Chapter Text
A few days later, and I still don’t fully understand what my situation is—but I have got an idea.
I seem to be reincarnated as a ball of sentient mana. My body used up mana in the atmosphere in order to sustain itself, and I had a sneaking suspicion that if my supply of mana ran out, I’d end up fading into nothing.
I haven’t made any breakthroughs yet. Mana comes to me pretty much as easily as breathing, but I still don’t really understand how magic works.
Or actually, that’s a lie. I do somewhat understand how magic works. I need to funnel it through something in my body, imagine it taking shape, and then use mana to manifest it. I don’t know what kind of magic I have though, so it’s near impossible to do that.
Well anyway, there is actually something I’ve noticed about this desert. There’s this horrible smell lofting through the air all the time, and it makes me want to puke. Thankfully, I don’t have a body to puke with—which leads me into more things I've noticed.
Since I’m not food, the monsters haven’t bothered me one bit, which is a relief. If I was stuck in a desert with no water or food, constantly being chased by hungry monsters, I don’t know what I’d do.
As if signalling the end of my uninteresting-yet-slightly-reflective-and-important thoughts, nighttime fell on the desert.
Probably a few hours before one of those sandstorms appear. I muttered to myself.
“Those sandstorms” didn’t hit solely at midnight though. Every single day, a sandstorm hits three separate times during the day. Judging solely on the temperature and sleep cycles of the monsters around me, those times would be morning, afternoon, and midnight.
Though my body was made of mana, that didn’t make me exempt from being blown around, so it was a real pain to deal with.
However, I had come up with a way to counteract this, which in comes the exception from earlier.
It works sort of like shielding my body in a coating of mana that prevents me from being blown around by intense winds. Of course it isn’t perfect, but it lets me move around okay.
I’m not sure if this “wind shield” thing is magic, or just another application of mana. Wait, aren’t those the same thing?
Either way, I had a few hours before I needed to worry about that. In the meantime, I’ll continue drifting in the same direction I’ve been going this whole time.
It’d be pretty stupid of me if I constantly changed direction. At that rate I would never reach any kind of desert-edge settlement. So, the logical answer was to move forward at all times.
That’s not as easy as it seems though. With each and every sandstorm blowing through, my course gets altered, and I have to spend a long time fixing it.
Now that I think about it, I should probably check up on where I am.
It’s not perfectly accurate, but I can get a general idea of where I am through my [Sight]. Of course it doesn’t show me the entire desert, and I can only see the stuff in my general location.
The amount of distance my [Sight] covers is variable, and depends on how much mana I decide to dedicate to it. Usually I only have a little, but when I need to gain my bearings, I amp it up.
With that out of the way, I expanded the range of my [Sight] in order to find some monsters I could orient myself off.
I didn’t expect to find anything, until—
Hey, what… What the hell is that?
Quite a while behind me, there was a massive suction force pulling in all the mana around it. I immediately drifted away from it, but the source of this pull was moving.
And where was it going? Directly towards me.
Hang on, isn’t this really bad?! I’m made of mana, and if that thing sucks in the mana around it, that’s seriously bad news for me!
But seriously, at the speed that thing is moving, no matter how much I push myself to my limits, I won’t be able to outrun it. Just what kind of monster has arrived into this desert all of a sudden?! And not to mention that sandstorm coming up soon.
What should I do? Running away wouldn’t do me any good, I’m not nearly fast enough to outrun that. Obviously I can’t fight or try and stop it from moving entirely—maybe if I was capable of using proper magic, but as of now that’s a no go.
Ah. The deeper I think about this, the more I realise just how hopeless this situation is. A mana-hungry monster is charging right towards me at blinding speeds, and is probably going to swallow me up the second it gets nearby.
And to make it worse—there was nothing I could do about it.
—
Saying that there was “nothing I could do about it” may have been a little bit of an overreaction.
A few seconds after I had said that to myself, an idea formed in my head. I dived downwards underneath the sand, extending the range of my [Sight] upwards to track the movements of the mana-absorbing monster.
Just because I couldn’t actually touch the sand, I was still able to conceal myself with it by diving underneath. And with that in mind, I watched as the mana-absorbing monster kicked up sand into the sky as he rocketed towards me.
