Black Clover's Biggest Mysteries, Asked From the Anime Side of the Fence

Episode 170. Asta steps into Nacht's ritual circle, his right arm vanishes into black smoke, and the devil walks out — not a monster wearing his power like a coat, but a small, furious kid who was born with nothing, bullied for it in hell itself, and thrown at a gate like rubbish. Then the flashback lands: a woman who absorbs the magic of everything she touches, a baby she had to give away, and a devil who realises, mid-fight, whose son he's been living inside. This show just answered the question it asked in episode 1 — and somehow left six bigger ones standing. Season 2 is back to collect.

*Spoiler scope, stated plainly: this article works from the anime only — the 170 episodes of the first run and Season 2's opening episodes (premiered 3 October 2026). Yūki Tabata's manga finished in May 2026, so for some of these, an answer exists in print. You will not find it here. Where the manga knows more than the anime has shown, there's a status line that says exactly that — and stops. Theories and evidence only, from the anime side of the fence.*

Why was Asta born with nothing?

Status: The manga knows — the anime hasn't shown it yet.

What the anime has shown: Episode 1 opens in a world where magic is worth, status, oxygen — and Asta has *none*. Not weak magic. Zero. In a setting where even peasants can light a candle with mana, a boy with literally no magic at all is not unlucky; he's a glitch. Episode 170 finally gives us the other half of the equation, from Liebe's memories: a woman named Licita, whose body involuntarily absorbs the magic — and the life force — of anything near her. She could not touch another living thing without draining it. She found an abandoned devil child, adopted him, named him Liebe... and when the high-ranking devil Lucifero seized Liebe's body to force his way into the living world, she sealed the boy inside a five-leaf grimoire to save him, and died smiling.

The theory: Anime fans have connected the two dots the show placed side by side: the mother who could not hold her baby without killing it, and the baby born to a woman whose magic was absorption. A child gestated inside a body that drains magic might be born... drained. Empty vessel, from birth. And the same logic explains the pairing: a devil made of nothing finding the one human made of nothing, because Anti-Magic is the only power that could live in either of them.

My verdict: The Licita connection is not a coincidence — this show doesn't do decorative flashbacks, and it chose to answer Liebe's origin in the same episode it underlined Asta's. Expect Season 2 to say the quiet part eventually. Grade the pattern-recognition, not the certainty: highly plausible, anime-unconfirmed.

The father-shaped hole in Asta's story

Status: Still open everywhere.

What the anime has shown: Nothing. And I mean that as a measurable fact, not a complaint. Episode 1 deposits two babies at a church in Hage Village — Asta, and Yuno with his mysterious pendant — and in 170 episodes the anime has revealed Asta's mother (by implication, in flashback) while never once mentioning, hinting at, or casting a shadow shaped like his father. No name. No silhouette. No "he got that from his dad." In a genre practically built on legendary fathers, that silence is a design choice.

The theory: The old fan guesses were bloodline bingo — a secret noble, a devil father whose nature Asta inherited, a Magic Knight who died a hero. But notice what the anime has done since: it answered the *mother* question through story, gave Asta his power through a traumatised devil brother rather than a bloodline, and built his strength out of push-ups and spite. The growing anime-side theory is that there is no reveal coming — that Asta's father is a nobody, on purpose.

My verdict: My honest take is that the missing father is the point. Asta is the one shonen hero whose origin keeps refusing to be destiny: no famous dad, no inherited technique, a devil he *befriended* instead of inherited from. If a father reveal ever lands, it will have to beat 170 episodes of the story insisting it doesn't matter. Still open everywhere — and maybe better that way.

Anti-Magic: the power that shouldn't exist

Status: Still open everywhere.

