Chapter 453

“How…?”

Elias trailed off, staring at me in a dazed expression. His lips moved soundlessly as he looked at nothing but me.

“…No…”

“…….”

I had to explain. At least to Elias.

I lowered my gaze and slowly walked toward him until I finally stood before him. I had no idea what I looked like to him. Had I become some strange mixture, just as Archduke Maria had said? There was nothing I could do about it. Whenever I pictured myself, all I could think of was the face I had worn my entire life. Even so, for Elias’s sake, I pictured Luka’s face instead. I tried as hard as I could to make it look like him.

“…….”

I raised my head and looked Elias straight in the eyes. According to the Archduke, I was in an astral state, so whether it even made sense to say I raised my head and looked at him was another matter. At least I was still imagining myself with a human body.

“…Luka.”

Elias reached for my shoulder. Or, at least, he tried to. His hand sank straight through my shoulder. His mouth fell open as he stared at the hand inside my body.

“Whaaaaaat?!”

“Hey, wait…”

“Wait? You really are Luka, right?! Right?! But…!”

An emotion I couldn’t quite identify flashed across Elias’s face. The instant I realized what that expression meant, my heart seemed to drop. With the same face as mine, Elias moved his lips.

“You’re dea—”

“No.”

I cut him off immediately. I placed a hand on his shoulder and spoke quickly and clearly.

“I’m alive. I know this probably sounds impossible, but I’ve left my body. I had to stay in a state closer to pure mana to find a way out. I even brought someone who could help me… another ghost.”

“What…?”

Of course, Elias froze with an expression that suggested his entire understanding of common sense had just been shattered. I understood. I still couldn’t quite believe that astral projection was actually possible myself. Elias looked around frantically.

“Then where’s your body?!”

“Somewhere safe. Not here.”

For some reason, he didn’t question that and simply let out a deep sigh.

“Thank God. But…”

“But?”

“Are you all right? Your face…”

“…….”

I hadn’t managed to become completely Luka, it seems. I’d tried, but I couldn’t make myself fully into either one of us. Maybe because somewhere along the way, I’d realized that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t become entirely ‘Luka’ again. I unnecessarily picked at the ground beneath my feet while searching for something to say.

“Ahhh! Never mind.”

Elias waved a hand right in front of my face.

“Did something go wrong? Did you somehow merge with another ghost while projecting yourself?!”

“No. It’s nothing like that.”

“Then forget it. Don’t tell me. Anything.”

I raised an eyebrow, silently asking what he meant. Elias answered as casually as if it were obvious.

“I don’t need to hear something if it’s going to make you uncomfortable.”

“…….”

His straightforwardness made me feel as though my thoughts had simply stopped for a moment. This kind of candor was rare enough to feel strange coming from anyone, and I had always liked it. Whenever it was directed at me, an indescribable feeling would surge up inside me like a wave reaching my feet.

“…You really are straightforward.”

“Well, I am. What can I do about it?”

I slowly nodded at that.

“Thank you.”

“Haha~”

Elias reached out as if to run a hand through my hair, then abruptly startled himself and pulled his arm back.

“Hurry up and find your body and come back! I need to touch your hair.”

“Why do you even need to touch my hair…?”

Honestly, the Elias I knew would have been more likely to uncork a bottle with his molars—or grab someone’s hair whenever he was irritated—or hang off their shoulder. Telling me to find my body just so he could do that was no less strange, so I decided not to ask. Elias narrowed his eyes and looked into the distance.

“Then is that blurry~ person over there the one who’s going to help us?”

“That’s right. Blurry?”

“Way more than you.”

“Really…?”

Whether I looked puzzled or not, Elias leaned in close, eyes shining, and carefully studied my face.

“Is this what your soul looks like? No. How can a soul even have a shape? Did you make this yourself by molding mana around, Luka? Because you didn’t want to wander around as some pale, formless ghost?”

“Half of it is probably something like that.”

Elias immediately pressed both index fingers against my cheeks. Knowing what he was trying to do, I snorted. Even if he tried to stretch them, they wouldn’t budge. Elias examined even the expression on my face as I laughed before muttering, “Fascinating.”