Good. At this rate, he’ll pass right by me. I thought in relief.
Well, it’s as they say. “Don’t speak too soon.” Because the moment I finished forming those thoughts in my mind, the monster stopped in its tracks.
It was there when I finally got a good look at the monster's form. The amount of mana that surrounded it was so dense that, even with a shoddy form of [Sight], I could fully make out the shape of its body.
And, once again, I had spoken too soon. Because the thing that I had branded as a “monster” was, in fact—human.
Not the kind of mana-hungry beast I had been expecting. Just some really strong person.
So there’s people that strong in this world, huh… Wait, shouldn’t I be happier that they even exist in the first place!?
This world really wasn’t some post-apocalyptic wasteland! Ah, to say I was relieved would be an understatement. Once I realised that it was just another human, I jumped out of the sand I had hidden underneath—before realising that it was a pretty stupid idea.
Just because he was a human didn’t mean that he wasn’t still sucking in mana! Damn it, what am I, some kind of idiot!?
The human turned his head to face me. I couldn’t hear the words they spoke, but at the same time, I could understand the emotions that were conveyed.
Confusion. The person looking at me jumping up from the sand was confused.
How exactly was this the case? Well, it was kind of tricky to explain. In the few days I had been here for, little bits and pieces of information had sort of clicked into my head. The way to use mana, how to channel said mana, and then finally, a way to communicate.
It wasn’t phrased exactly like that though. Basically, I could transmit and feel emotions of other things by reading or sending mana. And once again, it made me wonder what mana actually is.
But anyway, what was he so confused about? This is a fantasy world, so sentient balls of mana must have been pretty commonplace. Or actually, I couldn’t rule out the possibility of me being unique…
No! I can’t think like that. If I do, then it’ll only make things worse for me in the future. I’ll end up some self-centered arrogant bastard who only thinks about himself!
Interrupting my thoughts was another surge of confusion from the desert-man. My body wobbled slightly, and I felt myself being drawn towards the person.
I read into the transmitted emotions a little bit more, and what I found was intriguing. At first I had assumed he was confused about why I was here, but actually, he was confused about what I looked like. Hey, wait! That’s rude as hell, man!
I decided to shoot back a bit of my frustration at him, but that only ended up making him more confused. This guy was either extremely stupid, or there was something about this that he couldn’t understand—either way, he seemed pretty dense.
His body stiffened slightly, and so did the mana around him.
And at that moment, I wondered—Did I do something wrong?
—
Spirits initially start as “lesser spirits” prior to becoming actual spirits. In essence, they are only balls of mana, with their only form of communication being the ability to transmit emotions or feelings via mana.
But even so, these feelings are limited in the way that they cannot process complex emotions. At most, they could only perceive extremely basic things like anger, joy, sadness, or disgust. Lesser spirits were completely incapable of proper individual thought.
And so, as he stood in the middle of the Augria Sand Dunes, facing a slightly luminescent ball of black light that could fit in the palm of his hand, the monster—Reinhard van Astrea—felt utterly confused.
Seconds prior, he had paused in order to stare at the Pleiades Watchtower above. He had been running for what felt like hours, and yet it never drew closer.
It was in that moment where he felt a disturbance in the air beside him. Reinhard turned to his side, expecting to see another witchbeast—but only that small black light rose up from the ground.
A lesser spirit of yin… but what is it doing in a place such as this? He wondered, eyebrows rising slightly up his forehead.
The spirit likely picked up on his confusion. A few seconds later, Reinhard was hit with a wave of frustration transmitted through mana.
He blinked, eyes widening only slightly through his professional demeanor. Though he did not allow himself to become fully immersed in his surprise, the fact that a lesser spirit was capable of transmitting an emotion like frustration greatly stunned him.
Frustration was different from anger, which is simply a strong displeasure at something. Frustration, however, is more akin to being upset, an emotion too complex for most lesser spirits to understand.
It wasn’t simply unusual. In fact, for a lesser spirit to convey such an emotion should have been impossible.
And yet, Reinhard could not deny what was right in front of him. And because of that, he couldn’t allow such an abnormality to go unnoticed.
Stiffening his body, the spirit seemed to drift backwards in response. Can it process danger, too…? He wondered, eyes narrowing.
