Prologue：They Used to Call Me Jesus
They used to call me Jesus.
Not because I was saintly, or tried to save anyone.
Just because I never said a girl was cute.
“Hey, don’t you think she’s hot?”
It’s the kind of thing every high school guy says eventually. That day was no different. My friend pointed at a girl on the field. I felt the pressure to say something, but I didn’t.
Not because I was shy. Not because I was trying to act cool.
I just had a line I always used.
“...Oh, really? Hmm. I don’t know. Doesn’t really click for me.”
It was safe. Neutral. And honestly, kind of annoying.
Even I thought so.
But he didn’t mind. He was used to it—used to me. He kept watching the girl everyone said was the prettiest in our class.
And yeah, I could tell she was cute. I wasn’t blind.
I just couldn’t say it out loud.
It wasn’t allowed.
Still, I wasn’t some loner. I helped lead the school’s cultural festival two years in a row. I had friends. I laughed. I joined in.
But whenever the talk turned to girls, I froze.
People noticed.
They gave me those half-curious, half-skeptical looks.
I couldn’t blame them.
They didn’t know the whole story.
They didn’t know the name some people used behind my back:
“Christ.”
It was half a joke. But not entirely wrong.
I belonged to a strict Christian group.
One that said looking at girls was a sin.
Love? Lust? Desire?
All dangerous.
Being alone with a girl? Temptation.
Thinking she was cute? Impure.
That’s what I was taught.
So of course, I got overly conscious around girls—every glance felt like a mistake, every stray thought like a failing.
But I was a teenager.
My thoughts didn’t stay clean. My body didn’t follow the rules.
Every night, my mind argued with itself. I wanted to believe. I wanted to obey. I also wanted to look.
Maybe even touch.
That contradiction ate at me. And little by little, a new thought began to grow—one I didn’t dare name out loud.
I wanted to leave.
Leave the rules I never chose.
One day, I wondered:
How many people in Japan are religious?
I looked it up.
1.8 billion.
Wait—what?
That’s more than the population.
It turned out people often belonged to multiple religions: Shinto, Buddhism, both. If eighty million people each count twice, that’s 160 million. Add a few more, and you hit 1.8 billion.
The math didn’t make sense. But the point did.
In Japan, religion isn’t belief.
It’s habit.
New Year’s at a shrine. Church weddings. Temple funerals.
I realized I was born in a country full of religion.
And I was part of one too.
But mine was different.
It wasn’t ancient. It wasn’t woven into the culture.
It was new.
A “new religious movement,” they called it.
And it had rules.
Like: have sex before marriage, and your whole family goes to hell.
We lost money. Every time we moved, the house got smaller.
In Japan, there’s this joke: if you’re still a virgin at thirty, you become a wizard.
And I did cross thirty. So yeah, I became one.
A real wizard—born of circumstance, without any magic to show for it.
Tied down by society and religion, one day that old high school feeling came back.
That “man, this sucks” kind of feeling—when I couldn’t even say a girl was cute.
But this time, something else came up too.
Something I hadn’t felt in a long time.
A voice in my chest, quiet but certain, saying:
“...Maybe I should just go.”
This is the story of a wizard who walked the world, trying to learn what it means to be free.
