Wizard of the Deep Sea

TL/ED – Miso

Death felt the same as always.

My body sucked deep into the ocean, where neither consciousness nor sound could reach, my usual state.

What’s the difference between a living person and a corpse at the bottom of the Deep Sea? Even the ability to think would soon fade away, and I figured about ninety percent of it was the same. While I was lost in such idle thoughts…

“…Gasp!”

I woke up on the cold ground, my entire body drenched in sweat.

“Gah, gasp. Ptoo, ptoo…”

Speaking from experience.

Dying is more bearable than you’d think, but coming back to life is absolutely wretched.

For some reason, I coughed up the seawater that had filled my lungs, clutched my splitting head, and looked around. “I’m alive.”

It seemed the Princess’s contingency plan had worked.

Seemed like it, but…

…something was off.

“…Where am I?”

It appeared to be the Imperial Palace, at least inside it.

But it looked a little different from what I knew.

Since this wasn’t the Underworld, I wasn’t dead. Yet no matter how much I looked around, this didn’t seem to be the place Sharmia had arranged for me.

Even to the naked eye, this was, if I had to pick a word, a bedroom lined with several beds, the kind servants would use.

I had been sitting in a chair there, holding something in my hand.

It was something dark and foul-smelling, like the innards of a fish. Disgusted, I tossed it out the window and activated my Current Sense.

“It is…the Imperial Palace.”

Only then could I feel relieved. Judging by the layout, this was definitely the Imperial Palace I knew. There must have just been a slight error in setting the location.

I stood up and walked naturally through the halls. There was so much I needed to tell Dersia. Now that I knew what they were after, there wasn’t a moment to waste.

But…

“?”

“…?”

As I walked through the palace, patrolling guards looked at me with bewildered eyes.

They exchanged glances with one another, then approached me, kindly lowering themselves to my eye level before asking.

“Pardon me, but which family’s young lord might you be?”

It seemed that since I was wandering the palace alone out of nowhere, they assumed I was a noble’s child.

Had Sharmia not told them about me? I answered casually.

“Tell them Jern, Jern Aspandal, and they’ll know.”

“Aspandal…? I’ve never heard of such a family name…”

Tilting their heads, they soon called other guards over and left to verify.

When they returned a short while later, they shook their heads with hardened expressions.

The guards who saw this reaction stiffened as well.

…What?

“Pardon me, but could you perhaps be mistaken about your family name?”

When they asked again with notably stiffer expressions, I hurriedly pulled a key from inside my clothes and showed it to them.

“I belong to the Black Magic Tower. Please check once more.”

“The Magic Tower, you say…”

“I primarily studied wind magic.”

When I conjured wind above my palm, I could see the suspicion fade from the guards’ eyes.

“Very well. We’ll verify again and return.”

I couldn’t relax.

Something, something had gone terribly wrong. That feeling wouldn’t go away, and cold sweat was already running down my back.

Unfortunately, whenever I had a bad feeling…

“…Yeah, figured as much.”

It was never wrong.

I let out a sigh and watched as a spear blade was shoved toward my throat.

“Requesting backup! A magic-wielding assassin has infiltrated the palace!”

“No, what I’m saying is…”

“No excuses!”

The guards didn’t let their guard down for a second, surrounding a mere child like me and threatening with their spears.

Showing them magic had been my undoing. In modern terms, it was like admitting I was carrying a rifle.

“The Magic Tower has no Apprentice matching your description, and no child is recorded in the entry ledger! How did you get in?!”

“I didn’t break in. The Princess called me here on official business. Please, just pass my name along to Lady Sharmia once.”

“Have you lost your mind? The Princess is not yet of age to carry out official duties!”

“…?”

“Tch, no matter how cutthroat the power struggles are, to turn a child this young into an assassin. Who on earth would…”

The guard clicked his tongue, but I couldn’t make any sense of what he was saying.

It seemed I needed to assess the situation, even if it meant taking a bit of a loss.

“Hmm, seems like there shouldn’t be a problem.”

“What?”

Fortunately or unfortunately, the surroundings were still dark and cold.

I lightly clenched my fist, and…

Crack!

“Wha, what?!”

The guards scrambled with startled faces, trying to hold onto their spears as they were wrenched upward.

It was considerable force. The title of Imperial Guard wasn’t earned for nothing, but regrettably, it wasn’t enough to overpower the Deep Sea.

The guards’ ironclad rule of never letting go of their spears created an opening. I threw my small body through the narrow gap and rolled once.

“Damn…! Grab him! Do not let him escape!”

“Where’s the backup?!”

It had arrived.

Within a structure designed like a labyrinth to ensure no intruder could ever escape, they were closing in without leaving the slightest gap to slip through, but…

Unfortunately, my Current Sense was far too exceptional for situations like this.

“Where the hell did that little runt go?”

“…He vanished?”

“He must’ve fled to another wing. After him!”

Since I knew every safe spot, hiding went beyond easy.

For the moment, there were no guards chasing me in this area. I let out a sigh and this time extended my Current Sense a little deeper.

Beyond this wing, to the next one, and further still…

…After searching for quite a while.

“What the…”

I found Sharmia.

[Your Highness, I believe it’s time to head inside. An intruder entered the palace, and apparently they knew your name, Lady Sharmia.]

[Is that so? But I haven’t finished picking all the peaches yet…]

[I’ll have the attendants pick the rest.]

[It only means something if I pick them myself. Make sure no one touches them.]

[As you command.]

That beautiful face and that name, it was unmistakably her.

But, she was small.

