CH 1

I, Nicola Michael Harvey, the first son of the Leslie count household, was born with a frail constitution. I spend half the week lying in bed and the rest of the time walking was the limit of my physical activity. I constantly was out of breath, suffered from headaches and had bouts of nausea, leaving me with a sickly pale face. I knew the reason for all of it, the sins of my previous life, in other words, it was mana’s fault.

All humans have some amount of mana inside. However, they cannot use magic on their own because humans don’t have a special organ that allows them to circulate mana like Elves and Beastmen do. There will be no issues if the amount of mana they have inside is small. If this stored mana is very large, they will be afflicted by an illness called Mana-Poisoning, also thought of as the result of one’s numerous sins in the previous life resulting in a horrible death in this life. This was my illness.

The church considered this mana as the manifestation of one’s sins. A collection of the sins that were inherited from the first ever humans and the sins of one’s previous lives. Looks like I had committed a really horrible sin in my previous life. I was told that I was the reincarnation of an absolute scum. Though, I have no idea if it is true or not. If the people of the church declared it to be so, I guess it must be true.

There are two ways to suppress the symptoms of Mana-Poisoning. The first way is to bind a contract with a Servant, a tool that possesses a personality. They are capable of consuming the mana inside a human to use a magic called Ability. They cover a very diverse range of tools such as swords, shields, armour, mirrors, pens etc. The two things they all have in common is that they are made of a metal called Animium and can manifest in a human form once they bind a contract with a human. If the contract holder dies or the tool is destroyed, the life of the Servant will also come to an end.

The second way is to always wear something made of Animium. Animium has the property of transmitting mana, by wearing it always, it allows the mana inside the body to flow out. Soon after I was born I was made to wear an Animium belt around my stomach because there was no way I would understand anything about Servants or contracts at that time. Now I wear a bracelet on each hand instead of the belt. The bracelet is quite heavy with 15 large Animium pearls strung together, but is not an issue once you get used to it.

The reason the church declared my previous life as the worst sort of scum is related to this quantity of Animium. Usually people suffering from Mana-Poisoning can lead regular lives if they carry an Animium pearl half the size of those on my bracelets. I wear 30 pearls in total, each twice as big as the regular ones, and am still not even able to rise up on my own. The first time I was able to leave my bed was when I was 2 years old. I formed a contract with a Servant as soon as I learned how to talk. In the form of a sword, she was named Katrina and I looked up to her like an elder sister.

The church believed that even if I was the scum of the earth in my previous life, it would be fine if I lived properly in this life. So, I wasn’t killed or abandoned by my family…until that day.