A Little Shock from the Ancestor

Karya's face was incredibly distinctive.

Utterly ordinary, really.

Though with the collapse of the Shuriman Empire, most Shurimans who encountered images of Karya saw ones that had strayed far from the man himself. They were either statues of the Death God or some strange shrines and idols.

But in Ixtal, where the historical record had remained relatively intact, Karya's face was familiar to many people. At the very least, in the Great Library of Yuental, he was the second portrait in the corridor.

(Incidentally, the first was Setaqa, and the third was Nezuk. Of the three portraits, Nezuk's was the most distorted. That wasn't because the artist lacked skill; considering where the portrait was going to be hung, they had no choice but to apply a little filter. Otherwise, compared with the first two, it would have been pretty gruesome.)

For Ixtal's Great Elementalists, Karya's face was one they'd seen all their lives.

So when Karya took off his mask, the third Great Elementalist to arrive spoke at once in the refined and congenial Old Shuriman tongue.

But shortly after his courteous greeting, he realized something was wrong.

Lord Karya... hadn't he died ages ago?

According to Ixtal's historical records, Karya's death marked the end of the Shuriman Empire. In Ixtal's history, the Shuriman Empire without Karya was known as the "Kingdom of Shurima."

This was an extremely important point, because Ixtal's independence from Shurima was founded on this legal basis. Ixtal acknowledged that it had once been part of the Shuriman Empire, but when the empire fell apart, Ixtal, as a "kingdom on equal footing" with the Kingdom of Shurima, naturally no longer had to swear allegiance to it.

It was no exaggeration to say that the distinction between the Shuriman Empire and the Kingdom of Shurima had, in