This Is Driving Me Insane.
Sian had hoped today, too, would begin like any other — a peaceful, uneventful day.
*Hoped* being the operative word, since it meant exactly that: the hope had not come true. And of course it hadn't.
“…….”
“Please, I beg of you!”
It was all because of Selene, standing right in front of him.
Just yesterday she had done nothing but stare at him for a long moment, then walked away without a single word, her face twisted in disbelief. Now, overnight, she was bowing to him like a completely different person.
'What on earth happened to her?'
It was enough to make him wonder whether a human being was really allowed to turn on a dime like this. Sian had noticed lately that he kept reaching for the same word over and over, and he couldn't help reaching for it yet again.
“Um, I think there's some kind of misunderstanding here….”
Misunderstanding. A mistake. If any words topped the list of what Sian had been saying recently, those were surely it.
He tried to reason with her — but of course,
“O great Transcendent One! Bestow upon me as well the knowledge that grants a glimpse into the truths of this world!”
there was no chance that Selene, who had already misunderstood him *perfectly*, would take his words at face value.
Recoiling before the sheer fervor of it — madness practically radiating off her — Sian despaired.
'They said mages were a crazy lot. They weren't kidding.'
Selene was a genius, and at the same time, a mage. Mages, by their very nature, harbored a burning hunger for the unknown — for the knowledge of it, some were willing to throw away their own lives, depending on how deep it lay.
She had always been confident that as a genius, she would one day reach the truth of magic herself.
'But.'
Reaching the truth of magic and understanding all of it were problems of an entirely different order. And yet — what if, instead of blazing her own trail, someone were there to guide her along the way?
Then, through such teachings, comprehending the truths of all creation would not be beyond her. That was precisely why, believing Sian to be a transcendent being who had touched the truths of the world, she had no intention of backing down easily.
Of course,
'No, seriously — a hidden master is one thing, but a Transcendent? Really?'
Sian, knowing nothing of the machinery turning inside her head, could only sense that the level of misunderstanding had climbed another notch.
What exactly had she misunderstood, and *how*, to arrive at the conclusion that he wasn't even human?
'And what's this about a "Founding Ancestor" now?'
Don't tell me she's actually nobility.
The instant that ominous thought flickered through his mind—
“My lady!”
A woman came sprinting toward them from the distance, radiating sheer terror. Exhaustion was written plainly across her face, and only upon reaching Selene's side did she finally stop, panting heavily as she tried to compose herself.
“Hah, hah… What in the world brings you to a village like this all of a sudden… wait. What are you doing, my lady?”
The woman's face filled with confusion at the sight of Selene bowing so reverently. Sian, feeling the dread inside him swell, cautiously addressed the newcomer.
“Ex-excuse me, but are you acquainted with this young lady?”
“Yes. To introduce her properly — she is Selene Vesperia, daughter of Count Vesperia and the future Great Mage of our era. As for myself, I am Estelle, the lady's personal attendant.”
Estelle, Selene's attendant, announced it all with no small measure of pride.
Hearing this, Sian thought:
'I'm screwed.'
This was on a completely different level from the Tiana incident. She might have been an S-rank adventurer, but on paper she was still a commoner.
The girl standing before him now, however, was nobility.
A count's daughter, no less.
'Can this really be waved off as a simple misunderstanding?'
As in every medieval age, the power of the aristocracy was monstrous. If someone like him — a commoner — were killed merely for offending their sensibilities, the world would simply shrug: 'Eh, nobles will be nobles.'
And this wasn't some baron or viscount. A *count*. Worse—
'The Vesperias are a famously famous house, damn it.'
Something about a founding ancestor who was a hero of the realm, the one who had defeated a Calamity. Back in his adventurer days, he'd once overheard a bard singing about it as he passed through town.
'…What do I do?'
If things kept going like this, it wouldn't be strange for his head to end up on the block under the pretext of having disgraced a noble. He had to find a way out.
Whether or not she sensed his spiraling thoughts, Estelle turned to him and spoke.
“Why is my lady bowing like this? Depending on your answer….”
“Estelle.”
“Yes, my lady!”
“Be quiet.”
“Ye-yes?”
“You — no, *we* — are not someone to be spoken to so carelessly.”
“Uh, um. Yes, understood.”
A storm of questions swirled in Estelle's mind, but she resolved, for the moment, to obey her mistress. Whatever she was told, she would follow without doubt.
That was the foremost duty of an attendant, after all. And so—
“I, too, beg of you.”
She didn't know what was going on, but she knelt and bowed to Sian as well.
Sian looked down at the two women prostrated before him with the expression of a man who had seen everything the world had to offer.
'Ha. Life, my ass….'
What had he ever done wrong to deserve a mess like this? He wanted nothing more than to throw in the towel entirely — but leaving things as they were would only let them snowball.
The villagers nearby were already beginning to drift over one by one, wondering what was happening.
“Let's… talk inside, first.”
Selene showed no sign of moving until he addressed her directly, so he reluctantly ushered the two into his house.
At his words, she beamed as though she had finally been granted an audience, and followed happily behind him.
Estelle trailed after her mistress, still utterly bewildered as to what any of this was.
The moment all three disappeared into Sian's house, the villagers who had been watching began to whisper.
“Did you hear? They say she's a noble.”
“Not just any noble — from a count's family.”
“The daughter of a *count*?! Why would someone like that come here?”
“They say she came to become Sian's disciple…!”
“And someone that high and mighty actually *bowed* to him….”
