Where there is black, there is white.
Where there is joy, there is sorrow.
Where there is wealth, there is poverty.
Not everyone can be happy, and not everyone can be unhappy.
Such is the law of the world.
And the magical city of Tetradia was the place that followed that law most faithfully.
As befitted a city of mages who studied and made use of the laws of the world, the law of duality was laid bare there as well.
—A new revolution in magic! The next-generation Tower Master! Willstaum Berian!
Brilliant magical letters glittered in the distant sky.
The boy looking up at them was filthy, foul-smelling, and gaunt.
The underside of the dazzling, resplendent magical city.
Light and darkness.
Unfortunately, the place where the boy was born was darkness.
A shadow cast long by the light.
The underground city of Tetradia, reeking of rot.
A world where even eating for a day and living to the next required luck.
His memories began there.
He grew used to the nose-stinging stench that had seemed impossible to endure.
He grew used to the hunger that gnawed at his belly until it ached.
But the one thing he could not get used to was himself.
He could not get used to himself for having grown used to a gutter like this. It was hard to accept.
Pop—! Boom—
He wanted to go up to that upper district, where magical fireworks burst whenever people were bored, where it was bright and warm all year round.
But he could not.
No matter how he reached toward the dazzling sky, he could not touch it.
From this gutter, the sky was far too distant.
He wished to step out into the light, but even that was impossible. That was reality.
“You ignorant little brat. I’ll put your money to good use.”
The money he had scraped together by force of will was all gone.
He was beaten to his fill by the gutter thugs who cackled at him.
“Kid. Know your place. Your place. If people like us go out into that bright world, we’ll only burn to death.”
“It was money you were going to waste anyway, so we’re just spending it well in your stead. Kihihihi.”
The day he was thrown into a heap of trash.
It even rained, of all things, making his fever rise, and for some reason the stench was especially awful that day.
No matter how he thought about it, there was no way left.
A life born in the gutter could never go out into the dazzling world.
Because he had been ragged from birth, he had no heart left to grow any more ragged.
He simply stared up at the sky as his consciousness blurred away.
Blood and sweat.
Stench and rain.
Even sweat and tears mingled together as he looked up at the splendid night sky where fireworks burst, and he tried to let everything go.
What appeared before the boy then was—
“Oh dear…”
A miracle.
A miracle by the name of Ren Hank.
And only then did Hio realize.
“Child, are you all right?”
This was within the memories of the greatest mage, Abelard Pavlenko.
* * *
After escaping Tetradia’s underground with Ren Hank, the place Abelard went was the Magic Tower he had dreamed of.
Naturally, he came into contact with magic, and naturally, he learned magic.
No, it was not natural.
He learned magic at a bizarrely swift pace.
Every attribute produced its greatest effect when it met Abelard, and the number of glyphs he could accept was several times that of an ordinary person.
“In terms of magic, there is nothing more you can learn from me.”
It took only six years for Ren Hank to say those words.
That was how long it had taken a boy from the gutter, with no magical knowledge or experience whatsoever, to become a fifth-circle mage.
“Still, I worry. It seems as though you only look ahead and run. At this rate, you may miss many things you ought to enjoy at your age.”
“It’s all right. I’m already enjoying more than enough.”
“…Child. What dream are you dreaming? What goal have you set that you look only forward like this?”
At the old mage’s question, Abelard did not look at Ren Hank.
He looked at the sky, which even the towering Magic Tower had never managed to conquer to the very end.
He was looking at the top of the Magic Tower, which at least came close to it.
“It’s nothing much.”
He was merely looking up at the sky he had gazed at his whole life, only from a little closer.
“I want to see the end of magic.”
“You will spend your whole life running.”
“No. It’ll be over soon.”
After looking up like that for a long while, Abelard lowered his gaze briefly and spoke, and in him there lay a certainty that it truly would be so.
“I think it will.”
After that day, Abelard left Ren Hank’s school and went around learning the magic of many different schools.
An ordinary mage would have been busy belonging to one school and conducting research there, or producing some achievement of their own, but Abelard seemed to have no such intention at all, roaming about only to learn magic.
This was possible because he was Abelard.
It was possible because there was no one who did not know of his monstrous genius, and no mage who did not covet it.
Ordinary mages, even geniuses, had limits to their glyphs, but no such thing existed for Abelard.
He had virtually no limit to the number of glyphs he could bear, and his magical understanding was extraordinary, as though he had been born with it. He was truly a person born for magic.
He collected and learned every possible kind of magic, and at the same time, the number of his circles increased as well.
One year, two years.
As the years passed, his skill grew at an appalling rate, and his fame increased in proportion.
There came to be no one on the entire continent who did not know the name Abelard.
Hio watched that entire process through Abelard’s eyes.
‘…So this is the life of a true genius.’
A life for magic.
A life spent thinking only of magic, researching only magic, and devoted solely to it.
It was the gaze and thought of a true genius, and if time continued to flow like this, it seemed that someday, just as he had calmly declared, he might indeed see ultimate magic, the end of magic.
