3 Mage

Ian first noticed the change the moment he woke up.

“……I’m not tired?”

He worked the dawn shift at the convenience store, so his daily routine was completely different from everyone else’s.

He went to sleep in the morning, woke up at noon, killed time for a while, then headed off to his part-time job.

As a result, the fatigue never really went away. His body was always as heavy as lead, and dark circles always sat beneath his eyes.

But today was different.

Exactly one week into the dirt-eating routine.

The moment Ian sat up in bed, he could feel that his body was lighter than expected.

His mind was unnaturally clear, and even his perpetually heavy eyelids felt perfectly fine.

The reason was obvious.

‘So the mage initiation process was real after all.’

Apparently, the methods written in the grimoire were genuine.

At first he’d been half-doubting it and just stubbornly doing it anyway, but this changed things. Now that he had personally felt the results in his own body, he could no longer dismiss everything in the grimoire as a pack of lies.

Ian burst out laughing, sat down on the living room floor, and gulped down a glass of water. Then he stopped by a nearby convenience store and bought a boxed lunch.

After a week of eating nothing but dirt, he was dying for real food. He heated the boxed lunch in the microwave, ate it, cleaned up neatly, and flopped down into a chair.

“Summon.”

Ian muttered as he reached his empty hand into the air. At that moment, pure white light burst forth and the grimoire appeared above his hand.

It was a function he had discovered by chance. As long as you were the owner of the grimoire, you could use its summoning ability even if you weren’t actually a mage. Thanks to that, he didn’t have to worry about losing the book or it ending up in someone else’s hands.

That was the one small blessing.

“……Mm.”

He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and slowly opened the grimoire. The book, opening smoothly, flipped itself to the desired page, following its owner’s will.

Page 785. The page that explained how to begin practicing magic.

Ian had just finished the part corresponding to earth, one of the four elements.

Now it was time to start air—in other words, wind.

Fortunately, wind was far easier than earth. All he had to do was meditate morning and evening for a week in a place where the wind blew strongly.

Seeing the word meditation after eating dirt for three meals a day was strangely comforting.

“There’s no reason to put it off.”

The first stage was already over, but Ian had no intention of dawdling. The sooner he became a mage, the better.

Without taking any real rest, the moment the sun went down he headed up to the rooftop of the low-rise building where he lived alone and sat down cross-legged.

As luck would have it, it was winter. The wind was strong, and while it was cold, it wasn’t so bad that a hand warmer couldn’t help him endure it.

The problem was meditation itself.

The only meditation Ian had ever done in his life was zoning out in the shower. If someone suddenly told him to meditate, he had no idea where to even begin.

Still, he managed it somehow. He gritted his teeth and stubbornly tried to empty his mind.

And so time passed.

With each sunrise and moonrise, the time he could spend meditating increased accordingly.

At last, exactly one week had passed.

Ian had gained enough mental fortitude to meditate all day and still have energy left over.

But that wasn’t the end.

‘Merlin’s flesh.’

In other words, ether.

It had once been one of the components of the five elements proposed by philosophers in the past, but now that concept had been replaced with a different meaning. Even so, Ian could tell that the element they had proposed had never been a lie.

‘The air is full of ether.’

To put it in fantasy terms, it was the same as saying the world was full of mana.

The most fundamental and primal force underlying this world—above all else, a pure energy bordering on chaos.

According to the grimoire, ether was the flesh scattered when Merlin, the first mage and the greatest archmage this world had ever seen, died.

Here, “Merlin” did not refer to the Merlin from the legends of King Arthur, but to some unknown being that had existed since before the Common Era.

He left behind no records, no grimoire, no family—nothing at all—and scattered only the substance called ether across the world before burning away in a fierce blaze. Thanks to that, the other mages were able to come into being.

‘If I’d heard this in the past, I’d have dismissed it as a fun setting, but I can’t do that now.’

Ian gave a bitter smile as he quietly watched the ether filling the world.

He still couldn’t touch it directly. He couldn’t store it in his body, and he couldn’t yet use magic through ether.

But he could see it, and he could feel it through his skin.

For now, that was enough.

Ian looked at the beautiful radiance spread across the sky and let out a faint chuckle.

*

He had succeeded in sensing ether, but he still wasn’t a mage. Two elements still remained.

There was no time to waste.

So the moment he finished the air portion of the four elements, Ian moved straight on to the next part.

This time, he had to consume nothing but water for all three meals. Fortunately, it was far easier than eating dirt. He was hungry, but thanks to his body having changed somewhat, it wasn’t unbearable.

Another week passed. The moment Ian opened his eyes in bed, he frowned at the filth staining the sheets.

‘Waste that had built up in my body.’

Since he already knew what it was, he wasn’t surprised. But the smell was more horrific than expected, so he used every method he could think of to clean it.

But the smell wouldn’t go away. In the end, he stuffed the soiled sheets and blanket into a bag and threw them away immediately.

It was a waste of money, but he had no desire to sleep wrapped up in stinking bedding.

Maybe because he had expelled the waste, his body seemed even healthier. And, just as the grimoire said, he could now manipulate ether directly.

He still couldn’t store it inside his body. That was something only possible after going through the final stage.

“Hoo…….”

Before he knew it, three weeks had passed since he began the process of becoming a mage. Only the final stage remained. Once he finished that, it would be essentially the same as transforming his body into one fit for a mage.

If he became a mage, he probably wouldn’t be able to keep living as he did now, quietly shuttling between his one-room apartment and the convenience store. He would surely get caught up in some incident or horrible ordeal.

