Originally Posted by
SeiKeo
The Clock Tower of 2015
[...]
A magus was a creature with nothing but magecraft on his mind. There was no room for burdens such as "life".
To a magus, deciphering a grimoire was not just a matter of comprehension. It was for recreating a Mystery from eras past, and then redefining its meaning in the current era.
It was like translating Shakespeare into modern English.
If deciphering a page of the grimoire took an hour, then a five-hundred-page tome would take 20 some days. In the research building, there were 500 grimoire awaiting to be read. On average Leiv could read about 12 per year. It would take 4 to 5 years to finish reading all the tomes.
No, if that were the case, it would be a simple matter. Reading grimoire one by one was even easier.
However, Leiv Uvall's duty was not "deciphering a certain grimoire", but "deciphering a System". He must digest all concepts and comprehend all the interrelated phenomena.
If grimoire A and grimoire B had conflicting views on a certain item, then the content of A must be reviewed.
The more grimoire he read, the more time he needed to redefine concepts. The number was astronomical.
Of course, the cause of Leiv's grief was not "exhaustion from reading for so long".
Rather, he was disgusted by the briefness of his life, which fell short of the time required to comprehensively analyze all the tomes.
"Short. O so short. My one life time will not suffice!"