What the anime has shown: The five-leaf grimoire arrived with a warning label in episode 1 — "in the fifth leaf resides a devil" — and a sword Asta could barely lift. Since then the anime has established the *rules* without ever explaining the *thing*: Anti-Magic negates magic on contact, it lives in the grimoire's swords, it flows from Liebe, and it is exhausted and finite in a way ordinary mana isn't (episode 170's ritual is explicit that what Asta has been swinging around is borrowed). Liebe himself is an anomaly stack: a devil born with no magic, at the bottom of the underworld's hierarchy, who crossed into the living world as a child and ended up sealed in a book. Why does a magicless devil produce the one energy that unmakes magic? The anime has shown us the *who* — Liebe, Licita, the grimoire — and left the *what* and *why* untouched.

The theory: Fans argue about what Anti-Magic fundamentally *is*. One camp: it's a devil's attribute inverted — the underworld's version of a vacuum, magic's opposite number that exists because the world needs a balance. Another: it's a property of beings born empty — Liebe had no magic for the same structural reason Asta has none, and emptiness, in this world's physics, actively rejects mana. The second theory is tidier and ties Asta and Liebe together as the same kind of glitch, which is exactly the show's favourite sentence.

My verdict: The anime has told us whose power it is. It has not told us what it is — why negation pools in a magicless devil, why it hides in a grimoire, whether it existed before Liebe. Status: still open everywhere — the manga may know things we won't repeat. What anime fans *can* say: the show built its entire power system with one hole in the middle, and the hole is the protagonist's sword.

Yuno's second inheritance

Status: The manga knows — the anime hasn't shown it yet.

What the anime has shown: Episode 160 is the bomb: Ralph, a Spade Kingdom loyalist, shows Yuno his past — he is the lost prince of the Spade Kingdom's royal house, Grinberryall, carried to Hage as a baby when the Dark Triad butchered his family. That explains the pendant (a Spade royal heirloom) and why the show kept framing this "peasant" like royalty. And then Season 2's return added the visual essay nobody asked for and everybody noticed: Yuno's magic in the new opening episodes burns *gold* — Golden Dawn colours, royal colours — and the fandom's episode discussions lit up with the same observation. Meanwhile his Wind Magic, his four-leaf grimoire, and Sylph the wind spirit choosing him all sit unexplained on the other side of the ledger.

The theory: Here's the arithmetic anime fans can't stop doing. His Wind Magic flows from the elf-soul reincarnation tangle (the show established his body hosted the soul of Licht and Tetia's unborn son — even if, as the elf arc clarified, Yuno's will stayed entirely his own). His *birth*, though, is Spade royalty. Which inheritance is the real one? The running theory: both — Yuno is the story's thesis in reverse, a boy the world handed *everything*, whose actual achievement is that he never once leaned on it.

My verdict: Too many coincidences is not a coincidence. The show gave Yuno two kingdoms' worth of inheritance and one church doorstep. Which of those the story crowns — and what it says about Asta when it does — is Season 2 territory. The manga knows. We're watching the anime. Fence rules apply.

What's behind the gate: the underworld

Status: The manga knows — the anime hasn't shown it yet.

What the anime has shown: Zagred, the word-soul devil of the elf arc, needed a five-leaf grimoire and a massacre to claw his way into the living world — one devil, at enormous cost. The Spade arc then widened the crack into a system: the Dark Triad host the underworld's highest-ranking devils, the ritual of Qliphoth is designed to open the gates between worlds in sequence, and Nacht — a devil-host who works *for* humanity, with four devils of his own — proves the traffic runs both ways. Episode 170 even showed us the underworld from inside Liebe's memories: a hierarchy where the strong torture the weak for sport, and a magicless devil child somehow ended up at a gate to the living world and got *thrown through it*. Who threw him, and why he survived the crossing, the flashback pointedly does not say.

The theory: Anime-side, the running fan reading is that the underworld isn't just a prison the Triad is opening — it's a society with politics, and everything we've seen (Zagred's grudge, Nacht's contracts, Liebe's exile) is spillover from fights happening off-screen in hell. The Qliphoth gates, in that reading, aren't an invasion plan so much as an escape route — and what's being escaped is worse than what we've met.

