Even a Mastermind Has a Story (1)
The first thing that met me, after the bullet struck, was a bright light.
I was alone in a world gone pale and blinding. My body was terribly heavy, and there was nothing I could do for myself. Whole days amounted to nothing more than being swept along by sounds I could not understand, pouring in from every side.
About a month had passed when I finally grasped the situation I was in.
……
I could see, and I could hear. In the first world I truly recognized, I had a very small hand—a tiny hand I could not move as I pleased.
"Waaah."
It was, without question, a baby's hand. As if to prove the point, a baby's wail burst from my mouth. Once I had seen that, I had no choice but to admit it, however little I wanted to.
I was no longer the scientist who had devoted himself to the study of spirits. I had been born again, into a new world.
Around the time I turned one, I understood speech. No—perhaps it would be truer to say I awoke to it.
That first year I spent most of every day asleep. Whenever I was awake, I listened to talk from morning to night and stared at letters. The one who spoke to me was always a young man with platinum-blonde hair. His eyes were a gold deep enough to stand out even against that hair, and the instant I first saw them, the thought that rose was simply that they were beautiful.
I had no intention of appraising his looks. It was only that the strangely radiant gleam of those golden eyes brought topaz to mind.
Setting his appearance aside, from the moment I came to my senses he had been stressing certain words. I first understood what they meant about a week after I began to hear them. Repeat the same situation for nearly a week, and only a fool fails to catch on.
The word he used while pointing to himself was Dad. The word he used while pointing to me was my name: Junia.
No sooner had I grasped that new name than a single doubt took hold of me.
It sounds far too much like a little girl's name.
The thought had barely formed before I checked my own condition. My guess, of course, was not wrong. The self I had been reborn as—Junia—was a girl.
The shock of my changed sex was so great that for a while I simply stared at the sky, empty of thought. They say a hunger for learning has nothing to do with gender, and yet there was no denying the sour feeling that settled over me.
It was my third year in Junia's body.
Once I had grown a little and learned to seem quiet and well-behaved, my father, Folton Raynant, took to leaving the television on and stepping out more and more often. Between the monologues of his I had been hearing and that television left running on its own, I came to understand the language and its writing well enough in full. The name Folton Raynant itself I discovered along the way, reading it off his business card.
"Hm. So things like that happen, too."
News and documentaries. Current-affairs programs. Educational cartoons for children. Every day the television offered something different, and even the childish fare I would never have watched in my past life was useful to me now. I was learning not only the language, but the general character of this world and the way its people lived, because the world the screen showed me was interesting enough to hold me.
To begin with, the place was remarkably like the Earth I had known. Advanced things such as televisions and computers existed here, and daily life ran along broadly modern lines.
Unlike Earth, however, there were spirits, and a Spirit Realm, and Spirit Masters contracted to powerful spirits appeared on television as the pride of the nation. Scholars who studied spirits existed as well. To someone who had spent a lifetime devoted to Spirit Engineering, it was a world like heaven.
For the people of my previous Earth, though, I imagined it would have been little different from hell. This world's name was Eustonia—one of the eight worlds that had collided with Earth without end, eating into it through a continuous encroachment.
"Interesting."
For me, this was a kind of opportunity. The knowledge of spirits I had built up in my past life held true here as well.
Eustonia was a world where Spirit Masters under contract were prized as military power. Separate schools existed to raise outstanding Spirit Masters, and research institutes meant to support both masters and spirits had been founded beyond counting. In my previous life, moreover, I had stood alone at the pinnacle of Spirit Engineering, even on Earth. In Eustonia, I stood a good chance of being received with considerable respect wherever I went, and of living in comfort.
"……What am I going to do from here."
Turning the future over in my mind, I fidgeted with the card in my hand. I was still too short for my hands to reach the desk, so the card was one of Folton's that I had picked up off the floor.
Caught in the light of the bulb, the card gleamed, smooth and bright.
"Junia, ready to see Daddy's laboratory?"
I had thought that so long as my passion for Spirit Engineering held, being born into Junia's body would never amount to much of a problem for the rest of my life. Hidden inside that assumption was one truth I had overlooked.
The body I had been reborn into was exceedingly frail, and sickly.
"Dad. You're jostling me. Hold me properly."
"Ah—ah. I'm sorry."
Junia Raynant, age five. The small girl in the arms of Folton Raynant—thirty-two, a doctor of archaeo-spiritology raising an only daughter alone while he struggled on in his laboratory—was me.
Regrettably, I had been born far sicklier than I ever imagined. There was no grave illness, they said, and yet I bruised and came to harm with unfortunate ease, and my stamina was so poor that even an ordinary cold could lay me out for days on end.
As a rule, bearing the mana waves given off by a powerful spirit, or the strain of multi-contracting, called for a healthy adult body—and a man's body most of all. Junia Raynant's aptitude, then, stood at a considerable distance from that of a fine Spirit Master.
That did not mean I had given up the dream of Spirit Engineering entirely. Even now I was on my way to his laboratory, after pestering Folton at length.
"Are we there yet?"
I kept my balance while putting as much distance as I could between myself and Folton's roughly trimmed beard, and before I knew it we had reached the laboratory underground. He set me down on the floor.
A pair of smoothly finished iron doors, pure white. Wearing a confident look, Folton opened the laboratory and spoke to me.
"Here, here. This is Daddy's laboratory."
"Woooow……!"
The moment the door opened, I let out a cry of delight. I had already lived more than my share of years, and yet the Spirit Stones glittering without number on every side were a shock even to the me of my past life.
On the Earth I had known, you could pour hundreds of millions into the search and still struggle to obtain a single fragment the size of a fingernail. Whether because Eustonia itself was a source of Spirit Stones, Folton's laboratory had a staggering quantity of them on display.
Perhaps pleased by my reaction, he stroked my head with a satisfied face.
"Haha! The laboratory seems to be to Junia's liking!"
When I had begged to come, Folton had agonized over it for a long time. I had never even imagined he was hiding a facility on this scale. I nodded and answered him.
"Well, I'm a researcher too."
"Yes, yes. Our Junia ought to grow up and become a spiritologist just like Daddy."
"……."
Before I knew it, I was glaring at him with a sulky look. Catching my gaze, Folton flinched and took a step back.
As I was now, I was nothing but a five-year-old brat whose sparkling golden eyes happened to leave an impression. With a face like this, being dismissed even when I told the truth was unavoidable. Still, if I began to show him something from here on, his reaction would change.
Glancing around, I found a sheaf of papers on the desk.
"What's this?"
"Materials Daddy's been researching lately. You're welcome to read them, but mind they don't go missing."
To my surprise, Folton handed his work over without resistance. I could guess the reason well enough. Even if I failed to understand a word of it, he meant to boast of his splendid results to his daughter before anyone else.
To meet that expectation, I turned the pages and read through them one by one.
Befitting research on Eustonia, the birthplace of spirits, there was a great deal in it that was unusual—all the more so because it belonged to archaeo-spiritology, a field that did not exist on Earth.
In short, at the beginning there had been a single spirit that created the world, and that spirit was the Creation Spirit Irelion. Having finished the work of creation, Irelion gradually lost its power and vanished. Traces of it could be found in the ways spirits evolved, in the folktales handed down among the people, and in the wavelengths of the Spirit Stones scattered across the world.
Even to my eye as a scholar, it was a considerably interesting hypothesis.