Chapter 31. The future that shaped the present (Interlude)

[Armored Dragon Calendar - Year 500 (around 90 years into the future).]

There lived a young girl called the Blessed Child of Restoration.

There was no life in her eyes. Ever since she was born, they had been empty save for despair.

The adults around her thought of her as ominous and kept their distance.

The girl knew what fate had in store for her. She had known since before her birth.

No, it is not quite true that she knew before birth.

She had not known before her first, true birth.

But this girl had been reborn many times. Again and again, she had repeated a life with only slight differences each time.

Different lives, albeit only slightly…

Nevertheless, they all ended the same way.

There was never a big change that occurred, and she approached the same conclusion time and time again.

That conclusion was her death. She would always die.

No living creature may escape death, but her death was a particularly awful one.

Most often, after being manipulated as a tool by her country, she was captured and murdered by an enemy nation; she was like a toy fought over by children. Sometimes she was brutally raped, sometimes she was eaten alive by monsters, sometimes she was bound and thrown into water…

The girl died each time, in pain and despair.

To her, life was just a road that always ended in anguish. Every day was nothing but another step closer to the executioner's block.

She was without hope.

Still, the girl had a power.

She could restore the time of an object by, at most, a single day.

With this power, she could restore broken things. She could even resurrect the dead.

But only within 24 hours.

The power to bring the dead back to life within just a single day was enough for her to be pressed into service by the nation.

The King kept her all to himself, monopolizing her powers.

Her power freed the king from injury and illness.

Mysteriously, she could not stop him from aging, but this was of little importance to the king.

The girl had known three versions of the King.

Though his name and appearance never changed, there were small variances in his personality and his conduct.

Every time she died, and a new nightmare began, the king she served changed a little.

But none of it mattered to the girl. There was no difference in how any of the kings treated her.

To her, the kings all blended into the same monster.

The power that made her a Blessed Child brought her no happiness. She could not turn back her own time, nor could she use her power for her own purposes. All it did was shackle her to the palace that served as her prison.

And then, she died.

She was kept like an animal in a corner of the palace, meeting slightly different people every time, until she finally perished.

Sometimes her power was insufficient, and she incurred the wrath of the king.

Sometimes another nation invaded the kingdom, and she was taken prisoner.

Sometimes the kingdom was overrun by demons that slaughtered them all.

Her life faded away in misery.

And then, she returned to the beginning.

She started again from her birth in a remote rural corner of the kingdom.

After spending her early years enduring the adults' disgust, she was taken to the palace where she would ultimately die yet again.

The girl tried to escape her fate in the beginning. She hid her power so that she could stay with her mother and father.

It did no good.

For some reason, just before her fifth birthday, soldiers came from the palace and took her.

She tried to run away from the village before the soldiers came, but that too was futile. She was either killed by a monster or was captured by bandits or kidnappers - who she was sold on to next varied, but she ended up at the palace without fail. Fate dragged her back to the palace like an anltion's trap, crushed her hope, then murdered her.

It was hell - an eternal, unceasing hell cycle that utterly destroyed her.

She ceased to feel anything. She followed the king's orders like a machine, her face devoid of expression.

A hundred years passed, then two hundred. Or was it a thousand? Two thousand? Perhaps ten, or twenty thousand. She no longer remembered how many times she had died, or how long she had lived.

Her memory was perpetually hazy, and she couldn't recall a single instance of joy.

However, the moments of her death were always crystal clear. Perhaps it was instinct. Some pure animal urge within her that clung to life, that recorded the memory of her death as something to be avoided.

Alas, the result was that her whole life was blotted out by her own deaths. She no longer recalled anything else. It was nothing but a chain of memories of death.

Immersed in an endless cycle of death, the girl made a wish.

She wished within all her heart.

I can't bear this anymore… Someone, save me… 

In that moment, the laws of the world shifted.

.... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

Things in her next life had changed.

She was again born in a provincial unnamed village and was taken to the palace.

She obeyed the king's every order and used her power day in and day out.

None of this had changed.

But when she was ten, something different happened.

Something that had never happened before.

It was her tenth birthday. As though to celebrate the occasion, the girl was taken away.

She was taken beneath the palace, to a space with a vast Magic Circle.

The girl hadn't known whether there was such a Magic Circle in the palace, for she had never been allowed to walk freely within it.

Several dozen adults stood around the Magic Circle. They held staves and wore black robes. Hoods covered their faces.

The knowledge she had gleaned from her eternal hell told her that these people were magicians.

But what would happen to her, she did not know.

She knew little about magic and Magic Circles. She had never had the opportunity to learn such things in any of her lives.

The girl was bound to the Magic Circle.

Her eyes were empty as always. Something new happened, but it failed to stir her heart at all.

She would still die in the end.

No matter what happened along the way, nothing would change. The sense of resignation crowded out everything else.

The ritual began.

The Magic Circle relentlessly drew the mana from her body.

As a Blessed Child she held an inconceivable volume of mana within her body. It was a different stripe of mana to that which was used in magic and swordsmanship, and in theory, it could not typically have been used for a Magic Circle like this one.

