I looked around the banquet hall with a sick-of-it face. It was wide enough to hold a footrace, and the ceiling was high, too. The floor was marble, and one entire side that led out to the terrace was made of glass windows. Every pillar without exception was packed with sculptures, and there was even a painting on the ceiling. My employer and I were slumped on the bare marble floor with nothing laid down beneath us.
What happened if I messed up the power level of my magic? If I snapped the nose off one of those statues? If I broke even a single pane of glass the wrong way, that spy’s warning about ending up in slavery didn’t feel like someone else’s problem.
“First you should worry about whether you can manifest magic at all. Control comes after.”
The prince said it like a teacher scolding a student who’d been stirring up trouble all over the classroom. No—more accurately, like a teacher dressing down an overambitious student who didn’t even have the multiplication tables memorized but was charging in to solve equations.
He was right. I twisted my neck back into place after it had turned however it pleased and closed my eyes. Like the prince said, I recalled the sensation of pouring magic power into the pot and roused the mana inside my body.
“They used to treat fire as a single element, but there isn’t a mage alive who still believes that stuffy old theory. In your hand, there’s air—and in that air, there’s oxygen that lets fire burn. Pull your mana out. Think of it as detonating the air in your hand with mana. Then keep feeding it oxygen. With your mana.”
What he said was close to scientific truth. Mana, which I’d once thought of as some unscientific force, was clearly a real power, too. Reviving the memory of absorbing the mana that existed outside into my body, I tried this time to push the mana inside me outward.
“Now.”
Following his lead, I recited the ignition word for fire.
【Ignis.】
For a split second, what came to mind was the welding torch we used in the workshop. Flip the switch and it would spit out an orange flame in an instant. If you fed oxygen into lit LPG, the flame gradually turned blue…
Bang—something actually exploded. Startled, I opened my eyes. In that moment, the magic power I’d been struggling to maintain scattered.
I let out a deep sigh. My back had already gone damp with sweat, and my body felt chilly. At the same time, I felt hollow, like the inside of me had been scooped out.
But did I do something, at least? Did I manage to imitate even the “m” in “magic”?
“How did you do that?”
The one who confirmed that I had, in fact, done something was the prince. His brow was knotted tight.
“So there was a reason you were thinking about controlling it first.”
That reaction wasn’t normal. No, I’d been worrying about something pointless because I didn’t know any better, but before I had time to explain, he pressed me.
“You—what are you hiding?”
All I could do was blink. The prince stared at me with razor-sharp eyes.
“They say the king who unified this land and founded Henia was the illegitimate son of the King of Meridiem, who ruled the southern region back when this country was split into three. He took as companions a fallen noble, an orphan mercenary of unknown origin, a mage excommunicated by his master, and others—and he unified the land and became the founding king.”
I didn’t even know what this body of mine truly was. At some point, I just found myself using it. So I had no answer to give the prince when he asked what I was.
It was suspicious no matter how you looked at it. There was no way I wouldn’t be tense. I tried to act like I wasn’t.
But the prince, who’d been digging into my identity, suddenly started telling a legend about the founding king.
“…When was that?”
“Over six hundred years ago.”
That was plenty of time for truth to vanish and only legend to remain. A fairy tale would be more realistic.
“That’s the end of the history of someone hiding their status and accomplishing something.”
I felt like I finally understood why he’d brought up a story even more unreal than a fairy tale. The prince kept going.
“Do you really think there were no talented people after that with miserable personal histories? Of course there were. They disappeared without leaving anything behind—or they spent their entire lives hiding their roots.”
“So, my lord Duke, you’re saying I’m hiding some secret about my birth. Something like that?”
“Keep hiding it. Desperately. Don’t let it slip halfheartedly.”
The prince warned me with deadly seriousness. He was genuinely worried about me.
“You’re smiling? Do I look like I’m joking?”
“Am I smiling?”
At my question, the crease between his brows deepened.
“I understand perfectly that you mean every word.”
If I had been smiling, it would have been the kind of expression that came from relief.
“My father was a hunter, and I don’t know what kind of person my mother was. My father might have told me, but I don’t remember. Like you said, there might have been something secretive about my birth—but I want to say the odds are very low. As you know, I’m a Beta.”
I thought it was a line of reasoning even he could accept, but he didn’t relax his frown.
