The Tower Master (1)
If you asked anyone to name the three people they most respected, certain figures were bound to appear without fail.
1. Gilbert Rosenbach.
2. Oscar Sage.
3. Ado Bale.
The first was the name of his beloved teacher, a man who had been like a father to him, and the second was himself. It sounded like boasting, perhaps, but then again, he had been the greatest mage of the past several centuries.
'More than anything…… I doubt I could ever live that way again, even if I were given the chance.'
Wasn't it for good reason that his past self had been called the flawless mage? Stepping back and looking at the human known as Oscar Sage from a distance, he was a hero straight out of a fairy tale. So utterly perfect that he had become an icon of flawlessness, where even a single blemish could never be forgiven.
'And the third—anyone from the White Tower would name him.'
Ado Bale, the first Tower Master of the White Tower. He was a great man whom Oscar genuinely revered—and an eccentric, and a wielder of a special attribute.
"This tower shall become a place that produces the greatest, strongest mages in all of history."
With those words, Ado Bale raised a fifty-story cylindrical tower out of empty land. Once the first tower stood, the others sprang up in a mad scramble to follow, and only then did that gleaming white spire come to be called the White Magic Tower.
In other words, Ado Bale was the progenitor of every magic tower in existence—the pioneer who had invented the very concept. Wasn't it telling that one of his epithets was the Prophet?
'His thinking was ahead of his time, but his abilities were straight-up broken, too.'
Among special-attribute magics, spatial manipulation was considered exceedingly rare, and Ado Bale had made a hobby of remodeling his own tower with it. That, in turn, had become the defining signature of the White Tower, which aside from being the first magic tower had otherwise had nothing to recommend it.
'Though even his expanded spaces were tailored strictly to the first Master's personal tastes.'
The flower garden and the campus-like grounds—wide, airy, and perfect for clearing one's head—were fine enough. But among them were zones so baffling that no one could fathom why they existed at all.
'I knew he was an eccentric, since I knew that about him…….'
But who would have guessed he was this impossible?
What snapped Oscar out of his thoughts was a bark of anger.
"Seventeenth Master! Are you listening to a word I'm saying!?"
"Ah—yes. Listening intently, sir."
"Then tell me what I said just now."
"……Those who receive the knowledge passed down from their predecessors have a duty to hand it safely to the generations that follow?"
He hadn't heard a word of it, honestly, but a rough answer like that would probably land close to correct. Nine times out of ten, the old man's lectures all ran along the same lines.
"Hmm. So you were listening. Now, continuing where I left off—when I was thirty-two years old……"
"Excuse me, Lord Ado Bale."
Oscar carefully raised his hand and cut him off. Left unchecked, this lecture clearly had no end in sight.
"Forgive me for interrupting such pearl after pearl of wisdom, but I don't have much time left."
"Hm? What's this nonsense? You don't look like a man on borrowed time to me."
"I made a promise about the date I'd return. And I have to return as a 4th-level mage, at that."
The nagging had already been going on for two days. Honestly, he hadn't expected a lecture to drag on this long. He needed to descend the mountain and catch a carriage back to Shilin right this instant if he had any hope of making his promised deadline.
'And even if I train like a madman the whole way back in the carriage……'
There was no guarantee he could reach the 4th level. No—truthfully, some progress had shown itself. But anyone could see that the odds of failure were far greater if he thought about it realistically, even a little.
Just then, Ado Bale spoke in a dangerously bored voice.
"Well, well…… So you cut off the words of a senior like the very heavens over something as trivial as that?"
"It is not trivial! It's a matter of grave importance to me—whether or not I ever see my precious students again!"
"Hah? Do you realize whose presence you're raising your voice in!?"
In that instant, Ado flicked a finger without moving from his seat. Space warped, and a flying flick smacked Oscar squarely on the forehead.
"Ow!"
Oscar hastily rubbed the burning spot. It hurt. He could feel a swelling bump rising under his fingertips.
'How many times has it been now?'
In the early stages of the lecture, he had owned up to his guilt cleanly and offered his forehead without complaint. After all, wasn't he the arch-criminal who had blown away hundreds of years of the White Tower's accumulated history in one careless pull?
But as time went on, the blows grew stronger, until at some point they hurt too much to ignore.
'From then on I gritted my teeth and tried to dodge……'
All attempts had failed miserably. Worse, he hadn't the faintest clue how one was supposed to avoid the attack at all.
'He keeps his mana hidden to the very last moment, then manifests it the instant his finger flicks.'
Far from sensing any tell, by the time Oscar collected himself the blow had already landed. And this was how much it hurt even while his entire body was sheathed in mana.
If he were honest about his feelings right now: this was a man he never wanted as an enemy, no matter what.
'If that attack had been anything other than a flick……'
A shiver crawled up his spine. If the man had merely thrown out a Wind Cutter just now, Oscar would have died without so much as a reaction. He was beginning to understand why Ado Bale had been judged to have no equal in his era.
"Don't concern yourself with the time."
"I say again, sir—this is a matter of enormous importance to me……"
"Time flows at a different ratio here than it does outside."
"……Pardon?"
When Oscar blinked back at him, dumbfounded, Ado snorted in reply.
"You've spent about two days here, so by outside reckoning, roughly two minutes have passed."
"……Really?"
"Seventeenth Master, do I look idle enough to joke around while dragging along a green junior like yourself?"
