How Does The Dark Magician Transmigrates After 66666 Years End?

Question

Just caught up on this transmigration manhwa and can't guess the MC's final fate. No spoilers, but does the dark mage's revenge arc deliver a satisfying conclusion?

solenn_virgo · Answer

Rather than simply dying after reaching the limit of his life or getting pulled into a random new world due to some lingering cosmic connection, many of these stories have the protagonist use some sort of last-ditch spell or artifact to willfully jump to the new world. I think of A Farewell After Being Reborn (Sayonara glasses to Youdeirin), where a powerful protagonist dies and is reborn as his younger self some time before he became powerful. His knowledge and regret of the betrayals and choices he made as a younger man interact with his current knowledge in interesting ways. I wouldn’t think of this as a magical system reset so much as an exploration of the tensions of having a second chance to interact with the same people with a greater understanding.

Lila · Answer

I keep telling my friends about the ending of ‘Dark Magician Transmigrates After 66666 Years’ because it’s kind of like a secret handshake – it’s really good. A neat way to deliver some mythic payoff and also some real consequences for the hero of the story. So the ancient cycle is broken by a risky spell of memory, consent and shared power. In short, it’s not a solo activity and it requires witnesses and promises. So, the hero’s immortality wasn’t meant to be a lonely existence.

Instead of being coronated as the supreme ruler of the magical world, the main character works to establish a council of many different mages, rewriting bad-old-years' lore and opening up long-closed archives. A sweet little moment of the character eating their first real food in 66,666 years was very grounding and I loved it. The story ends on a hopeful, rather than triumphant, note, just as I'd expect it to given the story as it's been developed.

Owen · Answer

This story really struck a chord with me. It’s a good balance of action and quiet consequences. The ending of ‘Dark Magician Transmigrates After 66666 Years’ follows the transmigration loop coming to an end after a mix of reveals and sacrifices instead of just the hero winning in the end.

Rather, he binds himself to the ‘Eclipse Grimoire’ and, instead of being frozen in time forever, becomes a sort of guard of the sealed ritual. All of his friends come through unscathed and fully heal from their wounds. And, rather than becoming some kind of all-powerful immortal, the cycles of rebirth and the structures of society that had exploited them collapse in on themselves. It’s not a very heroic ending. But it’s good. It’s hopeful in a saddened sort of way, and it’s not one of those melodramatic sacrifice-for-the greater-good type scenarios. The author did a great job of making it seem meaningful.

Declan · Answer

The climax of ‘Dark Magician Transmigrates After 66666 Years’ was the most emotional core of the novel. Instead of an exciting battle, the hero’s memories of 66666 years were finally confessed in order to be transformed into magic that would dissolve the cycle of 66,666 years. I was deeply moved by the hero’s memories being released and transformed in that way.

Instead of throwing away his immortality and power to interfere with time, he gives it up in exchange for a normal life, only now he gets to experience it with the people he saved. The rest of the book is very quiet and focuses on the hero’s life in the present, rebuilding the various academies and training up the plural leaders of the new government. I really loved this portrayal of endings being new beginnings for our hero.

Xavier · Answer

To sum it up, cleverness and cost are the ends of the loop. The hero of the story comes up with the idea that the transmigration that had been going on and on was tied to this world because of a ruined ritual, and that he could just re-negotiate the terms instead of killing all the magic in the world and ruining everything. Instead of killing the magic, he anchors his own essence to the world by writing his self into the ‘Eclipse Grimoire’ as a lock to be kept from being used in evil ways in the future.

He transforms the anchor for the ruined ritual into a lock. His essence is now contained within the ‘Eclipse Grimoire’ which means he will never have to come back as a magician in a body to die for this world again. But the world will not lose magic, instead it will be saved and be guarded by him. It was good to see the secondary characters get the closure they deserved as well as the fall out from the political angles and the rebuilding of everyday life. It was so restrained and ended up very satisfying and even a little bit tear inducing.

Owen · Answer

It’s been years since the world was quieted and mellowed, and this is where the epilogue begins. It’s a very peaceful scene, and then the story begins to be told in reverse. The transmigrations had been anchored by a pattern in the leyline lattice. It was a script that reconstituted the soul of the magician in body after body. And to break it, more than just power was needed. The script had to be understood. It had to be rewritten in such a way that it no longer called its master.

