===Part 9===

“This will probably be confusing, so allow me to make a note first: we will now move the timeline beyond the Golden age. Just keep in mind that this is past the time he spent with Mathers and Westcott.”

Every man and every woman is a star.

Separate from their surface consciousness, people contain a self that can achieve wisdom. If everyone could awaken to that self, the entire world would turn at maximum efficiency, as if all the gears fit together. In other words, nothing is intrinsically worthless.

“You look upset, young lady. Would it cheer you up if I invited you to the starry sky?”

In that case, there may have been some kind of necessity to the “human” known as Aleister Crowley meeting a certain woman.

His voice was similar to when he was younger, but it was also decisively different. It was calm, it contained an intent to connect with the outer world, and most importantly, it was not filled with hatred and doubt directed at the world.

He was considerate.

He was trying to gently touch the other person’s formless heart.

“…That’s surprising,” said Kamijou. “The magician of the century could fall in love like normal?”

“And I am the wife of eccentric Mathers,” said the Black Cat Witch. “Is that a problem?”

Did marriage really make someone look so much more reliable?

“Also, Crowley was surprisingly popular due to his androgynous beauty and his eccentric charisma. In fact, because it came to him so easily, he never had much interest in normal love.”

“Normies are the worst.”

“Watch what you say. He was generally an unemployed eccentric who loved black jokes and submitted his own erotic novels to a cheap publisher, so you can’t really call him a normie.”

“Bff!?”

“In his great masterpiece, he got carried away and referred to male genitalia in more than 100 ways. He also visited Egypt and attempted the K2 with no extra oxygen supply. Once he started something, he would stubbornly give it his all.”

Kamijou began trembling.

He felt his image of the evil demon king crumbling down around him. This was like looking under your father’s bed or searching through your teacher’s computer. There was some important information that an adolescent was better off not knowing.

“By the way, Crowley would also nonchalantly bring his own semen to the ceremonial ground where everyone was gathered and use it in experiments, he stole the butterfly decoration used to hide the crotch of a naked bronze statue and wore it over his pants to a party, and he would make the most wonderful rhyming sexual jokes whenever he saw a magician from the same cabal. He was quite the unrestrained magician.”

“That just makes him a giant pervert!! His personality was entirely broken!!”

“At the time, it was all dismissed as mere mischief, so the difference between eras can be a frightening thing. I’m truly jealous of modern society with its civilized definition of sexual harassment…”

Whenever he looked more deeply into the older ages seen in samurai dramas or knight stories, Kamijou could not help but notice how difficult women had it, but if everyone around her had been ''that'' eccentric, Mina Mathers must have felt completely surrounded. And the sad part was that enduring it all would have been meaningless.

But Crowley the Unrestrained King had toned it down in the current scene.

Had the silver-haired young man seen enough value in the ephemeral woman standing next to him to suppress that egotistic side of himself? With the perverted side of himself closed up like a cuckoo clock, the silver-haired “human” looked just like a gentleman with a strict policy of “ladies first”.

“That woman is named Rose. She became Aleister Crowley’s first wife.”

“First?”

“The details can come later. …Although after this, the things pent-up inside him exploded.”

“Now I don’t want to see the rest!! I have a bad feeling about what’s coming!!”

Time flowed by.

After marriage, they seemed to begin living together and Aleister apparently stopped trying to hide his magic research from his wife Rose. In fact, he actively used her as an assistant. Kamijou did not know exactly how it worked, but he seemed to sometimes use an incantation and a magic circle to summon something formless and send it ''inside his wife’s body.

The woman had initially seemed ephemeral, but Kamijou felt a heart-pounding unease when he saw her convulsing in a chair inside a basement filled with some kind of burning incense.

“Crowley was a man of logic and efficiency, so he did not hold back even with his own wife.”

“Huh?”

“That is a method of hypnotizing someone to intentionally guide them into a trance and access a higher being, but the trance here is the same type used by the ancient witches who would rub a special ointment on their brooms, mount them without wearing any underwear, and-…”

“Waaahh! Waaaaaaaahh!! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!!!!!!”

Kamijou shuddered as his danger sense warned that carelessly listening any further would be like a scam where he was made to overhear told personal information and then pressured into paying money in apology.

“Now, as his true self exploded out and he ended up playing doctor – or rather, playing magician – with his newlywed wife, he eventually accessed a higher being said to be a guardian angel during a trip to Egypt. And that guardian angel’s name might have been glimpsed here in Academy City.”

“?”

“…That name is Aiwass. That being contains the number 93, just like Thelema. And just like Coronzon, that name became a major turning point in Aleister Crowley’s life.”

Kamijou did not recognize that name.

''Although it was possible that it was a name someone other than him had pursued.

Answers did not always appear before the one seeking them.

