Anti-Aging

 

The Witch of Sloth advanced civilization by a thousand years with her wisdom.

Yet it took a hundred years to convey those words that could be spoken in an instant.

 

"Innis!"

The next day, I headed to the university with Chryse and called out to the sofa drifting lazily through the air.

"Oh, Mentor, you actually showed up today. Good boy, good boy."

Innis answered in her usual sarcastic tone, rolling around on her sofa as always.

"I only took one day off."

"Yeah, but like, me — the girl they call the Witch of Sloth — I've been coming to school without skipping a single day, and then the teacher plays hooky? How's that fair, I wonder?"

Yes. She was exactly the same as always.

I didn't know Innis's exact age, but it had been nearly seventy years since she'd first entered the university. That put her at eighty, at least.

That alone made her remarkably long-lived for a human, yet Innis looked exactly the same as she had back then. She still appeared to be in her teens, young enough that you might even call her childish.

She'd changed so little you could pass her off as a baby-faced elf, but she was a genuine, bona fide human. Her ears weren't pointed, and I could trace her lineage back thirty generations by name.

"Sorry about that. I have something I want to ask you."

"Ask me?"

She tilted her head, and I nodded.

"About the anti-aging magic you use."

Once, when I'd grown suspicious of how little her appearance had changed and pressed her on it, she'd confessed without the slightest resistance. She'd even explained the principles behind it at the time, but the explanation was so convoluted, and I so uninterested, that I'd let it go in one ear and out the other…

"Sure, so let me explain. First off, the human body has an extremely high degree of plasticity compared to other races. This is called phenotypic plasticity, and if we let A be the population, B the height of each individual, and C the mean value, then the distributional variance from C is calculated as one over B minus C times the total divided by…"

"Wait, wait, wait, hold on."

Innis had produced a notebook from somewhere on the sofa and was already scribbling equations with ease. I hurriedly stopped her.

"What I want to ask is much simpler than that."

When she started throwing numbers around and explaining from theory, I couldn't follow at all. I couldn't even begin to read the equations she was writing.

"It's enchantment sorcery, right?"

"Well, obviously. My specialty is enchantment sorcery."

Innis looked somewhat miffed but confirmed it with a nod. She might be known as the Witch of Sloth, but the moment anyone asked about her research, she'd spring to life. That said, almost no one could keep up with her, her own apprentices included.

"Then what about me and elves being long-lived?"

"… Probably something different, I think."

Innis thought for a moment, then answered.

"When I first set out to create anti-aging magic, the first approach I considered was transforming an aged body back into a young one."

I nodded. That was probably the approach anyone would think of first.

"But as you know, when a spell's effect wears off, the body reverts to its original state. Once it expires, you'd just turn back into an old person. And the bigger the change, the more power it takes. Turning an aged body into a young one is, well, impossible for a human. Elves, fairies… or maybe merfolk. Races with that much magical aptitude might be able to pull it off. Not that elves would ever need to."

There were racial differences in magical strength. What we conveniently called magical power had become quite measurable since the advent of sorcery.

"It wouldn't work for merfolk either. Not unless they paid a steep price."

"A price… a price, huh. I see, so there was that kind of method too."

Innis's eyes widened at my words, and she sank deeper into her sofa, lost in thought.

"So how do you do it, Innis?"

"Oh, sorry. Umm, to put it really crudely, I stripped my body of the function that makes it age. That way, I just have to recast the spell periodically."

Innis resurfaced from her thoughts to answer.

"… That means…"

"Exactly. Aging is the other side of growth. As long as I'm using this magic, I don't age, but I don't grow either. But it's not like that for dragons or elves, right?"

I nodded. An elf's growth slows to a crawl past a certain age, but it never stops entirely. Even Nina, who'd passed a thousand years, was still changing little by little.

In my case, it was even more pronounced. My human form might not change, but my true dragon body grew larger with each passing year. If one dragon year equaled ninety-eight human years, then I was only about ten. Still in my growth period, really.

"From what you've told me, dragons and elves don't have a natural lifespan, right?"

"Probably not."

"Then why do dragons and elves grow at all? If you can live forever without dying, there's no need to reproduce. You could simply exist in your completed form from the start."

I had no answer. I'd simply accepted it as the way things were. It felt as though birth and growth were inseparable from being alive. But by that logic, death should be inseparable too.

"Conversely, if a species reproduces and grows, it needs a finite lifespan. That's what plasticity means."

Innis stated it with unwavering certainty.

She had a point. If a species had no lifespan yet kept multiplying, the world would eventually be overrun by that species alone. Fire dragons, unlike elves, had no natural predators. No matter how low their reproductive rate, sooner or later the world would be teeming with them.

Was there some mystery behind why that hadn't happened… or were we simply in the middle of it happening?

"Um, the anti-aging magic you use, Miss Innis… can anyone learn it?"

Out of the blue, Chryse, who had been listening in silence until now, asked.

"Not yet. I haven't been able to formalize it. So this isn't sorcery, it's still just magic."

Innis answered, her expression sour. The broad category of magic that altered the properties or shape of matter and flesh was called enchantment magic. The process of converting it into written notation was formalization.

It had recently come to light that when people used magic, the subconscious played a controlling role. But when an incantation was written down as text, it produced the same effect no matter who activated it. The subconscious fine-tuning was stripped out entirely.

Replacing that subconscious control with written notation while maintaining the same effect grew exponentially harder as the magic became more complex. Anti-aging magic was something only someone with Innis's near-godlike intuition could pull off. The day Scarlet's average lifespan would skyrocket was still a long way off.

"You went so far as to invent such advanced magic just to stay by Ara's side, and you still can't confess to him?"

I could clearly see Chryse's innocent question pierce Innis's heart like a spear.

"Wh-why do you even know about that…?"

"Why wouldn't I? I think Ara's about the only one who doesn't know."

Innis wrung the words out like a groan. Chryse furrowed her brows, genuinely bewildered.

Over forty years ago, when Chryse had stumbled upon Innis crying in secret, she'd been too young to understand. But now she was more than old enough to grasp the depth of Innis's feelings.

"I-it's fine, okay! I've still got plenty of time…"

Innis insisted, but I had a nagging feeling that this very sense of having time to spare was what kept nipping things in the bud. If she'd had less time left to live, she might have mustered the courage to confess long ago.

"Anyway, why are you even asking about anti-aging magic? It's got nothing to do with either of you."

Innis cleared her throat to cover her embarrassment, and I nodded.

"Right. That's exactly what I wanted to confirm, that it has nothing to do with us."

What counted as a mystery, and what didn't. It was a surprisingly difficult question.

Was it something within the reach of existing knowledge, or was it an endless wonder?

The quickest way to find out was to ask whoever stood at the cutting edge of current knowledge. And as far as I knew, that was Innis, without question.

"… I don't really get it, but does this solve whatever's been eating at you lately?"

Oh. So Innis had seen through me too. Apparently I wore my feelings on my sleeve more than I'd thought.

"Well, this doesn't settle everything. There's someone else I need to talk to. It's been a while since I've left the village…"

Innis was, to my knowledge, the sorcerer with the deepest understanding of the current state of the art.

But the being most likely to possess the broadest knowledge of all was someone else entirely.

"You're going somewhere other than Scarlet?"

"Yes."

Chryse tilted her head. I nodded and answered.

"Home."