Be the One Who Plants the Tree

"Hello, Roland. My name is Skord."

Of the two fellow students who had come to meet him, one was a plump boy who looked rather guileless. But his fine clothes and fair skin made his noble background obvious at a glance.

He wore a radiant smile as he shook Roland's hand.

The other was a red-haired girl wearing black-framed glasses. Even as they met, she clutched a thick stack of books tightly to her chest and looked rather nervous.

She fumbled as she extended a hand, trying to follow their example and shake hands, only to nearly let the books slip from her arms.

Her face flushed with embarrassment, and she said timidly, "Y... Yvonne."

"Hello, Yvonne. It's a pleasure to meet you both."

Roland placed his right hand over his chest and bowed slightly, speaking with genuine warmth.

"I... I'm very pleased to meet you both, too..."

Yvonne lowered her head and squirmed, speaking in a barely audible voice.

"All right, Yvonne, no need to be nervous. You three are this tower's only students this year, and you'll be spending quite a few years studying together. I gathered you here so you'd have a chance to get to know one another and exchange contact information."

Froya, the petite, twin-tailed senior in charge of the new students, watched them exchange greetings before speaking with a cheerful smile.

During the pauses in their conversation, the maids seized their opportunities to bring over fruit, drinks, and other refreshments for them to enjoy.

They sat down and turned the conversation to Arcana.

Only then did Roland learn that Skord specialized in the practical applications of magical scripts-in plain terms, research into alchemy, magic scrolls, and the like. He already held several invention patents and related awards.

Yvonne, meanwhile, specialized in translation. She was skilled at translating the scripts and languages of various other races, with particular mastery of Elvish and Celestial.

While still at the academy, she had earned two empire-certified advanced translation certificates. Her expertise in her field was enough to rival that of some high-ranking arcanists!

As for Roland, Froya gave him a little publicity.

"His Excellency Ovesto recruited him personally and even granted him an allocation for the first-level spell Comprehend Languages! His chosen specialization is currently Linguistics."

Skord and Yvonne immediately looked at him with newfound respect.

Atrelin's Linguistics encompassed over a hundred branches, including philology, phonetics, grammar, semantics, dialectology, lexicography, runology, incantation studies, and cryptology. It was the root and forebear of the Runes School, as well as the most fundamental general discipline.

Quite apart from being heirs to the orthodox tradition, mages specializing in it who could conduct research in such an ancient and traditional (unfashionable and outdated) field were nothing less than pure pioneers (doing thankless work). They deserved everyone's respect and affection (protection as an endangered species).

Roland said, "My graduation thesis at the academy was an overview of a writing system called Oracle. I intend to use character-formation methods based on pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, and phonetic-semantic compounds as a starting point to create an entirely new ideographic writing system.

"As everyone knows, Atrelin's spoken language is decent enough, but its writing... well, you could call it a complete mess. That's because, in the early stages of Atrelin's development, its magical power was borrowed from the elves and dragons, leaving it far too deeply influenced by them without anyone realizing."

Froya could not help looking a little resigned. "That really isn't an easy direction to pursue in depth. It's vast and complicated, and not only is it hard to produce results, it's also hard to gain widespread recognition. That's why it's always been a popular topic of conversation rather than a popular research topic."

"That's true. Creating a script and language in the fullest sense is practically equivalent to shaping the soul of a civilization!"

"The history of a script's creation is the history of a civilization's development. One person's imagination alone can't possibly compare to the practical experience of millions of people over countless years.

"Many so-called creations are really just reflections or distortions of existing scripts, and their pronunciation and grammatical rules are often based on things that already exist, too.

"The writing systems mages have attempted to create in recent times suffer from the same limitations.

"After all, most of them still have to draw on the languages and scripts of elves and dragons. Their innovations are limited, and it's difficult to establish unified standards."

Skord and Yvonne offered their own opinions as well.

So this is how everyone sees it?

As they talked, Roland sank into thought.

At first, he had copied Oracle merely to graduate.

He had never expected it to earn such high praise from Archmage Ovesto that he would recruit him into the tower.

That meant its existence truly did hold some significance for Arcana.

Roland also enjoyed novels about transmigration and reincarnation, and had encountered premises such as "ancient forbidden spells were actually Mandarin" and "Chinese was the language of the gods."

With his efforts to introduce it, all those things might just become reality.

But while everyone wanted to enjoy the shade beneath a tree, or even pick its fruit, sometimes there was no predecessor to plant it. He would have to do it himself.

I have to be the one who plants the tree!

Driven by that resolve, Roland continued making frequent trips to the library. He used existing scripts to work out the evolution of character forms, sounds, meanings, and more, gradually refining Oracle's character-formation rules and basic sentence patterns. He even compiled a dictionary with the help of the precious memories in his mind.

Some things were not so easy to copy, even when copying was all he had to do.

For the thousand-plus characters Roland had selected and organized, he still had to consider whether they suited the broader conditions of this world. There was some creative value of his own in that process, too.

Because there were so few new students in their year, everything they did attracted unusual attention. His work soon caught the notice of Froya, who was in charge of them, and his two fellow students.

Froya kept shaking her head. "What am I supposed to say about you? Tsk, tsk... ambitious, or just out of your depth?"

Skord, however, said enviously, "Don't say that, Froya. I think Roland is very brave, and he's already moved ahead of us.

"Although we have a full four years to study here, most people can become full-fledged mages in just two or three if they work hard enough.

"At that point, mage ranks advance according to the old system, but arcanist ranks are tied entirely to achievements in Arcana.

"One more paper could mean one more advantage. The impact is huge!"

Yvonne looked equally amazed, with a hint of a fangirl's excitement. "R... Roland, you're incredible!"

"Fine, fine, fine. Just don't regret it when your paper gets rejected!"

Froya rolled her eyes.

"You juniors really have no idea how high the sky is or how vast the earth is. Harsh reality hasn't beaten any sense into you yet.

"Do you really think papers on Arcana are like those little essays you wrote for practice as students?"

These newcomers had all been top students, so they saw nothing wrong with studying and researching so far ahead.

But this was a monumental undertaking that the entire Arcane Empire and the world of Arcana had failed to make any clear progress on for thousands of years. Was he supposed to be the savior who finally pushed it forward?

Dream on!