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Most people know A Certain Magical Index from the anime, and honestly that’s a problem, because the anime covers maybe a third of the actual story and does a mediocre job with most of it. The light novels are a completely different beast. Over sixty volumes. Three distinct series, each with its own title. Two decades of Kazuma Kamachi writing at a pace that borders on inhuman.
So is it finished? Not quite. Two out of three series are done, the third is still going, and the English translation situation makes the whole picture messier than it needs to be.
TL;DR
A Certain Magical Index is not finished. The original series (Old Testament, 22 volumes) and its sequel (New Testament, 23 volumes) are both complete. But the third series, Genesis Testament, started in 2020 and is still publishing — roughly 12 volumes in with no announced end. English readers face an extra complication: only Old Testament has a full official translation. New Testament just started getting official releases from Yen Press in 2023, and Genesis Testament has no English license at all.
How Many A Certain Magical Index Light Novels Are There?
Here’s where it gets complicated. The Toaru Majutsu no Index light novel isn’t one continuous series. It’s three:
Old Testament (OT) — 22 main volumes plus 2 short story collections. Published from April 2004 to October 2010. Complete.
New Testament (NT) — 23 volumes. Published from March 2011 to July 2019. Complete.
Genesis Testament (GT) — Ongoing. Started February 2020. Around 12 volumes published so far with no end date announced.
That puts the total north of 57 volumes. Kamachi doesn’t slow down. Five months between OT ending and NT starting. Seven months between NT and GT. The man just writes.
Each series has its own story arc and escalation, but they’re sequential. OT first, then NT, then GT. No jumping around.
What Did the Anime Actually Cover?
This is the part that surprises people. The anime only covered Old Testament. Season 1 adapted volumes 1 through 6. The second season covered 7 through 13. And then Season 3 crammed volumes 14 through 22 into 26 episodes.
Nine volumes crammed into one season, and it shows in every episode of the back half where entire arcs that needed three or four episodes to breathe got compressed into twenty minutes of disconnected action scenes. Character development gone. Plot threads resolved in minutes. Fans who went back to the novels after watching Season 3 describe it like watching a highlight reel instead of an actual story.
New Testament and Genesis Testament have zero anime adaptation. None. If you’ve only watched the show, you’ve experienced maybe a third of the story, and it’s the worst-adapted third at that. The Railgun and Accelerator spinoffs actually got better anime treatment than the main Index series, which is both ironic and frustrating for novel readers who know what NT and GT bring to the table.
Is New Testament Worth Reading After Old Testament?
Fans rate it even higher than OT. New Testament sits at 8.72 on MAL versus OT’s 8.46. It takes the magic-science conflict, Academy City’s dark side, the power ceiling Kamachi keeps raising, and pushes all of it further.
NT Volume 9 comes up constantly in fan discussions. Without spoiling it, it’s a character piece that recontextualizes everything about Touma. Thirty-plus volumes of buildup paying off in a single book. That doesn’t happen often.
OT sets the table. NT is the full meal. The scope expands, the stakes get wilder, and Accelerator’s side arcs start rivaling the main plot in quality.
Where Does Genesis Testament Stand?
GT picked up seven months after NT ended and shows no signs of stopping. Roughly 12 volumes in as of early 2025. It scores 8.67 on MAL, impressive for an ongoing series where readers usually wait to rate.
No announcement about when it ends, and given that OT ran six years while NT ran eight, GT could easily keep going for several more years before Kamachi decides to wrap things up. His pace hasn’t dropped. Still multiple volumes per year.
The catch for English readers: Genesis Testament has no official license. Fan translations are the only way to read it, and they stay reasonably current. More on that below.
What’s the English Translation Situation?
This is the messiest part of the Index LN experience.
Old Testament is fully translated by Yen Press. Individual volumes went out of print, though, which created a real headache for new readers trying to start the series physically. The solution was a massive omnibus collecting all 22 volumes plus the 2 short story books into one physical release. It costs around $250 and weighs enough to double as a weapon. Works, but people joke about needing a magnifying glass for the tiny font.
New Testament got licensed by Yen Press in July 2023, and the fan community lost it. The releases are rolling out, but catching up to 23 volumes will take years at Yen Press’s pace. A real worry among longtime fans is whether the official translators will do justice to key emotional scenes. NT9 especially. The fan translations set an extremely high bar, and readers who grew up with those versions have strong attachments to specific phrasings.
Genesis Testament has no English license. Fan translations cover it and readers call them high quality, but genuine skepticism exists about whether Yen Press will ever pick it up given how the official releases sold. As one fan put it: “The novels never sold well officially in the west.” The fan translation community is what keeps GT accessible for English readers right now.
Should You Start Index If It’s Not Finished?
The first two series are complete. That’s 45 volumes of finished story. Even if you never touch Genesis Testament, OT and NT form a satisfying arc with real closure.
GT is a continuation, not a cliffhanger. You won’t hit the end of NT and feel stranded the way No Game No Life leaves you hanging. The main story threads resolve. GT opens new ones.
The bigger barrier is the anime’s reputation, because Season 3 scared a lot of people off the entire franchise before they ever picked up a novel. That’s a shame. The light novels give you Touma’s internal monologue, which is the thing that actually makes his character work and is almost completely absent from the anime adaptation. Academy City’s Level 5 espers, the magic side’s political games, the factional maneuvering between science and magic. All of it breathes on the page in a way the show never allowed.
Sixty volumes sounds intimidating. It is. But Kamachi writes fast. His volumes don’t waste pages, and the three-series structure gives you natural stopping points when you need a break.