Overview
The Forest Calendar is the chronological system used in Ainomori, and the only widely recognized method of measuring time throughout the forest.
The conversion formula is simple: Forest Year = CE year + 3030.
Forest Year 5050 equals 2020 CE. Forest Year 5571 equals 2026 CE — the year Titan awakened.
But behind this seemingly simple system lies a question no one has been able to answer.
Notable Dates
- Forest Year 1 — The year marked on the oldest surviving record. Its contents have faded beyond recognition.
- The Day of Blue Tears — Before Forest Year 5050. The exact year is unknown.
- Forest Year 5050 — Rana crosses through the portal into the human world.
- Forest Year 5571 — The Sacred Tree Titan awakens.
The Mystery of the Origin
Why does the Forest Calendar begin counting from over five thousand years ago?
This is one of the oldest riddles in Ainomori’s history. The earliest surviving documents can be traced back to around Forest Year 1, but those records are fragmentary — only a few indecipherable symbols remain, along with a single phrase that appears again and again:
“Begin anew from here.”
“Anew.” What does this word imply? Before Forest Year 1, was there another history now forgotten? Was there a previous cycle?
No one knows. Those symbols remain undeciphered to this day.
The Nature of Time
In Ainomori, time does not always flow in a straight line.
This is not a metaphor. In certain regions of the forest — especially near the core of Titan’s root system — travelers occasionally experience strange temporal displacements. One enters at dusk and emerges on the morning of three days prior. Some elders claim to have seen “memories that have not yet happened” in their dreams.
Because of this, some scholars have proposed a bold hypothesis: what the Forest Calendar measures may not be time, but something deeper.
It records not “how long has passed,” but “how much has been experienced.”
If this hypothesis holds, then over five thousand years of the Forest Calendar may correspond not to five thousand years of elapsed time, but to five thousand years’ worth of memory, emotion, and existence.
Coincidence, or Design
One thing unsettles the few scholars who have noticed it.
Forest Year 5050. The year Rana left Ainomori.
5050 — such a neat, such a symmetrical number. In a chronological system spanning more than five millennia, a guardian departing in such a perfectly round year — is that coincidence?
Or was all of this written from the very beginning?
No one dares answer this question. Because if the answer is the latter, then the Forest Calendar is not a record — it is a script.
And we are all still within the script.