“What is this…? The future… changed?”
—Bzzzt. Bzzzzzt!
The afterimage of that dazzlingly brilliant [Vision] engraved on my retinas began to shatter, warping into bizarre static like a broken screen.
A vast silver meteor shower. The overwhelming majesty of a great mage who swept away tens of thousands of magical beasts in a single breath.
Those radiant silver fragments distorted into a dull, old amber glow, painting an entirely new scene.
“Bubble, bubble.”
‘…Huh?’
The newly overlaid future was a small log cabin in some nameless, quiet countryside village.
A simple kitchen where warm afternoon sunlight seeped in.
There stood Camellia, wearing an old but cleanly patched apron.
She hummed as she stirred a steaming pot. The bubbling stew was full of generously cut chunks of meat, and her cheeks were flushed with peaceful vitality.
There wasn’t even a trace of the dignity of a great mage who would shake the world. She was simply… an ordinary, “happy housewife” one might find anywhere.
The moment I confirmed that vision, my instincts writhed in my head like they were having a mad seizure.
‘……Have you lost your damn mind?’
My vision went dark, and my breath caught in my throat.
What kind of catastrophic mega-bad news had just dropped?
How the hell had the confirmed future of a great mage who would conquer the world crash all the way down into some apron-wearing village woman?!
A drop in market value?
No, this wasn’t on the level of a drop. The fundamental identity of the company had changed.
Wasn’t this like a top-ranked IT unicorn company that was supposed to dominate the world suddenly switching industries overnight into a neighborhood shop selling handmade jam?
Seriously, what is this? Stop messing around and give me back my great mage already.
‘There’s no way this cutesy, giggly, slice-of-life healing future is my revenue model!!’
With trembling hands, I wiped my face.
The greatest stock of my life, the one I firmly believed would inevitably skyrocket someday.
Camellia.
Seeing a future where she had fallen into an ordinary village woman and was enjoying modest happiness made my insides crumble beyond recognition, until they simply scattered into empty air.
‘Don’t tell me…….’
I looked up at the night sky with blank eyes.
It felt as if an invisible system, or the damn god of this world, was whispering to me.
[ Did you think this was the bottom? But… ]
[ Even rock bottom has a bottom! ]
“Don’t give me that bullshit…….”
Two years.
I spent two years trying to raise this girl into a great mage. Do you know what I did in the gutters of the slums to earn money?!
I carried smuggled goods while avoiding the soldiers’ eyes, and I never slept more than four hours a day. To feed her mana potions, I lived off hard scraps of bread, and even tonight, I tore apart my precious magic scrolls to make it all the way here.
Every time I coughed up blood, I told myself.
That this blood and sweat would someday return with tens of thousands of times the interest. That my brutal “value investment” was not wrong!
And yet the result is just that happy village woman boiling potato stew?!
‘I oppose this future…… I absolutely refuse to acknowledge it!!!’
With my mentality shattered to pieces, I began desperately negotiating in my head with some imaginary thing in the air.
‘Hey, you damn fate! Fine, I’ll concede a hundred times over that it’s nice to see Camellia smiling like that.’
But!
‘If she becomes a great mage, she’ll be way happier, damn it!!’
Huh?! If she becomes a great mage, she won’t have to live in some log cabin—she can start every morning cutting into the finest steak in a high-class mansion built of marble!
And that’s not all. Once she gains wealth, honor will follow.
She’ll be able to live far more arrogantly and abundantly than she did back when she was the young lady of the Valentine Count family.
Most of all…… revenge!
Those noble bastards who shattered her mana circuits and mocked her while cutting off her parents’ heads. The overwhelming power to turn them into ash with a silver meteor shower!
She has the talent to obtain all of that, and I’m supposed to be satisfied with a future where she just stirs stew in some rural corner?
Fine. For Camellia’s true happiness, and for the recovery of my investment! I have to stop that cheap, “fake” ending.
“N-Nasus……? Why do you look like that? Are you feeling sick…… Eek!”
