Shattering Iron Bars
After listening to his account of mana and magic, I finally understood why the mana of the Demon of Hatred and a mage’s mana felt so different.
But still… Grandpa Deprim was an absurdly overpowered mage. So why had he come all the way out here?
I asked him every question that came to mind, and he answered each one with patient kindness.
“Haren… raised as a weapon, and you don’t even know something as basic as this?”
“Haha… yeah…”
“Magic is the will made real, isn’t it? And it twists reality. That means it needs the world’s permission—in other words, permission from these ‘spirits.’”
“So the spirits are the ones who put the twisted reality back in place.”
“That’s right. They’re the ones who always suffer because of us mages…”
“Pong-pong~~”
“That’s why mages made a promise: go to the spirits endlessly, offer them gratitude, and talk with them.”
So when you cast magic, reality gets warped, and the spirits are the ones who fix it…
“Grandpa Deprim, how do you use magic?”
“Just like you saw earlier—hiding my body, making life more comfortable, that sort of thing.”
“Huh?”
“Making barriers, warming myself when it’s cold, carrying water, flying through the sky, concealing my form, lighting up the dark… and so on.”
Ah… looking at it that way, there were actually quite a lot of spells that weren’t attacks.
“Hm? But why are you asking, Haren?”
“Haha… well…”
I explained my own magic to Grandpa Deprim, then demonstrated everything from basic spells up through intermediate ones.
“What do you think?”
“That… Haren… that… good heavens…”
Grandpa Deprim squinted as if he had just seen something he never wanted to see. He thought about my magic for a moment, then the tears started again…
“Hup!! Growing up in a place like that as a child… your imagination and will…! Khuh!!”
—A little later—
“Hahaha. I got carried away.”
“It’s fine… but please give me an honest review.”
“The efficiency is terribly low. And most of your spells take the shape of weapons…”
He rose from his seat and gazed out at the distant lake.
“Magic meant only for killing… Haren, your spells are systematic.”
“Huh? But you said magic isn’t systematic…”
“Only yours is. Because they’re systematic, they’re trapped inside a mold…”
Grandpa Deprim turned his eyes from the lake and looked at me with a smile.
“Even though you have more mana than I do and a body that could overturn mountains, you’re still not free—like someone locked in a prison.”
My… my magic is formulaic trash…?
“So… why don’t you learn magic from me for a little while?”
“Is that really okay?!”
“You’re a junior walking the path of magic—of course it is! About five days here should be enough. Huheheh.”
“Thank you!!!”
Here, for the first time, I had met a true master.
While learning Grandpa Deprim’s method of circulating mana, we talked about all sorts of things—how he had ended up here, what other mages were like, and more.
“Master…”
“Ack!! Do you think I’m teaching you so I can be treated like royalty? Just call me Grandpa.”
“Yes! Grandpa Deprim. You said you came here to meet spirits, but aren’t there plenty of them elsewhere? You don’t have to meet them specifically here, right?”
“A friend of mine told me to head this way.”
“A friend…?”
“Yes. A mage whose specialty is astrology. He said if I traveled in the direction he gave me, I’d meet a good connection.”
He can see the future…
Other mages really were on a completely different level.
“Looks like that fellow was right—I did meet a good connection. To think I’d gain such a splendid disciple. Huheheh.”
“Thank you… By the way, are there many other mages? I’d like to meet them someday.”
“There aren’t.”
“What??”
“True mages—including myself—number fewer than twenty in this entire world.”
“What?! Why… why is that?”
“Because this is an age of peace. What do you think of magic, by the way?”
“It’s versatile and powerful, right?”
“Yes… far too much so…”
Grandpa Deprim sighed and continued.
“This is something I and every other mage have agreed upon. We believe we should disappear.”
“Isn’t that… a bit extreme?”
“This power… is dangerous. The moment it falls into the wrong hands, the world can be thrown into chaos.”
“It’s powerful, sure… but is that really a reason it has to vanish?”
“Haren… we carry many incidents of love and hate. A prime example is the Mind-Body Method.”
“The knights’ Mind-Body Method…?”
“Yes. Thankfully it went to a righteous hero…”
He explained the Mind-Body Method as a power that amplifies life force and lets a human transcend human limits.
