Having succeeded in putting his immediate situation in order, Odysseus set about searching for information in earnest. Although he had sworn to take his revenge, he needed to make certain whether this place truly was the future of the land he had lived in, or whether it might be another world entirely.
Beyond that, he also had to get a grasp of this body's exact abilities and talents.
"...Seeing it again, it's still remarkable that this isn't parchment."
He fiddled with the 'paper' that had been made by synthesizing plant fibers in place of sheepskin. It was remarkable all over again.
In the era he had lived in, far from an object that gathered up every event of the past and called itself a history book, the very concept of a book had been exceedingly rare. At most there were records made into scrolls, or what poets passed along from mouth to mouth, and that was all.
So Odysseus picked up the first book, unable to hide his strange mood. Of the books he had brought, three were history books, but since they were all one connected series, choosing his first target was not difficult.
The cover reading ⌈Let's Learn About History 1 -The Age of Myth-⌋ spread wide open.
"Perseus, founder of Mykene; the expedition team of the Argo; Theseus of Athens; the twelve labors of Herakles......."
Odysseus skimmed idly through the pages, taking in the contents. Fortunately or unfortunately, nothing so very different from what he knew had appeared yet. Though there were tales slightly adapted from having been abridged too far.
"The war between the allied forces of Greece and Troy."
Then, when he had reached about 2/3 of the way through the book, names quite familiar to him came into view. Greece and Troy. Names he knew better as Achaia and Ilios respectively.
"...I could at least understand it if they called it the allied forces of Hellas, but where did the name Greece spring from all of a sudden?"
He was sour about the change in the name of the land he had lived in, but soon focused on the Troy side.
"They used to say they hoped King Tros' name would spread far and wide, and it truly has."
This side he could at least understand. The meaning of Ilios was 'the land of Ilos,' and the reason it had been called that was that among the kings ruling the land at the time, Ilos was the most famous.
And that in later ages the place name Troy, taken from the name of Tros, became the more famous... that too made sense, given that it was what the bastards of Ilios in his day had wished for over and over. If they knew of it, the descendants of Ilos would surely be pleased as well.
Even though Odysseus himself had cut off that house's line.
'Ah, perhaps I didn't cut it off completely?'
Still, it was true that everyone who could carry on that house's name had disappeared, so saying he had cut off the line would not be entirely wrong either.
"...More to the point, good grief, this is nothing but a heap of fabrication. Building the walls in the ninth year? Finishing the wooden horse in a matter of days with a god's help? Are they joking?"
In any case, he was dumbfounded as he read the Trojan War section. The rough framework lined up, but perhaps for the sake of a dramatic narrative there were rather... nonsensical corners here and there.
For reference, they had begun building the walls in the third year of the war and completed them in the middle of the seventh. And the wooden horse had barely been built in a matter of weeks, not days.
"At least they wrote down the supreme commander's idiocy properly. Yes. This much ought to be handed down properly."
Just thinking of the supreme commander of the allied forces, who went mad over a woman and earned the wrath of the alliance's finest general, still made the back of his neck stiff. If not for that alone, the war would have been at least two years shorter.
A real idiot son of a bitch. If he was going to bring a man along as a staff officer, he should have damn well listened to him. There was nothing in that head but women, fighting, and honor.
He clicked his tongue, tsk tsk, and turned the page again. The sentences themselves were very short, limited by how thick a book could be, but so many memories were tangled in a single line that the hand turning the pages naturally slowed.
All the more so because every recollection that came back to him was nothing but coaxing and soothing morons who knew nothing except charging forward, so that they would follow the plan. Odysseus ground his teeth over the days of the great war that he had lived without remembering.
"...It's astonishing all over again that we were the ones who won that war."
In any case, Ilios, no, Troy, was defeated by the allied forces and destroyed. On the alliance's side many generals died or were wounded, yet some of the survivors returned home in robes of silk, having taken all the wealth and fame for themselves.
And Odysseus, too, was among them. Though he had not gone home in robes of silk made for the occasion, he took pride that in fame alone he fell behind no one. It was a fact plain from the sheer frequency with which his name was mentioned in this very book.
Unless one was a great hero like Herakles or Theseus, there were few mentioned more often than he.
"Penelope......."
