Chapter 113
After roughly thirty minutes of rummaging through the old library's shelves,
There was nothing much to show for it.
Of course, I'd only been wandering around aimlessly to kill time, so it would've been stranger if I'd found anything.
The fact that even Princess Celestina and Senior Sylvia, who had searched in earnest, failed to find anything said it all.
Still, fortunately, the team investigating the materials Vice Chair Thomas had organized was making some progress.
“To sum it up... it seems a student named Laverna Crowell was called the Witch of Greed.”
“Laverna Crowell?”
“Yes. She was a student here about a hundred years ago, shortly after Elterion Academy was founded.”
Vice Chair Thomas said this as he carefully turned over the stack of papers.
From the snippets of conversation passing between Claire and the vice chair, the documents seemed to be transcriptions of things like student council meeting minutes and student records from a hundred years ago.
I had no idea how he'd even gotten hold of materials like that. He really was amazing.
“The contents are... rather troubling.”
“I know. Just as Junior Chloe said, they definitely seem suspicious. When we were researching the materials, we were too busy grabbing whatever we could to examine them closely...”
At Chloe's words, Vice Chair Thomas cleared his throat with a rough “Ahem-” and began reading the contents of the documents aloud.
“Laverna Crowell. Entered the Department of Alchemy in her first year, but transferred to the Department of Magic in her second year at her family's insistence...”
“There used to be a Department of Alchemy?”
“They say there were more departments in the past than there are now. The Department of Swordsmanship used to include separate departments for things like spearmanship and archery, and there seem to have been quite a few magic-related departments back then, including Alchemy.”
“Oh, really? They've been cut down a lot since then?”
“They just dumped everything together~ The weapon-related departments were merged into Swordsmanship, and all the magic-related ones were lumped into Magic Engineering.”
Perhaps tired from rummaging through the shelves, Chairwoman Sylvia had somehow ended up standing behind Vice Chair Thomas, casually resting her chin on his shoulder.
Thomas's flustered face turned bright red, and Claire began to giggle when she saw it.
Our vice chair was such an easy-to-read little mushroom.
“Ah, anyway... Even after transferring to the Department of Magic, it seems she stayed holed up in the Alchemy Department's labs almost until her third year. She barely attended her major classes, and apparently had no interaction whatsoever with her classmates.”
“She was a complete loner.”
Chairwoman Sylvia's comment seemed to hit a little too close to home, because Vice Chair Thomas cleared his throat with another ahem and turned the page.
“Her reputation among the students seems to have been awful too. Wherever Laverna went, things had a habit of disappearing, and something collapsed in the laboratory every time...”
“The professors' evaluations were harsh too. ‘Rather than neglecting her studies while lost in delusional fantasies,’ and, ‘lacking any sense of ethics,’ they say.”
Vice Chair Thomas turned another page.
“Then, starting in her fourth year, she seems to have begun attending her major classes diligently, having become obsessed with something or other.”
“Maybe graduation finally looming scared her straight?”
“Ha~ Come to think of it, I'll be a senior next year too, and I'm starting to worry about what I'll do about my thesis~”
“...Chairwoman, before you worry about your thesis, do something about your credits. You barely avoided failing several classes just last semester. You might end up having to repeat a year.”
As I listened, I couldn't help thinking that Chairwoman Sylvia really wasn't in a position to be investigating things like this right now.
Well, whatever. It's not like I'm going to spend an extra year at the academy, either.
“In the end, she dropped out without even graduating. After that, she apparently experimented with some kind of forbidden magic, was eventually captured and executed by the Imperial Mage Corps, and was expelled from the academy as well.”
“By the way, Vice Chair, how did you manage to find the records of an expelled student?”
“It may be difficult to find records of students expelled within the past decade or so, but records of a student expelled a hundred years ago are surprisingly easy to find.”
“Oh, really?”
“There are quite a few collectors who deal exclusively in these kinds of untold stories.”
Thomas gave an awkward smile as he admitted he was one of them.
“So why was that Laverna Crowell person called the Witch of Greed?”
“When it was discovered that she had been researching forbidden magic and a warrant was issued for her arrest, it seems the alias Witch of Greed was put on the wanted poster instead of her real name.”
“So what exactly was that forbidden magic?”
“That... isn't recorded separately. It seems they disposed of all the related materials.”
As I listened, it didn't seem like there was anything particularly special about her.
She was just a problem child with no talent but plenty of ambition, causing trouble until she was finally kicked out—someone you could find in any era.
