I wasn't concerned by my immediate arrest, as it had been essentially unavoidable. It was considered very unlikely for a human to be able to make it across the mountains, but given the political situation, they had protocols to deal with such a circumstance.

According to regulation, I would be imprisoned, fitted with mana restricters, and either interrogated or outright tortured until I explained how and why I was here.

But Loraine intervened.

She didn't have much of a choice, as it had been part of the deal I had blackmailed her into accepting. The guards seemed to recognize her and were surprised to see her, although respectful.

They kept me under heavy guard, near the border, while Loraine went with another group to explain the situation to the monarch.

I took the time to get used to the mana in the air. If the elves were living in a place like this, it was unsurprising that they managed to fight the rest of the world on even footing, despite their vast inferiority in numbers and apparently technology.

For a human mage, it would be considered basically heaven. I wouldn't be surprised if this place spawned archmages like rabbits.

That made their technological situation even more noteworthy. They seemingly had abundant resources, so they should have ample time and energy to spend on innovation. With the threat posed by humanity, they certainly had motivation.

Why were they still wearing armour made of bark?

I asked a nearby guard. She sneered at me and spat something about how filthy humans don't understand the value of tradition.

"Is tradition worth more than your lives?" I asked. There was probably something more to this.

"Of course it is! It's the most important thing that separates us from scum like you."

I hoped there were more things that separated us.

The guard turned away with a disgusted face. I doubted I'd get much more from her anyway, so I sat in silence.

Eventually, the guards who went with Loraine returned with the monarch's order. I was to be brought before them.

As I expected, the throne room was in the centre of a giant tree.

Contrary to expectations, however, when I walked into it, the face of the woman sitting on the throne immediately changed colour.

She made a gesture to her guard captain and the captain charged towards me. She moved with the grace of hundreds of years of practice.

I barely managed to block the sword that came flying at my neck. I stepped backwards, deflecting it, and looked at Loraine.

"This wasn't our agreement."

The guards surrounding me began to close in.

Loraine seemed confused as well, and she hastily turned to the queen.

"Wait! If he dies, the knowledge gets spread across the continent!"

But the queen wasn't listening.

"How dare you come to this place, wearing the corpse of my son?" She shouted.

What?

"I'm not sure why you think that, but I have no knowledge of this," I responded, dodging between the guards.

"Enough. You think I wouldn't recognize my eldest child's body?"

She began to weave her own magic. The air around me became thicker and my limbs started to feel heavier. It had been hard enough already to fend off her guards, so this wasn't good.

Should I try to escape? I'd lose the chance to explain myself and would get hunted by elves on their home ground. It would be very unpleasant.

Loraine grabbed the queen's hand.

"Grandmother, please! Einor is already dead! Don't send thousands more to follow him!"

The queen was still furious, but the white-hot rage in her eyes faded.

"We can't trust a black mage. Who knows what intentions he has by coming here?"

I had miscalculated. A human who had obtained valuable knowledge and was using it as leverage would simply be another greedy, evil human. A black mage who had somehow survived the purge, however, was different. They'd have to be notoriously slippery, and to the elves, they'd be their most hated enemy.

Furthermore, if the queen thought I was using her son's body, she would believe that I had known how to steal elven bodies long before I met Loraine. It made sense, then, for her to jump to the conclusion that everything I told Loraine had been a ruse, and I was here for some other purpose.

"I'm not a black mage," I said, "Do you think I would've come here so freely if I knew my body was made from the elven queen's son? It would be absurd to think some of the world's strongest mages, with millennia of experience, wouldn't notice."

"I've known humans that hubristic," said the queen.

"I don't think he is," Loraine responded.

The queen seemed to trust her judgment at least a little, because she nodded.

"Alright. I'll give you a minute. Explain why you have my son's body."

I didn't think saying I had no idea would cut it. Maybe if I were a normal person on the street, there would be a chance, but I had come and deliberately threatened the elven rulers with forbidden magic.

I no longer had the right to be ignorant.

First point of consideration, then: Was the queen correct? Was my current body originally her son's?

When I was summoned, I'd attributed my magic talent to selection bias. If I hadn't happened to have had immense talent, I wouldn't have been summoned. That was likely at least partially true; aside from my personality, I was good at everything important and had few weaknesses. At the very least, I was far better than a random choice.

Certainly, my memory and my senses were fantastic, so that could have reasonably resulted in my speed of learning magic, my fine control, and my ability to sense mana.

