Chapter 20
In fact, everything needed for the bathhouse had already been prepared.
The most important part was the water-pump system that would supply water to a mansion-sized facility.
Then there was the boiler that would send hot water throughout the mansion.
And finally, the insulated bathtub he had made to prevent heat loss.
“You had prepared all of this for this very purpose?! As expected of you, Young Master!!”
“No. I just got lucky.”
“As expected of Akion! As my disciple, you are truly─ Mmph! Cough! What are you doing, putting your hand in my mouth?!”
“My hand moved on its own when you started spouting nonsense.”
Akion had all the technology necessary to recreate the public bathhouses he had visited with his parents as a child in his previous life.
Right. Everything except the land and the additional facilities.
“There’s no land in Ridasid….”
“Eek….”
First, the land.
There was no land on which to build a bathhouse in Ridasid, where the most people lived…!
Of course, he could use the authority of Count Enersis to declare, ‘This land is mine now!’ But Akion did not want to seize land like that just because he was Akion.
“I’m sorry, Young Master. This land has been used by our family for generations as part of our business….”
“There’s no need to apologize.”
So when he tried to buy land with his overflowing funds, most people refused to sell.
Everywhere in this commercial city was prime real estate! Many people had inherited those choice locations for generations to use in their family businesses.
If they sold those plots, they would lose their livelihoods altogether, so even to Young Master Akion, who always looked after them, they could not hand them over.
“No, my public bathhouse!!”
And Akion was not shameless enough to take it from them.
Even with money and status, there were things he could not accomplish!
Akion beat the ground and wailed.
“Stop making such a fuss.”
“Yes.”
Actually, he wasn’t crying.
He was merely at a loss. Anyway.
“Akion. You want to build it close to the citizens’ homes so it will be convenient for them to visit, don’t you?”
“That’s right. If it’s close to their homes, they’ll come more often.”
A bathhouse would have to be located near a residential district, but most of those plots were the prime real estate mentioned earlier.
But Ridasid had no prime plots left. The count’s family had a building there, but demolishing it and constructing a new one would take ages.
Just when he was wondering if there was a more efficient method….
“Um… Goldie thought about it, and I think there’s one place.”
“Huh? Really?”
“Goldie, where do you mean?”
Goldie raised her hand, apparently having thought of somewhere, and both Akion and the Tower Master looked pleased.
“Well….”
When the two of them stared fixedly at her mouth, which refused to open, Goldie reluctantly spoke.
“There is some land beside the monastery….”
“Ah.”
Akion remembered it too.
The Ridasid parish where the Saint had welcomed him the last time he visited.
There was a fairly large vacant lot beside it.
Based on what Akion knew from his previous life….
“The place that was about the size of a soccer field?”
“Soccer field? What’s that?”
“A field for playing a fun sport.”
It was quite a spacious vacant lot. It was even flat, without any uneven ground.
“All right. I’ll inquire with the parish.”
He would have to negotiate with the Holy See and the Church to obtain it somehow. Honestly, there was no other answer.
Next came the additional facilities.
“We can’t leave all the sewage treatment to slaves.”
A sewage-treatment facility!
The scale of the waterworks that would soon be installed throughout Ridasid, including the bathhouse, would be beyond imagination.
An enormous amount of wastewater would flow through those pipes, and if they dumped it straight into the river, the downstream area would be completely polluted.
And if the territories downstream could no longer use the river water….
“The nobles downstream will get angry, won’t they?”
“Hmm. It would give them a pretext for war.”
The lords in that area would launch a territorial war with everything they had. Their farmland would lose its water supply.
In Akion’s previous life, water for agriculture was classified as Grade 2 to Grade 4.
Even then, Grade 3 and Grade 4 water required separate chemical treatment.
Would things be any different here?
If the water they used was poor in quality, agriculture would be ruined anywhere.
“Ah, isn’t there some monster that can process all the filth by itself?!”
“Would there be one, Young Master?”
“Could there be?”
“Right?”
That was why Akion wanted to take the easy way out.
Honestly, environmental engineering for water purification was no simple field, especially given its enormous scale.
On top of that, many of the materials were difficult to obtain right away.
If he tackled it properly, construction would be delayed tremendously.
And if that happened, when would he ever get to see the bathhouse?
“Actually, there is.”
“Slimes, I mean. Heh heh.”
“What?”
But there was, in fact, an item that let him take the easy way out.
Akion had been tricked.
*
- Wriggle, wriggle~!
- Squelch~!
“It’s a slime.”
From games to comics, anime, novels, and more.
A generic-mob slime, the sort that appeared everywhere, was sitting before Akion.
“Heh heh, aren’t they sturdy?”
“They are sturdy.”
John, the manager and owner of the waste-treatment site on the outskirts of Enersis.
A tycoon from commoner stock, he had turned the universally shunned work of handling waste into a business.
Thanks to the subsidies he received for it, he was apparently making a tidy profit.
His method was simple.
“I raise this fellow and put it in a huge pit, then pour waste into it for him to eat.”
