Chapter 96
The Academy's second semester has quite a lot of holidays.
“Ugh. How am I supposed to plan the curriculum if this happens every time?”
Around this time, abundant harvests from across the Empire come pouring in,
and several festivals vaguely resembling the Empire's founding celebration are held to commemorate them.
“But you're the young master's solid backing, aren't you?”
“Tsk.”
However, since Akion's research grants all came from there as well… he had no choice but to swallow his complaints and revise the curriculum.
Of all of them, the largest event by far, at least from Akion's perspective, was….
“The Academy Harvest Festival.”
Compared to what he knew from his previous life, it was a university festival.
Basically, it was a presentation, exhibition, alcohol-stall festival, and so on, where the cadets invited all their parents, relatives, and friends to show off by saying, ‘Look what we did!’
“So our department has to hold one too?”
“Yes, Professor. Do you have a plan?”
“Tsk, I'll come back and let you know by the end of today.”
Apparently, it was an event meant to strengthen unity among the cadets.
Because of that, every faculty and department had to hold at least one activity.
The Magi-Engineering Department also had to hold an event….
“Will it work?”
Akion had run into a truly enormous obstacle.
“Do we even have any students in our department?”
Namely, the Magi-Engineering Department was suffering from a drought of department students!
There were plenty of Academy students taking its lectures, but not a single one actually belonged to the department.
“Young master. Does that mean I look like an inadequate cadet to you?”
“I'm joking, Your Highness.”
In truth, there was Flare,
and graduate students were still department students, so Hermione and Astera, who were still in the preparatory program, could also be considered department students.
But was he supposed to do something with just those three?
“Could it work…?”
After returning with the news from the administrative office,
Akion fell into a long, arduous deliberation.
“Hehe, Akion. Whatever the problem, surely you can overcome it. I believe in you.”
“Tower Master. You know I'm popular, right?”
“You ask that so openly in front of me… but yes, you are.”
Just how many people would gather at the Magi-Engineering Department?
The department where Akion, supported by the Emperor, adored by Duke Volkov, and sought as a grandson-in-law by the Empress Dowager, served as both professor and department head?
“It's obvious that people are going to come swarming in.”
People would flock there in droves.
All eagerly anticipating what the genius professor Akion of this year's new department, Magi-Engineering, would unveil!!
- Pinchiiip~!
“You're kind of annoying.”
“Let's pinch him.”
“Gyaaaah! It was just an objective deduction!!”
Although to Aysirel and the people around him, it sounded like shameless self-praise, so they pinched him mercilessly.
Akion wasn't wrong.
The early symptoms had already begun to appear.
“So, that noble lady who made me her friend back then contacted me, you know?”
“Made you her friend…? Big Sister, what does that mean?”
“She's your big-big sister. You don't usually make someone your friend.”
A letter had arrived through the people around Akion asking, ‘What are you doing during this year's Academy festival?’
“When I was a department student… if they paid me a friendship fee, I made them my friend.”
“Oh.”
“Who was that bitch?”
“Y-you don't need to know. She got expelled after having an affair with a professor to get good grades. Hehe.”
“Oof….”
Everyone was dying to know what Akion would do.
Of course, he could have had Hermione and Astera put on a modest presentation about scientific theory and called it a day.
The problem was,
“Y-young master. My parents sent a letter saying they're coming to see me this time…?”
“You too? My father says he's coming as well. He says he wants to see Akion's face at least once before he forgets it.”
“I-I, ahem! Our Papal See will also be visited by His Holiness the Pope and the Saint for the eternal glory of the Academy! O-of course, they'll definitely attend the Saint's presentation….”
“I… my fath—cough, His Majesty the Emperor also said he would stop by.”
“Oh my God.”
Far too many of the Empire's most important people were coming.
The matter had grown too large to get by with a single presentation.
“Akion. If you want, I can throw them all out—.”
“No, no, no. Let's just change the plan.”
It seemed that many people with no connection to magic would be coming as well.
In such circumstances, a presentation on scientific theories related to magic would have a hard time receiving much enthusiasm….
“Let's open a shop.”
“A shop?”
In that case, it would be better to run something resembling a street stall.
And what sort of street stall would they open?
“Sisters. How far along is the ice cream machine?”
