Then Hill quickly spotted a few people who were in better shape.
But "better" merely meant that their clothes fit reasonably well. They were still frighteningly thin... the skin-and-bones look that girls obsessed with losing weight in his previous era had dreamed of.
The younger children, on the other hand, all looked fairly well.
Among those over eight, only a small minority still seemed healthy, and their clothing had begun to look different from everyone else's.
Hill could identify eight as the dividing line because children whose magical aptitude had not manifested by that age could essentially bid farewell to the path of a mage.
There were, of course, people who underwent sudden changes, but the general public would not take such exceptions into account.
Among the adults, only those wearing mage robes... even apprentice robes that looked like plain sackcloth... looked halfway decent.
Apparently, although Mage Apprentices who could not enter the Mage Tower were unable to bring their families into this town, they themselves could remain here.
If a child still had a little conscience... and there would always be some, Hill reckoned there would be plenty of villages made up of these apprentices' families on the outlying lands near the Mage Tower.
That was quite consistent with reality.
It was just that the more he watched, the more normal it all seemed.
If Asmodeus had not insisted on using his wife's name, Hill probably would not even have been able to determine who had ruined this world.
And the mortals of this world did not pray.
Hill crouched beneath the town and observed it for a long time. People without magical aptitude were not even entitled to kneel before the goddess. They could only watch from a distance as the apprentices entered the assembly hall every morning