would come to use them.
"Mmm... Somehow it feels awkward for no reason."
The ones waiting were, in turn, the three people seated apart from one another in the rows of lecture chairs.
Yena, the final one to pass, scratched her cheek pointlessly and glanced around the room.
First, a woman with a giant star-shaped lollipop propped on her shoulder.
She had pink hair and wore a pink princess dress, and a glittering jeweled candy mounted at her chest caught the eye.
At a glance she looked like a magical girl, but that candy of hers was obviously going to be classified as a blunt weapon.
'Is it a concept? Or a hidden class?'
Her interest piqued, Yena had approached and asked her a few questions, but the girl seemed oddly evasive with her answers, so she gave up and returned to her seat.
Though for some reason, the vibe and the way she talked felt familiar... Where had she seen her before?
'And then there's that guy...'
While she and the magical girl (blunt weapon) were seated toward the front, that man had planted himself in the very back row, where the light barely reached at all.
A person whose insistence on wearing a black robe even indoors she simply could not comprehend.
'Can't see his face at all... so, Stealth? Or a mask?'
By the standards of an assassin ranker, it didn't read as Stealth.
Probably a face-concealing robe, or a mask.
'I'm the most normal one here.'
Just as in the last lecture, Yena — in her academy uniform and inscrutable glasses — laid out a mountain of writing tools and notebooks.
Plop.
Finally, she took out the stone-turned condensation stone and let out a long, deep breath.
She had scraped through with ten minutes to spare before Lily's 'cutoff line' — a truly hair's-breadth success.
When nothing she tried worked, the choice she'd finally settled on was a cheat in all but name.
She'd gotten so fed up that she'd slathered on every buff skill and consumable potion she had and machine-gunned every ultimate she possessed until, at last, it worked.
It felt like cheating, sure — but Lily had said any and all means were fair game.
"Still, it's like I saw something..."
She definitely caught a fleeting glimpse of an imperial city, but she couldn't make heads or tails of it.
Was Lily connected to the Empire somehow?
'The Outlaw of the Port... it's a thing, but it's not like she has real influence over them.'
At most, she'd earned the Empire's disfavor — she hadn't been designated a threat to it.
A mere Outlaw of the Port barely registered as a caution-worthy target; she was small-time criminal material at best.
Grroooom—
The door opened.
Three pairs of eyes swiveled at once.
"Ah... uh! Yena!"
"Leo?"
"You passed!"
With a bright, beaming face, Leo waved her small hands and came darting over.
As expected of a passer — and leaving Sword God aside, someone who could stand against an entire nation's legion single-handedly.
'The spirit mage, Leo.'
Truly, the more Yena looked at her, the more impossibly cute she was.
Leo settled naturally into the seat beside Yena and arrayed her household spirits around her body — the kind that assisted with everyday tasks.
A mystic, regally flowing wellspring of magic power.
Before, she'd sensed it as nothing more than skills. Now, it felt different.
'...At this level, she might actually beat Sword God.'
Leo's power was that far beyond imagination.
Granted, no one knew just how much stronger Sword God had grown since vanishing without a trace months ago.
"You finished first, didn't you, Leo?"
"Mmm... I don't know about first, but I did manage it in two hours."
"Two hours?"
Is she out of her mind?
When Yena shot her a look of sheer disbelief, Leo just hehe'd and hugged her snow-white baby yeti tight against her chest.
To the eye it was nothing but a plush doll — but it was a mid-tier spirit fully capable of turning any player at level 50 or below into a corpse within seconds.
And Leo had spirits like that coming out of her ears.
"Ugh, I hate counting us out this early, but... the Mock Siege Battle feels kind of hopeless, doesn't it...?"
"Yena's team is plenty strong too! And Lily's team absolutely can't be underestimated either."
"...Lily's on there too, huh. Yeah, that's... definitely not fair.."
Rankers — armed with expensive items, valuable information, and outstanding skill.
Their worth surpassed all imagination, and a handful of them had made their names resound across the kingdoms and regions of the continent, save only the Empire.
There was even a running joke that moving Leo for a single day would require an entire castle.
That was how much a ranker's time was worth compared to an ordinary person's — dozens of times more. No, hundreds.
And yet here were rankers of the very highest tier, swallowing the cost of that precious time to come to this place.
The reason they had gathered to sit in a month-old newbie's lecture.
Grroooom—!
"Alright, everyone's here."
Lily had arrived.