Chapter 11
There is no such thing as a high or low occupation, but the popularity of particular professions reflects the spirit of the times.
There are worlds where doctors and judges are treated as the foremost professionals, and worlds where war mages are considered the ultimate career for turning one’s life around—even enough to reach for the Imperial Family.
They were professions commonly held by people with the wealth, fame, and social influence the public admired.
Doctors and judges could accumulate more wealth than people in other professions, and their honor was no less impressive. War mages went without saying.
If you asked what the most prestigious profession in this world was, nine out of ten people would answer like this:
A theoretical magic scholar.
Theoretical magic scholars had existed in my previous life as well, but their peculiar eccentricity, heavy workload, and pitiful salaries made them unpopular.
But this world was entirely different.
If you dug deeply into the reason, it ultimately came down to mana.
Unlike in my previous life, mana here existed everywhere and nowhere at once, in a state of probability superposition.
It was not a precise explanation, but you could think of it as borrowing mana from another dimension.
The system in which mana existed was called ‘Idea,’ and using magic in this world required going through a process of connecting to Idea. Naturally, that process reduced efficiency.
The people who worked to improve that efficiency were theoretical magic scholars.
Ultimately, that meant they were also where the money gathered.
Factories needed mana to operate, and weapons needed mana to function as well.
Mana boasted overwhelmingly greater efficiency than electricity and had become an indispensable part of modern industry.
There were people everywhere willing to pay fortunes for even a 1%—no, 0.1%—increase in efficiency.
“Please make sure you hold hands with your partner so you don’t get separated. Understand?”
““Yes!!””
During the second semester, Arabyeol Elementary School took its lower-grade students to a career experience fair around the end of August.
About five hundred students from first through third grade boarded and got off buses.
Since it was in the same city of Seoul, the travel time was fairly short.
“Where should we look around first?”
“Anywhere. Somewhere cool...”
Arin had already declared that she would try every single profession at least once.
It would have been a lie to say I had no interest at all, but the heat inevitably drained me.
So we headed to the closest place, Hall 2.
“It looks like we can learn cooking over there! Does Name like cooking?”
“Not really.”
I could survive on mana potions alone, after all.
Besides, I hated eating because of the peculiar nausea I felt whenever I ate too much.
Even in my previous life, I had only eaten reluctantly because of the risk of being poisoned. This life was no different.
“Ugh... Then where should we go... You definitely won’t like exercising...”
A group of boys rushed over to challenge an AI goalkeeper to a penalty shootout.
It was a superb shot that curved beautifully toward the corner of the goal, but the robotic goalkeeper sprang out from its spot and knocked the ball away without mercy.
“There are too many people over there... I heard a famous Twish streamer is coming today, so I guess everyone’s going to see them. You’re not interested in this kind of thing, are you, Name?”
“Let’s go somewhere without any people.”
“Okay, okay! I’ll look for somewhere!”
[InSert Catch-Up Challenge! -Letterbox] Dozens of children were gathered in a line in front of the booth.
Unlike most booths, which replaced everything with augmented reality, this one had even brought actual capsules to provide proper virtual reality content. It was capital worthy of a major corporation.
“Since you’re good at magic, how about trying the magic experience?”
There was no profession called a wizard. It was like calling a researcher an engineer.
It was still better than soccer, though. The moment I showed the slightest interest, Arin dashed toward it.
“Hello, kids! Are there two people here for the magic-circle drawing experience?”
Twenty-something college students greeted us with warm smiles.
Judging by their robes, they seemed to be running the practical program as part of a university club.
“Yes!”
“Then you can sit here. The chairs are high, so be careful!”
Arin and I safely took our seats, and a slate was placed in front of each of us.
One of the college students held up a slate identical to ours and sat across from us.
“Hi. What’s your name?”
“I’m Arin. This is Name.”
“Nice to meet you, Arin—and you too, Name! My name is Dayeon. Today, we’re going to write a Light spell!”
