The Old Man Gets Screen Time and No Name
The stills give the old man plenty of frames and not a single identifying detail. He appears in front of Rudeus with no setup and no introduction, and delivers his opening line as plain fact: "I came from the future."
Rudeus does not handle it well. The synopsis describes him as thrown by the claim, and the old man keeps talking regardless. He tells Rudeus about cruel, disastrous things that are going to happen to him, and about the root cause behind every one of them.
That is where the MANTANWEB report on the preview stills stops. The Japanese entertainment outlet does not name the old man, does not say whether Rudeus believes any of it, and frames his identity as an open question right in the headline. Roxy and Sylphiette turn up elsewhere in the wider batch of stills. That is about all the report says about the rest of the episode.
The episode title, "Owari to Hajimari" (終わりと始まり), translates as "The End and the Beginning." Set against a stranger who claims to have come back from a future full of tragedy, the title points to a turning point rather than a one-off scene, though the source itself makes no such claim.
Studio Bind Is Three Episodes From the Finish Line
Mushoku Tensei III has been running Sunday late nights on TOKYO MX, BS11 and other stations since July 5, and it entered a new stretch of story, the Chaos Breaker arc, with episode 8 on August 16. Rikiya Koyama joined the cast that week as Pergius, alongside Ayumi Tsunematsu and Nanako Mori.
Studio Bind handles the animation, as it has since 2021. The studio was founded specifically to make Mushoku Tensei, and the high-quality visuals it delivered became a talking point in their own right. Ryōsuke Shibuya directs, with Yoshiaki Fujisawa on music.
Yumi Uchiyama voices Rudeus, with Ai Kayano as Sylphiette and Konomi Kohara as Roxy. Tomokazu Sugita plays the Man from His Previous Life, the jobless 34-year-old Rudeus used to be. Nobody has been announced for the old man.
Where Mushoku Tensei Started
Rifujin na Magonote began posting the novel to the user-submission fiction site Shōsetsuka ni Narō in 2012. The setup is simple: a jobless 34-year-old man dies, wakes up reborn in a world of swords and magic, and restarts his life using the knowledge and the regrets he carried out of the old one. Japanese coverage generally credits it as the pioneer of narō-kei light novels, the wave named after the site it came from. Series circulation stands at more than 18 million copies across the novels and the manga adaptation. The books are published under KADOKAWA's MF Books imprint.
The anime has always arrived in halves. Season 1 ran January to March 2021, then returned that October through December. Season 2 ran July to September 2023, then April to June 2024. Season 3, per the same MANTANWEB report, has been in its Sunday late-night slot since summer.
Looking Ahead
Episode 12 airs late Sunday night on September 13 in Japan, with ABEMA and d Anime Store streaming it there at the same time as broadcast. Crunchyroll carries the season internationally, with the English dub running two weeks behind the Japanese broadcast since it started on July 19.
Crunchyroll's schedule has the season finishing on September 27, which puts "The End and the Beginning" third from last. Two episodes follow it.
Readers who want to get ahead have an option in English: Seven Seas Entertainment publishes the light novels under its Airship imprint, and announced deluxe hardcover omnibus editions of the series in 2025. As for who the old man actually is, the source doesn't say. That answer arrives Sunday.