Chapter 7
The three of them—the eldest son and heir to the House of Marquis Hiohne, Cyril Ashley; Monica Everett, the 〈Silent Witch〉; and Raul Roseberg, the 〈Thorn Witch〉—were looking up at the pea towering before them.
Each vine was as thick as a human arm, and the vines had twisted together until they reached a size comparable to a centuries-old tree. Even as the three of them stood there in stunned silence, the pea continued to stretch its vines at an alarming rate, growing thicker and taller.
To reiterate, this is a story about peas.
Looking up at the thing writhing before him, Cyril spoke in a stiff voice.
"...Lord Roseberg, I have something to ask you."
"Don't be so formal. Call me Raul."
Raul was still grinning cheerfully despite the situation, so Cyril shot him a sharp glare and corrected himself with heavy sarcasm. "Then, 〈Thorn Witch〉-dono."
"When infusing plants with magic, weren't we forbidden from exceeding the prescribed amount?"
The pea that was now growing at an extraordinary rate before Cyril and the others had been nothing more than a few seeds moments ago.
They had been ordinary pea seeds, the sort found anywhere, without a single unusual feature.
Yet the instant the seeds were planted in soil mixed with the growth-promoting fertilizer made by the 〈Thorn Witch〉, they all sprouted at once, shooting upward, writhing, and rumbling ominously as they reached their current size in the blink of an eye.
Monica, who had gone deathly pale beside Raul, opened her mouth, trembling.
"M-maybe there was a mistake in the amount of magic infused into the fertilizer..."
Cyril was stunned, and Monica was pale with fear. In stark contrast to them, Raul—the very person who had made the fertilizer for these peas—was perfectly carefree.
"My, it certainly grew splendidly."
"What's splendid about this?! It doesn't even resemble a pea anymore!"
When Cyril snapped at him, Raul pointed to the pods hanging from various parts of the vines.
"It's obviously a pea, no matter how you look at it. Look, it even has peas inside."
Raul had a point. The pods hanging from the vines were packed full of plump peas. Their shape was undeniably that of peas, but their size was far too different.
The pods were as tall as people, and the peas inside were as large as human heads. The delicate Cyril simply did not possess the nerve to insist that these were peas.
Before Cyril could retort, Monica spoke with tears in her eyes.
"I-I'm so, so, so sorry! I must have made some kind of mistake..."
"Hmm, hang on a second."
Raul cut Monica off and pulled a stack of papers from inside his coat.
Written on them was the fertilizer recipe he had concocted for these peas. There was no mistake in the figures Monica had calculated over and over again.
Yes, there was no mistake in the numbers written there... but Raul, who had used those figures to mix the fertilizer, lightly slapped his own forehead and said,
"Whoops. I misread the decimal point."
"So this is your fault?!"
Cyril's furious roar echoed beneath the clear autumn sky.
＊ ＊ ＊
The House of Hiohne funded research by the 〈Thorn Witch〉 and the 〈Silent Witch〉 into infusing plants with magic.
More specifically, it was a groundbreaking study aimed at developing crop varieties that could grow even in cold climates and nutrient-poor soil by infusing them with magic.
There were two main ways to infuse plants with magic.
One was to channel magic directly into a fully grown plant. The other was to infuse fertilizer with magic.
For widespread adoption, mixing magic into fertilizer required far less effort than channeling it into each individual plant.
That was why they were conducting their research using the method of infusing fertilizer with magic.
However, infusing fertilizer with magic made it more likely to affect the soil itself. A single mistake could turn the entire area into barren land.
So they had built a field deep in the remote mountains of the Hiohne Marquisate, far from human habitation, to research their magic-infused fertilizer.
Improving plant varieties required enormous amounts of time, money, and perseverance. Even two of the Seven Sages working together could not change that.
Above all, infusing plants and fertilizer with magic was subject to numerous regulations in the Kingdom of Ridill, so they had to proceed with caution.
In particular, infusing a plant with more magic than the prescribed amount was strictly forbidden.
