Chapter 84
“What?”
Meanwhile, Akion was examining the graded final exam papers from the first semester.
He examined and reexamined the exam papers of the academy students taking Introduction to Basic Science… and Akion groaned as though the situation were dire.
“Why did someone get a perfect score?”
Like all professors, Akion had made the final question extremely difficult so that no one could possibly get a perfect score.
Actually, not all professors did that. Anyway.
“How did you get this right? There are so many variables that it’s difficult even to identify them, and this was actually a problem where you had to find the function.”
“Well….”
The method of separating variables that he had never taught, the law of conservation of mass and the continuity equation that followed from it,
and on top of that, an inverse-problem question designed to be a perfect-score killer.
The other questions had not been easy either, and the basic average being so high was already puzzling enough. Yet one student had even managed to get a perfect score.
“It just made sense.”
“There’s no way that could have just made sense….”
Since the exam had been conducted under the Tower Master’s watchful eye, cheating was impossible… so Akion summoned the only student with a perfect score.
She was none other than…
“Your Highness, let’s be honest. Who studied with you?”
“As if that could be true!!”
It was the Seventh Princess, Flare!
Akion simply assumed that the imperial family’s genius had manifested itself.
After all, whenever he dined with professors from the other faculties, they all marveled at Flare’s genius.
“I-it’s just that you said the curve function determined the shape of the vessel… Since mass is conserved, the amount flowing out and the absolute value of the change in the volume inside the vessel must be the same… and you said the rate at which the water level fell would be the same too….”
“Wow.”
“Then I figured I could use the chain rule you mentioned in passing during the lecture, when you were talking as though it were nothing….”
“Wow… You used that to get the continuity equation…?”
Akion now agreed with that point as well.
No matter how well someone had learned mathematics, applying it well was a matter of talent.
“Your Highness, this may be rude, but may I be honest with you?”
“Yes.”
“You look incredibly attractive right now.”
“W-w-what are you saying…!!”
Tremendous physical intuition and an ability to abstract.
The genius to instinctively grasp a continuity equation he had never even taught.
Akion vowed to remain eternally loyal to His Majesty the Emperor for granting him such an excellent research slave.
“Ahem. Young Master Akion? You shouldn’t say things like that so carelessly. You could easily give someone the wrong idea, you know?”
“Would it really cause a misunderstanding? The relationship between Your Highness and me is quite close, after all.”
“Every single thing you’re saying right now…! Phew…!!”
Of course, the relationship Akion meant was that of professor and graduate student,
but Flare assumed he was referring to the engagement (in all but name) that she believed he knew about.
‘Could it be that Young Master has feelings for me too…? No, why would I have feelings for him?!’
Flare’s misunderstanding grew larger by the day, but no one could correct it.
First, Akion was not perceptive enough to notice something like that,
“Sister Aysirel, Sister Aysirel. What should we do about Her Highness? Should we tell her?”
“What can we do? Leave her be. She’ll have to get her heart broken before she learns.”
The women perceptive enough to notice had already been burned by Akion once,
so they were standing by and watching with the mindset of, ‘I’m not going to be the only one who suffers.’
Of course, that didn’t mean they intended to hand Akion over so easily. Anyway.
“Well, I’m sure something good will come of it.”
Even the students who had performed terribly on the midterm for Introduction to Basic Science had achieved excellent scores on the final.
Akion had taught them pretty rigorously.
To be honest, he had been prepared for some of them to fail.
And yet their basic average had risen! From Akion’s perspective, that was a tremendous boon.
“If this is how things are, then next semester I can compress the material a little more….”
“Akion. I’m a knight, so I don’t know much about magic, but I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Young Master, are you trying to kill the academy students?”
“Please help me.”
“Y-Your Highness. Please calm down. I was only half joking.”
“Half? Half? Half? Half? Half?”
“Aaaagh, it was all a joke, so please calm down!!”
However, the curriculum reform failed because of the resistance of the three women.
Flare’s desperate pleas contributed the most.
“I… I saved my classmates’ lives…!!”
“Good work, Your Highness.”
“If it weren’t for Your Highness, we might really have been cleaning up corpses next semester.”
Even so, a boon was still a boon.
Moreover, the professors had been praising the academy students until they were hoarse, which seemed like a sign that things were about to go well.
