Chapter 27
“Uh, uh…? A pot?”
“Coming through~.”
The instructor looked as though they’d seen a hallucination.
Nice reaction.
Anyway, this is a world where magic is everywhere.
Unless you’re a high-level mage, you wouldn’t even know whether this was magic, an innate spell, spatial magic, or something else.
Even if there’s magic they don’t know, they’d just brush it off with, “Oh, it’s a pretty interesting spell.”
Of course, it probably wasn’t great to use it too often in front of other people.
Still, this is too heavy for me to lift.
Hmm.
I looked at my skinny arms.
To think I couldn’t even lift a single cast-iron pot with ease.
My mana’s increased too, so should I just dump my enhancement ticket into Strength?
It hadn’t increased dramatically, but with Adrian’s help my mana had been steadily rising.
The last time I went was before we climbed to the third floor.
It was a short time, but there had been a meaningful increase in mana.
Then I could just use it...
No, forget it.
Stuff like this only really hits when you save it up and use it all at once.
The thrill of a stat increase is at its peak when it jumps all at once.
I realized that when I increased my Agility before. Honestly, it had felt a bit underwhelming.
And if I was going to use it anyway, I wanted to save it for creating an opening in the middle of battle with monsters.
I naturally slipped past the instructor and headed elsewhere...
and got swallowed up by the crowd.
“Uwaaaah!!”
There were way too many people!
Looking at this, it seemed like the other grades were also coming to pick up materials.
On top of that, after receiving the materials, you even had to sign the roster.
Lots of students, the instructors leading them, and even more materials.
“Damn it, this won’t do!”
I took a sack out of my inventory.
A sturdy burlap sack.
Back in the modern world, I used it for storing spices, and it had long since become nothing but a space-wasting lump of junk.
Finally, it’s getting some use.
If I tried putting every ingredient into my inventory one by one, I’d really start drawing attention, so the sack was an unavoidable choice.
I’d shove everything else into the sack first and then put it all away at once.
I blended into the crowd and somehow managed to gather the materials.
Let’s see...
“Spirit plant, dried mandrake, sizzling herb, thunderflower...”
Why are there so many!
These ingredients filled the list to the brim!
The list of tools wasn’t any easier.
Various flasks were a given, plus a mana-powered warmer, an igniter, a smoker, and so on.
There was a whole mountain of stuff that looked like a pain.
By the time I’d roughly gone through everything, about an hour had passed.
The sack was almost full.
“Huff... This... was fine... for a macho man like me... but... for a girl... this’d be a bit tough...”
I kept going somehow, muttering nonsense.
Maybe it wasn’t nonsense after all.
To begin with, I didn’t even know whether it was nonsense or not.
If I didn’t spout crap like this, I felt like my mind would snap.
There were so many people that I didn’t even have time to put anything into my inventory.
If I was going to put it in, I had to do the whole sack at once, and then I wouldn’t be able to carry anything else.
...Wait. Then what about Aris?
Just then, I heard Aris’s voice behind me.
“Y- Yumia... Could you take this...”
Her face was beaded with sweat.
Her legs were trembling, her cheeks pale.
With a solemn expression, she held out her bulging backpack to me.
“A-Aris?”
“This is as far as I go. I’m counting on you for the rest...”
Thud.
“Ariiiis!!”
But thinking about it, wouldn’t it have been enough to just go back to the dorm once?
I could’ve just hidden somewhere and put them into my inventory on the way back.
We were idiots all the same, huh.
* * *
Aris drank the water I handed her.
Only after using her own healing-like innate magic on herself did she finally regain her energy.
“T-thank you...!”
“Don’t mention it. It’s only natural.”
I even put Aris’s backpack into my inventory.
If I’d known there would be this much, I would’ve come up with a plan.
“If I’d known this would happen, I really should’ve stopped by the dorm.”
The dorm and the great hall were quite far apart, but it was still better than carrying that huge backpack.
In fact, the students were shuttling back and forth to the hall with small backpacks.
“Still, we moved it all in one trip, so that’s fine.”
“It really is a convenient spell, no matter how many times I see it.”
“Honestly, the very idea of moving it all at once without this was absurd.”
It was truly absurd.
If I didn’t have my inventory, I would’ve definitely put my stats into Strength.
Then how had Aris moved it, I wondered.
But Aris’s raw Strength should be higher.
I hadn’t put any stat points into Strength, and Aris’s own mana had a much stronger base strengthening effect as well.
Aris said, huffing angrily.
“My brothers said they moved it in one trip, so they were lying... Just you wait until I go back home later.”
Aris clenched her fist tightly.
The kind of thing you do when you’re really angry.
Ah.
I thought Aris was making some foolish mistake.
So she’d been fooled by her brothers’ trickery.
Sibling relationships seemed to be the same here as on Earth.
I’d just been reckless because I trusted my inventory.
