Sometimes, a single word from the protolanguage had evolved to carry different meanings in each race’s new language. And while the students here were capable of deciphering formulas, they were just students, at the end of the day. There was no way they’d be able to decipher everything.
They’d been given quite an unreasonable task.
“Mmm... We need a change of pace after being stuck in this rut for so long, don’t you think?” Yi Ling said.
“I do,” Serina agreed. “Do you have any suggestions? Anything interesting we could talk about?”
“I have one,” Makarov interjected. “So, like... Everyone making magic tools back in the ancient era knew a shared language, right? But what about the language of the era before that?”
“Interesting question,” Serina mused. “I know it’s been more than two millennia since the Dark God War, but it’s strange that no ruins have ever been found from before the ancient era—from the beginning of civilization. I know it’s called the mythological era, but if people were around back then, they must have left some evidence behind.”
A glance at Isa Lante was enough to tell you an advanced magic-using civilization had existed before the Dark God War, during the period known as the “ancient era,” the “ancient times,” or similar terms. However, the period before that was shrouded in mystery. Various magic tools, weapons, literature, and documents from the ancient era had survived the Dark God War, but most had been destroyed in the upheaval of the subsequent thousand years. The Holy Land of Metis, for example, had banned the surviving texts and burned any it found. After all, they’d contained writing that a theocracy certainly wouldn’t want its people reading.
Now, the fact that you could translate a magic formula into the language of every individual race suggested that the constituent magic letters must have come from a shared language.
Plus, all the surviving races, like elves, dwarves, humans, and so on, spoke with some degree of mutual intelligibility.
Of course, no one had yet found even traces of ruins from back then to prove that theory...
“Shouldn’t we simply assume that nobody has found ruins from the mythological age because they were destroyed in a different war that engulfed the world? One that occurred before the Dark God War?” Croesus suggested. “Wars between countries and religions, racial and ethnic conflicts, wars of unification... Humanity’s intelligence is the very thing that leads to war, and in turn, war perpetuates a constant cycle of civilizations rising and falling. At least, that’s the only explanation that comes to mind. It isn’t all that different from the modern era, if you think about it.”
Croesus’s answer to Makarov’s question was pragmatic, realistic, and devoid of any romance.
“C’mon, dude... Why do you have to be so boring about it?” Makarov sighed. “Don’t you get excited thinking about how things could’ve been all those years ago? When you’re so straitlaced about it, it kinda kills the mood...”
“Oh, Makarov... However many races there are in the world, at the end of the day, we’re all still animals who’ve learned to think a little better, are we not? You merely need to look at the world we live in today. Metis, for one, derides the beastfolk as ‘savages’ while using its religion as an excuse to invade its neighbors time and time again. All sorts of things can lead to war: political circumstances, ambitious leaders, racial tensions, you name it. And do you honestly think the victors of every war throughout history have allowed evidence of the losers’ civilizations to survive? Even in our era, we often see victors in wars destroy that evidence, don’t we? Deep down, human nature doesn’t change. If anything, the winner eradicating every last trace of the losers’ culture is the way things have always been.”
One culture would blow up another’s idols out of religious disagreements; statesmen would issue an order to burn down an entire city and everyone inside just because they didn’t like a philosophy that was spreading there; a conquering nation would destroy the castles and graves of the royal family they’d overthrown. Those sorts of things were carried out as if they were nothing, even in the modern day.
“When just one war we do know about, the Dark God War, was enough to leave the world on the brink of destruction, I would be incredibly surprised if there were any relics remaining from the very beginning of civilization,” Croesus said. “By now, it will all have been swept away by the sands of time. We have no way of finding out anything about it.”
As Croesus said, there was no clear means of unearthing history from the mythological era. Even the ancient area’s patchwork of civilizations had been largely wiped off the map in the wake of the Dark God War. Perhaps, somewhere out there in the world, there was some remnant of the very first civilization...but these students were no archaeologists.
“The Dark God’s a mystery too, y’know~?” Yi Ling said. “If there was this huge, destructive being strong enough to end the world, then where was it hiding up until the war? Given all their technology, don’t you think people in the ancient era would’ve found something like that before it attacked?”
“Yi Ling’s got a point, yeah,” Makarov said. “We’ve got no idea what the Dark God actually was, or where it came from.”
“That’s true. In fact, it’s only called the ‘Dark God’ and the ‘Dark God War’ and so on because Metis started using that name,” Serina said. “But with how many unknowns there are, there’s nothing we can say for sure about what kind of entity the Dark God even was, is there?”
“Ah—what if it was actually a biological weapon made during the ancient era?” Croesus posited. “Take homunculi, for example. We aren’t able to create those nowadays, are we? It’s considered taboo; ‘man creating living things is blasphemy against life itself,’ or so we’re told. But...what if that taboo exists because of the Dark God?”
“Oh. Yeah. If what you’re saying’s right, then I mean, of course they’d ban it...” Makarov nodded.
Nobody actually knew the Dark God’s true form, but the idea that it was actually a biological weapon from the ancient era made sense to these researchers. After all, mages had a tendency to doubt the existence of gods. These people devoted themselves to untangling the mysteries of the world, and most of them struggled to believe in beings so vaguely defined as these supposed gods that most of the world believed in.
That didn’t just apply to the Dark God either. Most mages considered even the Four Gods to be creatures that had evolved in some particular way. It made sense.
In reality, their hypothesis was half right. However, nobody but a handful of reincarnators knew the truth, and none of them were here right now to explain it to these students.
“Well, then—I’d say that little chat should have sufficed as a breather, don’t we think? Back to work,” Croesus said.
“Blech... Did you have to remind me?” Makarov groaned. “Now I’m depressed again.”
“With the way things are going, I would’ve been happier just analyzing modern-day magic,” Serina said. “Should we really be spending our time digging through these old magic tools? We don’t even know whether they’ll be useful.”
“Croesus sure looks eager, at least...” Yi Ling said.
Amid a throng of fed up students, Croesus alone was still full of energy and excitement.
The other students envied how obviously happy he was to get back to analyzing magic tools.
It had been unfair to ask a bunch of students to analyze these tools in the first place. There just weren’t enough proper researchers, though. And since Croesus had been the one to release the groundbreaking publication on deciphering formulas, he and his peers made up a good portion of those who could analyze the tools.
In other words, the high ratio of students here boiled down to Solistia’s policy of meritocracy.
However the research group had been assembled, though, all of them—with one notable exception—were dreading their continued slog at what was practically a black company.
In fact, seeing as there wasn’t even an end in sight, this might have been worse than a black company. Perhaps it was hell itself.