It was the first spell beginners encountered when learning magic.
It was like printing ‘Hello World!’ in programming.
The reason Light magic was taught first was that, setting aside all the talk about it being the foundation of magic, it was simply the easiest spell.
“But plain old Light magic isn’t very fun, right? So we’re going to make a mini fireworks display!”
“Wow! Can I choose the colors too?”
“Of course! Why don’t you put your hand on the slate first?”
So this was a modern slate.
In the past, magic circles had usually been drawn on marble, but this was a kind of artificially manufactured alloy.
A chill traveled up through my hand.
“Do you know the five stages of magic?”
“No! Please tell me!”
“The five stages of magic are recording, infusion, activation, storage, and casting. They can also be divided into three stages—writing, storage, and casting—but today we’ll go through all five in detail. Want to repeat them after me?”
Arin slowly recited the five stages in rhythm with her.
“Why don’t you try repeating them too, Name?”
“Name is a genius, so they probably already know everything.”
“Oh, reaaally?”
After that, Dayeon completely ignored me and explained everything to Arin at practically a one-on-one level.
If a child more than ten years younger than her was mistaken for showing off because they knew a little more than everyone else, I had nothing to say.
Through a university student’s eyes, I must have looked ridiculous.
Besides, responding to her enthusiasm one thing at a time was bothersome, and if she thought that way, it was actually better for me.
“Casting: Light! Wow, it worked! Name, look!”
Yellow and white flames burst and shone above my head in concentric circles.
Aside from Dayeon helping with the mana infusion, Arin had completed most of the process herself.
Besides, didn’t it seem as though she had chosen the colors based on the first letters of our surnames?
It didn’t feel like a coincidence. Arin basked in the pride of having achieved something meaningful.
“Hehe, isn’t it pretty? Make one for me too, Name.”
Arin tugged on my arm. I couldn’t help it. I was clearly weak to a little girl’s cuteness.
I learned the basic principle by watching Dayeon’s explanation out of the corner of my eye.
Every step was identical to what I knew, except for the one special step: storage.
The reason activation and casting were given separate names was because of the fourth stage, storage.
The principle itself was closer to a ‘link’ than storage, but it seemed to have been given that name because its application resembled storing magic in subspace.
Even if a magic circle was recorded correctly, magic did not occur naturally in this world.
One more process was needed to convert an irreversible transformation into a reversible state.
The inconvenience, effort, and temporal inefficiency were drawbacks, but I thought that very trouble made this world safer.
It wasn’t a world where anyone could simply copy a picture and fire barrages of ice missiles.
Light magic consumed too much mana, so I decided to try something easier.
I drew an asymmetrical arc on the slate.
Around it, I inscribed the same pattern as the Arabesque Transmutation Formula I had once taught Arin, then filled the numeric runes before and after the operators representing the color, direction of rotation, coefficient, and exponent I wanted.
When I infused it with a tiny amount of mana, the arc spun once around its vertical axis and transformed into a three-dimensional heart.
The inside then filled with a red glow, and it floated up from the slate until it reached Arin.
“Casting: Wh... I love you?”
As soon as it was cast, the three-dimensional heart exploded, and dozens of small heart-shaped flames burst all around it.
Even if we eventually parted ways, I wanted to give Arin at least one memory she would never forget.
[I’m not an angel-like being.]
[But... if you’re not an angel, then what else can we call someone who gives our brothers bread every day in this hellish place?]
[I’m the kind of person you hate because you go hungry, because you get sick, and because you lose your family to war.]
[Are you leaving this place?]
[Because the hero will be here soon. The merciful hero will look after you.]
[Don’t go.]
[I have to.]
[Then please promise you’ll come back.]
[I can’t promise that. Instead, I’ll give you this. It will be an asset more precious than a piece of bread. In our world, we call it compassion and hope.]
It must have been my imagination that made such a useless memory surface.
