The First Ten
Chris floated Segorin's torso, frozen hard as an icicle, and went back to the cave. That accursed cave, where a sickening stench never left the air.
"I'm back."
At the greeting, Grain eyed the corpse with open displeasure.
"We already have enough material."
"Richard put in a special order. He bent at the waist and begged, so I promised him Motaro within a month."
"And who are you to be making promises?"
"The one and only disciple of the peerless hero born of Mick Magic Tower — the great mage who knows how to make Motaro, the prodigy who raised the body arts to the level of true art."
"Can't say you're wrong."
Chris smiled like a court sycophant.
"Hehehe. You will make it, won't you?"
"Depends on how you work."
Chris folded until his forehead nearly touched the ground.
"I'll work myself to the bone."
"Good. I'll drive you hard."
He said as much, but Chris's duties did not increase. He went on exactly as before, cleaning and the rest of the menial work, while everything that actually mattered in the making of Motaro — the blending of herbs, the regulation of mana — Grain kept entirely to himself.
Scrubbing the floor with a brush, Chris asked, "Why did they stay in the first place?"
"They?"
"The mages who came down from the sky ten thousand years ago."
"You didn't know?"
"I've heard the stories, but I suspect parts of them were twisted. You know the truth, don't you, Master?"
"I do."
"Why did they stay?"
"Some were too greedy. They dawdled, snatching up this and that, and missed their chance. Some had offended their betters and been exiled. Some had committed crimes and hidden themselves in this world to escape their enemies. Some stayed for the pleasure of massacring commoners. Some would rather have been the head of a chicken than the tail of an ox. The reasons were all over the place."
Chris began pinning each of them down with a single word.
"So they stayed because they were the greedy, the unlikable, criminals, butchers, and the ambitious."
"Back then, they didn't know this place was a sewer."
Hearing the world he had been born and raised in called a sewer put Chris in a foul mood.
"Why is this place a sewer?"
"The mana's far too thin."
"It isn't."
Chris flared his nostrils and drew a deep breath.
"The mana's plenty rich."
The stench rushed in with it, and he wrinkled his face.
"That's because you've never seen a real world. This is genuinely thin. They meant to live here for a while, build their strength, and then return to their own world, but that was when they ran into a serious problem. The mana was so thin that raising one's realm was difficult. Thin mana meant scarce resources. Scarce resources meant fiercer competition. And once the competition grew fierce..."
He knocked his fists together.
"Wham! War broke out. A great many mages died."
"I've heard something like that. When mages ruled the world, every kind of cruelty followed, and it looked as if the world itself might be destroyed, so they raised the magic towers to stop it."
"It had nothing to do with the world ending. They called a truce because if they kept fighting among themselves, they would all go down together. The fear that they were hunting the land bare, and that the resources would run out, played its part in the compromise as well."
"So they built the magic towers."
"To be precise, their disciples did."
"Why didn't they rule directly?"
"The situation was extremely complicated. They did put up the towers as a compromise, but they got along terribly."
"It would be strange if the greedy, the unlikable, the criminals, the butchers, and the ambitious got along."
Grain barked a laugh.
"You've got it. On top of that, most of them were in poor shape. They'd fought so savagely that their injuries were severe. If they hadn't been hurt that badly, they never would have compromised in the first place. As you said, they were poor stock to begin with."
Chris tilted his head.
"Hadn't healing magic developed by then?"
"These weren't injuries healing magic could mend. Recovery would have taken two hundred years at the least. For one reason and another, the towers split into the hundreds, and as the years passed the great towers swallowed the small... After all that gathering and scattering, this is what we were left with."
"After two hundred years, they should have been able to rule in person."
"Many of them never recovered, and died. This is only my own thought, but I don't believe they died natural deaths."
"Then what?"
Grain's expression darkened.
"I suspect the ones who recovered first fell on the others and devoured them. That's my guess. In any case, when they looked around later, only ten of them were left alive. How do you rule a world with ten people? And the disciples had grown heads of their own and were thinking of other things."
"So what did they do?"
"They decided it was better to pretend to forgive the disciples who had rebelled, take resources from them as support, and scheme their way upward, rather than fight them."
"Didn't you say they couldn't raise their realm?"
"There was still hope then. Everyone else was dead, and only ten remained. Pour the resources of the whole world into those ten, and they might raise their realm and open a passage. That was the hopeful view."
"If you raise your realm, you can open one?"
"Reach the Combination Realm, and you can open a passage alone."
Chris thought it through.
So after Ring Binding comes Absorption, and after Absorption, Combination.
"If one of them opens a passage, the rest can just follow up in a line..."
Grain cut him off with a snort.
"If that worked, why did the dragons open a massive gate in the sky? A gate opened from the Combination Realm lets only one person through."
"Why?"
"The passage is narrow, and it doesn't stay open long. Ring Binding and Absorption can't cross it in that little time. The passage closes halfway, and they die."
"So has any mage ever ascended?"
Grain answered flatly.
"No."
"Why not?"
"As I've told you again and again, the problem was that this world's mana is too thin. Forget the Combination Realm. Even the Absorption Realm was difficult."
"Pardine, the master of the Sitta Ruins, is Absorption Realm."
"If you heard how many resources that man poured into raising his realm, you'd faint dead away. Now the important resources are gone, so it's truly impossible."
"Once the original ten realized they could never reach the Combination Realm, what did they do?"
"The original ten?"
"They're the first New Mages of our world. So, the First Ten."
"Right. The First Ten. Those First Ten decided to pool their strength the way the dragons had, and open a large passage."
"The ten of them?"
"No. It wasn't a thing ten people could manage. They summoned every Ring Binding mage from every magic tower."
"They crushed them with force."
"No. They persuaded them with words."