Camellia, who had been in my arms, flinched in fright and hunched her shoulders.
“Camellia.”
I tightly gripped her slender shoulders.
To stop that horrible vision I had just seen, that “stew ending” where my blood-like investment funds exploded like fireworks in midair, I had to overhaul her mindset right now.
“Listen carefully. Look me straight in the eyes, Camellia.”
“Yes? O-okay…….”
Staring into her trembling eyes, like those of a frightened puppy, I poured out the sincerity boiling up from deep inside my stomach.
“You…… are not someone who should be satisfied with a backwater like this.”
“……Pardon?”
“You will shine brilliantly! You’ll become the one and only moonlight in the night sky that no one would dare look up at! You possess infinite potential. No, even the word potential is too shabby before you. You’re the one and only jewel of this world!”
It wasn’t empty flattery.
Camellia truly had the latent ability to become a “great mage” in the future,
and she was the “blue-chip stock” that would genuinely turn my life around.
“Ah…… um…….”
At my ferocious torrent of fawning, Camellia’s cheeks instantly turned as red as tomatoes.
Her eyes wavered all over the place, unable to settle.
“N-Nasus……. I’m just useless…….”
“Don’t even put the word useless in your mouth! You’re great! The best! The strongest! Got it?! I’ll… definitely make you that way!”
“Eek! O-okay! I understand, so please calm…….”
Her flustered, embarrassed state.
‘Good. At this point, she must have clearly understood just how highly I value her “worth.” Now she won’t dream of some comfortable country-mouse life at all, and she’ll devote herself to the path of a great mage…….’
—Gurgle.
“…Urp!?”
At that moment, something hot surged up from my stomach.
“Cough, hack!”
Dark-red clots of blood squeezed through my fingers and splattered onto the floor with dull sounds.
“N-Nasus?!”
The color drained from Camellia’s face in an instant, turning her as pale as paper. With her large eyes filling with shock as the last thing I saw,
my vision flickered and darkened.
Whirl.
As if the world’s gravity had suddenly twisted, everything spun around and around, and my knees buckled helplessly.
“No, Nasus! Stay with me, please stay with me!”
Camellia’s scream as she rushed toward my body plunging to the floor grew distant, as if I were hearing it underwater.
‘Damn it… I did push myself too hard recently, trying to pay back all that increased interest.’
Poor meals.
Short sleeping hours.
An illness left untreated for far too long.
The days I had spent running here and there to earn a few coins.
The moment I felt relief that I had corrected Camellia’s mindset, everything I had suppressed to the limit burst forth at once and crashed over my body.
As I collapsed onto the floor, which was growing colder and colder, I felt my consciousness slowly cooling as well.
……My stock, which would definitely skyrocket someday.
But that “someday”…
was after I kicked the bucket, huh…….
Life sure is damn shitty.
“Sniff, no, Nasus! Please, please open your eyes!”
Camellia’s two hands, cupping my cheeks, were spasming uncontrollably as if she were having a fit.
“Don’t die. Again! Again, right in front of my eyes… this time too, like this… leaving only me behind…….”
When her tearing sobs reached even the pitch-black abyss,
within my fading consciousness,
I definitely felt it.
A small but warm ripple rising from Camellia’s slender palms as they held my face.
A warm cluster of light gently wrapped around my frozen cheeks.
This sensation is……
I remember it.
Long ago, when I was injured while working as a laborer at the royal construction site,
it was the very miracle granted to me by the apprentice priest stationed there.
The moment I faced that light, I twisted up my bloodstained lips.
‘Ahh. As expected…….’
Two years.
A short time for some,
an endlessly long time for others.
After passing through that time,
the chart that had hit limit-down and found its floor
kicked off from that very bottom
and finally began raising a pillar toward limit-up.
…
“HODLing….”
“Nasus? Can you hear me? For now, as emergency treatment…….”
“Wins…….”
With those words, I completely lost consciousness.
Certain of the birth of something radiant that would save my life.