Chapter 100
“Why... Why did you do that!”
Haru fell on her bottom atop the soft, springy flooring and vented her anger.
There was no trace left of the brilliant illusion.
Under the starless night sky, only the shrill chirping of insects echoed through the silent playground.
“Why did you end the magic whenever you felt like it, why...! I haven’t even finished talking to Mom!”
She pounded the ground with her tiny palms.
“That’ll only make your hands hurt.” I helped Haru to her feet.
“It’s time to return to reality now.”
“I don’t want to. I’m not going.”
“It’s chilly at night, so you might catch a cold.”
“I don’t want to! I said I don’t want to!”
For now, I had to take our friends home again.
Haru threw a tantrum, insisting she wouldn’t move even one step from the playground.
“I think I can fix your eyes.”
“...! Even the doctor couldn’t fix them, so how could you...?”
“You said you could see colors for a moment when I used Aura on you before, right? I know how now.”
Her expression still seemed doubtful, but Haru willingly took my hand.
We didn’t say a word until we reached the entrance to my house.
Every so often, I heard her labored breathing beside me.
I could say my stamina wasn’t exactly great either, but Haru was on another level.
Haru’s inability to distinguish colors wasn’t simply due to the shock of losing her mother.
The pill Haru had been given was an object formed inside Alchemist, so I couldn’t bring it out, but it was definitely emitting a magical wavelength identical to that of black magic.
If this was true, and her mother had given it to her knowingly, she could hardly be considered a sane person.
When we returned to my room, I sat Haru down on the bed.
Then I brought Yuna, who had been sitting in my desk chair, over beside the bed so Haru could face her.
“Lee Haru, what color does Yuna’s hair look to you right now?”
“Gray... No, black...? No, gray...”
Yuna’s hair was still the same vivid red thread.
There seemed to be something wrong with her eyes.
“Close your eyes. Raise your right hand if it hurts.”
I wiped away the moisture from her swollen eyes, covered them with my palm, and let my own Aura flow into her. I intended to use it differently from last time.
“Ah... It hurts...!”
Haru immediately grabbed my wrist and let out a groan.
“It hurts? Where does it hurt, and what does it feel like?”
“Hic... I don’t know. Name, I’m scared... Can’t you stop? My head hurts so much...”
What I was doing now was simply a purification procedure using Aura.
There shouldn’t have been a single element in this process that could cause pain.
Haru trembled her right hand and complained of pain again.
For now, I squeezed Haru’s hand tightly. I couldn’t stop here.
This meant I couldn’t rule out the possibility of black magic after all.
However, black magic shouldn’t be able to exist in a complete form in this world.
As long as there was a “storage” stage that called mana from another dimension, there was no way magic could be cast through convenient methods such as human sacrifice.
Then the remaining possibility was that magic had been used indirectly through “inscription,” like the magic I had used to turn a ballpoint pen into an atomizer.
Had they engraved a magic circle onto the pill itself, then activated it through absorption into the body?
[3rd-Circle Reverse Cast: Inscription Removal]
Just in case, I cast a spell to extract the engraved magic circle in reverse.
Then writhing black letters and formulas rose from Haru’s eyes and crawled up my hand like snakes.
A prickling sensation swept over me, and my right arm filled with runes and distorted circles, as if it had been tattooed.
I barely managed to block its spread through my entire body with Aura and confine it.
Just as I was breathing a sigh of relief,
“What on earth is this?”
Yuna asked me in surprise.
“Inscription magic. The contents are probably... sixth-circle Thought Acceleration.”
Had Haru’s mother fed it to her thinking it was merely a pill that would make her smarter?
I was frustrated that I couldn’t verify the truth.
* * *
I laid Haru down on my bed and asked Yuna to look after her for a while.
I had to decipher it before the inscription formula temporarily stored in my arm disappeared.
“If Haru wakes up, come tell me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Haru, right?”
“Yeah. I healed everything, so you don’t need to worry too much.”
The reasons Haru couldn’t see colors or hear voices were simple.
A high-circle spell far beyond her level had entered her brain at an excessively young age, causing a kind of overload.
In the former case, the brain lacked the regions needed to process all that information, so the spell encroached on other senses; in the latter, it interfered with her brain waves.
Haru’s internal balance had been severely disrupted by her continual exposure to mana that had not been refined by her Aura Heart.