“The compilation of Aleister’s theories was turned into a book based on what Aiwass said through Rose’s mouth. And this was something sensational enough to blow away not just the Golden cabal’s foundational theories constructed by Westcott and the other leaders, but also the new theories Mathers planned to build by hijacking them.”

“What? So he got an answer through something like the ''Kokkuri-san'', decided he had drawn it from his own subconscious, and turned it into a book???”

“Sometimes a powerful grimoire is given more prestige through a legend saying it was provided by a higher being, but there are a relatively large number of records remaining of Crowley and Aiwass’s contact. Although it seems the skeptics that wanted to get rid of him searched through and found fault with all of them. Still, I think it has more credibility than the laughable document permitting the cabal’s establishment that Westcott forged.”

“…Did you just casually slip in something really important there?”

“Legends are unnecessary if you only wish to learn knowledge and technique. But Westcott was from an older age, so he wanted his cabal to have history with an academic or royal scholar. Thus, he claimed to be the only person to have received permission to create a cabal from the ultimate higher being named Anna Sprengel. Whether or not Lady Sprengel actually existed, the document Westcott received was a fake created by an Englishman forging a German’s handwriting. Honestly, if he hadn’t been so intent on social standing, he wouldn’t have fallen prey to those silly newspaper journalists later on.”

Instead of a superhuman organization that secretly determined world events from the shadows of history…they felt more like a group of eccentrics that caused trouble wherever they went. If this was the gathering of geniuses that changed the magic side’s level of techniques, Kamijou wondered if they had looked like an uncontrollable hurricane to those around them.

“But this would have been a happy time for Crowley.”

“…I’m really worried that his wife wouldn’t be able to survive that happiness.”

“Not what I meant.”

Time continued further.

And Kamijou heard a voice that seemed horribly out of place.

It was the crying of a baby.

“That is Aleister Crowley’s first daughter.”

“Oh… Yeah, I guess that would eventually happen if he got married.”

A small life was wrapped in a soft cloth.

The baby calmed down in her mother’s arms, but the man seemed to be keeping a slight distance. Was he afraid of infecting her with his impurity as a magician?

A high school boy like Kamijou had no way of knowing how much courage it would take to fill that slight gap.

But after a very, very long time, Crowley finally moved his fingertips toward his child’s mouth.

And then the small hand gently grasped the father’s fingers.

“To be blunt, her official name was about as overly-long as Jugemu Jugemu, but magic researchers simply call her Lilith. Crowley apparently read the stars to determine her name and it supposedly has an actual meaning. In other words, that was how obsessed with his daughter he was.”

“Ohh?”

His passion seemed to go to waste a lot, but it was kind of adorable when it went to waste for something like this. He sought logic and efficiency in everything and he would make harsh jokes and cruel jeers every time he opened his mouth, but perhaps he had worked hard to try his hand at something he was not used to.

As a father, he had wished for the happiness of his newborn daughter.

As he peered down at his daughter held gently in his wife’s arms, reached out his fingertips, and saw that tiny hand gently grab them, what had grown in the heart of that “human” who had the skill needed to master magic and hijack the world’s greatest cabal?

“This was the happiest time for Aleister Crowley.”

“Yeah, maybe so.”

“Do you not understand? ''This'' was the happiest time.”

“…?”

Kamijou frowned when Mina Mathers insisted on repeating herself. He sensed some hidden meaning to her words.

And the Black Cat Witch explained while surrounded by an ominous atmosphere.

“To put it another way, it is only downhill from here. Aleister Crowley’s life only continued to sink without ever resurfacing.”

“Wait… Hold on…”

Kamijou looked back to the scene before his eyes.

This was an illusion.

Instead of complete fiction, it was probably an image of the past a certain person had walked. So no amount of struggling could change history. All of it had already happened.

But Kamijou still begged it to stop.

[[Image:NT_Index_v18_193.jpg|thumb]]

What he saw here was perfect. This was the ultimate accomplishment of everything that Aleister Crowley was. What could be added to or subtracted from this? Any addition or subtraction would clearly be superfluous, but what had the outside world brought to this miniature garden?

“To assist with the birth and to protect the unstable mother and daughter with all his being, Aleister temporarily stopped his magical research. And to make up for that delay, he left on a trip to a great mountain once the mother and child’s state had stabilized. He had a certain objective there, but that does not matter here.”

There was a single answer.

“Once he was done there, he learned of his young daughter’s ''unnaturally'' sudden death by illness. That “human” had wished for his daughter’s happiness more than anyone else in the world and he had given her a name so long it was a pain to say…but he had not been allowed to come running and be with his beloved daughter as she died.”

That had begun the fall.

It had been a trigger great enough for a human to curse the destiny of the entire world.