Gaze shifting over towards the watchtower above, he frowned slightly. Whatever barrier that was preventing him from getting closer to the tower seemed to be of yin magic descent—or at least, that was what he assumed.
Reinhard was not capable of using magic, and because of that, he was not as well versed in it as he was in other things. However, spirits—even lesser spirits—were naturally capable of manipulating both mana and magic extremely efficiently.
Was it possible that this lesser spirit—no, it would be more fitting to call it an intelligent spirit—knew the origins of this spell.
No. Intelligence is one thing to have, but this spirit does not seem to be fully developed in strength just yet. He quickly shook off those foolish thoughts.
Spirits did not develop by age or intelligence. Instead, the only way for them to evolve beyond a lesser spirit or quasi spirit was to accumulate strength. This can be done in many ways, but all were irrelevant to Reinhard's current situation.
This lesser spirit undoubtedly possessed a great deal of intelligence—but that was only compared to other lesser spirits. Its mana capacity was not fully developed either, so expecting it to interfere with something of this scale was unrealistic.
And yet—
“Even if it does not help with the situation at hand, I cannot allow this to simply pass by.”
Reinhard only knew spirits at a textbook level. However, he was aware of someone who had both contracted multiple spirits, and become good friends with all of them.
Of course they happened to be quasi spirits, not lesser spirits—but the prospect remained the same. Compared to Reinhard, he would be much more knowledgeable about this situation. But even despite this, he could not remove himself from the mission he had been given.
To enter the Pleiades Watchtower and converse with the Sage in order to discover a cure for the disease-ridden Lugunican royal family. No amount of interesting spirits would dissuade him from this task.
“Perhaps Julius will know more about this. But that is for a later point in time.”
As he said this and prepared to dash off once again, another wave of mana was sent his way, this time conveying a new emotion. But he ignored it, simply focusing his gaze onto the watchtower ahead.
But even so, one singular thought slipped into his mind.
If only I could understand what you mean…
Something shifted. As if in an instant, the previously bland slates of emotion-filled mana gained new meaning. They carried not only emotion, but also intention and a sense of self.
Of course, such a sudden phenomenon would not be possible for anyone other than Reinhard. To be blessed so quickly and so suddenly was something nobody other than him could achieve.
He froze. Having moved only a few steps from his original position, he pivoted to his left and stared at the lesser spirit.
Seemingly noticing the sudden change in attitude, the lesser spirit retreated backwards slightly.
Perhaps the suction of mana towards Reinhard was too great, as when it attempted to move further backward, it failed to do so, instead being pulled back again.
“This…”
—Should not be possible.
Those were the words he wished to say, but were unable to verbalise. Lips pressed tightly together, Reinhard found himself torn between two separate decisions.
To continue with his current mission of entering the Sage’s Watchtower, and gaining their wisdom to heal the royal family.
Or to investigate this lesser spirit further, and figure out if there was an outward source to these peculiarities.
In actuality, however, the answer to this question was easy. After all, abandoning the task given to him as the Sword Saint of Lugunica would be a grave sin.
And yet, his eyes still lingered on the lesser spirits hovering form, unable to truly move forward towards the watchtower again.
Reinhard was unable to choose between fulfilling his duty as a knight of the kingdom, or his own personal curiosity. Or possibly, his curiosity was not his own. He was not a spirit arts user after all, he had no need to contract or learn much about spirits.
But with the royal family falling into disease recently, and his inability to enter the watchtower, he wondered if there was something he was missing. An opportunity he was yet to grasp.
And with the [Divine Protection of Semantic Processing] he had recently obtained, which allowed him to grasp the meaning behind another's words even without understanding of the language itself, Reinhard was capable of discerning what the lesser spirit was trying to say—or something close to it.
Even with that information, however, he still could not make his choice in good faith. Closing his eyes for a mere moment, he exhaled a short breath.
Opening his eyes once more, his feet dug into the sand.
“My apologies,” he said, eyes focusing on the tower ahead. “But there is something I must confirm.”
Gathering mana in his legs, a tremendous amount of force was released the moment he pushed outward, exploding sand outwards from behind him.
Just as quickly as he had appeared, Reinhard was gone.