He was taking advantage of slimes’ ability to devour anything.
Whether garbage or filth, everything was thrown into pits containing slimes and melted away.
But slimes were monsters. Magical beasts.
As fragments of demons, they were creatures that even ate humans, yet this one was hugging a tiny slime as if there were nothing wrong with that.
“Is it all right to reveal all this?”
“Oh, come now~!! The Tower Master and the genius young master of Enersis have come all this way. You won’t believe me unless I show you everything I’ve got, will you?”
“Including the slime-taming technique?”
“Please spare me that one~!”
John possessed the ability to tame slimes.
It was not some power granted by a god, but a technique he had figured out through instinct.
Akion learned for the first time that there was such a profession as a monster tamer.
“If you take even my technique, what will I live on?! Oh, Tower Master! Young Master! Please have mercy on this poor John just once!”
Seeing him make such a fuss, Akion suddenly realized that this must be how he looked to the Tower Master.
Having resolved to behave a little more modestly for the Tower Master’s sake, since she was his elder, he said,
“Get up.”
“Yes, sir!”
He helped John to his feet. John had been bowing partly as a joke and partly to flatter him.
Akion had not come here to listen to flattery.
“John. How much waste do you receive in a day?”
“I can’t count it exactly, but… we’re comfortably processing the amount of waste Ridasid produces each day!”
His ability was outstanding.
Ridasid was enormous, yet this waste-treatment site was handling all the garbage it produced with only this much space!
Indeed, seeing how rapidly the piles of garbage shrank as the slime swarm devoured them, Akion knew John was not lying.
So Akion asked,
“Could you process ten times that amount… no, an amount close to a hundred times that?”
“………Pardon?”
“Could you process all the garbage that comes with it, too?”
For John as he was now, this was an incredibly unreasonable request.
Could the slimes handle the enormous volume of wastewater and garbage pouring out of Ridasid once it was filled with bathhouses and every sort of water facility, without bursting and dying?
John had not become a business owner for nothing.
He possessed the merchant’s instinct to calculate quickly and determine with certainty whether something was possible.
After thinking it over, he concluded that the request was,
“Oh dear, Young Master. To be honest, that’s far beyond what we can accept─.”
“I’ll invest. As an advance… would about a hundred times the subsidy you receive now be enough?”
“I am endlessly grateful for Young Master Akion’s graceeeee─!!!!!”
Was impossibility really an issue?!!
More importantly, House Enersis was thousands and tens of thousands of times wealthier than John, and they were offering to invest!!
From that day onward, John swore to serve Akion Enersis loyally for the rest of his life.
*
Akion’s savings melted away, but he only grinned more broadly.
“Young Master, to spend money so recklessly…!”
“Now, Goldie. A sewage-treatment facility is essential for public hygiene!”
This was a world where waterborne diseases were frightening.
Without proper sewage treatment, an epidemic could break out in the territories downstream and spread all the way here!
Akion was the young master of House Enersis, so priests would come and treat him, but what about the unfortunate people of the territory?
“The people of the territory could all die. We have to invest now to keep an epidemic from spreading.”
“Heh heh, Akion… you truly are so kind.”
Akion did not want the people of his territory, who loved the engineering products he had recreated, to fall ill.
In any case, he signed a contract with John for the sewage-treatment facility, and John even swore to risk his life to expand and improve it.
Akion decided to entrust it to him.
However, when Akion tossed him a few ideas inspired by the facilities at the waste-treatment site, John understood them so well that….
“Sigh. Should I have brought him back?”
“Eeeek, Young Master is turning another innocent person into a research slave…!”
“Sometimes, when Akion acts like that… even I get a little creeped out.”
His graduate school… no, his lab….
More precisely, he felt the urge to put John in Akion’s workshop.
Had his evil professor felt this way too? As he revisited the past and recalled his memories with that professor, he said,
“Keh.”
Remembering the hair loss he had suffered during his master’s defense gave him psychological damage.
Those unpleasant memories put him in a bad mood, so he said,
“Let’s go to the boiler workshop.”
“Yes!”
“Oh? That girl was there… Heh heh, how vicious.”
He decided to take out his frustration on someone.
*
The targets of that frustration were….
- Clatter!
“Is everyone doing well?”
“A-Akion!”
“Welcome.”
Hermione and Lucrecia.
Akion was in the boiler research workshop where they were working.
Akion had assigned Hermione and Lucrecia to research boilers for the bathhouse.
In addition to floor heating, they were making a large hot-water boiler to supply hot water to the bath.
“Have you two finished everything I asked you to do?”
“Of course! Here, take a look!”
“Ta-da!”
Akion was still the main researcher, of course, while Lucrecia, along with the fire and water mages who followed her, were effectively lab slaves.
Akion had ordered them to build the hot-water boiler Mark 2 prototype he had drawn in advance.
“Let’s see….”
The previous electric heater had been relatively simple in structure and difficulty compared with this, so it had been easy.
Besides, its makers were craftsmen who had worked in sync with him for a long time. It had not been beyond them.
