When I lifted the entrance flap of the shabby tent, what appeared before me was a warm room.
A place of rest, wrapped snugly in the scent of burning firewood.
It was a cozy-looking room that somehow reminded me of my father’s hunting lodge, which I had once visited long ago.
“...What on earth is this?”
“It’s something like a portable shelter that mages carry around. With this, you don’t have to worry about sleeping out in the open.”
The mage, half her face glowing orange from the burning logs, spoke as she reclined in a rocking chair nearby.
“Just sit somewhere and rest. This place is completely cut off from the outside, so even if you sit on the floor, it’ll be warm.”
“If you can use a space like this whenever you want, wasn’t there no need to sleep at an inn? It feels like a waste of money.”
“Urgh! No, this place is better than sleeping outdoors, but it doesn’t relieve fatigue as quickly as an inn does... More importantly, there isn’t even a bed here.”
No bed?
At her words, I looked around the room.
She was right.
As she said, there was a fireplace, a rocking chair, shelves, a table, and so on, but no bed.
“Why isn’t there a bed? If there were a bed, you’d recover from fatigue faster...”
“Because you mustn’t fall too deeply asleep here. Half a day or so is fine, but if you lose consciousness here for two or three days, it becomes a serious problem.”
“A serious problem?”
When I asked back at the mage’s ominous words, she smiled softly and opened her mouth.
“You’ll learn this at Academia anyway, but to tell you in advance, if you lose consciousness for a long time in a space made of this sort of mystery, you’ll inevitably suffer something quite unpleasant. In a way, you could say that we, having entered this space, are resting on a precarious rope.”
For my sake, since I did not quite understand, she kindly explained.
Mystic spaces like this, created by using aether to expand space and the like, always had invisible torrents of aether winding through every corner of the room.
It was as though the flow of aether became twisted around a great bulge in the middle of a stream.
Because of that, she said, if one lost consciousness for a long time in a place like this, the body and soul could separate, the soul swept away by the torrent of aether, never to recover its body again, leaving the material realm in which we lived.
If one was unlucky, the soul might fall straight into the hell where demons lived and spend eternity as the plaything of those demons.
“...So demons really do exist?”
“Is that so strange? Your territory has a church too, so surely you’ve heard about gods and demons. Mysteries related to demons fall under the church’s jurisdiction, not ours, so mages rarely have occasion to meet demons. But demons certainly do exist. Gloomy, unpleasant things.”
Then, this time, she explained demons to me.
They were beings who appeared in forms that stirred human desires, such as demons wreathed in enormous flames that filled onlookers with fear, or demons who took the form of an alluring member of the opposite sex to tempt humans.
Demons carried aether with them as naturally as breathing, and some mages with more radical ideas believed that demons themselves were masses of aether that possessed personalities, and made contact with them.
In order to obtain even higher concentrations of aether.
“It’s foolish. The aether demons possess is not the pure aether we mages use, but tainted aether steeped in one particular concept. It’s wise not to go anywhere near such aether. If a demon appears, the aether you’ve painstakingly accumulated until then could be contaminated by it.”
“Then there must be no mages who make contact with demons.”
At my words, she bit her lip as if slightly flustered, then let out a faint sigh.
“That is... actually, there are quite a lot of them. Aether isn’t contaminated after only a few meetings, and more importantly, demons are cunning. So at the very first meeting, they give a ‘gift.’ They might hand over for free the aether you would have had to gather over years, or grant useful abilities or knowledge.”
Ah.
So demons were like drugs?
If years of effort could shoot upward with one little click of meeting a demon, it would be hard to resist the temptation.
In game terms, wouldn’t it be like an experience point burning event?
“Hmm. Since we’re on the subject, I’ll just tell you. What demons want most is a mage’s soul. Be sure to keep that in mind, and if you ever have the chance to meet a demon, remember it when you make a deal.”
“What? Didn’t you just say it was wise not to go anywhere near one if a demon appears?”
