“Here’s a little story you can take with you to the afterlife,” Maxwell began, his eyes gleaming darkly.
Once upon a time, 300 years ago, back when Maxwell was in his prime... the war-torn empire of Pajan was nearly unrecognizable.
Back then, women and men alike held jobs and titles of equal importance. Each person made a living on the merit of their own achievements. If one were to dig through the old, yellowed documents stored within Ode Castle, one would surely find records of female Guildmasters and Court Mages... not that those files were available to the general public, of course.
At the time, Maxwell was a painfully mediocre man. He had the track record—and the pedigree—to earn himself a spot among the Court Mages, but when contrasted with their talent and genius, he came out looking awfully average.
Cliché as it was, the pursuit of immortality was his life’s work, but his research was going nowhere. In contrast, the other Court Mages all had titles like “Sorceress” or “Wizard” and could cast spells without incantations. They were hailed as heroes on the battlefield; Maxwell was a nobody. And so the war waged on and on... and in the meantime, he pretended not to notice the desperate desire growing in his gut.
Then, one day, Maxwell noticed that all the most successful Court Mages had one thing in common: they were all working in weapons development, crafting spells that even ordinary Mages could use—anything to give the Pajanese foot soldiers even a tiny bit more strength. Their work was focused entirely on the war.
Then Maxwell started thinking.
Immortality was basically a form of body modification. If he could create a powerful, autonomous super-soldier that was guaranteed never to turn on them—that was sure to get him noticed. And for an under-achiever like Maxwell, this was an enticing prospect.
First, he would need a superior specimen to serve as his test subject. To that end, he began to search for people with a naturally high capacity for mana... but he needed someone who lacked agency. Someone who wouldn’t rebel against him. A short while later, he realized: of course. He could just create that person himself.
And so Maxwell decided to get married. His bride-to-be: a shrine maiden who served at a temple that worshipped the Dragon God. Once the marriage had been arranged, a young woman descended from the sacred mountain a few weeks later to meet him. She had long, silky black hair, porcelain skin, and icy, almond-shaped eyes. But most importantly, she was possessed of an extremely high mana capacity. After all, she was a high-ranked shrine maiden, said to be a descendant of the Dragon God himself.
Maxwell had used his status as a Court Mage, his wit, his wealth, and his connections, to acquire her. And with the current political climate as a convenient excuse, he succeeded in marrying her. The mountain had been forced to give her up in exchange for their continued autonomy as an independent state.
Maxwell reveled in his own omnipotence. Through many years of being a nobody, his ego had taken a beating. But now he had a trophy wife that he could use as he saw fit. Every night, he took her to bed with one order: bear my child.
That was all he wanted from her—an innocent, untainted child that carried the blood of the Dragon God in its veins. Using that child, he would create the ultimate super-soldier and seize all the glory for himself.
But their marriage was a short one. After their daughter was born, Maxwell’s wife left him. She had to return to the temple, or so she claimed. But they both knew it was just an excuse.
Everyone around him laughed at him for having lost the perfect woman... and Maxwell found this humiliation hard to bear. So he vowed to himself: in place of the wife who had abandoned him, he would create the perfect daughter. A daughter who would obey him—who would never betray him.