My verdict: The anime has shown us the lock, the key and one escapee's testimony. Everything above the middle ranks of that hierarchy — who rules, what they want, why a gate threw a nobody devil at exactly the village where a magicless baby had just arrived — is unwritten on our side of the fence. The manga has gone further; we haven't. It stays a theory until Season 2 shows it.

The only bet that matters: who becomes Wizard King?

Status: Still open everywhere.

What the anime has shown: Two orphans on a church step in episode 1, making the same vow: *I'll become the Wizard King.* 170 episodes later, neither is close and both are inevitable. Asta: no magic, Anti-Magic, a devil on his arm, the peasant who punched his way into the Black Bulls and saved the kingdom more than once. Yuno: four-leaf grimoire, a wind spirit, two royal inheritances, the Golden Dawn's golden boy. Julius, the current Wizard King, collects talented weirdos the way other kings collect taxes, and the show has never once treated the contest as settled — every arc re-deals the cards, and Season 2's opening episodes are already framed by episode reviewers and fans as the race resuming in earnest.

The theory: This is the fan war that never sleeps. Asta's case is the story's thesis — the title of Wizard King going to the boy with no magic would be the entire show in one sentence — and episode reviewers have been making exactly that claim for him since the Spade raid, calling his mastery of devil power proof he's ready. Yuno's case is the story's evidence: every measurable — lineage, grimoire, spirit, squad, composure — lands on his side of the scale, and the show has never stopped presenting him as the kingdom's obvious heir. The romantic dark-horse theory: they break the format — a shared crown, or one of them refusing it.

My verdict: I grade it the way the show frames it: it's Asta's story, and stories pay their theses. But I file my pick where it belongs — this is speculation, my bet, with the manga's actual result deliberately unconsulted. The finished manga knows who (if anyone) wears the crown; the anime hasn't shown it; and this article is not going to peek. Status: still open everywhere — from this side of the fence, where the betting is.

The fence is the fun part

Here's my honest closing take: the anime is in the strangest, best position in shonen right now. The ending exists. It's printed, it's finished, people I know could spoil the Wizard King question in one sentence — and the community agreement to let Season 2 *tell* it instead has made every one of these mysteries feel live again in a way finished stories usually lose. Six questions: one power nobody can define, one father nobody will name, one birth that might explain everything, one prince with two inheritances, one hell politely knocking, and one crown with two names on it.

I'll be on the anime side of the fence, watching the new episodes the week they air, not peeking over. You're welcome to join me. Bring theories; leave the manga at the gate.

Canon

Everything under "What the anime has shown" is canon from the anime's side of the fence — the 170 episodes and Season 2's opening, checked against the sources below. Where the manga knows more, the status line says so and stops; no manga answers appear in this article.

Interpretation

"The theory" under each mystery is interpretation — anime fans reading the evidence the show has actually given us. Interpretation is allowed to be wrong; that's what makes it a theory instead of a spoiler.

Speculation

My verdicts are speculation and predictions, labelled as such — including the Wizard King pick, which is my bet, not the manga's result. Nothing speculative in this article is presented as what actually happens.

Sources & further reading

• Anime News Network, Episode 170 review: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/review/black-clover/episode-170/.191532
• Anime News Network, Episode 160 review: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/review/black-clover/episode-160/.169236
• Black Clover Wiki, Episode 160 — "The Messenger from the Spade Kingdom": https://blackclover.fandom.com/wiki/Episode_160
• Black Clover Wiki, Chapter 266: https://blackclover.fandom.com/wiki/Chapter_266
• ComicBook, "Black Clover's Finale Explores the Origins of Asta's Devil": https://comicbook.com/anime/news/black-clover-finale-asta-devil-origins-liebe-licita/
• Animehunch, Episode 160 review — Yuno's past revealed: https://animehunch.com/black-clover-episode-160-review/
• Samlover, "Black Clover Season 2 Breaks Streaming Records": https://samlover.com/2026/10/13/black-clover-season-2-breaks-streaming-records/
• Outlook Respawn, "Black Clover Manga Ends at Chapter 392": https://respawn.outlookindia.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/black-clover-manga-ends-at-chapter-392-finale-out-now