Chapter 99
At Professor Maxiang’s suggestion that they organize things step by step, Lunaris’s face crumpled.
Ah, how frustrating. Can’t he just take the hint and understand enough?
Her crumpled expression said it all.
Lunaris gave Professor Maxiang a little nod.
It meant, Go ahead and explain.
“First... I think we need a definition of the term ‘contract familiar’ the student mentioned.”
Professor Maxiang asked, his expression somewhat tense.
Worried that Lunaris might take offense, he chose each word carefully.
“It appears to refer to a somewhat special kind of familiar, am I right?”
“It’s a little different from a familiar. Those are merely artificial life-forms whose bodies are made up of a mage’s mana, aren’t they?”
Lunaris slowly shook her head.
“The contract familiars I mean are ‘magic beasts that have entered into a contract with a mage.’”
Since it was subordinate to a mage, a contract familiar could perhaps be considered a type of familiar as well.
Lunaris nodded languidly.
“Then what does entering that contract entail? Is it simply feeding and taming one?”
Before he knew it, the lecture hall had taken on a bizarre appearance.
Professor Maxiang, who had been standing at the podium, had somehow come down and was looking up at Lunaris, seated in the rearmost row of the tiered seats,
while Lunaris lay sprawled across her desk, looking down at the professor.
“The word ‘tame’ alone can’t encompass the full meaning of a contract. That’s only natural, since suppressing an animal’s nature is difficult.”
Somewhere along the way, the questioner and respondent, the teacher and student, had switched places.
“We need to redefine what a contract is from scratch, starting now.”
A glint appeared in Lunaris’s half-lidded eyes.
“A process that implants an enchantment establishing a master-servant relationship in the brain, while simultaneously forcibly evolving the intelligence itself so it can understand and carry out a mage’s complex commands.”
For now, this would be the initial goal.
Lunaris was ready to create a new spell.
“I-Is that possible? If you make a mistake, the magic beast’s brain could burn out.”
“Why wouldn’t it be? The principle is the same as the sword-obsessed psychos... I mean, knights strengthening their limbs with mana. And magic beasts are sturdy, so wouldn’t they be fine even if we handled them a little roughly?”
“Are the brain and muscles the same? The brain is an extraordinarily delicate and sensitive organ. If you handle it incorrectly, who knows what might happen...”
“Ah, how frustrating.”
At Professor Maxiang’s worried rebuttal, Lunaris furrowed her brow unconsciously.
I was planning to hand-wave it with words and move on, but we weren’t getting anywhere.
Eventually, Lunaris took Arke in her hand with an expression that said what a bother this all was.
-Whoosh!
In an instant, the ceiling of the lecture hall vanished.
A painfully blue night sky spread above the students’ heads.
“Uh, uhhh...?”
“It suddenly became nighttime!”
“Is this the one from the rumors...”
This was Lunaris’s signature magic: spatial alteration.
“Now, watch closely.”
Ignoring the students’ murmurs, Lunaris began writing equations in the Milky Way across the night sky as though it were a blackboard.
“First, we’ll structure the brain-enhancement formula like this.”
The starlight left long tails behind as it
drew complex equations and metaphysical magic circles.
“To keep from burning out the nervous system, we’ll need to create a bypass. I’m going to carve the master-servant imprint here... At first, I considered hypnotizing it, you know?”
The two different magic circles meshed together, then burst with a small pop.
“Then it’ll cancel out the intelligence-enhancement formula like this. Rather than hypnosis, we’ll need to take an approach that makes it feel something... affection, perhaps, or a sense of attachment.”
“...Affection?”
Professor Maxiang stared blankly at the night sky, then let out a hollow laugh.
“Really... isn’t that an unmagelike idea? As an ecology professor, rather than a mage, I’m telling you that communion with a living being isn’t something magic alone can accomplish.”
The professor shook his head and continued.
“That, precisely, is something that can’t be defined by equations or magic circles. It belongs to the realm of the soul.”
“No. Emotions are ultimately just a combination of hormones... I mean, mana waveforms and biological signals.”
Lunaris continued, letting out a long, languid yawn.
“Of course, it would be difficult to apply this to living beings with highly developed brains. They have strong senses of self.”
“...”
“But it might be surprisingly simple to apply to relatively unintelligent magic beasts. We’d only need to devise a formula that stimulates their biological responses.”
“...!”
Maxiang’s eyes widened.
It was a clear-eyed perspective that sought to interpret even emotions through a mage’s lens.
To be honest, it was a theory he couldn’t understand at all.
That was only natural; no one had ever attempted to interpret emotions as a natural phenomenon.
Professor Maxiang muttered that it made no sense, but...
His intuition as a scholar—and as a mage—was crying out something else.
That Lunaris’s theory wasn’t entirely absurd.
