Chapter 96
Some people sleep lightly, while others sleep deeply.
In my previous life, I often woke at the slightest sound, so I had always thought of myself as a light sleeper.
But when I considered how I had nearly been late for the academy because I failed to hear my alarm, I began to wonder if I was actually the type who couldn’t wake up easily unless someone forced me to.
I suddenly remembered something my master had once told me: the human brain remembers experiences of deprivation.
For example, intermittent fasting that involves eating only one meal a day might be an effective short-term dieting method, but the body adapts to the reduced food intake, gradually increasing its calorie absorption rate.
I heard that this was also one reason people became more vulnerable to the yo-yo effect, along with their desire to compensate.
Had not getting enough sleep as a baby been the cause?
Even then, though, I had never particularly felt as if I lacked sleep.
If anything, I might have suffered from insomnia because I was afraid I wouldn’t open my eyes the next day.
Of course, this body had its advantages, too.
Being able to fall asleep the moment I lay down and closed my eyes was, along with not being a picky eater, one of the blessings a person could receive.
Someone shook me so violently that I became motion-sick, forcing me awake.
It was Yuna.
“Ah... Sorry. I must’ve dozed off. Did you eat dinner?”
She must have come in quietly without turning on the lights and woken me.
I apologized for preparing a pajama party, only to hole up in my room and sleep like an embarrassing host.
“If you’re done eating, do you want to watch a movie? I have ‘Zootopia’ and ‘Inside Out’ among the ones I downloaded.”
“......”
Why wasn’t anyone answering? I had deliberately chosen animated movies with their ages in mind, but perhaps they weren’t to their taste?
Haru, watching me cautiously, spoke first.
“Name... Are you still tired?”
Tired?
I had been tired from waking up early, but after taking a short nap, I felt refreshed.
I tried to make an excuse, thinking that I had ruined the mood by falling asleep while they were having fun.
“I just dozed off while setting up the projector. It’s absolutely not because I was bored playing with you. I woke up early because I was really looking forward to today’s pajama party.”
“No Name...”
Yuna timidly pinched my pajamas, her voice thick with tears.
Had the two of them fought?
The room was too dark for me to see their faces properly.
When I sat up and turned on the room light, I saw Yuna with her brow deeply furrowed.
“Why are you about to cry again? Did you fight with Haru while I was gone?”
Shake-shake-
Yuna’s red hair shook violently from side to side.
I tried to hug her as usual to comfort her, but Yuna pushed me away.
“Is it because I went into my room without saying anything?”
Shake-shake-
She shook her head again.
I lightly pinched her soft cheek, but she pushed me away again and even huffed angrily.
“I can’t know everything that’s going on in your heart. If something’s bothering you, I wish you’d tell me instead of hiding it.”
Children’s emotions were especially complicated.
Adults showed joy when they were happy, sadness when they were sad, and disgust when they were disgusted.
Their emotions appeared plainly on their faces, but children often didn’t even know what they themselves were feeling, which made it incredibly difficult to read their minds.
The only thing I could tell for certain was that hurt feelings showed clearly in Yuna’s eyes.
“You’re the one hiding something, No Name.”
This time, Haru spoke in an angry voice.
“Me? I am?”
“Yes. You... You’re hiding something from us, too, so why are you telling only Yuna to be completely honest?”
“I feel like I’m missing something here. Could you explain what’s going on?”
I was incredibly flustered at the moment.
I was as bewildered as an elementary school student who had stopped by the art room late to retrieve a pencil case they had forgotten after an after-school activity, only to witness the art teacher and the PE teacher devouring each other’s lips.
For the sake of their privacy, I won’t say who they were.
Yuna pressed her forehead against my thigh and hugged my waist tightly.
“Your nightmare... It was so scary... You were mumbling runes, then suddenly saying that you were in pain and asking someone to save you, and... and... saying that you thought you were going to die...”
When Yuna confessed what she had seen, the girl in the pig pajamas approached my side.
“If you’re in pain, say that you’re in pain. I hate people who say they’re fine when they’re hurting... They’re the worst kind of liars.”
Lee Haru spoke with both fists clenched tightly.
She, too, looked ready to burst into tears at the slightest touch.
I had no choice but to sigh deeply as I embraced the two girls who rushed into my arms.
On the first day of the pajama party, I had failed to reconcile the two girls and had only made them cry instead.
* * *
As a light nearly as bright as a full moon hung in the night sky and dusk fell,
Name gathered jackets for the two girls and prepared to leave.
“You’re going outside at this hour? What for?”
Professor Cheon asked in a puzzled tone.
“To look at the stars.”
With that short answer, Name opened the front door.
But the professor’s question remained unanswered.
In Korea’s brightest city at night, the stars had shyly vanished without a trace.
“On a day like today, there are a lot of clouds, too. You won’t be able to see even the few stars that are out, will you?”
“It’s okay. I remember where they’re hiding. Can I borrow this, too?”
Name and her companions headed to the playground in the apartment complex.
It was a desolate clearing where the traces of children who had once run all over the place had vanished, leaving behind nothing but silence.
She took Yuna and Haru by the hands and seated them on separate swings.
“It’s hard to see stars in the middle of a city because of light pollution. So if you want to see stars, you have to go somewhere dark on all sides, right?”
“I can’t see anything...”
Haru kept spouting TMI, while Yuna still hadn’t recovered from the shock of Name’s sleep talk.
Because Name had dragged them there almost by force without explaining why, they looked at her with eyes full of distrust.
“What I dreamed wasn’t a nightmare.”
Name said this after climbing to the highest point of the slide.
