Episode 25 Preconception Called “the World”
“Master. Did a demon really descend here?”
“We don’t feel anything at all…”
Jin Lianne and Al Ahned.
The two disciples put their hands to the ground to sense mana waves, then scooped soil, mixed it with reagents, and shook it—only to end by shaking their heads.
But the Sage, Sienel Mirsa, judged differently.
“You foolish brats. What good is it to look only for what is visible? You must look for what is unseen.”
“The unseen?”
Jin Lianne cocked her head, shaking her short, jet-black bob.
Sienel clicked her tongue.
“What use is there in searching for the demonic realm’s waves that have already flown off?”
“Then what?”
“You must look for the traces left by the demonic realm’s waves as they passed.”
“Ah…?”
Watching Jin and Al wearing that half-understanding look, Sienel pressed a spot on the ground.
“Here. Feel the mana here carefully. Don’t you see a minute deformation? The demonic realm’s waves are far denser and more powerful than our world’s, so they leave traces like this. A mark remains where something bored through.”
Al and Jin came closer and set their hands there.
After closing their eyes and straining a while, both opened them again, cold sweat on their brows.
“I… don’t get it.”
“Master, aren’t you just pretending you know?”
Sienel gave the dimwit disciple Jin one knuckle flick, and the cocky disciple Al three.
“Ugh… I’m sorry.”
“Why am I getting hit?”
Sienel gave the still-cocky Al one more knuckle flick for good measure, then straightened up.
“Anyway, let’s go. It looks certain a demon descended here. Now we must learn whether it was a summoning—or a natural descent.”
At that, Al and Jin’s faces brightened.
“Then we’re finally going to the forum?”
Sienel clicked her tongue and climbed into the carriage.
“Yes, you rascals. Hurry up.”
Al and Jin scrambled into the carriage after her.
“Yes, Master!”
“If it was going to end like this, we should’ve gone to the forum in the first place—!”
Snap!
Inside the carriage, a crisp knuckle-flick echoed.
“What’s today’s forum topic?”
“Yeah, what’s left anyway? It feels like the theoretical part wrapped up as of yesterday…”
“Ah, is it that? He said he’d guessed the reason the Mystical Realm drifted away. Who was it… that one guy?”
“Perseta Verite? The young lord of this domain?”
“Right, him.”
“Hm… a conjecture. What kind of conjecture rates getting your name printed in Arandria?”
Barony of Verité, outskirts. The magic school set in a small forest.
In its large auditorium, mages were packed in.
Every one of them shone with a confidence they’d never had before.
An age when magic was fading.
That distinct gloom of mages, slowly losing power and being pushed aside—you couldn’t find even a hair of it here.
Because they had recovered a great many of the magic they’d lost!
They were already satisfied; now they felt it wouldn’t matter much if the forum ended as is.
In that slackened tension, a figure appeared.
Creeeeak.
The moment the auditorium door opened, a mage who had been standing near it chatting idly glanced over—and his face instantly turned ashen.
“T-the S-s-sage!”
That single line dropped into the hall like some kind of magic spell.
Mages who had been sitting comfortably, leaning back, conversing, all shot to their feet at once.
Even the headmaster and professors of the Imperial Academy, who unlike the rest had failed to hide their grave expressions, rose as one.
“We pay our respects to the Sage.”
The Imperial Sage.
For mages, that was no different from a king.
A miraculous being who, even in these times when mystery recedes, alone uses magic freely and at will.
“Hmph.”
Under everyone’s gaze, the Sage, Sienel Mirsa, wore a peevish look, snatched up the compendium used in the forum, and flipped it open with a flick.
In under a minute, she had rifled through the thick compendium and clicked her tongue.
“To think you solved the mana frequency problem—this mage Salinelle is more commendable than I expected. You resolved the parts even I hadn’t thought through. But that you must rely on a mechanical device to detect such frequencies is, for a mage, terribly complacent. Hmph… In my day, mages weren’t like this.”
At Sienel’s scolding, the mages let out awkward laughs.
