Prologue: I Wish the World Would End
There is a girl.
There is a man.
Where the man's heart should have been, the air moved freely in and out. The girl's hands stroked a face that had already gone cold. Sad, warm tears slid down her cheeks and fell upon him.
She murmured,
"I wish the world would just end."
At last, I would become a Sage.
When talent and effort came together, even someone so young could aim for that title. The days of living in constant mana exhaustion would end today. I had set myself the goal of mastering one spell a day, and I had finally come to the very brink of achieving it.
I could no longer count on my fingers how many battles I had fought to claim the Fragments of Knowledge. That said, I hadn't gone around slaughtering people at random. Killing without reason was the work of a madman, and the times I had truly used magic intending to take a human life were few. It was an experience I never wanted to repeat.
Beyond that, I had done anything that might advance my magic. Truly anything—so long as it would make me a Sage. Had demons existed, I would have offered up my soul; unfortunately, they did not.
Now all that remained was to interpret the Fragment of Knowledge before my eyes. Do that, and I would almost certainly become the youngest Sage in history.
The Fragment was wrapped in something black, white light leaking through the cracks. I stretched a trembling right hand toward it.
"Unseal."
I felt the mana leave my body. All of it was being sucked away, as if I were withering from the inside. The drain never stopped, and before long I slipped into complete mana exhaustion.
Dizzy. The world seemed to spin. Just what kind of knowledge could this Fragment hold, to demand so much mana? I had interpreted no small number of them before, but never one that consumed this much. So this was what it meant to face the final Fragment of Knowledge.
A nauseating urge rose all the way to my throat. But I had come too far to give up now. On shaking legs I barely kept myself upright, fighting not to lose my focus.
The world swayed. No—more accurately, my mind did. There was no mana left in my body at all.
Only then did the black wrapping begin to fall away. The Fragment of Knowledge flooded the narrow room with light, and through my wavering vision I managed, with difficulty, to close my hand around it.
How much information could possibly be packed into such a small piece? Knowledge my mind could not contain began to force its way in, and a crushing pain seized my brain. Whether it was joy at what I was learning, or simply the shock of so much information arriving all at once, I could not tell.
Tears spilled from my eyes—and in that instant, I blacked out.