But my ability to draw mana and my speed of absorption were also extraordinary.

The reason why mages take so long to gain strength is not only because of their sensitivity. I didn't realize it at the time, but mana tends to be drawn to itself, so the more mana one has in their body, the more easily they will be able to accumulate more. The process speeds up significantly as the mage grows stronger.

However, there was no magic on Earth.

(That in and of itself is strange, given that this world and its rules bear some similarity to many Earthen fantasies and myths.)

Then how was my body physically inclined towards magic?

The ease of forming circulation channels had to do with my physical structure, which to my knowledge was copied perfectly. That could still be selection bias, but I was starting to think there might be more to it. Regardless, that was an issue for later.

The problem was that my original body should not have had a drop of mana in it. Yet when I was summoned, I drew mana with far more ease than the average person on this world, and they grew up with mana in their air.

Something had likely been done to my body.

I remember getting shot. It was only for an instant, but I felt the bullet hit. My brain would have been turned into a pile of mush. Even the highest form of healing magic probably couldn't have restored my mind that perfectly.

I could handwave it and say it was the power of the goddess, but the queen's reaction to me made that unlikely.

Back on my home world, someone once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Could something similar be said for magic and godhood?

What if an entity had used a black magic link to somehow create a copy of my body, then transferred over my soul? If the body they used as a base had belonged to the queen's son, it explained both my physical mana affinity and her identification of it.

Compared to something along the lines of resurrection of the mush-brained dead, cross-universe instantaneous teleportation of physical matter, and artificially implanting mana into each cell that exactly replicated that of a certain dead elf, it seemed slightly easier, although still far beyond the ability of this planet's mages (that I was aware of).

Second point of consideration: When did this happen? Who was responsible?

Even if I was wrong about the mechanics of the summoning, I started using mana almost immediately after arriving. So, it should have happened before I escaped the Temple of Light.

I didn't think it was Lenore and her priests.

I'd spent some time thinking about this before, but it wouldn't make sense for the ritual to bring an individual who just so happened to die when it was invoked. That would severely restrict the candidate pool to just people who died at the right instant. It would make far more sense to store the best candidates in some sort of stasis and then awaken them when needed.

Furthermore, Johan was summoned as well, which would make little sense if they were relying on some sort of temporal alignment. It would be too much of a coincidence if they happened to invoke it when he died, especially since they didn't seem to have any knowledge about either of us. Unless some entity also told them when to invoke the rituals? Even then, they'd have to accurately predict the moment of his death.

It wasn't impossible, however, I thought some sort of long term external capture process and stasis was more likely.

But that's somewhat tangential. The key piece of information here is that they did not know my name, not even the one I went by publicly on Earth. If they had some method of finding and selecting candidates themselves, to the point where they could capture our souls before they dissipated, they should have insane information gathering abilities.

The fact that they knew so little suggested, to me, that the entity that chose me and the Temple of Light did not communicate much information with each other. They should be distinct parties. It might seem obvious that the Goddess of Light was not a fabrication of the Temple of Light, but people will do all sorts of things to keep power, so I wouldn't take it for granted.

This matches with what Lenore told me about the goddess sending me to them. I hadn't had the impression she was lying about that, at any rate.

In the first place, the clergy seemed to genuinely consider it a 'summoning'. I could be wrong, but their attitude didn't seem to be that of someone pulling a body out of storage and waking it up. Furthermore, the restrictions the elves forced on the major human forces after the previous war added to the unlikelihood of the Temple of Light being able to knowingly practice body transferal magic.

There are some other details to take into account here, but I don't want to put you to sleep. After all, the agreement was that I give you my story, not read you a thesis statement.

Essentially, I decided that, unbeknownst to the Temple of Light, the entity known as the Goddess of Light had probably recreated my body separately with the queen's son as a base. Then, she sent that to the Temple of Light when they invoked the ritual.

Alright, the final point of consideration: How would I convince the queen to not try to kill me?

The ancient underground shelter with the artifacts too advanced for their time. The elves' determination to use primitive technology and their unyielding self-isolation. The Temple of Light's preparations to combat some sort of invasion. The strangely modern interfaces belonging to the suspicious 'tomb master'. This world, incomparably brimming with power and energy.

I still didn't understand how Johan and I fit into everything, but I thought I had a reasonable guess about the general situation.