I'm Not a Genius
Day one of the regression.
I laid down the single most important principle that would govern everything I did from this moment on.
...I have to save the world.
For the sake of the magic I had yearned for since my previous life — the magic I had devoted my entire existence to researching. If the world went up in flames, what would become of that magic? I had already torn through the realm of the impossible and turned time itself backward. I was not going to die as a heap of ash under the Demon King's army a second time.
If I wanted to freely explore and enjoy the magic I desired, this world, at the very least, had to keep turning.
And to be perfectly honest, I was a person with feelings too. I still remembered those days — the days when the people I had grown attached to in this strange world, my master among them, had died so meaninglessly. I had no intention of sitting through that ending a second time, helpless to stop it.
And to do that, first of all—
I have to get away from my master.
Call it biting the hand that fed me. Call it the height of ingratitude. It was a perfectly objective, rational decision.
The next morning, I set freshly baked bread and a bowl of warm soup on the table, the way I always did. Two portions. Mine and my master's. That was all — because inside the most notorious magic tower on the continent, the Black Rose Magic Tower, there lived only the two of us.
If I didn't take care of the meals, my master would just boil some unidentified magical reagent from a corner of her laboratory and eat that. Nutritional intake wasn't exactly a pressing concern for a 7th-Tier magician. It was just hard to watch. And she ate well enough when I actually put food in front of her.
"Master."
"Hmm? What is it, my cute little disciple?"
Soup smeared all around her mouth, she looked up at me with the happiest expression in the world, still chewing on her bread, and tilted her head. I said it as calmly as I could.
"I'm planning to go to the academy."
"Pfffft!"
Her eyes bulged like a frog's. An entirely reasonable reaction, under the circumstances.
"Cough! Cough! Hack— wh-what? What did you just say?!"
She shouted, choking, tears welling in her eyes. Here I was, apprenticed to the greatest magician on the continent, suddenly announcing that I wanted to crawl into a nest of amateur students. From her perspective, she had every right to be offended. Or at least thoroughly confused.
"D-disciple. Is the tower cleaning too much for you? From now on I'll just magic it all—"
"That's not it."
I cut her off firmly, wiping down the table. I knew how much she cared about me. But if I stayed in this tower, she would keep wasting her precious time trying to expand my hopeless mana capacity. In my previous life, she had spent so much of herself looking after me that her own training had suffered. She had never broken through the wall of the 7th Tier.
Even the 7th Tier put her among the handful of Great Magicians on the entire continent. It still wasn't nearly enough to stop the catastrophe and destruction that were coming. She needed to throw off the shackles that I represented and push toward a higher realm.
And the same went for me. If I wanted to find a genuine, fundamental opportunity to expand my pitiful mana capacity—
I need to go to the academy.
The moment I had regressed, I had driven a Memory Spell directly into my own brain until my nose bled, and this was what I had found. I had combed through every last setting of the original novel buried in my unconscious — The Genius Young Lady Is Too Strong — and I had uncovered one very certain opportunity.
She flung aside the bread she'd been eating, reached across the table, and latched onto my sleeve. Any pretense of dignity befitting the continent's greatest 7th-Tier magician had been thrown out the window a long time ago. This was some truly first-rate whining.
"If you go there, that sly old fox of a geezer is there too... Those academy professors are all out of their minds, every last one of them!"
"..."
"And you're not even a noble! The class discrimination and the factionalism there are brutal — if you're a commoner, making friends is going to be a nightmare... What if my cute little disciple ends up eating all alone in a corner and getting bullied?!"
I already know all of that.
From the deranged faculty who treated students like lab rats, to the vicious territorialism of those high-nosed noble heirs, to the tangled political games inside the academy itself. If anything, I — the one who had read the novel to the very last page — knew far more about the academy's wretched inner workings than my master, who had spent her life holed up in this tower. I had dragged every last scrap of the original story out of my unconscious, after all.