That this theory could open a new era in Magical Ecology—and, more broadly, in the School of Life.
“So, with that in mind, what is the structure of a magic beast’s brain? Is it very different from a human’s?”
“Structurally, it’s the same. The only differences are that the cerebrum is smaller and the brainstem unusually large.”
From that point on, the large lecture, packed with students, became a forum for research discussion between Lunaris and Professor Maxiang.
“If we reverse the mana arrangement in a formula that stimulates the hippocampus, wouldn’t memory erasure be possible too?”
“Wouldn’t that be dangerous? It could cause damage if we’re not careful. Rather, if we extend the strokes of the magic circle further here like this and add a suppressor circuit...”
“Extending the strokes isn’t a good choice. The more complex the magic circle, the less versatile it becomes. If we’re considering practicality rather than stopping at research...”
As they exchanged words, equations and magic circles turned into stars, embroidering the night sky with starlight.
The students thrilled and marveled as they watched the night sky the two created.
Even when they didn’t understand, they frantically copied it all into their notebooks.
Regretting not bringing a Wizboard capable of holding more information, they put their quills to work.
The students weren’t the only ones moved.
‘Aah...!’
They say the more one knows, the more one sees; Professor Maxiang was so moved that he shuddered.
How long had it been since he’d immersed himself so purely in an academic discussion?
He forgot even the dignity of being a professor and poured out questions with shining eyes, as though he had returned to his undergraduate days at the academy.
Each time, Lunaris responded in her languid voice, despite making her annoyance perfectly clear.
Every word she spoke opened up the clogged channels of Professor Maxiang’s thinking.
Lunaris’s voice overlapped with that of his late mentor.
It felt almost like he was dreaming.
‘If only this theory could be completed...!’
He could see a future in which the School of Life he belonged to rose into the Magic Tower’s mainstream.
As they were in the midst of drawing equations in starlight,
“Ah.”
Lunaris suddenly let out an exclamation.
“I-Is there a problem? Is there an error in the equation...?”
At some point, Professor Maxiang’s manner of speaking to Lunaris had become extremely polite.
It was a little undignified for a professor to act this way toward a student, but when he thought about it, wasn’t she an archmage?
There was nothing shameful about a mage seeking knowledge from an archmage.
“No, it’s nothing like that.”
Lunaris indicated with her chin the clock hanging in the night sky like a moon.
“Isn’t the class period almost over?”
“...Yes?”
Professor Maxiang checked the clock.
Come to think of it, it was already time to end the lecture.
Three hours had flown by in the blink of an eye.
“Haha. It seems it’s already this late. But that doesn’t matter!”
The professor raised his voice in excitement.
“There’s no one scheduled to use this lecture hall afterward anyway, so let’s continue our research...”
“That’s a little difficult.”
Lunaris cut Professor Maxiang off flatly.
She abruptly stretched, then let out a long, “Hwaaam—” yawn.
“I used my brain quite a bit for the first time in a while... and talked a lot too, so I’m pleasantly drowsy... just the right mood for falling asleep...”
“W-Wait! Weren’t we having such a good time? If you’re tired, perhaps we could give you a special stimulant made in our lab...”
“Ah, I don’t do overtime.”
At that exact moment, the minute hand pointed precisely at the hour.
Lunaris, who had been slumped over the desk as if fused with it, sprang to her feet.
At the same time, the night sky filling the lecture hall faded and began to disappear.
The equations for the contract-familiar theory, painstakingly written in starlight, scattered like dawn mist.
“N-No...!”
Professor Maxiang screamed and flailed his arms through the air.
“D-Don’t erase it! Stop! No, if you erase all of this...!”
“It doesn’t matter to me. I have it all memorized anyway.”
Lunaris was already riding atop Arke.
Her limp form, like a blanket hanging from a clothesline, looked utterly pitiful.
“Thank you for your hard work—”
“S-Student! Lunaris stuuudent!!”
Leaving Professor Maxiang’s anguished cries behind, Lunaris leisurely left the lecture hall.
“...”
Professor Maxiang stared blankly into the air, then suddenly realized that countless students still remained before him.
“You all...”
“...?”
“Did any of you... happen to record it separately?”
The professor’s eyes brimmed with mad obsession.
“Huh? Ah, well, I... It was too fast...”
“I wrote some down... but I couldn’t get all of it...”
“For this week’s assignment, summarize and organize the conversation Student Lunaris and I just had, then submit it. The deadline is midnight—the moment today turns into tomorrow.”
“What?!”
“Think of it as getting a weekend assignment done in advance.”
Students’ protests began raining down from all around.
But Professor Maxiang had eyes for nothing but the research.
“I’ll give extra credit to students who recorded it meticulously, so everyone make sure you organize it carefully!”