To lump her into the same category as a witch—something that practically radiated the air of this world's mastermind and final boss—felt... more than a little petty.
“She sounds like nothing more than a senior who was an alchemy fanatic with a slight kleptomania problem.”
When I answered indifferently, Chairwoman Sylvia stuck out her lower lip.
“Aw, how boring. I thought there'd be something more hidden beneath the surface.”
It was just as everyone was about to organize the materials with disappointed looks on their faces.
“Oh my.”
Princess Celestina let out an exclamation from one corner of the stacks.
“Would everyone take a look at this? I think I may have found something rather interesting.”
The object in the princess's hands was a thick, leather-bound book.
The leather on its cover had worn completely away, leaving it ragged and tattered from years of neglect.
The princess set the old book down on the table where we'd gathered.
“What's that, Princess?”
“I think it's a thesis written by that person Senior Thomas mentioned earlier, Laverna Crowell.”
“...What?”
The princess blew the thick layer of dust gathered on the cover away and opened the book.
There was something ominous about the title alone.
[How to Realize Infinite Space in a Finite World: A Magical Engineering Study of Spatial Compression and Transition]
“It says something about... doing what to space?”
My body reacted before my mind, and my intuition before my reason.
I sidled up beside the princess and skimmed through the contents over her shoulder.
“Huh? This...”
[I want to realize an infinite subspace in reality!]
At first, I thought it was just another collection of absurd, delusional ramblings.
The wording alone was hardly suited to an academic paper; it sounded as though it had been written by a child.
The title was perfectly normal, though. Had her advisor simply slapped it on for her?
But the more pages I turned, the more different this thesis began to look.
[By topologically superimposing the coordinates of arbitrary points A and B, the volume coefficient...]
[By compressing the density to its limit while leaving the mass unchanged...]
The progression of the equations was quite fascinating.
It wasn't a method of forcibly twisting the flow of mana to tear open existing space and create a new one.
It was the idea of inserting a new dimension into the gaps between existing spaces.
It was almost identical to the theoretical foundation of the subspace-creation magic I'd recently been researching in earnest, digging through books written in ancient languages.
“...Oh.”
An exclamation escaped me before I knew it.
“This theory is much more solid than I expected.”
At my reaction, Chairwoman Sylvia's eyes lit up.
“Really? To me, it looks like she just strung together a bunch of nonsensical gibberish at random.”
“Yes. The sentences are strange, and actually implementing the equations would be nearly impossible, but the theory itself is flawless.”
“Really? Enough to surprise even our archmage?”
“Yes, well... If we completed the magic in this thesis, we could create something like an infinite subspace.”
“So, you could carry around enough stuff to fill a single carriage?”
“Just one carriage? Ten—no, even twenty should be enough.”
At my positive assessment, Chairwoman Sylvia abruptly climbed onto her chair.
“I knew it! She wasn't called a witch for nothing!”
Chairwoman Sylvia snatched up the thesis she didn't even properly understand and rapidly flipped through the pages.
“And look! Laverna definitely wrote the paper this way on purpose!”
Then she opened it near the back, where a handful of pages had been torn out, and suddenly raised her voice.
“She got the results, then deliberately hid them!”
“...What?”
“Otherwise, why would every page of the appendix here have been torn out? She must have torn them out herself!”
But... this is a thesis written over a hundred years ago.
“Isn't it only natural for the pages of an old book to become tattered and tear away...”
“But isn't it strange that, if that were the case, the only part torn out so perfectly was the section detailing the experimental process and results?!”
“If it were me, I would've torn out the key equations in the main text instead.”
“Tsk! Lunaris, you're not being mysterious at all right now. As a member of the Ghost Story Research Club, you need to look at strange phenomena with an open mind.”
For just a moment, I felt the urge to call Chairwoman Sylvia out.
By that logic, the chairwoman herself wasn't being mysterious at all.
How was this a ghost story?
Witches weren't the same as ghosts.
But I decided not to. Arguing with her for no reason sounded tiring.
In the first place, whether something was a ghost story or not wasn't important to Chairwoman Sylvia.
She simply wanted to go somewhere thrilling enough to make her skin crawl and feel her heart pounding.
“B-By the way... Where can we find more information about someone from a hundred years ago?”
“Where else?!”
In response to Senior Thomas's question, Chairwoman Sylvia pointed out the window and said,
“There's a place where Laverna practically lived. The old laboratory wing of the Department of Alchemy!”
The corners of the chairwoman's mouth curled into a grin.
“That's where we're going to investigate tonight.”
“What?”
Tonight...?