"You're still going to go?"
"Yes. I'm going."
At that unhesitating, resolute answer, she pressed a hand to her forehead as if a headache were coming on. After a long stretch of muttering, she seemed to resign herself and glanced at a battered calendar lying nearby.
"Let's see... two months from now happens to be academy admission season."
She propped her chin on her hand, stared at me, and the corner of her mouth curled up. The childish figure who had been clinging to my sleeve moments ago was gone without a trace. This was the look of the continent's greatest Tower Master, and it was interested.
"But, disciple. You know that as a commoner, you need a recommendation letter to even sit the academy entrance exam, right?"
"I know."
"A recommendation from this magnificent 7th-Tier magician would open doors anywhere, of course."
She let the pause hang, just a little. Then she tipped her hat up slightly and met my eyes.
"Nothing in this world comes free. Isn't that right?"
"What's the condition?"
"Within the time you have left, bring me a spell formula that can actually surprise me."
She held up a single finger and added:
"It doesn't have to be some high-firepower combat spell. Just something clever and original enough to pique my interest."
There was a peculiar confidence on her face as she said it. However loose and scatterbrained she seemed on a regular day, she was, without question, one of the greatest magicians on the continent. And a condition spoken once from a magician's lips was never something that could be casually taken back. If I couldn't produce a spell that satisfied her within those two short months, she had no intention of sending me to the academy.
A spell that would surprise my master.
Even the me from before the regression could have made one, somehow. I had always possessed that one talent — the Heart, the gift for constructing a spell's very skeleton. The problem would have been the time limit. There was no way I could have made it within two months, before the academy's opening ceremony.
But now was different.
A spell even my master had never thought to attempt.
I was someone who had already completed it once. In the final moments of my last life, I had woven a spell that ran time itself backward with my own two hands.
That was more than enough.
Master of the Black Rose Magic Tower. The youngest 7th-Tier Great Magician. The Cannibal Witch, among other things.
There were any number of names for Violetta, the 7th-Tier magician. If she had to pick the one she liked best—
Master.
That plain, unadorned title her disciple used for her. Nothing else sounded quite so good.
That's strange.
Violetta propped her chin on her hand and watched her disciple across the table with an interested gaze as he cleared the empty dishes. Just now, she had made the utterly unreasonable demand that he construct a spell formula capable of surprising her within two months — and he had accepted it without so much as a blink.
Does he actually think it's possible?
She knew better than anyone that her disciple was a freakish genius when it came to the Heart — the talent for laying a spell's foundation. But creating a formula from nothing in a mere two months, and with a mana capacity the size of a mouse's tail at that, was not a matter of genius. It was physically impossible. The disciple she knew would have scrunched up his brow and sighed, Master, are you telling me to die?
The look in his eyes now was strangely still, and solid. As if the condition she had set wasn't even an obstacle. There was even a faint, unhurried ease about him.
Since when has he had eyes like that?
As of yesterday, he hadn't been like this at all. He had been a cute little kid overflowing with talent but drooping because he had no mana. Overnight, it was as if he had leapt across decades and come back from standing face-to-face with some vast, unreachable truth.
An ordinary magician might have felt a sense of alienation, or wariness, at such a sudden change in their disciple. But she was no ordinary master. She was the master of the continent's foremost magic tower, a Great Magician who was mad for the truth.
Well. It doesn't seem like he's changed for the worse.
If anything, Violetta wet her dry lips and felt a delicious shiver climb her spine. Because her instincts were roaring. She had no idea what he was preparing — but she was certain he would bring her something that would blow her expectations out of the water.
Violetta, the 7th-Tier Great Magician they called a witch. A deep smile spread across her lips for the first time in a very long while. How long had it been since her pure magical curiosity had burned this hot?
Watching her disciple's back as he walked toward the kitchen with the empty dishes, she murmured to herself, thoroughly satisfied.
I really did make the right call, taking on a disciple.