Since the heat had not yet faded this autumn and it was still relatively warm,
they had planned to make an ice cream machine first as a prototype before supplying it to Montblanche.
“That? For now, the heat-radiating radiator for the condenser, as you requested, is finished….”
“And I've made the fan to cool it, too. Hehe.”
“Big sis, we have a prototype expansion valve as well. Don't leave that out.”
“Ah, ah, right. We did make the expansion valve for now, heehee….”
The compressor and condenser stages were complete.
They had even brought the expansion valve up to the prototype stage, so Akion only needed to check it.
However….
“That won't do.”
“Wh-what?! What kind of hardship are you going to put us through this time?!!”
“Eek, hieeek, heeeek…!”
The ice cream machine Akion planned to put in the street stall wouldn't be sufficient with that alone.
As Akion quickly organized the principles behind the machine he wanted to build in his head and revised the blueprint,
“We're making soft serve, so we need a temperature sensor, too.”
“Soft…?”
“M-make ice cream soft? Montblanche does that too…?”
It was a machine one could often see everywhere from chain restaurants to buffets.
“No. It'll be a little special. It'll feel like eating sweet air.”
“Air?”
“Akion. You're saying something strange again. Air is for drinking—.”
He was planning to make a soft-serve ice cream machine.
*
The tricky part of a soft-serve ice cream machine was temperature control.
“So it stays in a state that's neither frozen nor melted?”
“Yes. In Celsius, it needs to be maintained at around five to seven degrees below zero.”
Unlike simply freezing it, the ice cream had to remain in a semisolid state,
so the low-temperature refrigerant gushing out of the expansion valve could not be too cold.
“Then we'll have to use something to close the expansion valve… What do we have…?”
“Big brother. We use mercury, right?”
“Mercury? That liquid metal you used when you made the thermometer last time?”
Before the modern age of electronic thermometers, mercury was a liquid metal widely used in analog devices.
Its expansion in volume according to temperature was extremely uniform, and it remained liquid from thirty degrees below zero to 356 degrees above zero,
making it a lovely metal that an engineer like Akion simply couldn't pass up.
“Ha! You're talking about the conditional automatic switch you demonstrated with Aqua Absol.”
“You hit the nail on the head, big brother. And since we need to regulate the pressure with this as well, we need highly pure mercury.”
“I know an alchemist in the capital who handles mercury. I'll obtain the purest kind!”
Of course, several people had gone to an early grave from mercury poisoning. Anyway.
The refrigerant that emerged from the valve in a half-gas, half-liquid state then went through the process of chilling the cylinder where the ingredients would flow.
Thanks to this, which operated on the same principle as the evaporator in a refrigeration unit, the milk-and-sugar mixture was reborn as ice cream.
It would be even better if a rotating blade called an auger scraped the inner wall of the cylinder so that frozen milk would not accumulate inside it.
- Bogrururu!
“Hmm, will this really make it soft…?”
“Little sis. Have I ever lied to you? Here, try freezing it and eating it just like this.”
“Hmph, if it isn't soft, you'd better prepare yourself—whoa?!”
Before that, they also needed to install a pump to force air into the small pipe connecting the milk-mixture reservoir and the cylinder.
That was what would make it soft serve, after all.
“Good grief.”
“Ha….”
“Whoa….”
When they successfully implemented all of this up to the experimental stage in just three days,
Akion's brothers and sisters let out sighs before they felt any jealousy.
“How did he even think to use it like this?”
“We need to open up that head of his. Is there a god of design in there?”
“A-amazing. Aki-chan, hehe….”
If the scientific theories Akion taught them were the mathematical formulation of natural phenomena,
then, in their eyes, his engineering was the process of figuring out how to apply and utilize those formulas to achieve a goal.
To them, that method of application looked like creativity, and that was why Akion looked like a genius.
“I'm not a genius, though.”
Of course, Akion could only be modest, since he was simply copying what he had seen in his previous life.
And since mana existed here, there were few limitations, making it easy to achieve his goals.
- Pinchiiip!
“Gyaaaah!!! Goldie, Tower Master, Saintess, Big Sis Aysirel, Your Highness Flare!!”
“Hmph, that's karma.”
Of course, to everyone else, wasn't it just shameless bragging?
Akion's cheeks did not survive the day.
* * *
- Bang-bang~ Fwoooooosh~!
