Ch2. Prologue 2

Thomas Prest, a nineteen-year-old young man of average height with messy brown hair and brown eyes, reasonably handsome depending on who you asked.

He was just a human and as far as he was concerned, that race didn't come with natural charm or devilishly tempting looks which was a damn shame.

Not that he really cared about his appearance that much. He was a magician and researcher, which meant he spent most of his time in his lab where he was alone so nobody cared about his looks either. Then again, he could clean up nicely if he tried... which he had to do while his father was alive but since the man met his unfortunate end two weeks ago, Tom was enjoying his newfound freedom a bit too much.

Nevertheless, Tom was researching like crazy.

He found out his family's savings were quite abysmal and that didn't sit well with him nor with his plans. He had to earn money but...

He wasn't extremely strong. In fact, he was barely comparable to a mid-class devil if their magic reserves were compared. And his body? That doesn't even need to be mentioned.

That was the unfortunate result of being a human and his family being merely an upstart in the magician community. Prests didn't have many magical tomes. They had quite a bit of beginner-level spells in their library and some rudimentary magical theory but compared to a properly established family of magicians, The Prests were dirt poor and had barely a minimal knowledge of magic.

With such a small amount of resources and incomplete study materials, it was frankly a miracle Tom could reach enough magic reserves to rival a mid-class devil. And yet, it wasn't anything grand. In more wealthy magician families, someone with his talents and advantages would long ago have high-class reserves if he had enough resources.

But Tom wasn't disheartened. This miracle was possible only thanks to his Sacred Gear and now that he had his freedom, he could finally get... creative with it.

...

Tom's Sacred gear, Vision, was quite obscure and weak compared to other gears. In fact, it could only allow him to look into the past when he started to use it, and even then it took a lot of magic from him.

But Tom had to play with the cards he was dealt with, knowing well nobody would give him anything for free. That's why he experimented with his Sacred Gear, trying to find out what he could do with it and where its limits lay.

It wasn't instantaneous and for some of them, it took years but Tom noticed some quite nifty features of his Sacred Gear.

While it was utterly useless in combat, he retained the knowledge of everything he saw in the past when he used it. A quite helpful learning tool, if he said so himself.

And around the time he was twelve, he tried something that sounded extremely stupid.

He used Vision... on Vision.

He tried to see the past of his own Sacred Gear.

Much to his shock, it actually worked.

Tom saw short glimpses of some of its previous owners, some of which never unlocked the gear, some who did unlock it, and when Tom saw how they were using it, he realized why his Sacred Gear was not known.

It was ridiculous.

One woman used it to scam people, telling them things from their past she could never have known as proof that her 'fortune telling' was real.

Another man used it only a few times, whenever he forgot where he stashed this or that important thing.

The most interesting of its users was a detective who used it to solve murders.

Neither of them was creative enough. Not one of them experimented with the gear's abilities and after the initial amazement that they possessed some kind of supernatural power, they all fell back into their mundane life.

That... was an enlightening situation but Tom was not satisfied. He felt frustrated. At first, he thought he would see some clue on how to use the gear effectively from its past users who spend their lifetimes using it, only to find out they were worse at utilizing it than his current self.

In a bout of childishness, he did something he would never attempt with a clear mind.

He tried to use Vision to see how Vision was made and how it worked on a deeper level. Its making was a part of its past so it should be viewable, plus he had already confirmed he could see into Vision's past so...

At least, that was Tom's reasoning at the time.

Much to his shock, he succeeded again! In a way…

Of course, he only realized that after he woke up since the knowledge overload sent him to the dreamland wonderland quite quickly.

When he woke up, Tom gleefully realized he could recite the principles on which Vision worked or describe the process of making it in detail...

But his excitement didn't last long. Real life was a bitch. He found out that despite knowing the process he did not understand even a bit of the magical hocus-pocus gibberish that was 'downloaded' into his head.

It was simply massively out of his league and that put a serious dampening on his mood.

There was nothing else Tom could do than to move on, momentarily putting this knowledge aside since it was completely useless to him.

His childhood went on and Tom was getting more and more knowledge about things, screening appliances with his Sacred Gear and learning science this way... since he was not really sent to a real school like any normal kid his age, and was locked at home, forced to practice magic most of his time.

Of course, he was homeschooled quite thoroughly since human magic relied upon math, chemistry, physics, and other sciences, but naturally, he would not be taught how to make electronic appliances. So... Tom decided to check them out in his spare time.

After all, if there was one thing his second life had taught him, it was that no knowledge was useless.

Time passed quickly with his new routine and... much to his shame, Tom realized the real potential of his Sacred Gear only a half year after he first learned how to 'properly' use it.

He was trying to learn a basic spell, having enormous trouble with it. His talent was average and he was behind his schedule, wasting six days on the spell and he could almost feel his father's disapproving looks on his back. In a bout of desperate frustration, Tom tried to use his Sacred Gear on the spell itself.

Don't call him stupid...

He was just a child and some things aren't obvious unless someone points them out or you learn them by accident.

In hindsight, Tom should have known this could possibly work but he was still not thinking enough outside of the box. It was a valuable lesson for him that propelled his future progress forward and while he learned it later than he probably should, he was glad he learned it at all.

In short, it worked. Vision was able to reveal many things about the spells. From individual cases where it was used... which Tom quickly discarded as useless, to the information on how the book itself was written.

And that's when Tom realized just how shitty his household really is and how vicious the magician community can get.

The reason why he was having trouble with the spell was simple. After some more specialized screening with Vision... and God it was hard since Vision didn't have any sort of sentience and like a machine, it only revealed to him what he 'wished to see', rather than what he needed to see... he came to a very simple solution.

The bastard who sold his father the spell scammed him horribly. The book was faulty. It still contained most of the spell but it was slightly tweaked in a way it would never have worked.

It was a simple case of sabotaging the upstarts by a different magician household.

To be honest, Tom couldn't blame them. If his family was stupid enough to fall for this, they deserved to be sabotaged. While he didn't know about the spell, his father should have checked what he was buying before he paid for it.

Nevertheless, Tom decided to shrug it off. He did the same thing he did with Vision and tried to see how the spell was created and how it worked.

Sure, not every spell was better at the time of its creation than in modern ages but if Tom had to start somewhere, it was at the very beginning, no?

Unsurprisingly, Tom learned the spell in under twenty minutes after that.

But the important part was that he also memorized the principles on which the spell worked. He wasn't like these 'monkey see, monkey do' magicians who only learn spells but have no idea how they really work.

These principles were not some incredibly hard-to-understand magical mumbo-jumbo. This was a basic spell so it worked on basic principles. Basics Rei could easily understand and build upon in the future.

His Sacred Gear was actually a much more amazing learning tool than he first imagined!

Needless to say, his magic studies picked up an abnormal pace after that revelation.

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Author Note:

The Gear might seem overpowered but there are proper limitations I will be introducing later on. :D Don't get your hopes too high. It is still one of the 'trash-tier' Sacred Gears that nobody cared to even note down throughout history.