“Is that an insult?”

“No. I actually like this too. Do you want to look like this~?”

Elias raised an eyebrow and teased me. The Archduke had asked me the same thing before. I had no idea how I was supposed to answer, so I merely gave him an ambiguous shrug.

“But why are your eyes purple?”

“Oh, that…”

It was simply a mix-up in perception. They were supposed to be blue until just moments ago. I instinctively pictured black eyes, then remembered I was standing in front of Elias and quickly changed them to pink.

“Oh~”

Elias whispered as he examined irises that shouldn’t have existed.

“Luka. This really does feel like divine power. So this is what it means for divine power to be something close to the soul.”

‘Hmm.’

Interesting. Hearing his insight made me feel as though I’d found something I’d known all along but had somehow buried deep in the back of my mind. Elias was staring intently at my soul as well, wearing the same expression I had.

“Now this is quite the field trip…”

“…….”

I could have done without that last comment…

Anyway, I understood well enough. Elias had regained his usual energy, and he had managed to pull himself somewhat out of the grip of death he had stood at eight hours ago—or, in this place, only a little over ten minutes ago. Before he recognized me as myself, his expression had still been somewhat tired and tense. We couldn’t stay here forever.

“Luka, you say?”

A voice suddenly sounded inside my head. The Archduke had come closer without me noticing and was looking at me.

“It’s my nickname.”

“Quite distinctive. Is this your friend? A pleasure to meet you. I’m Maria Österreich-Este.”

The Archduke instinctively held out a hand, and Elias, knowing full well that he was a ghost, took it anyway. He looked slightly bewildered as he grasped empty air and tried to introduce himself.

“I’m… Wait, what?”

Elias tilted his head.

“There seem to be quite a few Marias in the Österreich-Este family. I feel like I may have met one before.”

“That is just my middle name. One of my ancestors was named Maria—”

I cautiously gestured toward the Archduke.

“Your Highness.”

“Ah. Right.”

Before meeting Elias, I had asked the Archduke not to ask him about himself, and not to reveal anything about his own identity either. There was no point in overwhelming Elias with even more confusion. He had already just barely survived, and I couldn’t dump even more information on him in that state.

There was another reason I needed to limit what the Archduke knew. Left unchecked, he might start dissecting me—academically, of course—to advance magical theory. Once he became visible, my request was essentially pointless, but the Archduke was perceptive enough to understand. He gave me a serious nod.

“Let’s not ask about each other. What matters right now isn’t who we are, is it? I’ll assume that’s the case. Now, follow me.”

I gestured for Elias to come along and followed behind the Archduke. Elias looked like he had questions, but after exchanging a glance with me, he silently followed. The Archduke was heading south across the square. Elias shot me a questioning look, asking me to relay his words.

“Why are we going this way?”

“I can sense that the ambient mana is thinnest over there.”

“Oh. So you can sense it.”

Elias made a small sound of realization and whistled. I answered for us both instead.

“I can guess why it’s weak. That’s where he first fell through.”

“Just as I thought. If a rift formed there once, opening another one shouldn’t be too difficult… You said a fissure couldn’t be formed here using human mana, so we’ll have to manipulate the ambient mana in our astral bodies.”

The Archduke smiled as though everything had gone according to plan. I took a longer step and moved in front of him.

“Your Highness, that would be fine, but there’s a problem. We could be attacked by the contaminated people if we aren’t careful.”

“Contaminated?”

“Yes. There are people here covered in mud. They were changed after being caught up in this incident, and they attack us because they crave human mana.”

“…Hmm.”

Archduke Maria stopped and thought for a moment. He looked toward the place where the collapsed prison stood in the distance, his expression tinged with regret.

“The two of us are in astral form, so we have a slight advantage. But with someone here in physical form, that won’t do. Unless…”

He snapped his fingers and looked at Elias.

“My friend. Why don’t you stay a little farther away?”

“You want me to leave?”