“Is Sian royalty in disguise or something?”
“Sian… no, should we be calling him Master Sian now?”
“Was it rude of us to leave the kids with him all this time…?”
Far from where Sian could hear, the villagers' misunderstandings were deepening by the minute.
Once inside, Sian served the two of them tea. Deciding he first needed to understand what exactly had happened, he asked, and Selene — as if she had been waiting for the question — launched into a fluid, unbroken account of how she had come to learn of his existence.
And hearing all of it, Sian—
“…….”
was left so utterly dumbfounded that thought itself ground to a halt.
Who could possibly have predicted this? The kids had begged him so relentlessly for stories that he'd told them about a ninja manga from his old world, reworking the characters into a heroic legend — and now that fabrication had come boomeranging back at him as a misunderstanding of this magnitude.
Estelle, listening at her side, finally understood why her mistress had been behaving so strangely.
And then—
'Isn't this just… coincidence?'
Estelle was every bit as incredulous. As an attendant bound to support and protect her mistress, she had long since made a habit of judging everything objectively.
If an enemy they could not defeat appeared, it was the attendant's duty to buy time so that at least the lady could escape. Seen through those eyes, Sian looked like nothing more than a perfectly ordinary man.
He didn't merely fail to project the aura of some colossal figure — the teacher of a Founding Ancestor, of all things — he seemed *weaker* than she was. She also couldn't fathom how anyone could reach such a grandiose conclusion on nothing but the word of village children.
And yet…
'If my lady says so… then I must be the one who's mistaken…?'
No one had watched Selene longer than Estelle had. Her mistress simply did not make mistakes — whenever Selene declared something to be true, it had always turned out that *Estelle* was the one who'd been misinformed.
So this time, too, the attendant would be wrong, and the lady would be right. Which was why she had decided to say nothing at all.
“Like the Founding Ancestor, Aman Vesperia — if you would grant me the same opportunity, I will not disappoint you.”
'Give me a chance and I won't let you down,' she says.
She wasn't some failed villain begging for one more shot at the stage. Her eyes were ablaze, brimming and roiling with raw ambition.
'If I actually call this a misunderstanding right now, I feel like my head comes off.'
Even if he explained, she probably wouldn't accept it anyway. As Sian wrestled with how to navigate this impasse, a memory surfaced — the stories he'd told the children.
'That's it. That's the only way through.'
He let out a long sigh and lowered his voice slightly.
“Fine.”
“Do you… do you truly mean it?!”
Selene stared up at him, her face radiant with joy. She didn't seem remotely bothered by his casual, lowly speech — the look on her face said she considered it only natural. Those glittering eyes stabbed at his conscience something fierce, but there was nothing for it except to press on.
“However. There is a condition.”
“A condition, then. What is it? If you desire it, I will offer you everything I have. If it leads to the truth, I could even give you my life.”
Her resolve was honestly a little terrifying. Was every mage like this?
No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than Estelle, beside her, opened her mouth in alarm, clearly about to intervene—
“My lady, that's—”
“Estelle.”
“…….”
—and shut it again at a single word from Selene.
How wonderful it would have been if the attendant, of all people, could have shaken her mistress out of her delusion. Sian pushed the thought aside and voiced the plan he'd come up with.
“To learn from me, you must first awaken the 'Eyes'.”
“The… Eyes, you say.”
“Do you know what they are?”
“Yes, I heard it from the children. Eyes that allow one to replicate any magic after seeing it performed but once. But… wasn't that a power the Transcendent bestowed directly upon Aman Vesperia? Nothing of it remains in our family's records.”
'Of course there's nothing in the records.'
It was just some special ability from a manga — a flashy detail Sian had thrown into the story because he knew kids would eat it up. Why would there be a written record of something he'd invented on the spot?
“No. Aman awakened the Eyes entirely on his own.”
“He… he did?”
Selene could only stare in shock. She had been certain, utterly certain, that it was a divine power granted directly by a transcendent being.
And now she was told Aman had awakened it through his own strength.
She had always harbored the quiet conviction that her own talent surpassed even the Founding Ancestor's — which only made the blow land that much harder.
“I have nothing to teach someone who cannot awaken the Eyes. It would be dangerous.”
This was the escape route Sian had devised.
'Your talent is insufficient, so I cannot teach you!' — that was the excuse.
The eyes he had told the children about, the Magic Wheel Eye, naturally did not exist. There was no possible way to awaken eyes that had never existed in the first place.
In the end, Selene would accept that she'd failed to even reach the starting line, fall into despair, and go home. She was a noble — for the sake of her dignity if nothing else, she'd hardly go around proclaiming that she'd been rejected for lack of talent, which meant she wouldn't spread the story anywhere either.
All things considered, it struck him as a rather airtight excuse.
'Wait, though. So Aman, that bastard, could see a spell once and copy it perfectly — without any eyes?'
If a cheat-code talent like that existed, it should've been handed to *him* when he transmigrated. He was still sulking inwardly about his lack of starter perks when Estelle, who had been listening beside her mistress, furrowed her brow and spoke.
“That's… impossible. Even if I'm hardly versed in magic myself, I can tell how absurd—”
Her words amounted to turning away a guest at the door. Believing her mistress was being insulted, she moved to protest—
“…Understood.”
—until she heard her mistress's voice. Turning toward it—
“My lady?”
—she found Selene, her blue eyes blazing, a fire lit behind them.
“I will awaken those eyes, whatever it takes — and prove that my talent surpasses even the Founding Ancestor's!”