Having gone from ordinary life to suddenly becoming a mage, he couldn’t help feeling afraid. Honestly, he was a little scared.

But even more than that, he was overflowing with anticipation and curiosity.

He wanted to know what mage society looked like, and what kind of mysteries and wonders filled the world.

If he hadn’t known, he would have gone on living in ignorance forever, but once he’d already dipped a toe in, he could no longer go back to those ignorant days.

More knowledge.

The desire to uncover even more of the world’s secrets and find out what the pinnacle of magic actually was slowly began to well up inside him.

‘Was I always this kind of person?’

He had always been the type to dig obsessively into something once it caught his interest, but this time it seemed a little too much.

But it wasn’t impossible to understand, either.

The only things he’d ever really liked were games, musical instruments, and novels.

None of them were particularly mysterious.

But magic was the most mysterious of all, and this world was filled with even greater unknowns.

It was only natural that the degree to which he was drawn in would be different.

Thinking that, Ian lit a candle on the living room floor and sat down beside it.

His thoughts went on for a long time.

Now was the time to climb steadily from the very bottom. First he had to master all four elements, then move on to the next stage.

“Hoo…….”

With that exhale, he expelled every stray thought in his mind.

Seated cross-legged, he emptied his mind and began meditating.

And so Ian spent every day starting his meditation at noon and continuing beside the candle until just before he headed out for his part-time job.

And then another week passed.

“It’s done.”

At last, he had passed every stage of the four elements. His body had been transformed into a mage’s.

Compared to the previous stages, he didn’t feel anything especially dramatic, but he could clearly tell something was different.

From now on, even if he used magic, he no longer had to worry about his body bursting apart or collapsing because it couldn’t handle it.

With a faint smile, Ian opened the grimoire and checked the stage after the four elements.

[If you understand the four elements and have even awakened to the existence of ether, then you are effectively already a mage.]

[However, if you want to be a proper mage and use real magic, you must store ether within your body at least once.]

[Through this, you expand and sustain your own existence, transforming not only the body but even the soul into a form fit for a mage.]

[It is not a very difficult process, but if you fail to concentrate, your soul may crumble and you could die, so caution is required.]

[The soul is a delicate material. It’s not included among the three elements of magic for nothing. So whether it’s your own soul or someone else’s, fine control is required when handling it.]

“…….”

At the mention that he could die, Ian swallowed hard. But his hesitation was brief, and he acted quickly.

He immediately sat down on the living room floor, closed his eyes, and slowly drew the ether drifting around him into his body.

There wasn’t any particular resistance or rejection in the process. So the claim that this wasn’t a difficult process didn’t seem to be a lie. As long as his concentration didn’t waver, there didn’t seem to be much to worry about.

“Hoo…….”

He exhaled and let the moving ether settle inside his body. Ether that had taken root in his airways and blood vessels flowed through his bloodstream and gathered in his heart.

It condensed. It expanded. It split apart.

As if undergoing weathering, the ether crumbled in time with his pounding heartbeat, scattering throughout the heart and melting into it.

The moment all of the ether melted away and was absorbed, Ian felt as if his soul had become even more solid.

It probably wasn’t an illusion. As the grimoire had said, his soul must have been changed into something belonging to a mage, just like his body.

There was no change in his ability to think. Humans didn’t suddenly seem insignificant, he didn’t feel like some great being himself, and he didn’t lose his humanity.

Ian’s condition was thoroughly ordinary, and just as calm.

‘Is this it?’

Ian searched through the grimoire a little more just in case, but there was nothing else written about the initiation into magic.

It really was over.

A plain ending, with none of the mana storms or flashy effects you’d get when class-changing to a mage in a game.

It didn’t seem like he had to form circles or mana circuits in his body like some fantasy mage, either. That was a little disappointing, but not enough to bother him much.

In any case, the fact that he could use magic at all mattered more.

Ian got to his feet, gulped down a glass of water, and slowly checked the spells written in the grimoire.

The range of spells recorded there was fairly broad.

From simple room-cleaning spells to spells that turned water into wine, to spells that copied the shape of clothing, and so on.

There were also plenty of bizarre and aggressive spells that looked as if they could be useful in everyday life, as well as spells that compressed corpses, extracted eyeballs without touching them, or used another person’s body as a ritual sacrifice.

Most spells required a sacrifice or some kind of preparation to use. Ritual formulas or magic circles only appeared in large-scale spells.

‘Alchemy is... far broader than magic.’

‘The Hand of Re-Creation’ placed even more emphasis on alchemy than on magic. It seemed to focus more on alchemy.

Ian let out a thoughtful murmur and slowly scanned the alchemy section.

The items that could be made through alchemy were incredibly varied. From the potions people usually imagine when they think of alchemy, to ores imbued with strange power, to swords or cast items with special effects. Mysterious, bizarre items caught Ian’s eye.

However, most of them required extremely complicated materials.

Gold, silver, and lead at least made sense, but hair of an aberration, scales from the sea, or the teeth of a condemned prisoner carrying a curse—he had no idea how you were supposed to get those. He wasn’t even sure whether they could be obtained at all.

‘I think I should start with the easy ones first.’

Ian passed over the “medicine that plants parasites in the heart and kills you,” which he had been carefully eyeing, and looked over the alchemical items with simpler material requirements.

In the middle of that, one particular dagger caught his eye.

[Primate-Killing Blade]

The required materials were one blade, salt, silver, primate hair, ether, and an insect carcass.

They were all things he could easily obtain.

Ian decided to try making this one first.