They did not take her words as bluster. In truth, her sensitivity to mana was famed across the continent.
It would not be surprising if she could read and predict frequencies without a Mana-wave Meter, and to a similar degree.
Still, though she grumbled out of habit, she rated Salinelle highly.
“Even so, truly—this is a discovery worthy of Arandria calling it the greatest magical achievement since the Almagest. But… it leaves me wanting.”
Sienel murmured with a bitter smile.
The subject that had gripped her for the last thirty years was something else entirely.
She had come to question the Almagest itself.
She had yet to find clear grounds, but it was an intuition built from her keen mana sensitivity and over a century of experience.
So from her point of view, Emendatum, which was closer to supplementing and reconfirming the Almagest, could only feel lacking.
It did nothing to slake her thirst.
Swallowing her regret, Sienel refocused on what needed learning now.
If the demon did not descend naturally but was summoned… who? The prime candidate had been the mage Salinelle…
That was why she had come all this way. She wondered if seeing the great discovery he had made might offer a hint.
But it was ambiguous. Emendatum was an excellent magical text, but you could not use it to summon a demon of the demonic realm.
Does it not state right in the compendium that Emendatum’s predictions do not apply to the five Upper Worlds?
Then who… Could it be Perseta?
Perseta—the favorite pupil of Bardente, her predecessor.
It’s… not impossible.
What if Bardente had completed an immense vision before dying, and had passed it to Perseta?
What if it had taken thirty years to master it perfectly?
With her eyes deepening further, Sienel looked toward the rostrum and then strode forward.
“Ah!”
“Hrm!”
The mages who filled the hall started and sprang aside in flurries to clear her path.
Sienel sat proudly in the very front row, dead center.
Her two disciples stood at attention behind her.
Only then did the mages, reading the room, avoid the Sage’s vicinity and take appropriate seats.
Soon after, the auditorium door opened and Salinelle and Perseta entered.
As the mages expected, today’s presentation was Perseta’s session explaining his conjecture.
And throughout the presentation, Perseta felt a disquieting irritation.
“The conjecture is novel.”
“That’s true, but… knowing that, what changes?”
“Right. Doesn’t seem useful for actually casting magic.”
Most of the mages did not grasp its value.
They had their reasons.
For over two weeks, using Salinelle’s Emendatum as a base, they had revived magics that had been fading and thrilled at how easily they could now perform difficult spells.
That rapture had been so great that their response to Perseta’s conjecture turned lukewarm.
Only a few very scholarly mages listened and pondered how, if one assumed the human world was rotating, that might be applied to magic.
Meanwhile, a few others heckled openly.
“Honestly. Did he steal our precious time to spout such far-fetched talk?”
“Has Arandria’s evaluation system lost its edge? To tout a thing like a sci-fi story as a reasonable conjecture…”
They complained loud enough for all to hear.
Hearing it, Salinelle grew uneasy.
Ah, damn. What’s with these people? Perseta’s face doesn’t look good…
He was afraid of Perseta.
He had sworn, someday, to trample him and leap beyond, but fear was fear.
Perseta. Just bear with it a bit. Start from rotation and go all the way to the Mana Sun’s ecliptic being twisted—say it all. Then their snob noses will be broken…!
Meanwhile, Headmaster Ignacio of the Imperial Academy, who had heard this beforehand, felt both impatience and doubt.
I want to hear the story of recalculating the twisted mana ecliptic quickly. Is it really true…? Honestly, I still can’t believe it…
Only one person.
Of everyone gathered in this hall, only one felt a certain shiver.
It was the Sage, Sienel Mirsa.
What is this…? Our dimension… is rotating?
Why?
When she imagined it, it felt like being struck by lightning.
If… if our dimension really is rotating… then the Mana Sun and the Mystical Realm, which look as if they move across the sky of the dimension… couldn’t all of that, in fact, be an illusion?
She grasped precisely the significance that rotation implied. However, her thinking was still entangled in the Almagest’s worldview, so she couldn’t leap straight to the fact that the center of revolution was not the human world but the Mana Sun.