“Stay here with Sir Everett, somewhere the contaminated people cannot reach you, and keep a low profile. Sir Everett doesn’t know how to manipulate ambient mana anyway, so I’ll try to create a fissure as quickly as possible. I only know how to do it in theory, but still.”

“Everett?”

“…….”

Elias’s eyes lit up with curiosity, and I let out a dry laugh. This wasn’t going to work. I’d have to explain at least some of it to him once we returned.

I gave Archduke Maria a look and continued speaking to him telepathically.

“Your Highness, there’s something I’m curious about.”

“Yes? Ask me anything.”

“Why can my friend see me?”

“Didn’t you ask me that before? It’s because your souls resonate with each other!”

That talk of “souls” and “resonance” only confused me more. When I remained silent at his abstract explanation, his voice came again.

“The aether that makes up your souls is similar. You two must have exceptionally pure aether.”

“Pure?”

“Aether that is close to ambient mana. When aether of that kind draws close to each other, that is what I call resonance.”

“…I see.”

I took Elias with me to a small church about three hundred meters from the collapsed prison, and we climbed onto the roof. Elias used mana to leap up beside me and sat down. From there, we could see Archduke Maria climbing over the rubble toward its highest point. I asked Elias for a moment and spoke to Maria in my mind.

“Your Highness.”

“Yes~?”

“May I keep asking you questions?”

“Hahaha! Of course.”

“Then what exactly does it mean for a soul to disappear?”

Silence followed.

I watched the Archduke’s luminous soul in the distance and waited for his answer. Before long, his quiet voice entered my mind.

“Are you asking if even souls living in the past can be extinguished?”

“Let’s say so.”

“Let’s suppose that we erase the soul of someone named A who lived in prehistoric times. A would die. And hundreds of millions of descendants who inherited A’s blood and genetic information would lose the chance to be born. We would be living on a different Earth from the one we know now. So we can think of it this way. If I chose to erase myself now, then every version of ‘me’ that has existed up to this point would disappear together, along with everything accomplished through ‘my’ influence.”

“Hmm.”

“So, academically speaking, souls cannot truly be erased. The ultimate disappearance of the aether does not occur.”

From an occult academic perspective, that was probably what he meant. The Archduke continued.

“Of course, my own view is different. I believe a soul can be erased. If the energy that makes up an astral body is completely broken apart and can never be assembled into the same form again, would that not count as erasure when it comes to identity? If I become part of the aether that makes up this world, can I still call that ‘me’? And if so, where does the boundary of ‘me’ lie? At a funeral, which ‘me’ are we actually mourning? Is a funeral held simply because one physical body can no longer meet another?”

“I expected a Christian answer, though.”

“To advance scholarship, you have to know how to step beyond your own worldview. It is certainly true that Christianity shaped me, but I want to conduct research that can offer insight to people with different worldviews through my own understanding of the world. At the same time, I must know how to step outside the worldview that formed me. Otherwise, there will always be a clear limit to how far I can go.”

I smiled without saying anything.

Right. That was probably how those European mages who chased after nothing but Christianity—leaving occultism aside—had managed to advance beyond the mainstream magical sciences of the present day.

“I actually believe there is a way to completely erase even that aether. But doing so would create an absolute deficit in the universe. As I understand it, the universe does not naturally lose aether. If a single living being could artificially create even the slightest deficit in the aether of the universe…”

“…….”

“That would be thrilling. It would mean that we could also attempt to increase the total amount of aether in the universe. If that happened, humans would effectively become gods. And if those gods failed to possess anything worthy of a god’s nature, the universe itself might explode.”

“So it all ends in an apocalypse.”

“Exactly. If humanity climbs all the way to the top of the Tower of Babel, we may end up destroying ourselves. In the end, all of this would become a serpent devouring its own tail.”

“I suppose so.”

“On the assumption that it is possible for aether to be completely extinguished, then if it were, the version of oneself from the past should disappear as well. But in that case, as you said, a great many things would come into conflict with both the many-worlds interpretation and the astral plane. Perhaps, in the end, the ether itself does not disappear at all, but returns to the universe, while only the Maria Österreich-Este who made up the identity of ‘me’ ceases to exist.”

