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Lately, it feels like these mongrels have been getting strangely attached to me!
Their appearances vary widely. Some have dog ears twitching, others have cat ears folding and flicking, some stand with rabbit ears straight up, while others have fox ears trembling slightly. Their kinds are diverse, yet they all share one thing in common: they look at me with eyes filled with some sort of expectation.
I can more or less guess what they are expecting, but those who place expectations without thought will also be the ones to feel disappointment without thought. Before any such nonsense somehow turns into slander or insult toward Mother, perhaps I should grind these soft creatures into minced meat?
A preventive purge, as it were.
──There was a time when I thought like that.
I recall my past, immature self and let out a wry smile.
For the record, it is currently lunchtime, and I am seated on an old stone bench in a corner of the courtyard, meditating. Meditation is part of my daily routine. It is an essential discipline in the practice of magic.
Of course, there is my love for Mother, but through this mental training of meditation, I am steadily growing.
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I understand──I understand it. My existence is gradually drifting away from this world.
My lungs cease, my heart stops, and the sounds and light of the outside world peel away one by one. What remains at the end is a single point of light──my love for Mother!
The trace of her touch on my cheek this morning serves as my guiding flame, and with it, I descend even deeper. Without this light, I would never be able to climb back out from my inner spiritual world.
That is how deep I am sinking.
Behold, the brilliance of those stars.
Each of those lights is another world──another possibility.
In each of them, there is another me.
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Corpses are piled up.
Countless versions of me, dead.
One lies with his chest pierced by a sword. Another is laughing madly within a black miasma as blades run through his entire body. Another has grown cold in the academy library, having succumbed to illness. Poison, most likely. Another, unable to bear the humiliation of defeat in a swordsmanship tournament, has thrust a blade into his own throat. Another lies dead in his room within the Aster ducal residence, a dagger lodged in his back. An assassination. There is even one killed by that fool Azel, and another who blew himself up while surrounded by a great army.
Every possible death lies there.
The oldest of me was still an infant.
Killed in Mother’s arms. What I saw when I looked was her face, pressing a pillow down with trembling hands. A face mixed with tears, fear, and resignation. It was not the Mother I knew, and yet it was undeniably her.
All of them are me, and yet not me.
And still, I cannot accept that they are me.
They possessed power, yet withered without purpose.
Like mad beasts, they brought only destruction, and in the end, were destroyed themselves.
Utter inferiors!
I walked among the piled corpses of myself, examining each one. The more I looked, the more anger rose within me. What were you doing? For what purpose was the power you were given? What meaning was there in your birth──yet no matter how I demanded answers, the corpses did not respond. Corpses are corpses.
Me, and those who once were me.
Where lies the difference between us?
There is no need to think.
The answer had been clear from the beginning.
Mother.
Those who were me died without ever knowing Mother’s love. Some died before they could know it, some without the means to know it, and some without ever seeking to know it. Her warmth was never reflected in their eyes. The touch of her fingertips never lingered on their cheeks. The echo of her voice never remained in their ears.
Foolish, pitiful, inferior versions of myself.
Gather beneath my love──.
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The mountain of corpses had begun to glow faintly.
The light seeped from the surface of the corpses, rising in thin threads, and slowly drifted toward me──more precisely, toward the real me who was meditating like this now. It was like the flow of a river, and also like mist drifting in the air. Each strand was a weak light, but when countless strands overlapped, they gained a definite weight and poured into me.
The me that had vanished converged into me.
Countless versions of me decayed in their respective worlds, and the final light of consciousness they released at the moment of decay──crossing distant space and time──gathered into this me.
I could feel it.
Even now, as I remained like this, a number of me equal to infinity were decaying within worlds equal to infinity.
The me that died disappeared from their worlds. And those who disappeared from their worlds eventually converged to me.
I could not count how many versions of me had vanished. Even at this very moment, in some world, one me after another was falling.
The fallen me flowed into me.
The regrets and strength of their lives were poured into my blood.
Yes, my power is the sum of the power left behind by countless versions of me.
The bloodline magic passed down in the Aster Ducal House──Stellar Magic──is not a magic that summons stars. It is the art of becoming a star oneself and illuminating all three thousand worlds. The weak, that is, the me who are not me, gather to the strongest──me.
Do you understand what I am saying?
Until recently, I did not understand it either.
However, if you try to devote your entire existence without holding anything back to another──in my case, to Mother──you will realize that your current self alone is not enough. From there, if you consider every possibility, you will come to understand that this world is merely one among many.
The mountain of corpses began to collapse as if melting away.
When the convergence settled, I felt something within me click perfectly into place.
It was close to the feeling of something missing being filled. But it was not that something had been missing. From the beginning, I lacked nothing. This was not the filling of a deficiency, but simply the power that had always been mine returning from being lost on its journey.
Welcome back──.
I murmured inwardly.
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I opened my eyes.
The light in the courtyard was dazzling. The dull spring sun warmed the stone bench, and Esmeralda’s face was directly above me. When our eyes met, her gaze wavered for just a moment, then she cleared her throat and quickly composed her expression.
「Are you awake?」
「Yeah」
It seemed she had been resting my head on her legs. I know this is called a lap pillow, but this is something similar yet different. That is because Mother’s version is the proper one, and I still feel some resistance to putting this on the same level as Esmeralda’s.
──I suppose I should come up with a proper name for it.
Having decided that, I immediately forgot.
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Esmeralda watched Hein’s back as he left, saying something like 「Well then, the next lecture is about to start. Make sure you are not late as well」 in a model student tone. Her cheeks were slightly flushed as she gently pressed a finger to her lips.
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