"Aha. I see."
Chris flung aside the brush and slapped his knee.
"Just as you're buying cooperation with Motaro now, they tempted them with Motaro back then."
"No. Words were enough."
"You said their heads had grown and they were thinking of other things. They were traitors. Mere words could persuade them?"
"They were choking on their own limits. They'd trained until they bled and become Ultimate Mages, and the end of their lifespan was coming on. The Absorption Realm was impossible... They were desperate. Like Julien."
"If every magic tower on the continent had cooperated, they could have opened the gate. So why is there no record of the sky gate ever opening again?"
"Because they couldn't open it."
"Why not?"
Grain bellowed.
"You fool!"
Then he shrugged.
"A dimensional wall stands between the Middle Realm and our world. You think it's easy to hold a large passage open for a long time? Even the dragons couldn't, so they had to beg the Middle Realm's cooperation. A third of them died for it."
"Then the mages' dragon hunt on the Day the Heavens Opened was something arranged in advance."
"Yes."
"Why did the dragons choose to move their entire race, instead of letting only those who qualified ascend? A third of them were sacrificed for that."
"The dragons were starving for resources too. They foresaw that if things went on as they were, they would weaken until the race withered away. So they decided to migrate everyone while they still had the strength."
"And did those mages seek the Middle Realm's cooperation, the way the dragons did?"
"The dragons could, because dragons who had ascended first negotiated for them. Those mages had no one above to negotiate with. Coldly speaking, it wasn't the Middle Realm's great mages who remained on this land. The ones who stayed were flawed, whether in skill or in background. They had no decent connections up there. And they had nothing to offer in payment. A dragon — the heart first, then the scales, the whiskers, the horns, the hide, the bones, the blood, the flesh — all of it is a precious resource, so negotiation was possible. They had treasures hoarded over long ages, too. But those mages had nothing."
"They had Motaro."
"There's far more Motaro up there. That wouldn't do. We had to open the gate by our own power."
Chris nodded, satisfied, then a fresh question rose and he cocked his head.
"If opening the gate took that long, the towers' Ring Binding mages would never have cooperated. The lifespan you can gain through Ring Binding averages four hundred years, and even at the outside, a thousand is the limit. If the gate opens after you're dead, it's useless."
"You can't lengthen a life, but you can stop it from running."
"How?"
Grain grinned, pared the frozen corpse of the Seed Cultivation mage with mana, and dropped it into the cauldron. Watching three torsos go in, Chris spoke.
"You're saying they froze mages whose lives were running out?"
"They did."
"Two-thirds of a human body is water. Does that even work?"
Water expands when it freezes. Imagine the blood in the vessels of the brain freezing and swelling. The brain is ruined. And blood does not travel only through the brain. There is nowhere in the body it does not go. Every other organ would be destroyed as well.
"You drain all the blood."
"Then they die."
"Replace it with mana. That's why only a high-level mage, one who can live on mana instead of food, can use the freezing treatment. High-tier Ring Binding, at the least."
"That would burn through a ridiculous number of mana stones."
"Which is why they killed every one of them."
"What? What did you say?"
"Opening the gate takes an astronomical number of mana stones. You don't spend stones that precious on the wicked bastards who rose against their masters. Everyone who cooperated, believing the freezing treatment would let them leap across the years, became a living mana stone."
Grain laughed long and loud, as if the memory delighted him.
Chris was struck dumb.
"The First Ten were truly vicious."
"I understand their position."
"You understand that?"
"They took ignorant nobodies, taught them, and raised them into remarkable mages, and the moment the masters were injured, the disciples rebelled! That will not do."
Chris clicked his tongue.
"Not a single Ring Binding mage saw through it?"
"The day their lives would end was right in front of them. They had no mind left for looking at the situation coldly."
"Even desperate, it's strange that not one of them noticed."
"The sharp ones were disposed of in advance. Those elders were thorough. The funny part is this. Among the disciples' own disciples, quite a few guessed what was happening, and as if they had promised it to one another, every one of them kept silent."
"They betrayed their masters."
Chris cursed mages in his heart.
These bastards treat a disciple betraying his master as an everyday thing.
Then again, there was no point cursing the disciples. They say the lower stream runs clear only when the upper stream does, and with every master in that state, how could a decent one ever come of it?
"Why did they do it?"
"Who seized the magic towers and ran them as they pleased? The disciples of the First Ten. From where their disciples stood, was there any reason to like those masters? Precious resources that ought to have been theirs were being squandered wholesale, all so the masters could stretch their own lives. Of course they were furious."
"They decided they were better off without masters like that."
"Exactly."
"So the first-generation mages who helped build the towers and the ruins all left the stage as living mana stones."
"They received the price of betrayal. They brought it on themselves."
"Then the First Ten who came down from the Middle Realm — Generation Zero — seized the magic towers."
"No."
"Why not?"
"I told you. There were too few of them. They couldn't even all be active at once."
"Why...?"
"If the first generation had grown old and come to the time to die, how much worse was Generation Zero? Even the Absorption Realm couldn't endure so long a span of years, so they had no choice but to lay the freezing treatment on themselves. But if all of them froze, who would manage the ruins? Who would manage the mana stones? And who would wake them? They formed shifts and took turns freezing and thawing."
"What about the second generation?"
"They shoved the first generation aside, lived well and ate well, then grew old and died."
"So they died in the end."
"Even a mage can't do anything about the years as they flow."
"The second generation never thought of cooperating with them?"
"They had watched their own masters become living mana stones. Would they cooperate? A few who were in the dark, and a few who couldn't let go of life until the very end, did seek it out, but none of them met a good end."
Well, of course they didn't.
"And so, as the years passed, the original purpose of the ruins was forgotten as a matter of course, and things became what they are now."