“Come to think of it, how many idiots like that could there even be in the world...”
Then I heard a familiar voice.
And it sounded incredibly out of breath.
He was climbing up toward the dormitory building, using a cane—the kind you lean on while walking, not a magic staff.
He had a house-sized backpack strapped to his back.
It was Robert.
“Huff... You guys... already... went and came back... I’m... going to... have to suffer... even more.........”
He continued that glorious ordeal right before our eyes.
He seemed to have stamina to spare, so I didn’t think I needed to worry.
So there was another idiot after all.
And a top-class idiot at that.
That guy really looked like he could succeed at anything.
* * *
Today was the day of Potionology class.
“Grrruuuh...”
“Grrraaaagh...”
For reference, the students who attended yesterday’s Magical Biology class were barely even human anymore.
They were closer to some huge, limp, worm-like thing just flopping around.
After all, they were students at a magic school, chronically short on exercise.
‘I’m fine since I’m used to it, but physical work like that must be rough for them.’
Regardless, Miriam took back the Kakterarian from the students, and as promised, awarded 10 shop points to the student who had gotten closest to the Kakterarian.
Naturally, that was me.
The Kakterarian was now practically my pet.
Especially on the days when I’d gone to see Adrian, it was docile.
After my Dragon Eyes were strengthened, it didn’t even bare its teeth anymore.
‘Hmm... This is the first time I’ve seen the Kakterarian act so attached to someone...’
‘Normally it wouldn’t react like this unless there was some difference in rank... Interesting. As promised, I’ll give you 10 shop points.’
She didn’t seem to care in the slightest that I’d taken money to do the assignment for them.
It didn’t seem like she was unaware of it, either.
‘Ah, if you have time later, come by my lab sometime. I can help with potion or artifact materials, or even with earning a bit of pocket money.’
Come to think of it, I’d been hearing a lot about the laboratory lately.
The old professors who taught the upperclassmen had said something similar when I defeated the werewolf.
Of course, I still hadn’t gone there even once.
“So, what kind of class is it, anyway?”
Aris chattered beside me, her face bright with excitement.
We had brought the materials Isabel had handed out from among yesterday’s ingredients.
For reference, I had a hell of a time finding everything because I stuffed it all into a sack.
Still, I was curious.
Then Isabel walked in at the front of the classroom.
Her sea-blue hair shimmered.
An unfamiliar witch’s hat and cloak.
Suddenly, curtains were drawn across the classroom, and all the lights went out.
The classroom instantly plunged into darkness.
It wasn’t pitch-black; it was dark enough that you could see once your eyes adjusted.
Especially for me, since I had Dragon Eyes.
But the students whose eyes had adjusted to the bright room seemed startled by the sudden darkness.
“W-What?”
“The curtains moved by themselves...!”
“Hold on. Quiet.”
A calm voice spread through the entire classroom.
The noisy atmosphere instantly settled down.
I guess there really is such a thing as the aura a person gives off.
Or maybe it was because everyone could feel that blue, tranquil mana.
“I’ll begin the Potionology class. I’m Isabel, and I’ll be teaching you today. Nice to meet you.”
The faint light seeping through the curtains illuminated Isabel and the blackboard.
Isabel wrote Potionology on the blackboard in Imperial script.
“First, we need to understand what Potionology is.”
She opened her bag.
All kinds of colorful potions glowed brightly enough to be clearly visible even from far away.
“Potionology is the academic discipline created for making and designing potions. So then, what is a potion?”
She uncorked one bottle.
Mana flowed visibly within it.
It was a clearer, brighter blue than any mana potion I’d seen so far.
Even though I was seated fairly far from the front, I could still see all that mana clearly.
“A potion is a mystery contained in a bottle. Another form of magic.”
Isabel poured all the potions out onto the podium.
It was as if starlight were popping out of the liquid, pop, pop.
“If you individually consume the ingredients that go into this, you’ll only get enough mana to cast seven basic attack spells. But...”
The mana flowing from the potions was no ordinary thing.
It flowed across the podium with crisp clicking sounds and bright light.
At a glance, it was clearly neither low-grade nor mid-grade.
“If the synergistic effects of herbs, good natural mana, and the user’s skill are combined.”
She pointed her staff at it.
Almost at the same moment, an explosion rang out from the podium.
—Paaaang!
“Uwaaaah!”
“W-What!?”
The students murmured in confusion.
But nothing had been destroyed.
The reason the students were thrown into disarray was simple.
A wave of powerful mana had swept over their bodies.
“In this way, you can make it hold enough mana to restore even a great mage’s mana in an instant.”
“Wow...”
I felt almost overwhelmed by it.
To think that tiny test tube could release that much mana.
If I felt this way, how much worse must the other students have had it?
In that atmosphere, Isabel smiled brightly with satisfaction.
Then she called out.
“Well then, shall we learn how to make a basic mana potion today!”