“Then what was it?”
As if expressing her frustration, Yuna kicked off the ground hard and set the swing moving.
No Name was a girl steeped in mystique from head to toe.
She knew everything about herself, but Yuna knew nothing about her.
That made her angry and left her feeling stifled. Whenever she took a step toward learning more about Name, Name retreated two steps.
Yuna had no intention of tolerating it if Name tried to brush her off one more time.
“Have you ever had a moment in your life when you were happiest?”
The dream Name had seen was a nightmare, but it wasn’t a nightmare.
It had indeed been the most difficult and desperate moment of her life, but at the same time, it had been the struggle of someone yearning for the return of the happiest moment they had ever known.
“Today, right here, I’ll show you how many stars there are in this world.”
Name took out the simple magic-circle inscription device she had borrowed from Professor Cheon.
It was a wand-type device that could inscribe alchemy arrays and magic circles in midair without a medium.
Its drawback was that the stages of recording, injecting, and activating were all carried out at once through the inscription process, so it couldn’t be modified midway.
But every disadvantage came with an advantage.
It had excellent processing speed when reflecting the caster’s thoughts in the magic circle, and because it injected mana using the optimal approximation, it consumed relatively little mana.
Considering that Name would be using a large number of runes and formulas in the magic she planned to cast from now on, it was an essential item.
“There have always been plenty of eccentrics in the world. I suppose people have always wondered whether a magic circle would activate if they used every rune language exactly once.”
The ‘Null’ rune, which meant the empty set, could be omitted. But this time, she wanted to cast the spell according to the textbook, so she created 128 blank spaces in the magic circle.
The girls still had no idea what Name was doing.
That was, until light entered from the north of the magic circle.
“Null. El. Ras, Maven.”
She began the chant with the runes most commonly used by those casting first- and second-circle magic.
As the runes were embedded in the very top of the magic circle, lights came on one by one.
“Sutra, Arhen, Gernum, Psyche.”
The formulas in the associated circuits set five gears in motion.
With every tick of the second hand, the outermost track gradually illuminated a path in a clockwise direction.
“Istanya, Lumiere, Fresian, Fantasia, Nellimello, Samattra, Bestial, Hyprit.”
Overwhelmed by the size of the magic circle, which inspired a sense of sublimity beyond mere wonder, Yuna’s mouth slowly fell open.
The amount of mana being injected through the inscription device was limitless.
Whenever Name squeezed out every last drop of golden mana, a new rune appeared and greedily devoured it.
A massive magic circle eight meters in diameter, centered on Name, revealed its majestic form.
Five concentric layers of gears, brighter than the streetlights that flickered on and off, brilliantly illuminated the playground.
But only half of it was lit so far.
When the swing came to a screeching halt, Name fit the final 64 seven-syllable rune words into a single breath.
“Zigmundaschente, Leshaikvar, Saleantirumone, Harayetreika.”
The name of the magic circle in which all 128 rune words used in an ordinary magic circle had been written without omission was—
[Cast: Alchemist]
“Alchemist, the magic that stores wishes.”
No sooner had Name finished speaking than every light in the world vanished around the three girls.
“...!”
Their surprise lasted only a moment before Polaris twinkled first, greeting them.
Thirteen stars shone blue in the east.
Nine stars shone red in the west.
Stars began sprouting above Yuna’s head and beneath Haru’s feet, covering the entire world in starlight.
Before they knew it, the girls realized that they were no longer standing on the ground.
“How is it? Doesn’t it feel like you’re at the center of the universe?”
Name, who had descended from the slide, approached the girls.
Haru’s heart began to pound violently when she realized that even the swings they had been sitting on had disappeared.
“What kind of magic is this...?”
“Aren’t the stars beautiful? You won’t be able to find a place like this anywhere else.”
That went without saying.
Haru could swear that she had never seen a sight like this, with thousands upon tens of thousands of stars filling a black canvas.
“Name, then what you mumbled in your sleep...”
“Yeah. I guess I was using this magic. It’s my favorite magic, after all.”
What in the world was this magic?
Was she really doing all that merely to see the night sky?
But Yuna’s question was soon answered.
Her eyes were drawn automatically toward the spot Name pointed to.
A single streak of starlight split across the northern sky.
“A star is falling...!”
Name smiled as if to say that it was too soon to be amazed.
Before long, two stars fell, then three.
Hundreds of stars still hung in the sky.
This time, ten stars fell at once, then twenty.
Yuna suddenly grew afraid that they might fall on them and tightly grasped Name’s hand.
Haru was no different.
The spectacle of the meteor shower adorning the night sky moved something deep within Haru’s heart. She, too, refused to let go of Name’s other hand.
Along the paths the stars had traveled, cracks spread across the black sky.
If the world the girls were seeing had been inside an egg, then that egg was now beginning to crack.
Crash-!
When the 128th star had fulfilled its role and fallen, the black dome completely collapsed, revealing the world outside.
A blue sky without a single cloud and a meadow filled with abundant life stretched out before them.
Vivid crimson flowers in full bloom added color to the lush green grass.
Wherever the wind blew, warm spring sunshine mingled with the fresh scent of grass and spread as if nature itself were spraying perfume.
Petals carried on the fresh breeze clung to the girls’ cheeks as if offering them a greeting.
“All right, let’s go.”
“Uh... Where?”
Name pointed toward the end of the hill.
Two people had laid out an elegant picnic mat and settled down on the grass, which was thick with the scent of greenery.
One was a blond-haired boy with a cold look, and the other was a girl a little younger than him, her face full of smiles.