“What I said before was merely the orthodox answer... And mages are, by nature, a people who take risks because of curiosity. If you become a mage, you’ll come into contact with demons anyway, so as your senior, isn’t it better for me to tell you what to watch out for rather than blindly oppose it?”
So in the end, what she was saying was: even if I tell you not to meet demons, you’ll end up meeting them out of curiosity anyway.
So rather than simply saying, Don’t meet them! she thought it was better to tell me what to be careful of when I did meet one?
How reasonable.
“If you ask how I know these things, I only know them through experience. Generally, seeds of mages who can resonate with aether tend to be very curious, you see? So instead of forcing them not to do something by flatly telling them no, the survival rate is higher if you teach them how to at least stay alive if they do end up doing it. That’s why I’m telling you.”
“...Do you have some kind of mind-reading ability? I didn’t say anything.”
“Hehe. Your thoughts show plainly on your face. If I couldn’t read that, I’d be disqualified as a mage.”
Was that so?
Poke, poke.
As I touched my face here and there at her words, she smiled faintly as if looking at an adorable younger sibling and said,
“You really are simple and honest, not like a noble at all. How did someone like you come out of a noble family?”
“...I think I asked this last time too, but am I really that out of place among nobles?”
“Rather than using a negative word like out of place... I’d say you seem to have a warm heart unlike a noble. It’s a compliment. The nobles of the Holy City are so obsessed with making money that sometimes, when I watch them from nearby, there are scoundrels who make me wonder if they’re even human.”
If I belonged to the church, I would have gone around exorcising the nobles of the Holy City rather than beating down demons. There are so many demons who don’t even seem human strolling around openly, so what is the church doing not dragging the nobles away? As she joked like that, I quietly looked at her, then shook my head lightly to gather my thoughts.
“Mm. The things you’re telling me are all interesting. In the territory where I’ve lived until now, stories about demons were just silly tales treated like ghost stories.”
“That’s thanks to the church having dealt with demons well so far without showing itself. And the Holy City has so many people that one’s acquaintances or even oneself may end up caught up in such mystic disasters, but in areas outside the Holy City, where there are fewer people, it’s quite rare to experience a mystic disaster in one’s lifetime. Also, some mystic creatures grow uncontrollably stronger just from many people knowing of their existence, so information is controlled for that reason as well.”
The mage explained that to me and added one more fact.
That was why the Empire forcibly conscripted someone like me, a seed who resonated with aether, into Academia.
She said beings who resonated with aether inevitably drew the attention of mystic creatures or became more exposed to mystic disasters.
Before the Empire was established, the population was small, and even if several people were killed by mystic creatures, such events often ended as nothing more than ominous rumors circulating in the region. But for the Empire, now a massive nation, this was something it could never overlook.
Its own people were not being killed by soldiers of an enemy nation, but continuously by unknown beings?
That was like persistent, unpredictable terrorism occurring at random times and places.
The losses might be smaller than fighting a war against another country, but if such mystic disasters were left unmanaged and neglected, that alone would already disqualify it as a state.
It would be no different from abandoning the contract to protect its people, the most important condition for the existence of a nation.
“So I hope you don’t harbor hostility just because the Empire is conscripting you in such a heavy-handed way. In the end, it is a matter of probability, but if you hadn’t followed me and had remained in your territory... mm, something bad would have happened to your family.”
“I see.”
“An old castle is a place where aether gathers easily. Since you would have served as a wedge drawing in aether, you would have attracted the attention of unpleasant things. It would have been a trivial matter you could sufficiently prevent if you possessed mystical knowledge, but if you didn’t know such things, you would think you had been afflicted by a curse you could not resist, and end up cursing your own existence.”
As the mage said that, the firelight from the fireplace blocked her expression, casting deep shadows over her face, so I could not make it out in detail.
But for some reason, I felt as though the unseen expression on her face was sorrowful.
Because her figure looked exactly like that of someone regretting the past.