Was it a chance, then, that the Magic Circle was drawing out her mana?

No. This Magic Circle had been created for a purpose. It was designed to be activated using the mana of the Blessed Child of Restoration.

Who had made it?

Though they were out of the girl's sight, the architect was present at the ritual - the kingdom's prodigy, a magic knight - she observed the Magic Circle looking only a little less bored than the girl.

The ritual was a success. The Magic Circle blazed with light.

Light in a prison of seven colors - the light of summoning.

Then, when the light died away, there was a man standing in the middle of the circle.

"It worked."

"We did it!"

"The kingdom is saved!"

While the magicians celebrated, the man looked around his surroundings in amazement.

He was a muscular man. Although he was not huge, his body was sculpted in great detail.

His hair was standing right up in a strange unusual haircut and he wore unfamiliar clothes.

The magicians looked overjoyed; a powerful-looking hero was summoned!

The girl paid little attention to any of it.

The man turned his gaze to the girl with empty eyes who sat on the ground in front of him.

"This is... Can you understand me?"

The language he spoke was unknown to all there, and yet somehow, the girl understood.

Perhaps it was because her own mana had been used, or perhaps it was because she was connected to his presence here.

As the girl failed to respond, the man asked again, "Hello?"

"Hello," she replied indifferently like a machine.

"...Can you understand me?"

"...Yes."

"Oh."

"..."

"So, what is… this place?"

"It's the royal palace," the girl slowly answered.

"Royal palace…?"

"..."

"Uh, my name is #### #####," he said, as if suddenly realizing. "How about you?"

"I am the Blessed Child of Restoration."

"Blessed Child of Restoration… So you're a healer? And what about your name?"

With those words, the girl realized that in every iteration of her endless hell, and in particular after she came to the palace, no one ever asked her name.

A Blessed Child had no name.

Perhaps if they were royalty, an expedition might be made, but as a rule, Blessed Children had their names taken from them.

From that point on, they were only ever referred to as 'Miko' - the Blessed Child.

The girl was no exception.

But while usually Blessed Children had their names taken before they could learn them, the girl remembered her name. She remembered it precisely because she had died so many times.

It was the name her mother and father had given her.

"Riria," she said.

"Riria? I see. It's a cute name." The man smiled and then patted the girl's head.

The girl's heart stirred.

…

The girl had felt something had changed.

The king released her from her duties as a Blessed Child.

Instead, she was made to be the boy's interpreter.

After a mage knight joined them as a bodyguard, the three of them wandered freely through the palace.

"Riria, what's that?"

The man from another world asked her about everything - about the world, about how they lived, about the people in it.

But despite dying so many things, the girl knew nothing.

"He asked… what this is."

"That? It's a Magic Tool. When you put mana into it, fire comes out of the end. I wonder if they're going to the forest to drive out the monsters."

The girl, knowing nothing, asked the magic knight and the knight answered.

The magic knight looked half-asleep, but answered all the questions. Unlike the girl, she knew everything.

"I see. So it's like a flamethrower," the man said. "Do you know who made it?"

"He asked who made it," Riria again passed the question around.

The knight yawned and answered again, "This thing was invented by the Asura Kingdom. Many current magical tools were made there, and Summoning magic also made great progress. It's because of the last queen who heavily focused on magical research."

"I see…"

The man seemed to be deep in thought again for a while.

"Riria, please thank her again. She's very helpful," he finally said whilst glancing at the magic knight with gratitude.

The girl passed it around.

"No problem," the magic knight answered nonchalantly.

The man was very kind. The girl knew that much.

To her as well, unlike anyone ever before, she did not take her help for granted.

"Riria, can you use magic?" he asked.

"No. I never learned it," Riria said slowly.

"Ah, it's a shame."

"..."

"Do you know? There was no magic in my world."

"There was… no magic?"

"Yes. But just relying on their inventions, humans still became the top of the food chain. Even without magic we still made many things, for example, we had planes. A plane is, how should I say it, it's like a mechanical flying bird…"

The girl's life as an interpreter was nothing like her life before. Everything was fresh.

The man was very curious about the world. Every time he learned something, he smiled his easy smile, and every time, the girl's heart stirred.

At first, she'd think nothing would change. She'd think everything was over for her.

But she could dream about the stories the boy sometimes told her about his strange world.

When the knight answered the man's questions, she also felt her own world expanding. She learned that this world was unimaginably vast and full of all sorts of people she had never known.

A little while after the man came, she realized that her food had taste. Her ears opened to the chirping of the birds when she woke up in the morning and to enjoy the warmth of the sun.

She felt alive.

She believed her stint in hell was over.

The man had come to save her.

He had come to pull her out of this long, hellish cycle.

She had been born to meet him.

Now, her life would begin.

This is fate, she thought.

The man was so strong and so gentle, and such a support to her, that it seemed true.

She didn't know how to think of him - as a parental figure? A friend? A lover?

She only knew that he was her savior, and she loved him.

But that's why when the man did what he did, she decided to put her trust in him.