“You’re not an ordinary Beta.”
He let out a long sigh. The way he looked at me was like he was saying, What am I supposed to do with this kid?
“Your learning ability, your adaptability to mana—none of it is anywhere near ordinary.”
“If you’re calling me a genius, then absolutely not.”
“You might’ve wanted to be just a little better than everyone else. Unfortunately, you failed.”
He was serious from start to finish.
“Sounds like you’re finally starting to understand what I’m saying.”
This time, I could feel the corners of my mouth sinking. As he looked at my face—my smile completely gone—he exhaled long again.
“The drawing you made earlier is the same. That was a blueprint for a magic circle. Extremely precise. Even a greenhorn who just got their official mage license could make the same necklace if they had that blueprint. It’d be a bit of a slog, but still. And a master-class mage would repair the old magic circle and make something even better.”
This time it felt like I’d been hit for real.
“I only drew what I saw. Of course I was as meticulous as I could be, but if you give anyone enough time—”
What I’d been proud of was that I’d reverse-engineered it perfectly with limited time and tools. If you had enough time and the right tools, any jeweler could copy a design exactly. If not, how else would so many knockoffs exist? The differences showed up because they couldn’t replicate the craftsmanship down to the details—but if it was just the design, like the prince said, even a beginner who’d just stepped into a workshop could copy it. If they couldn’t even do that, they should give up on the dream of becoming a jeweler.
“It’s impossible.”
But the prince cut me off flatly.
“What kind of magic was on that necklace?”
“Distortion from pheromones, blocking detection magic, and a cognition-impairment spell… Don’t tell me.”
“Right. Even that spy couldn’t see the exact shape of the necklace I’m wearing.”
When the spy took the necklace off, I’d assumed all the magic on it had been released. Because I could see a perfectly designed necklace with my own eyes.
“Even the king probably can’t completely break a cognition-impairment spell. If you’d been acknowledged as the necklace’s true owner, the diamond wouldn’t have been contaminated in the first place.”
It was one thing after another. Like saying it must be a persimmon because it tasted like a persimmon, I’d only drawn what I could see. I’d been a bit obsessive about grading, sure—but I could do that because I could see it.
My head hurt. It meant my eyes weren’t “normal” in a different way.
My hand rose on its own and rubbed at my eyelids.
Even the king couldn’t see it properly? Wait—then how did the prince know my drawing was a perfect blueprint?
“Isn’t what matters right now not how I could bypass a cognition-impairment spell?”
My quick-witted employer figured out I’d come up with other questions just from the fact that I stopped rubbing my eyelid and glanced at him.
“Even if I couldn’t completely break it, I’d have realized right away that your drawing was strange. You would’ve drawn details I couldn’t see.”
He was right. And I understood perfectly well just how monstrous my employer’s magic skills were. The real genius was the prince.
I finally understood exactly why I’d failed to set the difficulty properly. I’d used a genius as my baseline without realizing he was a genius. Watching him run his household administration flawlessly as the family head, I’d thought I needed to be at least this good to catch his eye—to raise my price. There were plenty of other kids receiving the prince’s favor besides me. I had to win the unspoken competition with them.
My ignorance of this world’s level of magic probably played a part, too.
I never would’ve imagined that it wasn’t enough that pheromones didn’t affect my body at all—magic itself didn’t affect me much, either.
Fine. I knew the cause of the failure now. That meant I needed a plan going forward.
“What should I do from here on out?”
I brought the hand that had been rubbing my eyelid neatly together and looked my employer straight in the eye. He clicked his tongue, like he thought I’d recovered too quickly.
But I’d already had plenty of practice regretting things. What I learned, after a long stretch of regret, was that no matter how late you tried, you couldn’t undo what was already over. All you could do was move on with the wound still there. Time only flowed one way.
This, too, had to be put behind me.
“I lost my memories, and you’re the person who knows best about what’s unusual about this body. Back in the place I came from, I was just an idiot who’d even forgotten how to speak. My abilities will definitely be useful to you. I don’t know what kind of story I have, but I don’t particularly want to know. Like you said, even if I really did have some story, it would only make things dangerous. Surviving from here on out matters more to me than any past glory that probably doesn’t even exist.”
The only method I had was to persuade my employer. And I was also confident that the prince, who’d told me to go back even with the spy right in front of us, would definitely take me in.