But that lofty glory was of no use whatsoever now. No, in truth it had been meaningless from the very start. What he had truly wanted to have was not achievements that would follow him all his life but the fleeting moments spent with the one he loved.
Treasures that had now vanished as well and could no longer be reclaimed.
Odysseus fell silent for a while, thinking of his eternal love and his precious son. Past even the unofficial history of Telegonos that had caused his memories to awaken, the history book was already racing toward its end.
"...So the last part is the Eschatosomachia."
The final war. He stared for a long while at the closing passage saying that all the gods had died and the age of myth had ended, then shut the book just as it was. It was unpleasant, it was strange, and his chest churned. He wondered whether it was really so uncanny a thing that everything he had known had changed.
"Ha! If I bust my ass all the way to Elysion and the world turns out to be different, so Penelope and that piece of shit aren't there, that would be funny in its own way."
He called up another train of thought in order to suppress this unspeakable feeling. It was not a very good decision. The subject he had raised without thinking was every bit as prickly as a thorn.
"...Good heavens. To think the only method of proving whether it is the same world or not is to go and collide with it myself. Wise Pallas... no, you betrayed me, Athena, so there is no longer any need to seek you out. Oh, Nemesis, god who presides over vengeance and karma. I pray you let this pitiful man take just revenge upon those pieces of shit."
He prayed to a god out of habit. One god had betrayed him and the other gods were all dead, but there was no helping it. To Odysseus, prayer went beyond faith; it was closer to something inertial, no different from a part of his life.
Which meant it was not a habit easily corrected, not by being betrayed, not by knowing they had vanished.
'Since there are plenty who still believe even knowing the gods are gone, it won't look odd anyway.'
Pantheons and the like, shrines that still served the gods, existed. It seemed that since there was no longer any divine punishment to fear, heretics who revered the foreign enemy and cults whose faith had degenerated turned up now and then... but that was not a part he needed to concern himself with. Under ordinary circumstances he would never get tangled up in it.
"This much will do for the history of this world... now it's time to get a grasp of my abilities."
Odysseus pushed the problems no longer worth thinking about behind him and took up the next item. This too was an important matter. Outside the city had become extremely dangerous because of the contamination.
'It's fortunate that this body can work magic.......'
In other words, force of arms was no longer one option among several but an essential element. All the more so now, when the odds were high that the 'directions to the underworld' lay in the world outside the city.
'The only magical knowledge in this head is the manufacture of weapons, magic bullets and the like. What the.......'
If there was a minor problem, it was that Yul had not been a very good magician. More precisely, he had been a moron who seemed to have the talent but was not putting it to use.
Odysseus' gaze, fixed on his own fingertips, turned cold.
'His ability to perceive magic power is somewhat better.'
Magic power, or Aer Αήρ. What in his era had been called a god's energy, or breath, or blessing. An energy within the body that every living thing held, but whether one could perceive and control it was divided solely by innate capacity.
In that respect this flesh had better sensitivity than Odysseus' former body. Which meant he could grasp and control the magic power within the body in finer detail.
'The amount of magic power the body holds is large as well. Even in the past this much wasn't very common.'
He did not know how much magic power the magicians of the modern age held. But in the Age of Myth, magicians did not have all that much magic power unless they were of divine blood. In truth, not even all those of divine blood had a great deal of it.
His own former body had held a truly rat's-tail's worth of magic power, had it not? And that despite his birth father being no less than the son of Aiolos, god of the wind, and his birth mother the granddaughter of Hermes, god of messengers.
Yet his body now held double, no, several dozen times the amount of magic power he had held in those days. Considering that the amount of magic power came down to nothing but what one was born with, it was a tremendous endowment.
'And lastly, his ability to control magic power... it's definitely not below standard. For a magician it's more than enough.'
Was it because the body's sensitivity was good, or because he had the knack he had used in his former body? Moving magic power as he wished was better than in his former flesh if anything, certainly not worse.
It could only be called the talent of a born magician. A talent great enough to make the hour ago, when he had briefly despaired over his feeble muscles, look laughable.
"The problem is... there really is only a little knowledge to put it to use with."
But what good was hardware so good it verged on blessed, when there was no software to fill it?
'I understand that the knowledge magic requires is rare and expensive across the board, but.......'