“The founding emperor of this empire used that power to build a nation, and he wanted to spread the Mind-Body Method for the sake of all humanity.”
“Right, that’s why so many people still use it today.”
“But releasing it without any conditions would have been far too dangerous, so he came to us. We attached a curse called the Pact of Life and only then released the improved version.”
“So that’s why breaking the knightly code makes them weaker.”
“Exactly. The Mind-Body Method was a good example… but the question still lingered among us: what if it had gone even a little wrong?”
“That’s…”
“Ares… he was a hero. The kind of hero who appears maybe once in an era. If he had been even slightly ordinary, this world would have become an even greater slaughterhouse.”
Grandpa Deprim spoke with a sorrowful face.
“Haren… we’re old and worn out now. What if our successors lose hope in the world and turn their hearts to evil…?”
“There would be enormous chaos…”
“We feared that outcome and abandoned the responsibility of power. That’s why we no longer raise successors.”
“But you still called me a mage without being surprised when you saw me.”
“Huheheh. We’re human too. Sometimes we break our own promises. That’s why I wasn’t surprised by you.”
“What?! There are more people like me?”
“Not beings on our level—children who use magic weaker than yours. If you ever meet them, treat them kindly. Or perhaps people similar to you…”
He explained that they had given those children a downgraded version of the mana essence they themselves had consumed, so the power was weak and they could never create a mana essence of their own—thus they could never make new mages. There was also no restriction against using attack magic; they simply wanted to end the age of mana with their own generation, unwilling to force the price of love onto the next children.
There were quite a few people who handled power similar to magic, he said, but there was no real need to worry about them.
So that was why he had said there weren’t even twenty “true” mages.
“Then the total number of mages…”
“Excluding people like me and my friends, there won’t even be a hundred.”
Mages were basically legendary Pokémon.
Grandpa Deprim shared all sorts of stories with me.
“Among us there’s a fellow who forces a secret oath on commoners so they can only act as free citizens, nothing more.”
“That’s possible?!”
“Why wouldn’t it be? And there’s no risk of getting caught. In case you ever want to help a commoner, I’ll teach you that too.”
If you only used physical reinforcement inside the body, mana couldn’t be detected, so you just looked like an ordinary free citizen.
After that, Grandpa Deprim taught me how to create a faint mana essence, along with the precautions and the phenomena that would appear.
“Thank you!”
“Make sure! Only share that essence with someone truly trustworthy. Don’t forget what I told you!”
Hmm… he knew so many of these stories, and he even called the founding emperor by name. Just how old was Grandpa Deprim?
“Yes! Grandpa, how old are you…?”
“I stopped counting after I turned three hundred or so.”
If he was over three hundred, that meant more than six hundred years in my original world’s terms.
Wow… he’d lived an incredibly long time.
While we talked, I realized that unlike the mages of other generations, my mana reservoir was huge. I asked whether I was allowed to use attack magic, and he gave permission without hesitation.
“You’re not of our generation. Use whatever you like.”
“Thank you!”
“And you mentioned Blanc, didn’t you? With a powerful spirit following you around, you won’t even need to go on a pilgrimage.”
We chatted about other things for a while, then Grandpa Deprim suddenly stepped close and spoke in a quiet voice.
“Haren, I won’t ask how you obtained those powers.”
“Uh… well…”
“I heard you play. I choose to believe that a child who can play music like that could never use magic for wicked ends.”
Ah… a master’s faith felt like the sky itself.
Magic was the power to warp reality through mana, using will and imagination.
The reason my magic was stuck in a rigid mold was probably because my essence still carried a modern mind.
When modern people hear “magic,” what do they picture?
Fire Arrow, Ice Spear—just game magic, right?
Because that was all I could imagine—weapon shapes and explosions—I had only been able to use the spells I’d once cast in games.
So I practiced controlling magic with pure imagination, without chanting game skills, relying only on my will.
“Hmm… you sense mana and other energies well enough, but you’re not converting them properly.”
“Tch… it’s not working.”
“Your mind is already trapped in a mold, so what you need is to create magic free of that mold. Keep at it.”
Only two days had passed, yet my mana efficiency had improved dramatically. I could now cast basic spells with no casting time at all.
