Chapter 1

「Yenen, listen. It’s your Master. By the time you read this, I’ll already be gone.

Forgive your foolish Master for leaving without saying goodbye.

Yenen, I don’t want to work anymore. Try doing the same thing every day for three hundred years, and you’ll understand how I feel.

What could be worse than dying at work? I refuse to let that happen.

From now on, I’m going to waste my life to the fullest.

I’ll let my brain swell up from doing absolutely nothing, lying around and thinking about nothing.

I’ll eat only greasy and unhealthy food, stay up late at night, drink loads of coffee, and go to bed without brushing my teeth.

Since you always nagged me to take a break, I trust you won’t complain. I’m leaving for a place where I won’t have to hear your nagging anymore.

And Yenen, take the Mage Tower. There’s nowhere else for it to go, so you might as well keep living there.

If you get married and start a new life, close the Mage Tower.

Don’t even think about entering the labyrinth in the basement. This time, there won’t be a Master to rescue you.

For the record, I have no intention of coming back to save you, so don’t get any funny ideas. You’ll just end up dying before your time.

You can use the gold and treasures piled up on the 68th floor for your wedding. Your in-laws will be very pleased. Make sure to highlight your housekeeping skills.

Tell the Imperial Family that I’m dead. After working me to the bone for three hundred years, they’ve had enough. My eternal regret is that I couldn’t refuse their constant whining and pleas for help because of my position as your Master.

I can already picture the Emperor’s pale face as he wonders what they’ll do without me. But it’s time they learned to live without me.

They need to face some hardship for once.

At least now I won’t have to deal with that idiot Michael pestering me to marry him. It’s like pulling out a sore tooth.

Make sure he understands that I’m dead.

That guy is such a lunatic that I wouldn’t be surprised if he still tries to chase after me.

Though, finding me will be impossible.

I don’t want to be enjoying myself only to feel a sudden chill down my spine. Yenen, you can handle this, right?

Anyway, I’m leaving now. Yenen, lock up the Mage Tower properly.

Thank you for everything.

Your great Master, Kanis Riventi.」

“…Ha.”

The curtains fluttered in the wind from the wide-open window.

When he first arrived, the room was a complete mess, as if someone had turned it upside down.

The bedding was unmade, clothes were strewn across the floor, and tea had spilled all over the desk.

Finally, near the window, a crumpled piece of parchment lay discarded—Kanis’ signature handwriting scrawled across it.

Yenen was already gone.

He had probably left immediately after reading the letter to chase after his “Master.”

Thanks to Yenen’s failure to follow his Master’s final command to “lock up,” the Mage Tower’s door was left wide open.

As a result, the “idiot” Michael Clobern had managed to reach the top floor of the Mage Tower unscathed.

And now, the letter crumpled once again in his hand.

“…Gone.”

The aide standing beside him asked in a nervous voice.

“In two years, the Monster Wave will begin. Can we manage without the Master of the Mage Tower?”

“We’ll have to. We’ll just have to visit every sect and ask for their help.”

“…Where could the Master of the Mage Tower have disappeared to?”

“One thing is certain: if she doesn’t want to be found, no one will be able to find her.”

Even as he said this, Michael Clobern couldn’t take his eyes off the letter.

「That guy is such a lunatic that I wouldn’t be surprised if he still tries to chase after me.」

“…I have no choice. I’ll have to meet the Master of the Mage Tower’s expectations.”

“Your Highness, what do you mean?”

“I won’t return to the Imperial Palace until I find her.”

“What? Your Highness? I’m newlywed! My rabbit-like husband is waiting for me in the capital right now!”

“Are you bragging to me? That you succeeded in getting a proposal?”

“What? No, that’s not it—wait, Your Highness? Are you serious? Really?”

Michael’s icy blue eyes glinted as he let out a faint chuckle.

The aide’s face turned pale at the sight.

It was a chilling smile, far more terrifying than when he had been rejected after proposing to the Master of the Mage Tower.

***

Kanis wasn’t exactly in a relaxed situation either.

Though she had managed to write the letter and leave, the truth was…

As Kanis approached the front desk, the innkeeper lowered her glasses and glanced at her.

“Child? Where are your parents?”

“Uh, my mom said she’d go buy some food and told me to book a room first.”

“…Really? Do you have money?”

“Yes. Here it is…”

Kanis placed a gold coin on the counter, wearing the most harmless smile she could muster.

“This is too much. How long will you be staying?”

“One night.”

“Hold on, then. Your change…”

Kanis had never carried small denominations of money. She had more money than she could ever spend, and it was always in excess.

After handing over the gold coin, Kanis received a heavy pouch of change.

“…Make sure you go up through the back door so the people in the tavern don’t see you.”

The innkeeper seemed worried that a child carrying so much money might get robbed by adults.

That wasn’t the issue right now, but Kanis didn’t feel like arguing, so she followed the innkeeper’s instructions and went up to her room through the back door.

“When will your mother arrive?”

“At night.”

“Can you stay alone? My daughter is thirteen—would you like her to keep you company?”

“No.”

“I see…”

“Well then, goodbye.”

Kanis politely smiled and closed the door in the innkeeper’s face.

Phew.

After visiting five inns, she had finally managed to secure a room.

The reason it took five tries was entirely Kanis’ fault.