“…….”

But you are here with me now. Even if you are nothing more than a ghost, a collection of aether.

‘…No.’

We aren’t in the same world. I had to be precise about that. In the world I came from, Maria Österreich-Este was already dead, reduced to ashes and scattered into the sea. No matter what I did, he could never come back to life. The Maria of EC Stage 1 could not be the same Maria.

Fine. Anyway, there was a reason I’d been asking all these questions: the matter of my blood. How far could my blood interfere with a human soul? What could my ability allow in this world, and how much more would I have to carry from here on?

There were still countless questions left unresolved in my head. After thinking for a moment, I sent another question to him.

“I see. I have one more question. This time, it’s a somewhat different theory. Unlike before, only the object being observed is in a superposition. Suppose we have an observer and an electron. Until the observer measures the electron, it can have either an up spin or a down spin. But the moment the observer measures it, the wave function collapses, and the electron’s spin is measured in only one direction. In this theory, there is only one world. Does this theory intuitively fit with the concepts of the astral plane and aether?”

“That is a rather fanciful idea. You say the electron does what? And even if we are talking about the microscopic world, are you saying that something only determines its direction because we happen to observe it? Besides, why isn’t the observer also part of the superposition this time? Because the observer exists in the macroscopic world?”

“There may be some differences in interpretation, but this theory doesn’t include the observer in the quantum system. More importantly, it’s merely a model that leaves out many things for the sake of understanding, Your Highness.”

“It doesn’t seem as though the electron is fixed because of the influence of ambient mana. How would merely looking at it cause that? Does mana come out of your eyes?”

“This is what I mean when I say it’s only a model. The issue isn’t that a human sees it. Observation itself is the key.”

“Why?”

Let’s send this guy to the 21st century. He loved learning to such an absurd degree that, for a moment, I almost felt guilty for not being better versed in science and magical studies. With that thought, I prodded him onward.

“…Please answer me. What if this were true?”

“That wouldn’t be consistent.”

The Archduke answered without hesitation. His voice continued inside my head.

“In fact, the theories you’ve described seem rather far removed from time travel or the concept of the astral plane. At least, they don’t seem to deal with those as their central subject. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t really understand what you mean by wavefunction collapse, Sir Everett. But if a superposition in which something can spin up or spin down collapses into one definite state the moment it is observed, meaning the other possibilities are reduced to nothing, then the many-worlds interpretation you mentioned earlier seems more suitable when it comes to time travel. At least, judging only from what you’ve told me. I’m not saying it proves time travel is possible. Only that, in terms of possibility, it seems more applicable.”

Then the many-worlds interpretation was an interpretation that left more room for possibility regarding astral travel. Good. His opinion matched mine.

Assuming time travel was possible, supporting the Copenhagen interpretation¹ created a problem: he had already affected the past through astral projection. To hold on to the Copenhagen interpretation, I would have to believe that he somehow revived a wavefunction that had already collapsed, restoring it to its pre-collapse state and rewriting every conclusion that followed. But then, wouldn’t that put me in a contradiction where I could no longer claim to support the Copenhagen interpretation in the first place? No matter how generously I allowed for the fantastical nature of time travel, the two ideas simply did not fit together.

In the many-worlds interpretation, returning to the past meant moving into a newly branched world. Even if it felt to “me” as though I had traveled backward through time, I wouldn’t actually be returning to my own past. At least this theory left some room for time travel.

But there was still a problem.

If Maria of EC Stage 1 could travel into the past of EC Stage 1, then he should be able to travel into the past of the original world—the world I believed to be the original—as well as the countless pasts of Stages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and beyond. He should even be able to travel through the countless worlds branching off from Stage 1 at the quantum level right now. And according to his own beliefs about the astral plane, an astral body should be capable of traveling into the future as well. Yet according to the Archduke, he could move his astral body into certain parts of the past, while being unable to project himself into most other pasts. Why was there such a difference?

“Whatever could the problem be that has you thinking so deeply~?”

“…Nothing.”

