A bandit camp located deep in the mountains.
Inside a prison made of bamboo.
Gale wore a troubled expression.
The reason he was so confused was that everything from the final moment had been far too vivid to dismiss as a dream.
Gale felt around his neck.
Where Raskal’s blade had touched him, he felt only smooth skin.
“Why am I alive....”
Even when he pinched his cheek and rubbed his hand against the floor, every sensation in his body told him that all of this was real.
Gale looked down at his hands.
The trembling born from the primal emotion called fear still lingered in his palms.
“That wasn’t a dream...?”
Demon God Deus.
The absolute evil of the old era, and the strongest being of all.
He had said it.
[I wish for you to despair once more.]
A being like Deus wanted him to despair.
How many people could hear that and keep their sanity intact?
As if to prove those words, Deus had even thrown Gale into this place, filled with nothing but painful memories.
No matter how much he looked around, this was that place.
The very place where Gale had witnessed a human death for the first time in his life.
“Of all places....”
He turned his head and looked down at the red-haired girl sleeping quietly inside the prison beside his.
Gale knew her.
Rita Orhan.
She was a girl he had often played with when he was young.
If he really had returned to the past, then this had to be the day when he had been kidnapped by bandits who appeared out of nowhere while he was catching stag beetles with Rita.
‘She died here.’
It was one of the incidents he could never forget.
Although he had witnessed countless deaths while fighting the Celestials until just moments ago, his very first death in life was different.
Forgetting a friend who had been ravaged and killed by bandits right before his eyes was not an easy thing to do.
Gale slowly retraced the memories of that day.
In fact, not long after she breathed her last, the knights led by her father, Josef Orhan, had found this place.
Their urgent voices as they came galloping on horseback lingered in his ears.
-Hurry and find Lady Rita!
-Here! There is a survivor!
Fortunately, Gale had not died and had been found by them, but Rita had already lost her life.
As he recalled that moment once more, a bitter taste filled his mouth.
But that was, after all, something from the past.
Looking at Rita sleeping soundly beside him, it was clear that it had not happened yet.
Back then, he had not been able to do anything, but,
‘If I’ve really returned to the past....’
Regardless of what form it had taken, it was certain that he had been given another chance.
Gale clenched his fist tightly.
Rita’s death, which he had been forced to simply watch, and beyond that, even the opening of the gate to another world might be things he could stop.
First, Gale calmed his wavering heart and calmly looked back over his situation.
Now that he thought he had returned to the past, countless things he wanted to change came to mind, but the most urgent problem was escape.
‘Let’s look around first.’
Gale leaned forward and peered outside through the crudely woven bamboo bars.
Countless stars sparkled in the sky,
and below them, around a dying bonfire, he could see at least ten bandits.
Gale had fought countless bandit groups while serving in the Imperial Army, but right now, he had the body of a young boy.
Fighting more than ten armed bandits in this body, without any weapons, was no different from suicide.
He quietly watched them and waited for a while.
One by one, the men who had been sitting around the bonfire, sharing cups of liquor amid rough laughter, began finding places to lie down.
Watching them, Gale thought,
‘Come to think of it, how many days has it been since we were kidnapped?’
If his memory was correct, Rita had definitely failed to endure three nights back then.
He did not know what day this was, but what was certain was that there was not much time left before Rita died.
“Yaaawn... Then I’m off to bed.”
“When we wake you later, get up right away.”
Once everyone except the bandit standing night watch had gone to sleep, Gale began searching more boldly for a way to escape.
‘I think I can just break this.’
Gale grabbed the bamboo bars before him and shook them.
Creak, creak.
‘They probably slapped it together because they thought we wouldn’t even think of escaping.’
If secretly slipping out of the prison had been enough to solve the problem, the Gale of that day would not have simply watched Rita die either.
‘The problem is those bastards.’
Even if they were asleep now, there were plenty of men who would wake up the moment a commotion broke out and draw their swords without caring why.
In order to get out of this place safely, he needed enough power to make that possible.
All Gale had was his own body, which had become that of a young boy.
Aside from that, there was nothing he could rely on.
While he was thinking quietly, something flashed through his mind.
The very thing he had awakened a talent for too late in his previous life, leaving him to pound the ground in regret.
Magic.
If it was magic, he might be able to do something even with this body.
Having found a single strand of hope, Gale sat cross-legged inside the prison.
“The floor is a little uncomfortable... but this is enough.”
The magical talent Gale possessed was different in kind from that of other mages.
A deep understanding of magic and an academic fervor bordering on obsession.
With his innate talent for handling mana supporting those qualities, Gale had been able to achieve results at a tremendous speed in a short period of time.
However, Gale had first created his mana heart when he was nearly thirty years old.
Although he had reached the 6th Tier in a mere five years after creating his mana heart, his start had come far too late.
His teacher at the time, Rozena, had looked at him with regret.
-If you had entered the path of magic from a young age... the world truly might have changed.
Gale closed his eyes and slowly focused on his breathing.
The mana scattered around him slowly entered his body through his breath.
The knowledge required to create a mana heart was already inside his head.
Gale slowly moved the mana that had begun to form a flow and guided it toward his chest.
Mana fundamentally had a tendency to disperse.
In other words, no matter how much a caster tried to condense it, it was not something that would simply obey.
“Whoo....”
Acceptance.
And yet, the will to control it was the most important thing of all.
As the mana, rough yet gentle, began to rotate, he felt pain as though flesh were being carved away from inside his body.