A little later in the morning,
the sky above the Academy was beautifully decorated with magical fireworks.
“Line up, line up!”
“Please enter in order!”
From all across the Empire, and even from across the continent.
Since the Academy admitted royalty, nobles, and brilliant commoners from every corner of the continent,
its entrance was already bustling.
“I heard the Gestalpen Club of the Faculty of Magic developed a new telekinetic spell!”
“The Faculty of Knight Studies is going to show off some shield tricks. I wonder how they'll demonstrate the limits of the human body!”
“The Faculty of Arts is displaying moving paintings made with magical samples, apparently.”
“The Faculty of Administration has… a beastkin maid café? What in the world is this?”
People from all over the continent scattered in every direction with festival guidebooks in hand.
Some had come to see their children.
Some had come to observe the progress of the Academy as a center of education and research.
And some had come….
- Tap!
“So this is the Magi-Engineering Department.”
“Hmm. It's not as large as I expected.”
To the shop of Akion, the unprecedented genius who had set aside the marquis's castrated younger brother and obtained an entire research building for himself,
the leading figure in Magi-Engineering.
People curious about Magi-Engineering were beginning to gather, since they had heard that a new dessert would be unveiled here….
“But… aren't those clergy?”
“Indeed. Why are so many clergy gathered here?”
The clergy were already sitting in a line in front of it, and they had one thing in common.
Namely….
“That's coffee, isn't it?”
“Why are they holding coffee?”
They were each holding a cup of espresso in one hand.
“Here you are.”
“Ohhh, Saintess! Thank you!!!”
“What are we going to do about our Saintess… but I can't resist Saint Akion's new dessert!!!”
“Th-thank you….”
And why was the woman called the Saintess, all dressed up in a pretty dress, gritting her teeth as she handed out desserts?
“Hehehe, now if we eat this with espresso…!”
Anyway, the clergy accepted their soft-serve ice cream.
The strange ice cream piled in a spiral atop a small, slightly indented bowl
- Grab!
“Huh, what…? It collapses the moment I put my mouth to it?”
“It's not collapsing. It was swallowed whole! My goodness!”
“Ice cream can be that soft?!”
It melted away into their mouths with a softness perfectly suited to the word ‘soft.’
“N-no wayyyy…!”
“Can ice cream this fluffy truly exist?!”
“More importantly, quickly, the espresso too!!!”
- Gulp gulp!
With its scent of milk and sweetness, it was clearly a food that would be fantastic when eaten with coffee.
“Don't eat soft serve like affogato!!”
Although a young man who looked like Akion was shouting furiously. Anyway.
“H-haaaaaah…!!”
“It's too, too delicious…!!”
“And alssso….”
The clergy who had eaten it were overcome with euphoria….
- Kiiing!!
“L-look! Even above my head, tiny though it is!!!”
“Oh! Sister, you've finally got a halo too!”
“Congratulations!! Your connection to the Heavenly Lord has grown even stronger!!!”
“What the fuck.”
A halo, supposedly something that only manifested for the highest authorities of the Papal See, had appeared above their heads.
Apparently, having one let you wield an astonishing amount of divine power. Anyway.
Of course, it was small, and disappeared after only a few seconds.
“What did I just see?”
“I have no idea. But….”
The prospective customers who had been too afraid to approach because of the clergy looked at one another and said,
“Go buy coffee immediately!”
“Don't go!!!!”
Every one of them began running toward Ariba's café in the exact center of the Academy.
“Don't go! Just eat it—gurgle…!”
“Gasp?! Y-young mas—! Breathe, breathe!!”
Akion, who had watched the whole thing, collapsed from high blood pressure once again,
“Gasp?! Y-young mas—! Breathe, breathe!!”
“W-what?! The Saint has collapsed?!!!”
“I'll heal him with my enhanced divine power!!!”
“Bring the Saint here right now!!!”
The clergy took the opportunity to rush into the shop and began healing Akion in every possible way.
“Heavenly Lord, fucking hallelujah!!!!!”
“Hooray!! The Saint has risen again through the Heavenly Lord's grace!!!”
“Hallelu—jah!!!”
“Ameeeeen!! Aiiiiiiiiimeeeeen!!!”
Thanks to them, Akion couldn't even faint, and once again hated the Heavenly Lord very, very much.