Then, into Abelard’s life, which had only been soaring upward, a certain figure abruptly appeared.
“Good to meet you.”
Eyes gleaming black.
A presence so faint it was difficult to notice unless one concentrated.
A face and expression identical, without the slightest deviation, to the one Hio knew.
“My name is Kreutzwald.”
It was the first meeting between Kreutzwald and Abelard.
* * *
“Kreutzwald?”
Abelard’s indifferent eyes turned toward Kreutzwald.
“The mage who supposedly died hundreds of years ago?”
“Heh heh heh. I was perceived as dead. I did not die.”
“Is that so…”
He looked Kreutzwald up and down.
Then he cast his gaze behind him, examining the place Kreutzwald had walked through.
Not a single person he had passed had perceived Kreutzwald.
They had not noticed his existence itself.
“How is that any different from being dead?”
“Heh heh. A gifted child like you can see me, can you not? That is the difference.”
“So?”
Abelard was colder and more rational than imagined.
As though he were a person without emotion, he showed not the slightest agitation at Kreutzwald’s appearance.
“So I am asking why an old ghost has appeared before me.”
“You are quite the mage, little one. I like you.”
“Are you here to teach me black magic or something?”
“Heh heh heh heh. That would not be bad either, but for now, I shall tell you something far greater than that.”
“Something greater?”
“Yes.”
Kreutzwald, who had been chuckling, clasped his hands behind his back and slowly began to walk.
Even that sight was familiar.
“Do you wish to see the end of magic?”
“I do.”
“Do you wish to complete ultimate magic?”
“Yes.”
“Unfortunately, you cannot.”
“…Did you appear in a body neither dead nor alive just to say that?”
With interest gone from his eyes, Abelard walked past Kreutzwald.
“How many people do you think have said such things to me?”
“No fewer than a hundred, I would imagine.”
“You know well. One hundred and eighty-seven.”
“Tsk, tsk… Those fellows must have made quite an enemy of you. The next Tower Master, no less. How unfortunate for them.”
“And now it has become one hundred and eighty-eight.”
“Heh heh heh heh. Am I to be treated the same as those ignorant fools?”
“The only difference is that bizarre body of yours.”
Kreutzwald appeared again like a ghost before Abelard as he walked on past.
“Child. What I speak of is not your talent. You are truly a being born for magic. If someone like you does not see the end of magic, then who could?”
Before him, he whispered his words like a snake.
Abelard stopped walking and listened to the ghost’s words.
“Do you know why I became such a body in the first place? I, who can claim to have seen the end of black magic and necromancy.”
“You saw the end?”
“Only an exceedingly small part. Merely by seeing that, I saw a fragment of the truth and looked ahead to the future a thousand years hence. This is the price.”
“…I see.”
Abelard fell into thought, and Kreutzwald slowly circled around him.
“As expected, you had already guessed it. What it means to see the end. What conclusion it will bring.”
His smile deepened.
“You have the qualifications. You were born for magic, wished for nothing but magic, and your talent for it is overflowing.”
If it was Abelard, it was possible.
That was what Kreutzwald was saying.
He was different from the others.
It was not false flattery; he truly believed it.
“All you lack is time, and an environment.”
Kreutzwald curled his fingers around a staff that no one knew when had appeared.
Then he lightly struck the ground with it.
“Would you like to see the near future?”
The world began to change.
He was trying to convey the truth he had seen to Abelard.
“This is the reason you cannot see the end of magic.”
The monstrosities invade.
War breaks out, and countless people die.
As the Abyss descends, Abelard saves innumerable people and delivers nations.
But the end is, in the end, a world sinking into the Abyss.
Tetradia stained with darkness.
The magical city no longer dazzling.
Within it, the sight of mages who have died miserably.
Ren Hank’s gruesome end.
“I… fail to reach the end of magic because of this paltry thing?”
“Yes. It is the truth of the world I saw, and the future. Your conclusion.”
“Well, that was a convincing illusion. As expected of an archmage whose name remained in history.”
“Heh heh heh… You do not believe it.”
The illusion lifted.
Once again, this was the wide corridor of the Magic Tower.
In the heart of the Magic Tower, layered thick with all manner of restrictions, he had displayed an illusion spell of this caliber.
“It does not matter. You will come to know, step by step, anyway. When that time comes, even you will have no choice but to believe.”
“Is that so? We shall see.”
“Heh heh heh heh. Yes, yes. But remember this.”
Kreutzwald’s form gradually faded.
An absolute realm of magic already several stages above Abelard at the time.
“And become…”
Even so, Kreutzwald was certain.
Just as Abelard had once told Ren Hank.
As though it would, naturally and without the slightest doubt, come to pass.
“The greatest god of magic.”
He put into words something utterly unsuited to a mage.
“The method lies with me. I shall come find you again. Let us speak again then.”
Abelard Pavlenko, the unprecedented genius.
Kreutzwald, before he became the Lord of the Abyss.
And Hio Pavlenko, who was tracing through their memories.
The unofficial first meeting of the three thus came to an end.