Lumi shook his head and denied the credit. "It wasn’t . You freed yourself. The mont you felt the Elite Guard’s presence, you awakened on your own. I didn’t do that."
"You did not." she agreed with him, but proposed a counterpoint. "You had been dismantling Wing operations throughout Mora. Every inch of their plans that you tore apart, every move you made against them... even if there is only the slightest chance that they dispatched that Elite Guard because of you, then you deserve my thanks. That malevolent presence is what let awaken."
Maybe...
Lumi couldn’t dismiss the connection. Whether the Elite Guard had been sent specifically because of him or whether it had been coincidental was sothing he genuinely didn’t know. But the chain of events was what it was.
Rena’s gaze drifted over him, and her expression shifted into curiosity. "I can feel the magic you have been using. Light Shower. Light Shift. Light Leap. Even your passive skill, Light Affinity. I may not be a magician, but I know of those spells."
"Alton used them," she elaborated. "He invented most of them, in fact. You are following his path. His way of using Light."
Lumi nodded. "That’s true. I specifically searched for his notes in order to do so."
That statent caused the curiosity on her face to deepen. "Then why do you have no traces of dark magic on you?"
"..."
Huh?
Lumi blinked. "Why would I?"
Rena stared at him blankly. "Because Alton was a master of both light and dark magic."
Lumi stared at her.
???
He had spent years studying Alton’s path in his past life.
When he still thought it was a ga, he had been an ordinary mage. After Alton’s path was discovered by players, he had reset his class to it. He had done so believing that it was a secret class that would surely be stronger than a regular one.
It was not.
Though, neither was it weaker.
He had spent all his ti in this class. He leveled it up, followed the ga, and then discovered the ga was a real world in the worst way possible, alongside everyone else.
News of a way to escape from the grasp of the system had spread, and he had grasped the opportunity to beco free.
That led to him being unable to cast any of his spells, with all his passives imdiately dispelled. He had to learn from scratch the proper thod of casting spells.
Part of that process involved sitting down and reading countless books, including all the class advancent books that he originally had to use to obtain the class. He slowly regained all his skills.
There was not a single ntion of dark magic in any of it.
He was aware that he was speaking to one of the six heroes who had personally sealed the Dark One away. That this woman had fought battles that shaped the course of the entire world. She knew Alton personally. He couldn’t, didn’t want to contradict her or express open doubt.
But what she had just said made no sense to him whatsoever.
If Alton had been a master of dark magic as well, that was exactly the kind of detail that should have appeared sowhere across years of accumulated knowledge and encounters with people who studied the old heroes.
There was one key point he kept in mind, however. In his past life, he never spoke to Rena apart from being given orders by her. Rena would have had no reason or opportunity to tell him about it. The detail would have been entirely random information with no context to prompt it. Therefore, there wasn’t exactly evidence against the notion.
Still.
Rena could read his skeptical expression, and confird it once more. "He was."
She explained herself. "He was never fond of using it, that much is true. But the principle he always held was this. The brightest light exists in the darkest dark, and the darkest dark exists in the brightest light. He believed the two were inseparable, that you could not truly master one without understanding the other."
She paused. "It is not surprising that his notes make no ntion of it. Alton did not write about his dark magic. He made a deliberate choice not to spread it. Whatever the world knows of him now, it knows only the half he chose to share."
Lumi considered the information. Was it true, or not? It had to be true, even if it seed to blatantly contradict the experience of his past life. Rena had provided an explanation, and she had no reason to lie to him.
That ant every scholar who had ever studied Alton’s work had been working from an incomplete foundation. Every mage who had attempted to follow his legacy. All of them had been walking half a road without knowing the other half existed.
Including him, across an entire previous lifeti.
Before he could form a single question worth asking, Rena moved.
Lumi did not even comprehend that she had moved. By the ti his mind had even registered that she was moving, she had already finished her movent.
He did not see her raise her arm. He did not see her move a leg. It was entirely as if she had teleported, and yet she did not teleport. One mont her hand was at her side. The next, her palm was pressed flat against his forehead.
That was the terror of a warrior at the level of a demigod.
Her set of movents had been completed in less than a millisecond. Yet, she did so without creating a sonic boom or displacing the air.
With her palm on his head, information poured into him.
She did not slowly push the information in. It ca all at once, and yet it was not overwhelming. It was like a gate had been opened directly into his mind and a few dozen books had been pushed through the opening in a single mont.
It may have been staggering in volu, but it was not forced. The books all sat neatly in his mind, their knowledge waiting to be unearthed.
They were separated by rank. They did not rely stop at First Rank. From the basics to the furthest reaches of Fourth Rank, Rena had provided everything.
Knowledge of magic he had never seen, never heard referenced, never encountered in any form, was now sitting in his mind just waiting to be accessed.
He refocused and looked up to see nothing.
Rena had disappeared without saying goodbye.
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