Over Yesterday is the second chapter of the The Journey of a Dark Elf with Fading Powers manga series, written & illustrated by Daisuke Itabashi. It is apart of Volume 1 and released on January 19, 2026.
Plot
The chapter opens with a flashback to the day Amira's magic disappeared. She felt like a shell of herself, and had the sense that she'd also lost the last several thousand years of her life. In the present, Amira and Lilicena are in Miragus, the Southern Capital, at an antique shop. Amira has fallen in love with an antique magic-driven lantern (made around 200 years ago, priced at 3.25 million fonce). Lilicena points out the problem, the lantern lights up using the magic inside whoever holds it, and Amira has none. Amira just likes the design. Lilicena reminds her she's jobless and should be living simply and frugally, but Amira grabs the lantern anyway, saying her mission is to uncover hidden gems and carry them into the future. Then she asks to borrow money. Lilicena pulls out a ledger and reads off the total she has lent Amira over the past seven centuries, 1,257,650,000 fonce. Amira just laughs about it. On the walk over, Lilicena gets serious for a moment. Nobody knows how Amira's magic drying up will affect her health, so she needs to save money for emergencies, and Lilicena promises to keep a tight grip on her purse strings. They arrive at the Kisaro Academy of Sorcery. They eat sandwiches at the Floating Gardens, Lilicena's favorite spot on campus. Looking out over the city, Lilicena admits she has seen enough towns die right in front of her and hopes this one still looks the same in a thousand years. Amira agrees. Students doing windriding practice get them talking about staffs. They both remember Gen, a dwarven staffsmith from long ago, who said the most excellent staffs all have one thing in common, that it has a beautiful shape. He also told Amira, in so many words, that the one she was using was garbage. Lilicena notes that as an academy teacher it would befit Amira to carry a staff, if only for appearances. The problem is that when Amira's magic dried up, she was so upset she sold every staff she owned to a used magic tool shop and spent the proceeds on a huge amount of travel. The academy has a Department of Industrial Magic Arts that trains future toolsmiths, so Lilicena takes her there. The shop is run by Lightbell, a third-year student with a heavy lisp, who offers ready-made staffs same day or custom work in a week. Amira browses the stock, a super-lightweight avian type (128,000 fonce), an implantable slime type with a conductive crystal ball (35,000 fonce), a goblin ritual type (12,000 fonce), a giant clan staff hewn from a millennium tree trunk (879,000 fonce), a tiny fairy staff closer to a sewing needle, and a masterpiece with high-density magical ore crystal and rare earth material priced at 3,284,000 fonce. In the workshop, students are hammering and welding away at retail-ready quality. Amira watches all of it with stars in her eyes. Then she pulls Lilicena aside to ask something, and Lilicena reads it off her face before she can finish. Amira wants to build a staff herself. Lightbell is hesitant, since Amira has no experience and, more importantly, the shop's tools are state-of-the-art magic-driven implements. The students train on them for years, and Amira can't power them at all.This leads into the chapter's emotional core, another flashback to Amira's years holed up after her magic ran out. She believed that without magic force she offered no value to the world and couldn't do a single thing. Everything felt boring. All she wanted was a morning where she could wake up and feel her heart dancing with joy. What eventually dawned on her was that the hardest part wasn't losing the magic she'd built up. It was telling herself she couldn't do anything, and watching all that time pass while she did nothing at all, so Amira commits. "That's fine", she says. She'll build her staff in a way magic never could, by hand, and she's sure it'll look ridiculously amateur-hour when she's done, but that's all right. She wants the yesterdays where she couldn't do it to turn into todays where she can. Lilicena offers her assistance, on one condition, that Amira covers her own material costs. The chapter ends with Amira immediately asking to borrow a little for the jewels she'll need.
Characters in Order of Appeareance
Battle & Events
Trivia
- One fonce equals one cent.
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