WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Episode 7 of The Strongest Sage With The Weakest Crest, "The Strongest Sage Goes on a Journey," now streaming on Crunchyroll.
The ancient sage known as Gaius induced his own reincarnation thousands of years ago to increase his power levels with four crests. In his current incarnation as Matthias "Matty" Hildesheimer, he is quickly learning how much the world has changed in his absence. Not only have demons gotten more clever in their silent infiltration of human society, but they've even succeeded in making humans ignorant of magic. Two of the first signs of this ignorance Matty identified were the powerful four crests being reputed as "the crest of failure" and silent incantation being replaced with incantation spells.
In the first half of The Strongest Sage With The Weakest Crest Season 1, Matty identified and prevented a demonic invasion of the kingdom he resided in for school. As the more experienced sage at the Second Academy, he started teaching silent incantation to his classmates and progressed to the point of being able to defeat the entire First Academy student body with only five students. They were even able to hold back a horde of demons until Matty finished putting up a barrier. With one demonic invasion safely averted, Matty departs the school to continue following the demons' trail, which is where Episode 7 picks up.
Accompanied by his friends Lurie, Alma and Iris (who knows about his past life as Gaius), Matty decides to pay his next visit to the Melkia dungeon. To his surprise, however, a town was built on top of it, which Matty immediately finds suspicious. Upon entering the town of Melkia, he learns that the previous governor died of mysterious circumstances and a new governor took over. Under the rule of the new governor, powering lampposts with magistones was outlawed and most of the town's healers were driven out. On top of that, the town's adventurous magicians were sent to the dungeon where they all became ill or injured.
With all the unusual changes that have occurred in Melkia in a very short timeframe, Matty immediately suspects the new governor may actually be a demon in disguise -- a suspicion that's confirmed when the townspeople prove ignorant of powerful magic. Since the residents of Melkia have been robbed of their healers and resources by their new governor, Matty stays behind to heal all the adventurers who were injured in the town's dungeon. He also decides to earn money by slaying some smart monsters in the Melkia dungeon for gold. Between Matty's effortless healing of the injured adventurers and his group's easy defeat of the dungeon's smart monsters, the governor immediately becomes suspicious of Matty and his friends.
While The Strongest Sage continues to build on concepts first planted in the first episode, at the same time, it's very slow to reveal what the demons' gameplan really is. At best, it's known that they've been playing an incredibly long game in trying to invade human society, but their motivations for doing so remain unknown. Apart from the obvious reason of "they're demons and demons are evil," their side of the story still needs fleshing out, especially if they're a serious enough threat that Gaius was required to induce his own reincarnation as a way of becoming stronger.
On that note, Matty himself remains a mysterious character, especially since his past life as Gaius hasn't been explored in-depth either. How dangerous were demons in his past life compared to his current incarnation? Have they gotten stronger over the millennia or have they simply changed strategies? Similarly, how powerful was Gaius in his previous incarnation? What abilities did he have when he had only a single crest, and did any of those skills transfer over to his current incarnation? Did Matty have to relearn some of what he previously knew? More importantly, what will Matty do with the new powers afforded by his four crests once he defeats the demons?
As the series progresses, many of these crucial questions either continue to go unanswered or are only briefly revealed when they become relevant. Whether or not the Melkia story arc proves to be a game-changer on that front, only time will tell.