The magician’s solution to this problem is methodically intricate. He reprises scenes and experiences from past lives of his, studies most forbidden and obscure tomes, and even tricks the God above all gods into pronouncing the words which bind the magician. And he reverses them. The ultimate act of the story is that of a brilliant ritual-performance of greater intellectual than magical virtuosity: he encodes compassion in the formula of binding, and thereby transforms it into a shield of protection. The magician then proceeds to sacrifice his own continuity by locking his stream of consciousness into the grimoire, thus becoming eternally immortal as a guardian of the seal in the book. The thematic reorientation is quietly brilliant and deeply satisfying, for it transforms immortality from a never-ending monotonous drudgery into a voluntary burden of a sage.

Kevin · Answer

My biggest surprise with the ending of ‘Dark Magician Transmigrates After 66666 Years’ was how contrary it was to my expectations. Instead of a massive battle the author presented the reader with three key pieces of information: the origin of the seal, the real duty of the dark magician and the real want of the male lead.

Instead of an extended battle in the final chapters, however, that storyline is stitched together with alternating storylines of the Dark Magician’s past, and of the trials before the Council of the Four Kings. And in the end, it all culminates in a ritually charged ceremony in which the Dark Magician’s magic is re-encoded, no longer as the sole property of an immortal, but rather as a distributed system, protected by the darkest of vows. Rather than focusing on an extended and dramatic battle between good and evil, therefore, the final chapters focus on the due weight of apologies, of reconciliation, of the putting aside of old grudges, and the Dark Magician’s sacrifice of his claim to supreme control of time in order to grant dominion over their world to others. And it ends on a severely scarred but fully hopeful note, as the fledgling government struggles through the hard work of governing.

Owen · Answer

I will try to briefly summarize the conclusion to the story Dark Magician Transmigrates After 66666 Years. It was so, slow-burning magic that culminated at the right time. It took place in the Ruins of Solace, and it was the protagonist – who bore the weight of innumerable souls – uncovering the origin of his transmigration. It had been an ancient anchoring ritual conducted by a desperate god-king long, long ago, woven into the lines of magic that crisscrossed the world.

Instead of simply battling to defeat his foe the trip back to the Solace Ruins becomes a journey to relive the past, and in doing so to finally understand his current self. As he, and his many past lives, struggle to ‘close the holes’ in the long-abandoned ritual the story builds to a final, and deeply poignant, confrontation. At the end of it all he sacrifices his chance for return, his physical form destroyed as he becomes the new guardian of the grimoire; trapped inside of it to ensure that the powerful formula for the world’s anchor is never again misused.

The novel ended on a positive note with the world starting to heal slowly and then to develop and revert back to normal with joy in little things. There is even a touching scene of a kid finding a yellowed page from the long-lost grimoire. It made me happy as I felt that the author released the novel safely into my hands, and at the same time I was sad to see it end.

Elijah · Answer

I still get chills at the ending of ‘Dark Magician Transmigrates After 66666 Years’. In a completely unexpected turn of events, the novel managed to portray immortality as both good and bad. The author explained how the Dark Magician’s 66666 year long petrification was used as a defense mechanism every 66,666 years. A temporal disaster would occur and all magic would be erased, unless someone had somehow anchored time to prevent this by sacrificing the essence of a life. The novel then unfolded the layers of a complex plot full of betrayal, as the Dark Magician had been misled by people he thought were on his side in a game of temporal chess. It was also revealed that the antagonist was not entirely evil, his job was just too terrible to bear. In the end, it was revealed that the true enemy was tradition or rather entropy.

The whole thing mechanically plays out as a really nice spellcraft vs philosophy showdown. The ritual to repeat the cycle of life and death requires the protagonist to recall every loss, every love, and every failure from their near eternal existence, each recalled memory dissolving a link from a chain. In the end it all comes down to a gamble. Continue the cycle, or change everything? The protagonist risks the unknown by opting for the latter, and then has to immediately get to work trying to set up a new system of magic and its governance, a task that is left to the reader to imagine the details of.

