Prologue: Memory or Obsession
What is a sage?
A wise and great man.
In the long history of the Empire, among mages as countless as grains of sand, he is the most brilliant and excellent of them all—the one who commands the respect of everyone. That is a sage.
It is a title granted only to the rarest few among those goddamn mages who fly and crawl their way through the world.
I once believed I would become a sage.
I thought there was no one smarter than me.
Who was it that restored the lost runic characters others could not even dream of recovering? Who was it that deciphered the complex magical formulas sealed within ancient artifacts—those forgotten legacies buried in the dusty depths of underground dungeons—by establishing entirely new systems of geometry and mathematical expression?
And yet, for all of that, I could never be called a sage by anyone.
"That damned bloodline..."
If I had been born into the imperial family... Hell, if I had just been born into a decent noble house, I would not have minded. But a man born as the eldest son of a low-ranking knight family with not so much as a speck of talent for mana—dreaming of becoming a sage, or even a mage at all—that was the problem from the start.
In the end, I was betrayed by my one and only disciple and finished out a wretched life.
Yes.
In the end, I did not even possess the eye for judging people.
It is cold.
The chill that seeps in from my fingertips spreads through my entire body. My eyelids grow heavy. The light blurs, and every sound recedes into the distance. Sensation fades away, and all that remains within me now is...
Memory.
The vast stores of magical knowledge I had piled up, layer upon layer, over the years.
What the hell had I been living so hard for all that time?
In a void where nothing could be seen, nothing heard, nothing felt, I existed solely by clinging to the memories of the past I had built.
And then, at some moment—
Warmth returned once more.