So the first step of the purification I had performed was removing the mana impurities using Haru’s Aura Heart, and the second was completely removing the inscription formula and temporarily infusing her with my Aura.
While Haru slept, my Aura was circulating from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, restoring the organs that had been unable to function properly all this time.
Click-
With the sound of the bathroom door closing, I stood before the sink mirror and stared at my reflection.
My hair was really long.
Hyacen had gone to all the trouble of cutting it carefully, but once the illusion magic was dispelled, it had all returned to its original state.
This was why I hadn’t wanted to cut it...
Anyway, that wasn’t the issue, so I decided to start by removing the formula.
It was a procedure I had once performed until I was sick of it, so I didn’t need to close my eyes and concentrate.
As golden Aura flowed out, the combinations of runic characters contained in my arm began to writhe.
Aura. Probability-superposition matter derived from mana.
Just as the blood in our bodies passes through the lungs to replenish its oxygen, mana is transformed through the Aura Heart so that it can receive signals from brain waves.
In other words, the most appropriate way to summarize Aura would be to call it “controllable artificial hormones.”
The difference between Aura and ordinary hormones was that Aura encompassed the continuous secretion of hormones.
For example, thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) stimulates the secretion of thyroxine, which in turn promotes metabolism; Aura skips this sequence and turns the whole thing into a single step.
However, since Aura was ultimately a concept derived from mana, it wasn’t a material that physically existed.
It merely grouped the inactive hormones already present in the human body together, making it look as though a new hormone had formed; it didn’t create something out of nothing.
In other words, it could make a person run 100 meters in ten seconds, but a human could never be faster than a cheetah or a Ferrari.
Of course, someone with exceptionally skilled Aura control might be able to release it outside the body over a short distance, but that was beside the point here.
To be honest, this was just my personal opinion, but I thought being born with an Aura Heart was as miraculous for humans as the dragon race’s ability to speak the draconic tongue.
Even with its clear limitations, the ability to strengthen the body without permanent side effects or a price to pay was already an incredible blessing in itself.
Who was it that said human greed had no end?
Aura was easy to apply, but its limitations were clear. Mana, on the other hand, was difficult to control, but its potential was infinite.
As a result, people trying to use mana in the same way as Aura appeared in droves, and some even offered up their lives as the price.
A magic that activated on its own without the caster even knowing its principles—once, we called it “black magic” as slang.
Perhaps because the same magic had been layered several times, it seemed it would take a while. Erasing a tattoo was this difficult.
All the inscription formulas extracted from Haru’s head were the results of being gradually injected into her through black magic.
Inscription magic was the only magic in the world to have been successfully mass-produced, so it was used more often in factories than on people.
Therefore, if the magic contained in this pill had not been made by a human, decrypting the caster’s code should yield some useful information.
The process of decryption was similar to Dispel.
The difficult part was that Dispel didn’t care about the method and only needed to somehow reduce the sum of the mana flow to “0,” regardless of whether it was in dynamic or static equilibrium, whereas decryption followed only the procedure for static equilibrium.
So, as if unraveling a tangled skein one thread at a time, I performed every casting process in reverse order to deactivate the formula.
Decryption was the reverse order of recording magic. Therefore, the “subject,” which had to be written first when recording a magic circle, was the character that remained until the very end.
The reason the Korea Mana Power Plant could collect mana taxes from individuals was probably that it had the technology to decrypt the “subject” obtained during the “storage” process.
“This...”
When all the unsightly tattoos disappeared and only a single character remained on the back of my hand, I had no choice but to bite my lip tightly.
[Walpurgis]
Countless thoughts flashed through my mind.
‘Why is this appearing here?’
Could it simply be a coincidence? It wasn’t even certain that it was genuine. Unlike a caster, the naming convention for a mechanical subject was up to the user.
Yet I couldn’t get rid of this clinging sense of wrongness.
My heart began pounding of its own accord.
Why would those who had manufactured illegal drugs while clinging to sixth-circle magic, which wasn’t even licensed for ordinary people, choose “Walpurgis” as the subject of the inscription, of all things?
Was this really their doing? Or had they merely chosen the name for convenience because it was an organization that had been eradicated long ago?
As dizzying hypotheses continued to circle in my head for a long while, I heard a knock.
Knock knock-
“Hey, Name, are you done yet?”
For now, I decided to keep it a secret from the children.
I still had very little information to go on.
[1st-Circle Cast: Clean]
I erased even the last remaining character completely and greeted Yuna with a bright expression.