Some time later I showed Grandpa Deprim an advanced spell. His reaction…
“No… that… is advanced?”
He had already looked disgusted at my basic and intermediate spells, but the advanced one made him especially appalled.
“Don’t use that. It’s horrifically inefficient.”
“I’ll just use something else then…”
“Good… Ah! That’s right—when you want to grow your magical skill later, the best method is creating new spells.”
“Creating magic?”
“Magic is made from your own intuition and imagination. Haren, do you think imagination can be taught?”
Of course not… that’s why not just anyone can create art.
“When you make something new, your imagination expands naturally. So create and use many different spells.”
“Yes!!!”
He taught me how to store mana in the body and how mana recovered, and the days passed as I watched all kinds of magic.
“Mana isn’t consumed—it simply falls asleep.”
“So that’s why it recovers even when the world’s ambient mana is thin.”
“Exactly. If your mana capacity had to be fully restored solely by mana flowing in from outside, it would take about thirty years.”
“Eek… that’s insanely long.”
As evening fell I cooked the game Hati had brought back and asked about the common knowledge of this world and all sorts of other things.
“Is this world… pe–peaceful…?”
“Haha… I was just curious.”
“If a meteor falls on one side, the living things on the opposite side shoot into the sky… simply put, the world is a sphere.”
Grandpa Deprim answered every question one by one. A year really did have twenty-four months…
“Lifespan for free citizens is about a hundred and fifty years; commoners around seventy. Nobles, who eat and live well, last about two hundred.”
Even commoners lived almost to a hundred and forty? Wow… humans in this world were basically a completely different species from my original world…
And people with vast mana like Grandpa lived ridiculously long lives.
Time flowed quickly after that, and the promised five days came to an end.
“Grandpa… are you leaving?”
“Huheheh. I still have to finish my pilgrimage. Take care of yourself. And… I hope you make good use of that earring.”
He truly was a wonderful master.
Even though my ignorance of common sense had only deepened the misunderstandings and I still couldn’t clear them up, he had kindly taught me so many things and even left me this gift…
I could feel the firm faith he placed in me, and I was determined to live up to it.
I bowed deeply in the direction my master was departing and called out.
“Master!!! Thank you for everything!!!”
“Huheheh. You rascal… yes, take care, my disciple.”
Three hours after leaving the lake, Deprim descended the mountain with a grim expression.
“Those demon-worshipping bastards have crossed the line this time…”
The disciple he had just parted from—Haren… what a beautiful child.
A disciple who always spoke politely and faced him with a smiling face.
And the companions around him… the spirits… and even that music…
If that child, who carried a warmth that belonged in a fairy tale, had been his own grandson, Deprim would have been ready to die content right then and there.
Yet the immense mana and incomprehensible physical power he sensed from the boy…
Above all, the mana had clearly been forced into him.
Normally, when acquiring mana, the body was exposed for several months so it could adapt, then the essence was swallowed all at once. The pain of initiation was almost nonexistent because the mana settled naturally.
But if mana was forced in, the victim suffered extreme agony, and scars of mana remained—scars that showed immediately.
“Those damned bastards! Blinded by jealousy over power, they did that to my disciple?!”
Considering the state of the mana, the physical abilities had almost certainly been forced as well. Every single day must have felt like living torture.
And using those very powers, the boy had surely killed every last one of the people experimenting on him and escaped…
Yet even after enduring that pain and those experiences, the child claimed it was nothing.
He simply said he was traveling.
He wanted to walk the world.
Someone who did not stray, who walked his own path…
That child had been born with the spirit of a hero, just like Ares.
The reason his mana was warm rather than cold must have been that its nature had changed according to the boy’s disposition.
“I’ll have to find those bastards.”
Until now he had treated demon worshippers with a kind of pity.
Poor commoners who, despairing at the world’s unfairness, could no longer contain their rage… because he himself had once been the same.
But… now they had crossed the line.
Judging by what had happened to his disciple, they might even be creating living weapons.
He would ask a friend to track them down.
A considerable time later, Grand Mage Deprim took up his sword and stormed the vast cavern where the demon worshippers had gathered.
There he discovered an actual bioweapon laboratory…
And the misunderstanding about his disciple would never, ever be cleared up.