- Click.
“Good morning, Saint.”
“Good morning, Saintess.”
And Akion…
- Kiiing….
“…Saintess, why did you come with your halo on?”
“Huh? When did it turn on?”
The halo above the Saintess’s head,
and the Saintess’s reaction upon realizing that she herself had not known about it, made him slightly uneasy.
In Akion’s experience, when the Saintess acted like that, something had usually happened.
For instance…
“Is it because you drank espresso?”
“Espresso?”
Perhaps she had drunk the coffee she had told him not to drink.
And perhaps she had been affected by it.
If all they knew were kind clergymen, ordinary people would have thought, ‘Well, if the Saintess says so, it must be true~!’
“Saintess.”
“Yes, Saint?”
“Why is your halo on after you drank coffee?”
Akion, who now knew the clergy’s madness all too well, grew increasingly uneasy.
Among those clergymen, the Saintess was the person best suited to the word ‘mad,’
so there had to be a reason that someone with such strong convictions had gone against her own principles.
“…Gasp.”
And the Saintess realized that she had misspoken and covered her mouth with both hands.
- Clatter!
Akion immediately began running toward the café.
“S-Saint! Wait! I just forgot to turn it off─ Ngh, stop him!!”
“For what reason?”
“Just grab him, ngh! Don’t interfere, Lady Aysirel!!”
The Saintess tried to stop him, but Aysirel held her back to prevent her from doing so.
“Absolutely not. Akion! Run!!”
Apparently, the Saintess had done something wrong,
and if she incurred Akion’s displeasure, the guard position would belong to Aysirel alone.
Then she would have a chance to be alone with Akion, and then she could go heehee, squish-squish!
“Y-Young Master! Wait for meee!!”
Thus, Akion ran to escape the pursuing Saintess, Aysirel holding her back, and Flare following after them.
“Huff, huff…!”
The place he headed was Ariba’s Café in the academy’s central garden.
Since nothing had changed when the Saintess drank drip coffee before, Akion assumed that the espresso, a different kind of coffee, was the cause.
And his intuition was correct.
“S-Saint—hahahahaha!! Damn it, my body’s heating up!!”
“What the hell is this holy power?!”
“Ah.”
Paladins, priests, and nuns.
Clergy who should have been in the Papal See had swarmed in regardless of rank, age, or sex,
rejoicing as they drank a demitasse of espresso they had received from the café.
- Shhhhh~!!
The moment they drank the espresso, their eyes became clear and intelligent, and sacred light burst from their bodies like a tidal wave.
It would have been one thing if only the clergy were acting like this,
“Inspiration, inspiration is surging through me!!”
“Woooooo!!! To hell with complicated accounting!!!”
“I, I feel like I have to throw down my brush right now, grow a mustache, and go into politics…!”
“Is that really okay…?”
But the academy students, faculty, and even professors from every department who had drunk the same espresso were all around them!
Every last one of them had doped themselves with espresso and was running wild.
In a positive direction.
“What is this…?”
“Aww, this is why I didn’t want to show you…!”
“Were all those crazy people lately because of that?”
The Saintess was embarrassed as she watched the confused Akion,
while Aysirel, who had not known what was happening, was left aghast.
And finally…
“Oooooh! Your Highness, the Seventh Princess! You’ve come! Shall I pour you a cup, just the way you always order it?!”
“Mr. Ariba─!!”
“Even you, Princess Flare…!!”
Flare was such a regular that Ariba automatically greeted her as well.
Akion was deeply shocked.
“Could Princess Flare’s perfect score have been the effect of this espresso…!”
“…I didn’t want you to find out.”
She had applied the awakening effect of coffee to master Introduction to Basic Science perfectly,
and on top of that, she had even gotten a perfect score?
To be honest, this was no different from relying on drugs… so Flare felt both ashamed and humiliated.
“I’m sorry, Young Master.”
But a wrong was still a wrong.
Flare readily admitted her mistake and confessed everything about how she had used the espresso.
After hearing it all, Akion said,
“That’s wonderful.”
“Huh?”
Far from disliking it, he looked extremely pleased.
Because…
“With this, we won’t need to assign the same homework multiple times, and we can get through the material faster, right?”
“Huh??”