* * *
A slate that had activated a spell once could not be reused.
An object used as a mana circuit could not serve as a mana path without undergoing a complicated purification process, so all they had to do was sort it properly and throw it away.
Woo Dayeon, a theoretical physics major in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Hanguk University, was recalling the child who had visited earlier that morning.
“Whew, with this, we’re all done through the final day. Dayeon! You’re coming to dinner tonight, right?”
“...Oh, huh? Sorry, I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”
“I asked if you’re coming to dinner later. Don’t tell me you were planning to skip it even though you love drinking?”
“No, of course I’m going.”
“What’s that slate in your hand? You haven’t thrown it away yet? The recycling truck will be leaving soon. If you miss it, you won’t have anywhere to dispose of it and will have to carry it all the way home. It’ll be heavy.”
Subin, a fellow club member, remembered how she had forgotten to throw away the slates at last year’s booth and ended up carrying about ten stone slabs all the way to the dinner venue.
“I just... thought that geniuses really do exist.”
“Oh dear, if our runner-up says something like that, what does that make the rest of us?”
“Want to see it? The kids from Arabyeol Elementary used it today.”
Subin held up the slate, which weighed nearly a kilogram, with both hands and examined it.
“This is a rotation transformation matrix, isn’t it? We learned it from that bald professor in our first year. What a nostalgic memory. What’s this one, though?”
“It’s a special form of the Baker–Campbell formula.”
“Bacon what?”
“What do you think? Would you believe me if I told you this was a magic circle a first grader wrote by herself?”
“...”
“...”
“Don’t tease me! I don’t fall for jokes like that anymore. What kind of first grader... You’re serious?”
“Yeah.”
“Amazing! Can I take a look?”
Her name had been Name, hadn’t it? She was definitely an unusual child.
She was small and pretty enough that one could believe she was still in kindergarten.
Her black hair fell to her waist and was tied into low twin tails. Every time she walked, the two locks swayed noisily from side to side.
From the moment she first came to the booth, the pale child had been frowning fiercely and glaring with her eyes wide open.
I had thought she was a little cheeky, but looking at her now, it was simply the intense impression made by her sanpaku eyes.
“Wow. She reduced everything to Jacobian matrices, so the formulas ended up this short. This magic circle was more complicated than it looked, huh?”
Subin was right. But what shocked Dayeon most was the final thing the child did: uttering the incantation.
‘She solved it without even deciding on an incantation beforehand.’
When recording a magic circle, variables are assigned, and the spell undergoes its proper activation process when the names of those variables are spoken again to finalize their values.
Why did we assign variables in the first place?
Because it was the easiest way to simplify a problem.
Even when solving a linear equation, we could assign a variable called x.
But as we grew older, there was no need to do that, because after adding and multiplying the values a few times, we could calculate them mentally.
However, it made no sense to handle all those formulas that caused a headache just by looking at them without assigning any variables.
Had she effectively reverse-filled the runes corresponding to the symbols at the moment she uttered the incantation?
It was an astonishing procedure: solving the answer first and then using variables.
If it were really that easy, everyone and their dog would shout ‘Ice Arrow!’ during magic-duel practice and fire flaming arrows instead—a truly bizarre phenomenon.
So this was what they called ‘heaven beyond heaven.’
Dayeon admitted that she was exceptionally bright compared to her fellow students.
Denying that effort alone could not have brought her this far would be self-deception, too.
But there were people who made it impossible for her to compare herself even to ordinary prodigies: the current top student in theoretical physics, and a senior who had been student council president and had never once lost first place in high school.
Comparing yourself to others only made you endlessly unhappy.
After all, I was the only one who could move myself forward.
Dayeon put her complicated thoughts aside and decided to spend the evening enjoying drinks and catching up with her fellow club members.
“Dayeon! You have to take this with you! You gave it to me to look at so you could dump it on me, didn’t you! Hey!!!”