The Archduke’s joke about “Laplace’s demon would be in tears” meant he had immediately realized that the many-worlds theory was at odds with Newtonian classical mechanics. Of course, the fact that I was talking about things like wave-function branching—things he had never even heard of—must have already told him that it was different from anything he knew.

I asked him whether the world could be explained through determinism. He answered that, assuming the many-worlds interpretation were true, there could be no one who could know the past, present, and future all at once, even with complete information as in the thought experiments of classical mechanics. In other words, the only being who could do so would have to be God—and that would be absurd.

I had asked the question because I didn’t want to believe that was the reality, but his answer showed no consideration for my feelings. It was an obvious problem, even from Archduke Maria’s perspective.

Was it really impossible to make sense of this world with the knowledge I possessed? Really? I had to know why he was able to move freely between worlds using my blood. Why my blood, of all things?

It felt as though even the weight of the lives of the dead had been placed on my shoulders. The little knowledge I had wasn’t explaining anything to me.

“…….”

The wind passed through me, scattering Elias’s hair. I turned toward my friend beside me. Then, far away, a piercing line of light suddenly appeared for a brief moment, and I heard Archduke Maria shout in delight.

“Ah. Now—!”

Boom—…

‘Huh.’

“Hmm?”

Elias and Archduke Maria both reacted with confusion. I was no different. The moment I rose to get a better look—

BOOOOM—!

“…!”

Black air surged out from within the light.

Everyone who had been involved in the relic theft flashed through my mind. No. I couldn’t just leave that alone. I shouted toward the Archduke.

“Your Highness!”

“Yes?!”

“You have to go back. Wake up!”

“What? Wait, me?! Why?”

“Because—!”

‘The moment they realize you’re here, they’ll try to wring whatever they can out of you!’

Bang—!

The instant I slammed my foot into the roof, the world turned black.

“…….”

I opened my eyes with my cheek pressed against the ground. It was the same world as before, and I was back where I had been before entering the Extra Chapter. I ran toward the church where Elias should be, toward the collapsed prison behind it.

No matter how the Archduke could leave his body and perceive the world in a spiritual state, he could not travel into the future, and even when traveling into the past, he could only trace back along a single branch among countless worlds. In other words, he could never leave EC Stage 1. He would remain forever in that state of extinction. That was how the natural universe worked.

Pulling his mass of aether outside of the world was an act against nature, and the only reason such an act had been possible was me. Without my blood, without me willing him to come with me, Maria could never have observed another world.

So I simply had to stop doing it. It was something I should never do again. Not if I wanted to honor his wishes.

Mana surged through my injured leg and collided with the vitriol. Even so, I had to keep running.

I don’t know how long I ran before I finally saw the prison in the distance. Light and darkness were both surging from it at once. The Archduke’s fissure had succeeded. Unfortunately, something made of vitriol was trying to cross over from the other side again.

“Luka—!”

Elias’s booming shout reached me. His voice grew closer and closer. I shouted back at him.

“Eli, get ready!”

“Again…!”

Yes. Again.

In this insane world, again…!

I gritted my teeth and ran all the way to the collapsed ruins. And then—

Kaaang—!

“…!”

A strange sound rang out. The black liquid surging into the air was swallowed by a blinding flood of light and vanished. The one who had stopped the vitriol from crossing over slowly turned around. White hair fluttered before my eyes. Pale blue eyes slowly settled on me.

“It’s been a while.”

The hollow voice sank quietly into my ears.

‘Einsiedel.’

I was startled for a moment, then slowly twisted up the corners of my mouth.

My purpose in coming to Giesing had finally been achieved, in the most roundabout way possible. The thief who had stolen the holy relics had come to find us himself.

He looked toward me and Elias running toward us in the distance, then raised his pure-white staff and brought it down against the ground.

Translator Note

1. The Copenhagen interpretation is a leading explanation of quantum mechanics. Developed in the 1920s by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, it states that a quantum particle does not have a definite state or position until it is measured. Instead, it exists in a wave of multiple probabilities. The act of observation forces this wave to collapse into one single reality. ↩︎