I had been reborn.
Rebirth, reincarnation, metempsychosis, samsara… It wasn’t important what you called it. In short, my memories were those of a previous life. I had died and been born again. And moreover, into a different world.
Assuming I could trust memories left from before my death, magic certainly wasn’t real in my prior world, and there were no skeletons or ghosts wandering around, either. Those had all been mere products of the imagination. Despite having certain points in common, this world and my previous one were clearly different.
So: reincarnation. Reincarnation into another world, no less.
There were no obvious issues with this conclusion, but I was still uncertain. That was because I could still imagine a number of other possibilities.
Maybe this world possessed some incomprehensible technology that only seemed like magic to me. Maybe my memories were fakes that had been implanted. Maybe I simply had some kind of psychiatric disorder, which caused me to experience strange delusions. Given that there were ghosts, maybe I hadn’t been “reincarnated” as such, but this was a phenomenon like “haunting” or “possession,” where my personality had taken over another person’s body. Or maybe me being here was in fact a hallucination after all, and the brain of the person I remembered myself as was now floating in a tank in some laboratory.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. I could have listed maybes forever. Seriously, forever. As evidence, consider my foray into the classic philosophical thought experiment of the brain in the vat.
It was my opinion that once you started considering unproductive questions like that, you might as well give up. You would never reach a conclusion. That was why I had provisionally settled on the understanding that I had been reincarnated into another world, and I just so happened to have memories of my previous life. It was the most tolerable answer. That is, the one that would disturb my mental state the least.
I certainly didn’t want to find out, for example, that I was actually an evil spirit who had obliterated the mind of an innocent little baby and seized control of his body. I wasn’t going to claim I’d be crushed by the weight of my guilty conscience, but it would at least depress me to discover I was something the world could do without.
And most of all, I was praying, with relative seriousness, that the day would never come when some shocking fact would come to light, and moments later, I would discover that I was just a brain in a vat.
“Flammo Ignis… Waaagh?!” There was an explosive eruption of heat.
As I flinched and staggered backwards, Gus sharply incanted the Word of Erasure, blowing away the flames in front of me. “Idiot! Don’t pronounce it so accurately!”
What a thing to be criticized for.
“You may have talent, Will, but if you don’t get used to adjusting your precision, you’re going to wind up dead!”
Yes, this world, which I had been reborn into eight years ago (by their count), was a dangerous place. There could be no doubt about it. For example, just take the magic and Words of Creation I was learning.
In case anything went wrong, I was practicing outside, on the hill where the familiar temple stood, and I was not having much success.
“Gus, my results are all over the place. Is there really nothing we can do about it?”
“No. It’s just how the Words are. Get used to it.”
I was not finding magic very reproducible. I could get something working, try again the next day, and then never get the same thing to happen again. As for why…
“Let’s review. State the process for casting magic.”
“Umm, three steps. Sense the mana that fills the world, bring it together in resonance with your own mana, and pronounce or write the Word of Creation.”
The arche, the primordial chaos: mana. Sense it, and achieve resonance and convergence. Then, by pronouncing or writing a Word of Creation, define the mana into some form—for instance, fire. On paper, it was that simple. But there was no real room for creativity, and no way to make the results more reproducible.
“What you say is correct. And there have been many attempts through history to seek consistent results from magic. Many sages have bent their ingenuity toward this end, but there is only so much that can be done. Having experienced it firsthand, I expect you can appreciate why.”
“Yeah. The biggest problem is how the mana isn’t consistent.”
For the past few years, I had been sharpening my perception under Gus’s guidance. Fortunately, it seemed I had some talent, and I became able to detect the presence of mana—the thing magic was made of, its fuel. Supposedly, the world was infused with mana, but what I discovered was that mana levels weren’t the same everywhere.
Imagine splashing a few drops of ink into water, and then agitating it just a little. The ink would be concentrated in some parts and dilute in others. What’s more, these parts would flow in an irregular fashion. And that’s just your fuel supply.
“Mhm. There have been a number of attempts to create a consistent mana environment. Convergence devices, for instance—precious gems, precious metals, extremely ancient wood. But I’m afraid…”
“The results weren’t worth the cost?”
“Mmm… The mana inside the human body is also in flux, you see. There is a limit to what can be achieved with atmospheric mana convergence alone.”
Even if you managed to maintain a certain level of consistency in the mana outside your body, the magic user’s own mana, which was required to resonate with it, would still be unstable. Just like the external mana, it varied in concentration like the water and ink from our example as it meandered around the body. This aspect was similarly complicated, and even more difficult than the external mana to mess around with.
“That being said, it undeniably has some effect. Staves made with ancient wood, precious gems, and precious metals are the symbols of sorcerers.”
It seemed that the idea of a sorcerer bearing a staff was part of this world’s concepts, too.
“Why don’t you use a staff, Gus?”
I had at least seen him holding a staff number of times before. It was studded with emeralds and had a handle at the top like a duck’s beak.
“A grandiose staff attracts attention. In a battle situation, not only will you be singled out if you allow yourself to be discovered as a sorcerer, but the use of a convergence device makes it easier for the enemy to pinpoint the source of your magic.”
That reason was so grounded and pragmatic that I found it a bit unsettling.
“Hmm, we’ve gotten off track. We were talking about the fluctuations in the Words. The mana that fills the world and the body is in flux and not consistent. Attempts have been made to gather it into something consistent, but there were limits to what could be achieved. And human fluctuations also exist in the speaking and writing. To be strictly accurate, humans can never speak the exact same words twice.”
I understood what he meant. Even if the same person were to speak the same words, the waveform of the sounds would be different every single time. No matter how many times a person were to write the same letter, it would never come out exactly the same way. That was obvious enough, really. After all, we humans were not machines.
“For all these reasons, the general consensus is ultimately that one has to use their intuition to determine when the circumstances are right.”
So the only conclusion that could be drawn was that turning magic into a consistent mass-produced product was impossible. The professional expertise of the sorcerer would always be called upon to fine-tune things to follow however the mana felt like behaving on that particular day.