"You know, lots of stories have a plot like this, right? Someone makes a contract with the demon Mephistopheles... That's what our ancestor did."
Only the head of the Shishigami family at the time knew what kind of contract had been made in Japan.
Had it turned back time, or merely resurrected someone? Or had it granted a new Magecraft Crest and body? They couldn't even determine that much.
All they knew was that it possessed binding power as formidable as the Self-Compelled Testament, and that it had fulfilled the wish in an entirely proper manner without twisting it at all.
In short, the Shishigami family had miraculously regained its strength.
Their Magecraft Crest had been revived, surpassing even its peak.
The quality and number of their Magic Circuits, which had nearly vanished, had both increased smoothly. The Shishigami family had thus risen again as the foremost magi clan in the Far East.
They had lost their former theories of magecraft, but in exchange, they had learned Necromancy. Even so, they had still needed to make a sacrifice in order to survive.
Of course—to perform such a miracle, an appropriate price had to be paid.
"That price was me."
As it turned out, that contract had actually been a curse.
Sacrificing the future to prioritize the present... For a human being, that was fatally foolish, but for a magus, it was unavoidable.
Magecraft was passed down from parent to child, generation after generation. A family's inheritance existed only to reach that one destination: the Root.
So, abandoning the "future" for the sake of the "present" sounded utterly nonsensical—
But if magecraft ended with "this generation," then there could be no "next generation."
Perhaps Shirou's ancestors had once imagined that there was a chance the curse would never come... Sadly, their