Magic in the past had been something that varied with each individual's capacity, so there was nothing established about it and no fixed rules. That was also why Odysseus could not use proper magic.
But magic in Yul's world, that is, in the present age, was different.
Magic as the modern age defined it was 'the discipline and technique of producing a desired image in reality by means of magic power and calculation formulas.'
Put another way, that meant calculation formulas were necessary in order to work magic. In other words, one had to know higher knowledge such as chemical formulas or mathematics for proper magic to be possible.
'Even so, isn't this too much? With ability like this, wouldn't he be well worth investing in?'
And such knowledge was precious. Truly precious.
So precious that the places where knowledge above a certain level could be learned and read, schools and libraries and the like, existed only in specific districts.
And the specific districts in question meant, among the places walled off and completely separated within the city, the ones where those with a great deal of money resided.
The reality was that those living in the districts called poor quarters, or slums, could not receive even compulsory education. Which meant that schools and universities were out of the question, and that even a place like a library was far too much to dream of.
'You don't even need the standing to move between districts. Just pulling out a few books or papers through Brokers would.......'
Of course, going through those who could pass between the walls or extract information by hacking, the 'Brokers,' meant that reading advanced knowledge was not entirely impossible. The problem was that it cost a great deal of money.
'Yul's intelligence and memory don't seem particularly low either, so really, why?'
But investment was fundamentally something done while looking broadly.
Needless to say if the object of that investment was a magician who used the Eastern Continent's languages, Han and Gauri, freely, and could also use the Western Continent's Hellas and Latin, English, and even languages of the Arabic family.
Yul was not an object of investment that would fail.
'And when making alchemical products like magic bullets, he wasn't slow to master them or prone to mistakes either.'
Did that mean he had no talent for magic itself? The one magic Yul had known how to use... or rather, should it be called alchemy? In any case, digging through those memories let him draw up at least a rough estimate of that part as well.
Yul had not been a boy whose magical sense was poor at all. If anything he was a kid who could accomplish anything so long as he was given backing.
"Well, knowledge I lack I can build up in time, and in the unlikely event that I can't advance through magic, I need only make my name as a warrior, so it can't be counted a great problem, but......."
Why such talent had been left to rot, he could not understand for the life of him. Was it simply because Yul was young? But for that, there were far too many vague corners in Yul's memories.
The boy had clearly been aware that this was an uncommon ability, and even so had chosen not to reveal it. That went even for the captain he respected and followed in his own way.
Odysseus' deliberation deepened.
『Yul, let's make a promise with your brother. That you'll never hurt a person.』
Had Yul hidden the abilities he had because of this promise? But in keeping this promise, was it truly necessary to hide all of it? Of course, if it had been discovered that he had such aptitude, those around him would have tried to make use of him one way or another.......
『Never, never hurt anyone.』
Odysseus quietly examined Yun's figure within the memories. A boy of features similar to Yul's, but somewhat... bigger, owing to the nine-year gap in age. A young thing who had only barely become a man by the most recent memories.
『Yu-lu-yu-lu-Yul. You know I care about you a whole lot, right?』
Strictly speaking, twenty-one was not a young age. At least it had not been in the Age of Myth. In those days, twenty-one was an age at which having a child or two was nothing strange.
『It'd be really nice if we could just live like this.』
But not in this era. Modern thinking counted nineteen as an adult, and even at twenty-one one was not regarded as a proper grown-up.
And besides, Odysseus had passed fifty before he died and had a child past thirty.......
'Poor thing.'
He was not sad. To Odysseus, the being called Yun had been closer to a stranger than to family.
But since he had received Yul's memories, Yun was not a complete stranger either. Odysseus' eyes softened a little as he thought of Yun.
"...Sadly, the promise not to hurt anyone is one I cannot keep for you."
He could avoid killing as much as possible, but not even he could guarantee that never killing was truly possible.
"Instead, your revenge at least I will see to for certain. I swear it before the name of the god Nemesis."
An oath sworn on a god's name was never to be broken. That alone was the most Odysseus could do for the dead Yun.
Magic power spurted from his fingertips, and power struck against power to throw off a tiny spark. It was primitive magic, and incense honoring the repose of Yun's soul.
An unfamiliar custom of the Eastern Continent was carried out familiarly by his hand.