The First Letter (62)

Although discrimination based on gender has been fading in recent years, that was not the case in the past.

Only men were granted the right to inherit titles, while women were not even properly afforded the freedom to receive an education. This was closely tied to a system in which men bore the majority of the sacrifices in a world with a clear enemy known as monsters.

Men were vastly stronger than women. This was not prejudice but a simple, obvious truth. That was why men were often conscripted, whether for war or monster extermination. Naturally, the same applied to large-scale civil engineering projects for defense.

According to the doctrine of the Celestial Church, confronting monsters, humanity’s enemies, was itself a mission bestowed by God. Men followed the mission of Arus, the Celestial God, while women were unable to do so. Religious logic made gender discrimination even more firmly entrenched.

But as the study of magic and aura cultivation methods advanced, those ways of thinking began to change.

As long as one possessed mana, one could cast magic powerful enough to wipe out dozens of monsters at once. Physical ability? Physical training had not yet become meaningless, but it was the amount of mana that determined such core abilities of a martial artist as strength and reflexes.

Strength meant power. Regardless of gender, anyone born with mana could become a formidable force who dominated the battlefield. That was also why talk of ‘gender discrimination’ had recently begun to feel like an outdated discourse.

Senior Delphine alone proved that. Though she was a woman, she had already been recognized as the heir to House Yurdina, one of the Empire’s great houses. It proved that gender was irrelevant when it came to becoming head of a family, as long as one possessed exceptional ability.

Of course, I had heard things were somewhat different in the Holy Kingdom, which could not help but be somewhat conservative in its interpretation of scripture, and among commoners unable to systematically train their mana. But at least that was not the case among the Imperial nobility.

Even if nobles held such thoughts, they usually kept them to themselves. Power no longer belonged exclusively to men, and there was no noble who enjoyed making an enemy of power, whether great or small...