It meant that with just one cup of this coffee, they could become genius university students who understood any lesson perfectly.
In other words, it would save Akion time.
“With this, I might be able to compress the curriculum to twice as much, or even four times as much!”
“Ah.”
Only then did Flare, the Saintess, and Aysirel,
along with the students taking Introduction to Basic Science who had been watching the situation from nearby, realize it.
“We’ll have to give them espresso before every lecture. Then it won’t be a problem even if we cover two or three times as much material every day!!”
“Eeeeeek.”
“Gaaah!!”
“N-no! I actually hate coffee! I can’t drink it because you use espresso!!”
They had given Akion an excuse to work them even harder.
“…Then I’m okay, right?”
The Saintess also confessed everything about the meeting at the Papal See, together with Flare.
“Of course, Saintess! Shall we start by making an improved version of the espresso machine?”
“Yes! Our Papal See will support Professor Akion wholeheartedly, in every way possible!!”
Akion was not angry at all about the espresso. He was incredibly pleased!
She was delighted, as if she had been granted an indulgence.
“A-ahhh…!!!”
Flare alone could not feel that way.
Because her father had sent her to Akion’s lab as an intern, and she had half gone there of her own will.
Therefore, she could not leave until she had earned at least a master’s degree.
In the meantime, Flare would be steeped in espresso.
“No, no! Lady Aysirel! Please help me!”
“Hmm.”
Flare had dug her own grave, but the train had already left the station.
“M-Miss Goldie? You’ve been with Young Master Akion for a long time, so surely you have an idea that could get us out of this situation, right?!”
“Nope!”
She tried asking the people around Akion for covering fire, but it was useless.
“Ancestors!!!”
“Give up. No one can break Akion’s stubbornness.”
“Noooo─!!”
With the Tower Master’s final nail in the coffin, Flare screamed as she clawed at her own face.
*
It seemed as though things would end happily, but…
“We’re running out of beans….”
“It’s only been four days?”
There were not enough coffee beans to supply Flare, the students taking Introduction to Basic Science, and even the countless academy students, faculty members, and professors.
“Isn’t there anything we can do…?!”
“Hmm. Even if you say that….”
Because of the persecution—or perhaps the near-persecution—coffee farming had not developed on a large scale,
and there was also the problem that coffee demand, currently limited to the academy, would explode someday.
When the academy students returned home for vacation, wouldn’t they tell everyone about the incredible effects of espresso?
“Coffee trees, coffee trees….”
As with cotton farming, coffee farming would eventually have to be raised to the level of factory production to become manageable.
On top of that, a factory-based process requiring at least a year was essential.
Hadn’t Count Gossypium sent a letter saying that the cotton supply had only recently increased dramatically?
In fact, along with that letter, bales of cotton that were both higher in quality and greater in quantity than before had been delivered. It had taken ‘only’ about a year.
Of course, for tree farming, they could replace sensors with magic that detected the moisture in the soil,
and equip the farms with irrigation systems such as turbine pumps to supply water according to those readings.
All they had to do was properly incorporate the farming know-how used at the coffee plantations into the field of automation.
“There’s also the sorting process. It’s done by hand right now, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. But, ugh… you know that now, don’t you? Doing it with magic is far too inefficient….”
The problem was mass-producing coffee!
To produce the 18 grams of coffee grounds needed for two shots, they needed between 100 and 120 coffee beans.
And coffee demand was going to increase tremendously… Would it really be easy to peel and dry tens of thousands of coffee beans one by one by hand?
“My older brother, Viscount Irgacepe, tried every method he could think of… but we can’t exactly use mages as sorting labor, can we? Above all, the process of producing green beans takes far too long!”
Of course, there were detection-type spells that could be used instead, but mages were ultra-high-end, ultra-expensive labor in the first place.
Therefore, they needed a process capable of handling coffee cherries in bulk…
“Ah.”
There was one method that fit the bill.
“I think we could use the washed process…?”
Washed Process.
It was a coffee-processing method in which harvested coffee cherries were placed in a large tank for sorting, washing, and fermentation all at once.
“Mr. Ariba, is there a river with clean water in your viscounty?”
“Huh? Yes, well, the water is very clean.”
It was an indispensable processing method for mass production in the modern coffee industry.