Victoria first gave a highly impressionistic, broad description of how the Violet Kingdom selected "gifted individuals," allowing Gawain to form a rough picture in his mind. After hearing it, Heti, standing nearby, spoke up. "I've heard of this kind of 'selection,' and I've also heard that it did not always exist. In earlier times, the Violet Kingdom was even more isolated than it is now, and had no tradition of selecting gifted apprentices from the Loren Continent for instruction—it was only around six hundred years ago that some enlightened Arcane Prince established this precedent..."
"Yes, that was six hundred years ago," Victoria said with a nod. "That was after Ansu had stabilized following its founding. The formerly highly secluded Violet Kingdom suddenly announced that it would open its magical knowledge to the outside world—using 'the mages' own methods,' as they put it. Only then did openly active Violet traveling mages and 'guides' begin appearing across the Northern Continent.
"According to our family records, these masters who wielded profound magical arts caused quite a stir in the north at the time, especially among those groups of Supernatural Beings who pursued the mysteries of magic and ancient knowledge... As we know, after the Gondor Empire collapsed, humanity's magical civilization suffered a devastating blow. The Archmage system, which had relied heavily on the Azure Well, vanished overnight. The surviving spellcasters urgently needed to rebuild a reliable magical system without the Azure Well, yet how difficult was it for traditional mages, who advanced their knowledge through experience, trial and error, and accumulation, to construct such a system? Thus, during the century after Ansu was founded, human mages were like people feeling their way along stone walls in the dark, stymied at every turn..."
That was certainly true, Gawain thought. Though he possessed only brief