The Genius's Misunderstanding
"I heard Tiana stayed here for a while."
Selene asked as if the curious stares of the surrounding children didn't faze her in the slightest.
With her light blue hair neatly tied back and an expensive-looking robe draped over her shoulders, she was looking straight at Sian.
…Who is this one now?
The first emotion Sian felt upon seeing her was a sense of foreboding.
Even at a glance, she was clearly no ordinary person.
He could only assume she was connected to the strange things that kept happening to him lately.
A noble? Or perhaps a mage?
Either way, she was unmistakably someone who lived in a completely different world from a small-time commoner like himself.
Nothing good can come from getting tangled up with her.
Resolving to slip away as soon as possible, Sian answered her question as naturally as he could manage.
"Ah… yes, it's true an adventurer named Tiana stayed here briefly."
It wasn't as if a lie would stay hidden for long once anyone asked a villager, so he simply gave her a brief answer for now.
He tried to excuse himself from the conversation, but her next question came right back at him.
"Would it be possible to find out what Tiana did while she was here?"
"Ah, well, that's…"
He had no idea how to answer, and his words trailed off awkwardly.
The answer to Selene's question, however, came from somewhere else entirely.
"She learned the Gratitude Sword Draw from her teacher! The gratitude draw!"
"Yeah, yeah!"
"Take this—Gratitude Cut!"
"It's the Gratitude Sword Draw, actually!"
The children laughed and chattered among themselves, pressing their palms together and clumsily imitating Tiana's Gratitude Sword Draw.
Selene couldn't quite grasp what exactly it all meant, but she found herself recalling the information she'd gathered.
A palms-together gesture…?
Come to think of it, hadn't they said that Bloody Claw fell the moment Tiana pressed her hands together in prayer?
A connection materializing out of nowhere.
At the very least, it seemed certain that this village and Tiana were linked in some way.
Her expression, which had been flat and indifferent up until that very moment, softened into a faint smile as she turned to the children.
"Do you happen to know where that teacher of hers is right now?"
"Um…"
Instead of answering, the children simply turned their gaze toward somewhere nearby, wearing expressions that plainly asked why she was even bothering to ask.
Because the answer was standing right beside her.
"…?"
Selene, of course, could only be baffled.
To her eyes, Sian was genuinely, absolutely nothing more than an ordinary civilian.
There was no way she could arrive at the conclusion that he had taught Tiana.
Perhaps finding her bewilderment frustrating, one of the children shouted up at Selene.
"Sian the teacher is the one who taught Tiana the Gratitude Sword Draw!"
"…What?"
It was an answer beyond her imagination—neither above nor below it, but simply outside of it—and a foolish-sounding voice slipped out of her before she could stop it.
That night.
Since the village had no inn, Selene had borrowed the village chief's house, where she now sat in a chair, sunk deep in thought.
That utterly ordinary man is Tiana's master?
Something had gone wrong somewhere.
It was the only conclusion her mind would accept.
He supposedly used to be an adventurer, but even being generous, he looked no stronger than B-rank—no, closer to C-rank.
Was he concealing his mana so thoroughly that even she couldn't detect it?
That made even less sense.
Even Father couldn't manage that.
Even the Count Vesperia—head of House Vesperia, currently hailed as a Great Mage, and her own father—had never been able to completely hide his magical power.
Setting aside whether she could beat someone in a fight, being unable to even gauge their skill level was simply beyond reason.
But still…
She'd found it all so hard to believe that she had gone around the village asking questions, yet everyone gave her more or less the same answer: that Sian had taught Tiana.
Some even claimed he was the one who had trained Elina as well.
It was almost enough to make her suspect the entire village had conspired to deceive her.
And when even a visiting merchant said the same thing, her confusion only deepened further.
Is there really something I don't know about him?
She tried calling to mind the Sian she had seen that day.
No matter how she turned it over, he had been the very picture of an ordinary man.
After agonizing over it again and again, she finally reached her conclusion.
It must just be coincidence.
She could only accept that everything was a string of coincidental overlaps.
Elina had simply been born with talent and grown strong on her own, and Tiana—whatever trigger she may have had—was merely mistaken in regarding Sian as her master.
That was the bare minimum she could bring herself to believe.
Though even that was a stretch, a concession so absurd she could barely swallow it.
"I suppose I'll have to look for Tiana myself."
There was no more information to be gained here.
Having decided as much, Selene resolved to depart first thing tomorrow and use her family's resources to track Tiana down, and she closed her eyes.
Day broke, and Selene was preparing to leave.
"Ah, I trust you slept well, honored mage."