Only that, if she researched on this basis, she felt she might find the answer she had sought.
Even as people weighed Perseta’s presentation differently like this, a few mages who had swallowed their manners kept jabbering and running down his conjecture.
Truth be told, they had disliked Perseta being on that stage from the start.
It was a rude behavior you could only attempt if you thought of Perseta as some mage apprentice.
“Let’s just go. How long must we listen to nonsense like that?”
“Exactly. To call baseless imaginings a conjecture… If my disciple did that, I wouldn’t let it slide.”
And those voices grated on the Sage Sienel, who had been right in the thick of concentrating.
She scolded them, her annoyance plain.
“Be silent, children. Is this not a forum? Whose disciple are you, to behave so? Did your master not even teach you how great an affront it is to prattle during a mage’s presentation?”
At her words, the grumblers flinched.
“N-no, Sage. That’s not what we meant…”
But Sienel was no longer looking their way.
She merely muttered with a face full of irritation.
“Noisy. Truly.”
At that instant, her disciple Al Ahned, who had been standing quietly behind her, suddenly launched into the rude mages.
“Silence! Do not forget you are addressing the Imperial Sage!”
A voice that rang through the whole hall.
Even the other mages who had been keeping still hunched their shoulders in surprise.
Only then did the grumblers’ spirit snap!
“W-we… we are sorry, Sage.”
But the Sage did not turn, and her disciple Al showed no mercy.
“Were you not told to be silent! How long will you hinder the forum and insult the presenter and my master!”
“…”
It was truly a cold-sweat moment.
The grumbling mages could not open their mouths; they only mopped their sweat with handkerchiefs and bowed their heads again and again.
Only then did Al Ahned withdraw the frightening glare with which he had skewered them and face forward again.
Perseta, finding the scene quite to his liking, smiled.
“But, Mage Perseta.”
So when the Sage Sienel raised her hand to ask a question, Perseta answered brightly.
“Yes. Please speak, Sage.”
“It is true they were very rude, but they were not speaking sheer nonsense either. To infer rotation through the Doppler effect is exceedingly astute, yet by itself the proof is lacking, is it not?”
When the Sage posed this question, Salinelle and Headmaster Ignacio clenched their fists tight.
This is the moment to say it, Perseta!
At last…! Will it come?
So far as they knew, the only thing that could verify the human world’s rotation was to back-calculate the tilt of the axis and recover the coordinates of the twisted mana ecliptic.
Even that would be indirect evidence; still, if there were a powerful formula capable of fully restoring the Almagest, every mage would have no choice but to shut his mouth and bow.
At last, Perseta nodded.
“There is evidence. The rotation of the dimension can be proven quite directly.”
At that, Salinelle and Ignacio tilted their heads.
Directly? Wouldn’t it, in the end, still be indirect?
At that moment, Perseta spoke.
“No. I will make rotation itself visible to your eyes. Right here.”
???
All the mages opened their eyes wide.
To show a dimension’s rotation?
Is that… even possible?
Snap!
The moment Perseta snapped his fingers, the cloth that had been covering the ceiling area of the auditorium vanished, and a single pendulum with a heavy weight on a long chain appeared.
What was unusual was that the pendulum was not hanging from the ceiling. It was fixed, hovering in midair.
“By using dimensional separation magic, this is a pendulum of a dimension decoupled from ours. Only the end point of the cord is fixed to a point in our dimension.”
As he stepped down from the rostrum and walked to the center of the tiered seating, Perseta spoke.
“The moment that pendulum begins to move, it will follow inertia and trace the same trajectory continuously, yes?”
The mages nodded. If there is no external intervention, a body continues its existing motion by inertia. That was common knowledge.
Perseta smiled faintly.
“The pendulum traces the same trajectory… but our dimension is rotating. Then what will happen?”
“Ah!”
Barely had those words left him when the Sage Sienel gasped and sprang to her feet.
“I will show you now.”
Snap!
Perseta snapped his fingers once more.
Whooom!
Perseta’s pendulum finally began to move… shaking and shattering the preconception called “the world.”
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