In other words...
"If anyone finds out, we're in trouble, so we need to do something before we're discovered!"
Raul spoke in the tone of a boy trying to hide a prank, and Cyril fixed him with a gaze colder than absolute zero.
"...You will take responsibility and fix this, won't you, Lord Roseberg?"
"Hmm. I didn't bring any herbicide today. How about we burn the whole thing down with Monica's magic?"
When Raul made that suggestion, Monica shook her head vigorously.
"If we use fire magic here, it could cause a forest fire... I think it would be better to cut the vines with wind or ice magic. Then we can use earth magic to check how contaminated the soil is with magic..."
Before Monica could finish, she disappeared from Cyril's sight.
"Hiiiyyahhhhhhhhh?!"
Monica's shriek came from far above their heads.
Cyril looked up in shock and saw Monica caught in the pea's vines, swinging back and forth.
Cyril immediately began chanting and created an ice spear in his hand. He intended to throw it and cut the vine holding Monica. However, the vine restraining her was swaying back and forth, making it impossible to aim properly. If he mishandled it, the ice spear might hit Monica instead.
As Cyril clicked his tongue, unable to take aim, Raul cupped his hands around his mouth and called up to Monica.
"Hey, Monica! You should be able to cut through something like that with nonverbal magic! I'll catch you down here, so come on down!"
Raul was right. Monica was the only person in the kingdom capable of using nonverbal magic. Cutting through the vines holding her should have been child's play.
...But Monica continued to sway back and forth and cried out in a voice on the verge of tears.
"B-but... for some reason, my magic won't activate! ...Eeeek! N-no, I don't want to! Let me gooooo!"
At the same time as her scream, Monica's body was pulled toward the main body of the pea. She flailed her arms and legs, sobbing, but her desperate resistance was in vain, and her small body was dragged inside the pea.
The little hand she had stretched out for help was soon covered by green vines and disappeared from view.
The instant Monica was completely absorbed into the pea, its pods swelled up, and the peas burst free from within.
Each pea was about the size of a human head, and they came flying with tremendous force. A direct hit would leave no one unscathed.
Cyril hastily cast a defensive barrier to block the peas. But no sooner had he stopped the attack and breathed a sigh of relief than the peas rolling across the ground began to tremble and sprout.
As the vines stretched out energetically with wet slithers and smacks, Cyril's face went rigid.
"...What spell did you infuse those peas with? Wasn't it merely a growth-promoting effect?"
"Well, I actually gave them a magic-absorption effect, too. When you mix fertilizer infused with magic into the soil, the soil gets contaminated with magic, right? So I thought it might be groundbreaking to incorporate a spell that absorbs the magic around them into the pea seeds."
Cyril knew of such a magic-absorbing plant.
The flowers Raul had prepared during the operation to stop the 〈Barrier Mage〉 had possessed an ability to absorb magic as well.
Those flowers had drained the 〈Barrier Mage〉's magic dry in about thirty minutes, but the pea that had run wild because of the fertilizer seemed to be on an entirely different level.
Monica had probably been unable to use magic because the vines had drained nearly all her magic the instant they caught her.
(But to drain her magic completely in just a few seconds... If it catches you, there's no way to resist it!)
And the pea, having absorbed Monica's magic, was about to undergo even further growth.
The vines sprouting from the peas that had burst open wrapped around the original pea and began turning it into something even larger.
"I can't believe this all happened because I misread one decimal point in the fertilizer..."
Cyril felt as though he had been reminded all over again of just how dangerous research into infusing magic could be.
But when Cyril looked utterly hopeless, Raul shook his head and said, "That's not it."
Then Raul—the 〈Thorn Witch〉 and one of the Seven Sages—set his handsome, ancestral features into a dignified expression and declared forcefully,
"I was off by two decimal places!"
These were the words of one of the Seven Sages, who stood at the pinnacle of the kingdom's magicians.
Cyril thought, with a perfectly straight face, that Monica, who had spent day after day calculating the fertilizer, had every right to be furious.