Her hands, her feet, her height, her eyes seemed a bit larger perhaps, but.

Overall, she was only a few years different from me, no, she was exactly the same age as me.

“What the…”

Only then could I grasp the situation.

I was in the past.

And I had returned to the Imperial Palace of a very distant past, at that.

***

[How much longer do I have to stay here? You said the assassin is around my age, and you still haven’t caught them?]

[No, my apologies. They’re extremely quick and capable of high-level magic… It seems likely they’ve escaped beyond the palace walls, but even so, we would be grateful if you could bear with us until the search is fully completed.]

I evaluated the current situation from atop the palace ceiling, monitoring Sharmia through my Current Sense.

“Well, this is a disaster.”

There was simply no other way to describe it.

Coming back to life after dying, I’d known that certainly wasn’t an easy thing.

But it sent me to the past? That was different from what Dersia had explained, and even by my own reckoning, it made no sense.

Only then did I recall the last words Void had left behind.

[Of course, that must not be allowed to happen.]

“Looks like something was done to me…”

I rubbed my chin and sank into thought. The rational guess was that Void had done something to me.

Come to think of it, he had known that the Priestess, meaning Sharmia, was a being who possessed both the powers of prophecy and Regression simultaneously.

That was exactly why he’d created the fake Priestess, Cheon-hwa. Naturally, he would have prepared countermeasures… and he used one of them on me?

No, if he could have done that, he would have just assassinated Sharmia outright.

Something didn’t add up. For all I knew, this could still be inside some paradise, and I had merely been tricked into thinking I’d died.

After turning it over and over, I finally organized my thoughts after a long while.

If, truly and really, I had been sent back to the past.

That wasn’t such a bad thing.

No, it was actually an incredibly good thing. I could prepare for everything that was going to happen.

However, that was something I could have done indirectly simply by being at Sharmia’s side, making this unnecessary, and the biggest problem was that this was Void’s doing.

This lunatic wasn’t some third-rate villain who moved on mere hostility, malice, or hatred. He was the most terrifying and dangerous kind, one who acted according to his convictions.

That much became even clearer from the fact that he’d fought Sharmia on equal footing, even pushed her back. And someone like that had done something good for me?

For me, whom he’d deemed no longer useful?

“Not a chance.”

No matter how long I thought about it, this situation felt deeply unsettling.

The most urgent thing was to find a way back.

But how?

There was only one answer.

[It’s raining…]

By using that young Sharmia.

I was observing her closely through my Current Sense.

Her still-youthful golden hair and innocent-looking eyes gazed out the window at the peach trees, lost in thought amid the search.

Her manner of speaking hadn’t changed much, but the way she tapped her feet and puffed her cheeks showed the kind of light petulance you’d expect from someone her age.

If this truly was Sharmia, then…

[Still, it’s a good sign, isn’t it? If it rains today, it means the weather will be clear for your 10th birthday celebration in a week, Lady Sharmia.]

After her awakening, she would see the future.

In the process of seeing that future, I would inevitably be part of it. There was no way I wouldn’t be.

If I made contact with such a Sharmia and asked her how I could get back…

…Wait. Then did that mean Sharmia had known about me long before we met?

She’d never shown any sign of it. As I tried to suppress the questions that kept piling on one after another, the young Sharmia’s expression turned gloomy, and she asked her attendant.

[Do I really have to put on makeup that day?]

[Pardon? Of course. It’s an occasion where everyone will see you, so at least a light touch of blush…]

[There’s a strange woman living in that mirror.]

?

What was she talking about?

Sharmia had never once said anything like this to me. As I focused my Current Sense more intently, the attendant let out a sigh and spoke.

[That mirror woman story again? But Your Highness, we’ve changed the mirror nine times. The vanity has been replaced thirteen times. We’ve even moved rooms three times. Or would you prefer to at least do it in this room…]

[Then she’ll come here. I don’t want to.]

It seemed this had been a complaint of hers for quite some time.

The attendant appeared to simply dismiss it as a whim typical of her age, but…

Knowing that this Princess would one day become the superhuman who would save this empire, I couldn’t brush it off so lightly.

“…The vanity, huh.”

One week until the Princess’s awakening.

It was worth investigating.

I extended my Current Sense and located a room not far from hers.

It was a room made for applying makeup, with a small vanity, a mirror in front of it, and attendants busily cleaning inside.

After all the attendants had left and I’d confirmed the patrol routes of the guards, I quietly opened the door and slipped in.

Fortunately, the palace doors had been well-oiled and made no sound at all.

“…Hmm.”

The low ceiling in adorably soft colors, an atmosphere that clearly felt like a women-only area, made me hesitate for a moment, but now was not the time for such concerns.

I quietly entered and looked at the mirror positioned in the center of the vanity.

Fitting for a dark room, nothing was visible.

I was about to light a flame, but worried it might draw unwanted attention, I created a small light source with magic instead.

My reflection appeared in the mirror. A boy of exactly that age.

The woman the young Sharmia had spoken of was nowhere to be seen.

“Tch, a dead end.”

Just as I turned to leave.

Crack!

“?”

Suddenly, the mirror cracked.

I hadn’t done anything. For a brief, stupid moment I wondered if the mirror was sensitive to light. I shook off the thought and peered into the mirror once more.

This time I even used my Current Sense, but still, nothing was visible.

Even so, I didn’t give up, and after waiting about five minutes…

Bzzzzt…!

Like a scene straight out of a horror movie, the cracked mirror formed letters.

[J e r n ?]

…It seemed.

I had found exactly what I was looking for