Kate · Answer

There’s also an alternate way to look at how the story ‘Dark Magician Transmigrates After 66666 Years’ ends.

The core of the story follows the main character in his fight to uncover the reason he had been put into prison for 66,666 years, and once found, how he combats the cause of the repeating cycle of catastrophe. Along the way, the story unravels the mysteries of the protagonist’s disappearance in the past, and the betrayal that led to his imprisonment. He also discovers many unexpected things about his new friends, forming strong bonds with them along the way. The climactic duel takes place where the main character uses a forbidden form of memory and time magic – a ‘forbidden synthesis’ – to shatter the time-loop.

What I loved was that it wasn’t all battle and fight. The defeat had a cost, yes, but a cost the protagonist was willing to pay. The entire span of his immortal power was torn from his mind in order to defeat the cycle, and in doing so he became human again. The ending followed him and a coalition of mages and his former rivals having a picnic in the reclaimed ruins of the old city that he had once ruled. I was left smiling at this intimate scene, as opposed to being left searching for more in terms of fight scenes that had never been sustained.

Quentin · Answer

This concludes a very unique take on the ‘returning hero’ story in that instead of simply returning to re-establish his reign as an ancient powerhouse the hero comes to realzie that fixing everything personally would be to create a tyrant-god in his own image. Instead he ‘fixes’ things in such a way that he becomes unnecessary to the world of heroes, mages and regular folk. That is to say he builds a system that will succeed even when he is no longer around. He is the ultimate good governor. It is a surprisingly mature ending to a web novel.

PHOEBE LARYEA · Answer

What I described above was not the emotional climax of the ritual, but rather a lovely chapter preceding it. Here he walks through a city he had saved decades ago. Now it is a jumping busy place, but no one recognizes him here. He is startled by a passing bard who is incorrectly singing a well-known ballad about a legendary figure known as the ‘Kindly Spectral Sage’ (misunderstandings and mistakes being the obvious basis for this long-standing legend of a mysterious do-gooder). He smiles kindly at the bard and acknowledges that this is enough for him. The following ritual is the paperwork. The end of the story is when he finally finds peace, not when he completed his task.

mitchell arrington · Answer

There is a rather meta ending to the story of the dark magician. After much setup, his ultimate defeat of the world and ascension to godhood is not what you expect. Instead, the story reveals that the “transmigration” of the magician was actually a centuries-long cycle of self-punishment that he had placed upon himself. His journey back through time was one of redemption, a way for him to atone for his past acts of violence. In the end, rather than using his massive reserves of magical power to conquer the new world, he allows that power to seep back into the currently-lifeless world of nature. He becomes a myth, a legend, and a source of magical energy for the new world. It’s a rather somber and philosophical ending to a very power-focused story. We last see the magician alone on a hill at dawn, watching as the first natural sprouts of magic in centuries push their way up through the grass. He’s finally at peace, and he fades away. No epic battle, no harem of women. Just quiet closure.

Michael Rathje · Answer

It’s great for readers who prefer character-driven endings over plot. We get to see him grow up from the ‘Dark Magician’, a title born out of hate and pain, to a person where he’s no longer Dark and no longer a magician. In fact, he has no title. It’s a very satisfying end to his character arc, and the ending of the story as a whole. The ritual is the physical aspect of his long struggle against his ancient and corrupting hate. We don’t need to read about some big final battle, because the real struggle took place in the chapters leading up to this, and was won there. The ending is very satisfying, even if the final threat to the plot isn’t particularly impressive.

Joseph Emudainohwo · Answer

It answers the question that was posited at the opening of the work: “What is the purpose of surviving for 66666 years?” The answer is, that after a long and arduous millennium of lonely existence, he finally learns that survival is not the end, that true living, attachment and contribution followed by release is the end. His long and arduous transmigration was his final exam and he passed by choosing to sacrifice himself for the greater good as opposed to continued existence. The heavy conclusion that this work offers up to the reader gives tremendous weight to an otherwise absurdly long timeframe that the title of the work floats around. The number 66666 is not just window dressing. It is the burden that he has to overcome.

How Does The Dark Magician Transmigrates After 66666 Years End?

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