Without magical talent, he found himself beneath even their concern. He took solace in the fact that not every servant participated in this harmful gossip. It was only those who knew how to use magic themselves; those who didn’t sympathized with him.
After finally returning to his room, Arcus closed the door. His legs trembled, like all the tension holding him up had drained from his body.
“It doesn’t matter... It doesn’t mean anything...”
It didn’t matter. Arcus knew that; he had experienced over twenty years of another man’s life. Being hated and hit by his own mother wasn’t a big deal at all. It didn’t affect him. There was no reason for him to feel anything at all. He only had to think of his parents as his mother and father in name only.
Arcus’s true mother was the gentle woman who raised the man in his dream. As long as he believed that, he had no reason to break down here. He had no need to be jealous in the least...
A sob escaped his throat. Soon, his eyes were burning. There was no stopping now. Something snapping inside him, Arcus began to bawl. Why did his parents treat him so cruelly, when less than a month ago, they treated him so tenderly? They would stroke his head and hold him tightly. Even if he whined, they would smile without scolding him for it. Now they saw him as dead weight. Was this really how his mother was going to treat the son she carried for nine months?
Perhaps it was right to shout at your child just because they were talentless.
Maybe it was normal to hit them and treat them roughly.
Arcus had lived another man’s life now. He wasn’t the same boy he was before. And yet, he found he was powerless to resist the emotions the man had endured.
But why? He saw countless hardships through that man’s eyes. He was bullied through elementary school, which led him to become the class clown until college, where he could finally spend his days as he wanted. That entire time, he carried on.
That man’s life had taught Arcus how to stand strong. Why couldn’t he stand strong now?
Arcus howled, the emotions he could no longer hold back streaming down his face as tears. When his throat dried and his tears stopped, he stayed curled up against his bedroom door.
He didn’t know how long he stayed there like that. Before he knew it, the sun disappeared, and the view outside the window darkened. Opening the door behind him, he found a trolley laden with a meal. A servant who sympathized with him must have left it there. His stomach empty from crying, Arcus couldn’t hold back his appetite.
“Magic...” he murmured to himself as he dipped a slice of bread into the cold soup.
Magic. Magic was the reason he was in this mess. It was because he lacked magic ability that he was removed from the position of heir. It was because he lacked magic ability that his parents’ love for him ran dry.
A thought flashed in his mind.
If he became a magician more powerful than anybody had ever seen, he could show his parents that they were wrong.
Arcus bit off a clump of bread. He knew it was a childish thought, but the idea appealed to him. There was something else, too.
“...I miss hamburgers.”
And could you really blame him?
The truth was, while it was far from enough to satisfy his parents, Arcus actually possessed a fraction more ability than the average magician. He could use some level of magic, but it wasn’t like he was destined to become the greatest magician the world had ever seen, either. If he put the work in, there was a chance he would be able to find some way to increase his aether. He had failed before, but that was when he was a normal six-year-old. If he could bend his new memories of the other world and its technological wonders to his advantage, then the results might be different this time around. His determination renewed, Arcus set to work rereading all his family’s grimoires.
Magic is the power to bring all sorts of phenomena to life, using mystical words to create spells.
That was probably the simplest way to sum up what magic was in this world. Based on this definition alone, the magic of this world seemed to be less limited than the magic described in the books Arcus knew from the man’s world. All you needed was to put certain words together, and you could make all sorts of things happen. As long as you could create a spell, countless possibilities lay before you.
When the books spoke of “mystical words,” they weren’t referring to a modern language, but to the Elder Tongue, whose roots were in the very origins of society. It was written in characters known as artglyphs, which looked similar to astrological and zodiac symbols from the man’s world. Each word of this language held power related to its meaning, and assembling those words into a sentence or phrase would create a spell, waiting to be used.
What happened as a result of those words largely depended on the magician’s intention, but as long as you memorized the Elder Tongue, in theory you could use magic to do almost anything.
The book went on to describe that to use the language, you had to put an appropriate amount of magical power into each word. If you got the amount wrong, the spell would fail. In other words, the idea of “overclocking” a spell was mere fantasy. Not that it really mattered to Arcus, who wouldn’t have enough aether for that in the first place. The amount of aether you possessed determined a sorcerer’s staying power.
To sum up, Arcus needed to learn the right words and how to arrange them into spells (that, or knowledge of extant spells), and how much magical power to put into each word.
Alongside his studies of the language they spoke at home, Arcus had also been learning the Elder Tongue, and so he already had a decent understanding of it. When casting a spell, it was important to picture your intention vividly. Thanks to that man’s memories, Arcus now had a whole host of imagery that he could draw on—things he witnessed in real life and in films, comics, and cartoons...
“All that’s left now is aether and spells...” he murmured to himself.
In preparation for the test he had taken, Arcus studied how to control his aether to a certain extent, so that wouldn’t really be an issue. In terms of spells, he just had to learn those that already existed, how to make his own, and how much power was consumed upon casting them. On this front, he was out of leads; he’d bled the book dry.
It wasn’t worth considering asking his parents, and the magic users among the servants likely wouldn’t help him, either. At this point, Arcus would have been well within his rights to give up.
“I’ll make this work.”
The truth was, he had someone in mind who he thought might be willing to help him out.
A few days after Arcus gathered his resolve to become a magician, the Raythefts received a visit.
“Brother.”
“Hey, Joshua. Been a while, huh?”
In the Raythefts’ drawing room stood Arcus’s father, Joshua, and a man who looked much like him, with the same silvery hair. Unlike Joshua, this man had much more of a working-class air about him. His muscular body, browned from the sun, had a few burn marks here and there that spoke of his return from the battlefield.
His name was Craib Abend, and he was Joshua’s elder brother, although he had absconded from the Raytheft estate years ago.
The reason for his defection was to do with his aether.