… (read the comment, IMPORTANT)

War engulfed the kingdom.

The girl knew that every time this war came, it swept her up and she died.

She knew it better than anyone.

But there were things she didn't know: that the man had been summoned to win the war. That the kingdom's prophet had advised that they summon a champion from another world and have him fight for them. And that after the kingdom had taken the prophet's advice and spent ten years summoning the man, they were now at a point of no return.

The girl knew nothing.

But the man was different.

He approached her on his own.

Then he told her that he's going to die, that it's his fate.

He told him the reason why the kingdom summoned him and that he's going to be sent into the battlefield where he will die.

And after that she will die as well.

The girl didn't know how the man could know about the future.

But she did have her own power. She also knew that death was also the end that awaited her.

And that's why she believed the man.

Somehow, he knew about the future.

Not only that, but after that he revealed that he also knew about her power of rebirth - about a power that no one should have known.

Rather than feeling fear that her secret was revealed, the girl felt unbelievably relieved and glad.

Someone knew!

Someone knew about what she has been through, and about what kind of hellish life she's been living. She could share that curse with someone.

Then the man made a proposal, saying that there's a chance for them both to live.

He asked her to use her powers to the limit and send his soul back to the past, to the year of 406.

He said that he will create a future in which she will be saved.

But the girl had no belief whether her powers would be able to accomplish something like this.

She told him this.

She fully trusted the man, but she simply couldn't do it.

"You can do it! Use your powers to the limit. Even if it kills you, you won't truly die, won't you?"

Still, he attempted to convince her.

But she still had no confidence.

Her ability could not be used this way…

She proposed that they would attempt running away instead.

But that's when the man took out a dagger and suddenly stabbed his own heart.

The girl panicked.

She wanted to rush in to stop the man, restoring him back to full health.

But the man kept her at bay with the bloodied dagger that he pulled out of his chest.

She couldn't approach him.

"Stand back! This is the only way! Riria, you can do it! Please… believe in me!"

While speaking with an anguished and terrified expression, slowly, the man fell to the ground into a pool of blood.

The girl rushed up to him immediately this happened, but then hesitated.

If she healed him, couldn't he just do the same thing again?

The man was determined. And he trusted in her to the point he was ready to take his own life.

She also wanted to trust in the man.

He was her only hope in all of her lives.

Watching the dead body of the man who saved her, she decided.

Even if she will die for good, she will try it.

The girl made a wish.

For the first time since she was first born, she wished and wished with all her heart: I want to be saved by him!

I want to live with him!...

She picked up the bloodied dagger and then stabbed her own heart.

Her power could turn back time for a single day.

Or at least, it was believed to do so.

Everyone had a vague sense that something was strange about her power, but the ability was so convenient that no one had bothered to investigate it further.

But the man knew something.

And the girl also had this feeling. What he said might be possible.

However, she inwardly knew that she could only use her special powers at the time of her death.

Perhaps the man didn't know that.

Regardless of this, the time she had spent living with the man had not been long.

Even in that short time span, he had stolen her heart and usurped all the memories of death that had filled it.

The man was hope.

He was the first hope the girl had known. That hope kept her head raised high and facing forward.

For the first time since she was first born, she turned an eye to her own power.

The moment she also died whilst holding the man's hand, she bit her lip hard enough to draw blood, then used her power.

Even this fails and she dies for good, then so be it.

At least, she will no longer have to suffer.

Now, the girl forced out so much of her own might that she thought her mind would burst.

She used the Power to Alter the Past.

And the world looped, with the girl at its center.

…

The girls' power stretched back into the past of the year 400 of the Armored Dragon Era, the Citadel of Roa in Fittoa, where she and the man both lost their lives.

A rift in spacetime opened in the sky above the town.

Through that rift a soul was summoned from the future.

Because it was only a soul, the small disturbance of mana was not noticed by anyone.

But the time when the girl's power reached was too far off from the man's intended target. His soul wandered aimlessly for years and during the process his memories of this world gradually faded away.

Finally, in the year 407 it came across an infant on the verge of death and slipped inside.

That soul belonged to the person who would be named… Seraphim Greyrat.

***

***

***

(AN: So this is the story behind Seraph's reincarnation, even though he has no way to know anything about it just yet.)

(Anyway, it seems like there will be no Mana Disaster. What does it mean? It would mean that there would be more political machinations in the story and we have to abandon the canon timeline completely. Seraph will no longer need to worry about hastening the disaster and things like that, so he can go all out on acquiring learning resources, growing stronger and formulating schemes (still within reason, since he ideally would still not stand out too much before growing strong enough).)

(It's the development that eventually took place in my story for various reason.)

(It also means there's no Nanahoshi. It's a bit sad, because it would have been interesting to see Seraph and her interact. A pity.)

(To balance it perhaps I should mention that Seraph will instead have a chance to meet princess Ariel and maybe also Tristina Purplehorse when they're both much younger. It might have not been possible otherwise. As I write the story, there are things I have to give up on if I want to stay consistent. There are gains and losses.)

(In the chapter's comments I explaina few things and also provide spoilers on canon.)