Gale desperately endured the pain and focused his mind.
All of this was nothing more than phantom pain.
Just as a mana heart was not an organ that truly existed, this pain was also nothing but false.
But the pain was so immense that the process of creating a mana heart was the stage where the greatest number of those trying to learn magic gave up.
Amid the endless waves of pain surging in, Gale recalled the moments of despair that had been reflected before his eyes.
Rita crying out to be saved.
Count Orhan, enraged after losing his daughter.
His comrades dying one after another to Celestials.
And at the end of it all, even Raskal’s utterly vile sneer.
Compared to the scale of the despair he had endured until now, this much pain was nothing.
Gale closed his eyes and immersed his consciousness in the infinite mana billowing around him.
By the time the moon that had risen high set, and dawn broke far in the distance,
Gale opened his eyes, which had been closed gently.
At the steady pulse of mana he felt inside his chest, he smiled faintly.
***
The lord’s office of the Orhan estate.
Inside it, Count Josef Orhan, master of the estate, clenched his fist tightly.
His anger, with nowhere to go, soon turned toward the innocent desk, and a THUD rang through the otherwise silent lord’s office.
Two days ago.
Rita, his only child, had disappeared.
“What about our Rita? Sob....”
“Please wait just a little longer.”
Count Orhan had immediately ordered his knights to search the territory, but no matter how long he waited, no news came that Rita had been found.
Count Orhan could give no definite answer to his wife’s words.
He had been waiting endlessly for news from his knights when a hooded man came to Count Orhan’s estate.
-I have brought news of Miss Rita.
Facing Count Orhan in the lord’s office, he removed his hood.
A black moon tattoo drawn beneath one eye was revealed.
Count Orhan knew very well what that tattoo meant.
Black Moon Syndicate.
The Black Moon Syndicate was a massive criminal organization active within the empire.
The notoriety they had built had spread beyond the empire to the Valter Confederation in the south.
Their organization was vast, yet they operated so covertly that even the empire had difficulty responding to them.
Upon seeing that tattoo, Count Orhan’s expression hardened.
“I believe you know what it means that I have come here, Count.”
“…What do you want?”
If he could save Rita, he felt that he could give up anything he possessed.
The Black Moon Syndicate man said,
“There is only one thing we want. The mining rights to the Latium Mine east of the Orhan Territory.”
“…!”
Aside from the villages adjacent to the empire, most of the Orhan Territory consisted of mountains.
The reason the territory’s people could live on land where farming was impossible was that the Latium Mine existed within the territory.
Latium was a mineral capable of holding mana, and most of the territory’s income came from Latium.
In that situation, telling him to hand over the Latium Mine was no different from telling him to starve his people to death.
“That alone is impossible. I will give you anything else.”
At that, the Black Moon Syndicate man laughed.
“Then hand over the distribution rights to the Latium produced in your territory. I will allow you to see Miss Rita’s corpse.”
The instant he heard those words,
the reason he had barely been holding on to flew away.
“Corpse? How dare you spew that shit in front of me!”
“You would do well to think carefully. Can you even call a funeral without a single bone a funeral?”
“You bastard!!!”
“If you refuse even that, such incidents will continue to happen from now on as well. You know very well, do you not? Why we are so obsessed.”
Although Orhan shouted, the Black Moon Syndicate man continued speaking without concern.
“You will watch your family and your people continue to die.”
Josef Orhan, who had once been a renowned knight in the empire, immediately drew his sword and cut down the Black Moon Syndicate man.
The man met death in a single stroke, but Josef Orhan’s sword did not stop.
He cut and cut again until the lord’s office was stained entirely with the man’s blood.
He unleashed all the anxiety and rage that had built up inside him upon that man.
“You trash bastards!!!!”
But cutting him down changed nothing.
After repeating his venting for a long time, Count Orhan sat down in his seat and quietly looked down at the man’s corpse.
Belated regret came to him.
“Rita…!”
Now, the only hope left was that the knight order he had sent would bring her back safely.
That was all.
***
At that time.
Kalif, an executive of the Black Moon Syndicate, was in his tent listening to the news that negotiations had broken down.
Kalif asked,
“What should we do with the hostage we are holding?”
Then the communication crystal orb flashed.
An unpleasantly gloomy voice was heard.
“Bring her to Rustav. If you finish this matter well, I will let you leave the Crescent Moon.”
Being allowed to leave the Crescent Moon meant being recognized as one of the elites within the Black Moon Syndicate.
From here to Rustav, the imperial capital, two days would be more than enough.
A smile formed around Kalif’s mouth.
“Understood.”
The communication crystal orb turned gray, signaling that the communication had ended.
Seeing it, Kalif smiled.
“A nobleman’s daughter....”
The girl taken hostage had not yet matured, but she seemed sufficient to relieve the weariness that had built up from their long life in camp.
Maybe he should stretch his body a little for the first time in a while.
That was what he was thinking when urgent footsteps sounded outside the tent.
“Boss! We have a problem!!”
The man who roughly pulled aside the entrance flap and came in was panting hard.
Kalif frowned at the sight.
“I am quite sure I told you to pull the flap aside gently.”
“Huff... huff... That’s not what’s important right now!!”
“What is it?”
“The boy we kidnapped and locked up yesterday got out of the prison!”
Kalif let out a small sigh.
“If he escaped, you can simply catch him and put him back inside. Is that really something worth making such a fuss over?”
“No! He didn’t run away! He got out of the prison, and now he’s beating the men down!!”