"N-No way." It couldn't be. There's no way, it wasn't possible!
Except that was the only explanation. Django had to be the god's avatar, however unlikely it seemed. The potential to become a demigod, whose power exceeds everything in the mortal world...
He could feel every hair on his body stand straight, and an anxious warmth spread throughout his body. In the next moment, he felt a chill run through him.
"My head hurts." He sat, dumfounded, on the floor.
"There's no way." Ok, now he was sounding like a broken record. With a clap, he attempted to clear his mind, with a lackluster level of success. Stiffly, he walked over to his bed, laid down without even taking off any of his clothes, and threw a blanket over himself.
"I'm gonna sleep on this!" In quite possibly Django's greatest feat of self-control, he resisted spending all night poring over the documents and decided to drift into unconsciousness.
---
"Dammit!"
Django had been trying to find out more about being the Advent of Mist from his books, but found nothing. For some reason, not many of his texts even mentioned the advents of the True Gods, and the ones that did held very little sustainable knowledge, like "Records of Divine Conflict." While advents themselves were nothing new, very little was even spoken about the god's lesser disciples.
"Advents..." there were multiple levels to being a follower of a god. Realistically, an advent wasn't a follower, but a "middleman," so to speak, but it was generally agreed that advents had the "highest form of faith" compared to the other levels.
Priests, Acolytes, Cleric, Bishops, Archbishops, and Apostles. Everyone knew of these ranks for power - even the most rural villages, far distanced from any sort of civilization, knew the difference between the lower and higher echelons of strength. Of course, the names were different, and some rankings were skewed, but the fundamental system was the same.
Priests were basically regular clergymen (for the more religious folks) or an apprentice. As they grew stronger, they gained more power through their god or minor god, eventually becoming an Apostle, the highest level of power a mortal could achieve.
Aside from being an Advent, of course. Which Django was.
Thinking about it now, there were still some holes in the entire scenario. Why was Helceye's emblem so unknown... or any of the major gods, for that matter? He had never seen any holy emblems for them in any other books, even in "Gods" which he recently borrowed from the library. Plenty of minor gods had one, and they were used for all sorts of things. Certain schools used emblems of their patron gods as student IDs, many minor gods gave emblems or other holy objects to their priests or other ranks as a spell focus, and so on and so forth. Therefore, Django was confused about why the gods true didn't. Apparently that was a secret... but why?
Maybe the secret lied within his mark? If holy marks and emblems were used as a identification of godly power, it could make sense they were reserved for the advents. Perhaps only advents could handle bearing a mark from the true gods? It was certainly a possibility.
The second problem was the notebook. Django had been carrying it around with him ever since he found it, never really knowing why. It had just seemed like the thing to do. Even when Zherros brought him out to the festival, he had carried it with him. If the notebook was his birthright, passed down from magical super human to another, it wasn't out of the question the thing was somehow bound to him; linking them together intrinsically. Not that he knew how to get it to spit up words.
Speaking of Zherros, how was Django gonna break this news to him? It's one thing if he's hanging around a "weird kid" (Zherros had never taken the "cursed" part seriously, but had no problem calling Django "weird"), but around a demi-god?
'To be fair, I'm not exactly in demi-god shape,' Django mused, 'not in much of any shape, magical or physical.'
True, if Django was the avatar of a true god, he certainly didn't feel the part. He was more bone than muscle, and had no idea how to perceive mana, if he even had any - which he doubted, since mages typically could feel their mana instinctually.
In any case... wasn't this good news? Outstanding, even? No matter which way he looked at it, him being an advent seemed certain, which meant one thing -
He wasn't cursed! Well, not affected by a curse, anyway. There was no way his mark influenced people to be terrified of him, and he had no reason to cover it up... except for peace of mind, Django guessed. But, if he wasn't actually cursed, why did everyone in the castle, his father included, act like he was?
'More questions without answers. This is starting to piss me off a bit.' Did he really have to figure out everything himself?
---
It had been a month since Django learned the truth of his heritage, and his labors had finally begun to bear fruit. After borrowing another book or two about magic, Django finally had the knowledge he needed to use the lowest level of magic: basic mana manipulation.
By drawing upon the mana in his body, Django could, theoretically, read the contents of the book.
Theoretically, of course, because Django actually had no idea what he was doing. Magic wasn't something one could learn out of the blue... or wasn't intended to, anyway. It was very complicated at even the beginner level, often requiring years of training to master basic spells. The promised payoff for spending decades at the craft, however, were nothing if not promising.
Luckily for Django, he didn't have to learn magic, per se, merely imbue his mana into the book. Unluckily, mana control was the first, and largest, hurdle a young mage must face.
But if Django was a demigod, surely he could handle a little mana? Probably? There was only one way to find out.
"Here goes nothing..."