At the first inn, Kanis had said only one word: 

“Room.”

When the innkeeper asked for clarification, Kanis replied in a sinister tone, 

“I’ll pay whatever it takes. Just give me a room.”

This, of course, led to four separate incidents where the innkeepers threatened to call the guards.

Eventually, Kanis learned the hard way that her usual behavior wasn’t going to help and managed to secure a room.

Anyway, this time, it worked.

Moonlight was shining into the tiny room.

Kanis walked weakly toward the bed, intending to collapse onto it.

But no. The bed was higher than Kanis’s chin.

Instead of ‘collapsing’ onto the bed, Kanis had to ‘climb up’ onto it.

Something unbelievable—or rather, something she didn’t want to believe—had happened to Kanis last night.

After finishing the winter monster extermination and returning to the Mage Tower to rest, she woke up in the morning to find herself reduced to about a third of her original size. Her arms were short, her legs were short, and her cheeks were chubby.

She was unmistakably a child!

Her body, which should have been frozen in her twenties forever, had suddenly transformed. 

How could this happen?

Kanis instinctively wondered if she had accidentally used a transformation spell or some forbidden life-span spell, so she quickly scanned her body.

What a shock—it turned out she couldn’t sense any mana within herself.

Kanis was so bewildered that she cast scanning spells repeatedly without even breathing.

And after a while, she belatedly realized that the fact she could still cast “scanning spells” at all meant she had at least a trace of mana left.

But the problem was that it was so minuscule it was practically nonexistent.

If her original mana could be compared to the size of a dam, the amount remaining now was like the water that sticks to your finger after you poke the surface.

To put it bluntly, she literally had only a “speck” of mana left.

How did it come to this? Did I get cursed with some kind of abnormal status during the monster extermination? But I would have noticed if that were the case.

She couldn’t figure out anything.

Her body was tiny, and her mana was practically gone.

Kanis barely managed to confirm that her mana hadn’t evaporated or disappeared overnight but was instead “sealed” within her in a dormant state.

For now, Kanis decided to hide herself somewhere and resolve the situation.

She had to conserve her mana as much as possible since she didn’t know when or what might happen.

That’s why Kanis lowered a rope from the top-floor window of the Mage Tower and slid down in her child-sized body.

It would have been disastrous if she had gone out through the door and run into Yenen.

With such a tiny amount of mana, she couldn’t even be sure how long an invisibility spell would last.

The remaining mana was so negligible she couldn’t even guess what it could be used for.

Could it even be used for anything?

Anyway, she used what little mana she had to enhance her weak grip strength and cast a fall-prevention spell, allowing her to land safely on the ground outside the Mage Tower.

Immediately afterward, she cast a dispelling spell on the rope to erase it.

Yenen, who would probably discover the scene later, would assume that Kanis had flown out of the window using a flight spell.

Who would ever imagine that Grand Mage Kanis Riventi had climbed down the wall of the wind-blasted tower, clutching a rope like a desperate fugitive?

What was unimaginable had just happened.

Feeling a little gloomy, Kanis trudged toward the nearest village from the Mage Tower.

And that brings us to now.

Who would have thought that Grand Mage Kanis would declare her own runaway and, within just one day, struggle to rent a room at an inn in a nearby village?

What was unimaginable was happening again…

Kanis shook her head to clear her thoughts.

The real problem started now.

First, she planned to establish a safe shelter, where she could slowly study the “seal” that had been placed on her.

She had plenty of money… but having experienced firsthand how her childlike body attracted unwanted attention, she realized she needed to hire a capable proxy.

Someone indifferent to their employer but solely focused on the money offered.

But how on earth would I…

For now, her whole body ached, her eyes felt like they were about to pop out, and her migraine was severe.

Climbing down the tower without even washing her face in the morning had left her in this state.

But what kind of child gets migraines already? Of course, the adult inside was mostly to blame.

Kanis let out a groan.

“For now… sleep…”

Exhausted, Kanis collapsed on the bed she had barely managed to climb onto.

Her fatigue was so overwhelming that even her chronic insomnia was no match for it.

But just as she felt she had fallen asleep, someone began pounding on the door like a madman, waking her up.

Startled, she sat up to find the bright sunlight pouring into the room through the curtains she hadn’t drawn.

Squinting against the harsh light, Kanis stumbled to the door in a half-asleep state and opened it.

The innkeeper stared at her with wide eyes and shouted,

“Your mother hasn’t come back yet?”

Kanis belatedly remembered the nonsense she had told the innkeeper earlier about her mother coming to get her later.

“Oh, don’t worry about it. She’s not coming.”

She tried to close the door, but the innkeeper held it open.

“What do you mean, she’s not coming?”

“She’s dead, so she can’t come. Can I close the door now?”

Kanis’s mother had passed away over 300 years ago and was buried in the ground. Kanis had been there for it.

The innkeeper’s face turned pale. Leaning forward, she placed her hands on Kanis’s small shoulders and spoke in a worried tone, as if afraid to startle her.

“Oh, dear child. It seems… your father has come.”

Kanis stared at her like someone hearing nonsense.

The innkeeper kindly repeated herself.

“He said he came here looking for your runaway mother. Would you like to meet your father?”

What on earth… happened while I was sleeping?

Kanis was at her wit’s end.