But the boiler? It was difficult.
Was it really as easy as it sounded to implement a design that could withstand high internal pressure? On top of that, the mages before him were encountering engineering for the first time.
“Hmm, well. You did this part well.”
Of course, he had deliberately assigned them something difficult to give them time to adapt to engineering.
Akion inspected the hot-water boiler Mark 2, examining and touching it from every angle.
And then,
- Creak!
- Boom!
“Eek?!”
“Akion! Are you all right?!”
A section where the rivets had not been properly set twisted and burst, causing the boiler to explode.
It had not been operating, of course, so Akion escaped with only minor bruises, and the surrounding mages hurried over to check on him.
“What on earth is this?”
“Ghk.”
They froze beneath Akion’s unfamiliar gaze, which glinted with murderous intent.
“I clearly told you to heat the rivets to 800 degrees Celsius to soften them slightly before driving them in. You got impatient or lazy, decided they were soft enough, and hammered them in recklessly, didn’t you?”
“H-how did you─.”
“That’s why the rivets failed to join properly and this happened.”
- Tap tap.
Akion rose, dusting himself off, and swept his murderous gaze across the mages.
In fact, every one of them was someone who had tormented Akion for nearly ten years.
“Hey.”
“Yes?”
“You call this doing it properly? Is your research a joke?”
“N-no?”
And wasn’t the mage who had gone to the Tower last time suddenly returning after receiving an inheritance, claiming that Akion was an incredible genius and that merely hearing his knowledge allowed one to inherit it?!
“A ‘no’? A ‘no’─?!”
“Ghk?! No, sirrr!”
After learning the circumstances, every mage struggled desperately to enter Akion’s workshop,
and Akion surprisingly accepted them without hesitation. He even said he would lecture them!!
But the very happy smile Akion wore as he did so….
“Th-that is….”
“When I went to the capital last time, did you see the hot-water boiler’s kill switch disappear and the whole thing run wild and explode? Did you see the floor of the main hall get blown away, or didn’t you? Huh?!”
Only later did all of them realize that the smile had been a demon’s smile.
“If it bursts, a pressure tank can blow away the entire mansion. We are barely containing something that wants to expand under extreme pressure inside that one lump of metal, and you failed to perform even the most basic joining properly, yet you call this finished?”
“A-Akion. We were wrong….”
“Calm down. Calm down for now. Let’s first identify what went wrong─.”
“Isn’t it exactly because neither Sister nor Madam tested it properly that this happened─!!!”
No one had expected him to berate them this thoroughly…!
But every single thing he said while berating them was correct, so no one could refute him.
The mages who had tormented him, along with the mother and daughter, could only hang their heads like graduate students being scolded by their professor after ruining their research.
To those people, Akion said,
“Sigh. This won’t do. I’m canceling this week’s lecture.”
“What?!!!”
He gave them a punishment no different from divine retribution.
He revoked their chance to receive knowledge for free for an entire week!
“Nooooo!!!”
“We’re sorry, we’re sorry, we’re sorry, we’re sorry!!!”
“Kill me instead! No, I’ll kill myself, so please, please calm your anger─!!!”
Most mages were stuck at their current ranks and were desperate for knowledge inheritance to the point of feeling as if they were dying.
For them, Akion’s canceled lecture was nothing short of the harshest possible punishment.
“Young Master, why are you doing this?”
Someday, Akion might be asked whether doing something like this made him no different from an abusive professor.
“I’m simply… a victim who became a perpetrator.”
“What an intriguing thing to say.”
Who cared? Those were the very people who had subtly tormented him while he was developing the incandescent bulb!
Both Goldie and the Tower Master knew exactly how merciful Akion was for not throwing them out immediately.
But more than anything….
“Don’t worry, everyone! Just wait one day, and Young Master will return and give you a lecture!”
“You said it would be a week, so why would he return after only a day?”
“Because every twenty-four hours, we can smash our heads and erase our memories─!!! Hyaaah─!!!”
- Clang!!!
They did not need to do that for Akion to teach them properly.
He had no interest in it, nor was it any of his concern.
*
Meanwhile, in the head of the family’s office.
“So that sound….”
The count was listening to the bell-like sounds coming from outside the window….
- Clang!
- Clang!
- Clang!
“That’s the sound of my wife, Hermione, and the family mages smashing their own heads…?”
“Yes. Young Master Akion canceled the lectures meant only for them, and they went mad.”
“That figures.”
He felt sorry for them.
How painful it must be to be unable to attend Akion’s lectures?
“Send them all to the infirmary and keep them there for about a day. I need to attend my son’s lecture.”
“Yes. I’ll return as quickly as possible as well.”
That was as far as it went.
He merely pitied them.
*
Two weeks later,
“Young Master! We’ve heard from the Church!”
“At last!!”
A reply had arrived to the letter Akion had sent to the Holy See.
“The Saint says she wants to meet you in the capital. She left a message saying she really hopes you’ll come up, Young Master!”
“No, why?”
They wanted him to come up to the capital again.
Akion felt like crying.