Since she hadn't disclosed her status, the village chief—who knew her only as a mage—came shuffling up to her with obsequious bows.
To a village chief in the sticks like this, a mage and a noble were probably one and the same.
She was about to offer her thanks for the lodging and be on her way when—
"I get to be the Thousand Master today!"
"What?! It's my turn to play the Thousand Master!"
"Ehehe."
"You little—!"
She paused at the sound and turned her head.
A group of little children were squabbling with each other over who got to play which role.
The Thousand Master.
It was the title of Aman Vesperia, founder of House Vesperia.
An epithet said to have been earned for freely wielding a thousand different spells.
According to the records, he'd been such a genius that a single glance at any spell was enough for him to replicate it in full.
Impossible.
Wielding a thousand spells was one thing, but reproducing any spell after seeing it just once—even Selene couldn't do that.
It must simply be an embellished tale, spun in reverence of the hero Aman Vesperia.
While she was lost in thought, the children finished dividing up their roles and began their game of heroes, shouting at the tops of their lungs.
"Take this—Seal of Ice!"
"Then I'll use the Seal of Flame!"
The children twisted their hands into bizarre shapes as they played.
"I'm the Thousand Master, so you're not allowed to use seals!"
"Oh, right!"
"Aiy, you brats! We have a guest, so stop playing around here and go somewhere else to—"
"Hold on, just a moment."
Selene hastily cut off the village chief, who had been trying to shoo the children away.
Then she approached the children, her eyes wide with bewilderment.
"You—where on earth did you children learn that?"
She was genuinely flustered.
Because what the children had been playing at just now was nothing short of shocking.
"Huh?"
The children tilted their heads, clearly having no idea what she meant.
The village chief, too, wore a puzzled expression at her sudden behavior.
Realizing how abruptly she had blurted out the question, Selene took a breath and asked again, carefully and clearly, so the children could understand.
"What I mean is—that hand seal thing you were just doing. How do you know about it?"
Her astonishment had a simple explanation.
The children had been twisting their hands into those strange shapes and calling them "seals."
And that was a secret art of her family—the technique Aman Vesperia himself was said to have used.
According to Aman Vesperia's diary, a family treasure passed down through the generations, a transcendent being he had encountered by chance was the one who taught it to him.
But the diary had been damaged, and its contents still hadn't been fully restored—the seals remained the subject of top-secret research to this day.
So why…
Why would children in a backwater village like this know about it?
The children, who had been playing so merrily, shrank a little under Selene's intensity, but they answered her questions faithfully all the same.
"O-our teacher told us about it…"
"Your teacher… do you mean that Sian fellow from yesterday?"
"Yes…"
She certainly hadn't expected to hear that man's name yet again.
Her mind plunged into fresh turmoil.
How does he know about the seals?
Knowing about them at all was already preposterous, but to casually teach them to children, as if it were nothing?
Wanting to hear more, Selene softened her tone and coaxed the children gently.
"D-did that Sian person ever tell you anything else about the Thousand Master?"
At that question, the children's earlier fright seemed to vanish entirely. The prospect of showing off what they knew lit up their faces, and they began rattling off everything without pause.
"The Thousand Master is a hero with eyes that can use any spell after seeing it just once!"
"…"
'Can use any spell after seeing it just once'—that part existed only in the family's records.
It wasn't even in the tales told by wandering bards who made their coin off heroic legends.
There are limits to how many coincidences can pile up.
By this point, even Selene had no choice but to admit that Sian was no ordinary man.
This was no mere run of bad luck with coincidences.
And then—
"His eyes?"
Even information that was written nowhere in the family's records tumbled out of a child's mouth.
"Yeah! The eyes only appear in that bloodline? Only in his family…"
The child chattered on excitedly while Selene listened intently.
Eyes that can see the flow of mana… Don't tell me the founder's genius hid a secret like that.
But if that were true, an unavoidable question naturally followed.
How does he know all of this?
Not just the family's most closely guarded secrets, but even details that had never been recorded.
As her brain kicked into full gear to uncover Sian's true identity, a single clue flashed through her mind.
Written in Aman Vesperia's journal: the master of the hero who had taught him the seals.
Just what sort of being that transcendent entity was, no one could say for certain—but—
What if—
Sian. What if he were that transcendent being?
The moment the thought completed itself, she felt goosebumps rise all over her body.
And then—
"Please, grant me your teachings!"
The instant Sian opened his door, he found Selene standing there to greet him.
Looking at the woman bowed deeply before him, Sian offered a short review in the privacy of his own head.
This is driving me insane, seriously.