"……"
Oscar hesitated for a moment, but seeing the old man's brow furrow deeper by the second, he scrambled to respond.
"You do not."
"Ha. Groveling and begging forgiveness, nothing less. If you still can't trust me, say the word. I'll send you out right now."
"……"
Is this man the god of push-and-pull?
Oscar felt himself being toyed with, yet he couldn't quite bring himself to nod. 'If what he says is true, then this is a boon—a stroke of destiny.'
It was a tremendous opportunity that no amount of gold could buy anywhere else. Every single minute mattered to him right now. In fact, even through those two days of nagging, he had never once stopped his breathing technique. That meant mana was accumulating and his circuits were stabilizing with every passing moment.
In the end, Oscar made up his mind and flashed a sheepish smile.
"Not at all. The words of the venerable first Tower Master haven't even finished—where would I possibly go? Pray continue your biting lectures so this worthless junior can come to his senses."
"……Don't gamble, boy. A man whose insides show through as plainly as yours is exactly the sort who dies at the table."
Ado let out a laugh of sheer disbelief, then asked:
"By the way, Seventeenth Master. You reached the 9th level before you died, didn't you?"
"I did."
"And yet in a new body you still haven't managed the 4th level. Your growth rate is rather slow. Surely you haven't been lazing about just because you got to live twice?"
"Absolutely not."
Oscar protested as if genuinely aggrieved—on this point, he truly was.
"Judged purely on the intensity and efficiency of my training, I should be several times faster than in my past life. Ever since I opened my eyes in this body, I've trained without even sleeping properly, and my personal cultivation method runs around the clock. It's just that this body's physical circuits were badly tangled, so I'm not seeing the speed I hoped for."
"Hmm…… Still can't quite fathom why you'd be this slow, though."
Ado cocked his head, then reluctantly conceded the point and changed the subject.
"Well, fine enough. Enough with the small talk—let's start talking about space."
"I'm all ears."
"First, Seventeenth Master. What do you believe spatial magic to be?"
Space. Among all the special attributes, it was an extraordinarily rare ability, and the publicly known information about it was thin. Oscar thought it over carefully before venturing an answer.
"As I understand it, magic that lets you store things away, or cross space itself."
"Hm. Simple, but not far off the mark. Then do you have any notion of how that's possible?"
Oscar shook his head. He might have climbed to the 9th level once, but his knowledge of spatial magic was nonexistent. It was a school absolutely impossible to handle unless one was born with a special attribute.
Time and space—the higher-order concepts that fell squarely into that category.
'If spatial magic were a discipline humanity could actually understand, no one would have needed to stake their lives on developing trains or airships.'
Blink and teleportation were the exclusive possessions of spatial users. If everyone could use those spells, there would have been no reason to build such vehicles at all.
Ado Bale began to speak.
"Listen well. This world is woven from unseen threads, and those threads entangle, contract, and expand with every passing moment. Spatial magic is the craft of pushing and pulling those threads to reshape them."
"……Threads, you say?"
Oscar tilted his head. He was capable of seeing the world down to its individual particles if he so wished, yet he had never once glimpsed anything resembling threads.
"Don't try to understand it with that clever head of yours. Space is a magic closer to instinct than to scholarship."
"Closer to instinct……"
"From this moment on, I will share that instinct with you. In return—touch nothing."
Touch nothing?
Just as Oscar opened his mouth to ask what that meant, his eyes went wide.
"……!"
In an instant, the entire world began to appear as threads. The earthen floor they sat on, the weeds growing from it, even the wind drifting around them.
Everything was made of countless strands.
"Lord Ado, this is……"
"This is the world as it appears to those who command space."
"It's incredible."
"……I see. So to your eyes, this looks wondrous."
The playfulness drained from Ado Bale's voice, and gravity took its place.
"I have commanded space for hundreds of years now, and still this sight frightens me."
"……Frightens you?"
Oscar's face betrayed his incomprehension. Granted, a world made of threads was unsettling to look at, but there was no sense of fear in it.
Seeming to read that very thought, Ado wore an expression that was half knowing, half wistful.
"You wouldn't understand now. One taste of it yourself will teach you more than a thousand words."
Ado plucked roughly ten threads from the empty air and held them out to him.
"Normally you'd need to reach at least the 7th level to pull this many. But I'll be assisting you for now, so go ahead—give them a pull."
"……There are hardly any here, though?"
"Less talking. Move."
"Just pull them, like th—?"
Without a flicker of hesitation, Oscar casually took the threads he'd been handed and tugged.
An alarm screamed through his mind. In the same instant, he shot to his feet reflexively, his whole body trembling.
He had pulled only a handful of threads—and the White Tower, still mid-construction, had vanished without a trace.
As if nothing had ever stood there at all, Ado gazed out over the hollow emptiness and spoke.
"Doubt it without end. Guard it. Fear it. Misdraw even a single thread, and space will carry the thing you treasure most away to somewhere you will never, ever find again."
"……"
What if it hadn't been the tower that vanished just now—what if it had been a person?
Slowly, the sight before his eyes began to frighten Oscar after all.
"But don't worry."
Ado Bale rested a hand on his shoulder.
"I'll teach you every fundamental there is before I let you go—so that you never repeat my mistakes."
As he spoke those quiet words, gazing out over the empty ground where the tower had been—
his face looked, for some reason, terribly sad.