Chapter 2

Waking up, he found himself in the same cage. It was just as cold and depressing as he remembered it. Light poured into the room through the windows and slightly lit up the place. It was early in the morning and most people seemed to be asleep inside their cages. A few days had passed since the little girl was taken away and she hasn't returned ever since.

"What happened to her...?" He tried asking those people around him the question, but they didn't even spare him a glance.

'Could their will have been completely shattered? Is this what a human who gave up life looks like?' Kiyoshi wasn't like them as far as he could remember, though his memories were still a little confusing, he knew that as a matter of fact, he was actually a 200-year-old scientist. Though he couldn't compare with the heads of Megacorporations like MS or AMZ's CEOs who were 1000-year-old monsters in age, he was far more capable than them and as such capability entailed, he was also a man full of experiences.

Torture and psychos were just passing things in his busy life. There was even a time when he was kidnapped by a weirdo who wanted him to make a robot that would take care of his newborn child so this situation wasn't much of a surprise to him.

What really surprised him was the results of his time-traveling machine. Occupying the body of someone else was totally out of his expectations, it was even crazier than ending up in another dimension or reality as he had speculated it would happen. After all, there was evidence suggesting the possibility of interdimensional hopping being a possibility during time traveling, but somehow overwriting another individual's consciousness was totally out of his expectations.

Not only that, he even swallowed the other party's memories and almost confused his own identity a few days prior. It was good that his mind wasn't weak and that he wasn't willing to die yet, otherwise, he might have ended up losing himself. As for questions like, 'what if I'm actually the kid and somehow absorbed some super grandpa's soul', that was totally out of question. Even if it did end up being the truth, thinking about such a thing would only cause his personality to split and affect his decision making, and he was ruthless and decisive enough to completely ignore this matter and simply take whatever side suited him the most and that was his scientist persona.

Staring at his cage's door, he pondered for a moment before focusing on the lock. Unlike the naturally occurring blue ribbons, a red one formed out of thin air and circled around the cage's lock.

The words teaching magic hadn't calmed down in the last few days, instead, they had become increasingly clear to the point that it felt like there was someone teaching him. For some reason though, whenever the teachings are about to touch a subject other than spellcasting, the words turn blurry before completely stopping. Only a minute or so later would the voices continue and once again the focus of the lecture would be 'spells'.

Although it felt difficult at first, Kiyoshi had to admit that his progress was visible to the naked eye. Things that were difficult at first such as uncovering the Reality Code specific to certain things became second nature, he didn't have to rely on luck to read certain ribbons and could just forcefully control them so that they stop moving and come closer for him to read and so on.

What made him puzzled though was that his progress didn't match his efforts. It wasn't like he was lazing off, but it really didn't make sense for him to become so good at it with just words he heard in passing and that didn't seem to be aimed directly at him.

It was like walking into someone's lecture by accident and understanding the whole subject even though you're majoring in another course altogether. As a staunch practitioner of the sciences, he couldn't really wrap his mind around the idea of magic and so on, but it was so easy that made him puzzled.

Shouldn't spells and whatnot be a complex and unreliable thing to learn? Was his scientific calloused mind giving him an advantage in the matter or was it inborn talent? Both possibilities seemed farfetched considering that he hadn't come in contact with this before coming to this place.

Shaking his head, Kiyoshi sighed helplessly. Just as he was prepared to close his eyes and rest a little bit before continuing his own research into magic and spells, he heard a soft thud as if something had been hit and opened his eyes. To his surprise, there was an unreliable-looking girl sitting across from him in a blue student uniform.

She had long, sleek, and lustrous red hair that went all the way down to her waist and similarly amber-like eyes that stared at him in astonishment and confusion. "I..." She started as if trying to make sense of the situation. "I was falling from Wakigiri Building and... that huge shadow engulfed me..."

Hearing her, Kiyoshi gasped. 'What the hell? Why was she falling from such a huge building?!' Wakigiri was a huge commercial building near an open lake the size of several football fields, from the memories he got, he only remembered it in passing because the owner of the memories used to walk past it in his day-to-day journey to school. It was situated in a high-class area full of rich people, a district called Yadanobu.

'Wait, that's not important. What the hell are those ribbons floating around her?!' The girl sitting in front of him and looking around confused looked silly, but the ribbons around her made him feel pressured as if he had been staring at the eyes of a tiger.

They were purple and crooked, some words got so twisted that he couldn't even read them. It was his first time seeing such a thing since he... well, started seeing such things.

At that moment, the voice he had been listening to for the past few days reached him once more and his mind cleared a little bit.

"In this world and others, spellcraft can vary in size, shape, and form just like any scientific train of thought. Just like humans might find different ways to produce new forms of energy, many schools of magic developed over the years and some are more different from others. Seekers of Truth, the only ones that can peer into the truth of all things, can notice for example that conventional Spiritual Magic takes form in a purple crooked fabric. They are originated from the spirits that were born from all living things and can grant their power to spiritually aware people that form a contract with them."

'Spirits? Like fairies? They actually exist?' Thinking up to this point, his face contorted for a moment as he cursed himself. 'Tsk, that crazy bastard has already spoken about Trolls... why can't fairies exist? I might as well accept that dragons and gods might be wandering around too.'

"You! Where are we, what is this place?!" When the girl recovered from her stupor, she was immediately enraged and started pointing at him.

"Tsk, how annoying!"

"What?! How dare you speak to me like that!" The girl was enraged hearing such an uneducated response from the vile young man sitting inside the same cage as her. Not even for a moment did she stop to consider the feelings of this lonely captive that had been forced into silence by his fellow inmates.

"I demand to know what is going on!"

Kiyoshi chuckled hearing her words. "Sure, my queen. Let me just open my books full of answers to any and all things and I'll make sure to tell you once I've finished looking into it."

"You! Do you think this is a Joke? I'm the successor to the Kannagi family! The-"

"Blablabla, can't you use your brain and read the atmosphere? Fuck, of all places you could have been kidnaped to, why did it have to be the same room as mine? Are all kids this brainless nowadays? Or is it that you're special and slightly dumber than the rest?"

Facing his onslaught, the pampered young miss didn't know how to react. She felt that it was beneath her to even argue with this fiend, but her anger told her to punch his face.

Bitting her lips in frustration, she shouted loudly waking up everyone in the room as she waved her arm upside down. Kiyoshi stared eye wide as the purple ribbons gathered around her hand in the shape of a sword as she cut through the iron cage with what would have looked like the mere wind from the other's perspective. Caught off guard, he wasn't able to react as her invisible sword swept past him in a single motion!

'It's over!' He thought in despair. 'Killed by a little girl and I didn't even have time to learn magic!' Before his thoughts could reflect in his face though, the cage was split up in the air and he fell on his butt while the girl did a flip in the air and fell graciously on her feet.

"Aggh!" Feeling pain all over his lower back, Kiyoshi gasped for air as he tried to understand what had just happened. What surprised him the most was that he wasn't cut in half!