You Had Fun Last Night, Didn't You?

As dawn broke, I slipped out of bed without waking Hiyori, who was sleeping as though she'd passed out, and took a bath. After changing into casual clothes, I went to the earthen-floored kitchen and started throwing together breakfast. Then Mokutan came in through the back door from the garden, yawning hugely.

"Morning, Ori."

"Yeah. Morning. Been out somewhere?"

"I was at Fuyou's. I was told I couldn't stay home last night, so I stayed over."

"I see... Ah, yeah."

I tried to pretend I was calm, but failed and let out a strange noise.

No, Hiyori was the only one making strange noises all night. Thank goodness Fuyou had the foresight to help me out. I had completely forgotten Mokutan existed. I nearly let Mokutan see us playing grown-up wrestling at night.

I handed Mokutan three cleaned fish, and Mokutan breathed fire, grilling them in no time. After returning two to me, Mokutan charred the last one black and crunched it down with relish.

For breakfast, I made grilled fish and rice, pickles, miso soup with wheat gluten and green onions, and a slightly sweet, dashi-seasoned rolled omelet, since Hiyori had said she liked it that way.

But Hiyori still didn't get up after I waited for a while. I went to check on her and found her sleeping soundly, so I ate alone without waking her.

In the end, Hiyori didn't wake up until sometime after noon.

Hiyori staggered out of the bedroom and went straight to the bath. After a long soak, she came out while drying her hair with warm air skillfully produced by magic without chanting.

When our eyes met over the newspaper I had spread out in the living room, Hiyori turned bright red, stared at the floor, and fidgeted as she spoke.

"G-Good morning..."

"It's already noon. I packed breakfast into a bento box and left it over there. Eat it if you want."

"Mm."

Hiyori sat at the table, rubbing her lower back.

Hiyori looked a little dazed as she opened the bento box and searched for the soy sauce, so I picked up the bottle and handed it to her. Our hands touched, and Hiyori flinched.

"What's wrong? What happened?"

"Well, after what you did to me yesterday... No, never mind. Don't talk. Don't say anything. I was wrong to forget that your dexterity can sometimes turn into attack power."

"...?"

I had no memory of attacking her. I had simply put everything I'd learned in health class, along with the scraps of knowledge I'd picked up online, to use while watching Hiyori's reactions. I had unleashed my instincts, too, but I was sure I'd treated her with care.

Still, if Hiyori said she'd been attacked, maybe I had been rough with her without realizing it. I would have to be more careful next time.

"Mm. It's tasty even cold. Dairi, you'd make a good wife."

"Why am I the wife? Oh, I was talking about a child Hiyori and I might have..."

As I folded the newspaper, Hiyori nearly spat out the food in her mouth. She covered her mouth and started coughing. I poured tea into a teacup and handed it to her. She accepted it with an accusing glare, took a breath, and then complained.

"Why would you bring that up out of nowhere?!"

"Huh? It's not out of nowhere at all. If anything, I'm late. We should have discussed this before doing something that could result in a child."

"W-Well. I suppose that's true...?"

Hiyori's face reddened again, and instead of answering, she poked at her grilled fish with her chopsticks.

Why are you fidgeting? This is important.

"First of all, if you exclude the time I spent dead, I've lived for about thirty years. Based on everything I've experienced so far, I know without a doubt that I can continue loving Hiyori above all else for at least another thirty years. Even if the entire world turned against me, even if I had to quit being a wandmaker. I want you to accept that as an unshakable fact."

"Y-yes."

"I can't guarantee anything about more than thirty years, since I have no experience with that. Sorry."

"And here's the problem. Suppose that, while Hiyori and I spend many years together, a child is born to us. I don't have any confidence that I could love that child. I don't know. I can't even imagine having a child. Just putting Hiyori first is all I can manage. I want you to understand that."

"Yeah."

"If you definitely want a child, the best thing would be to find a man of Hiyori's species. There was one, so there's no reason there couldn't be one or two more. But this is my selfishness talking, so please don't. Even if Hiyori came to love another man more than me, I would still love Hiyori most of all, but that aside, it would drive me insane."

"Don't worry. I won't cheat on you."

Hiyori stated it firmly.

I see. Thank goodness.

But I knew of two actual examples of people who had reached a relationship like ours, only to have their engagements broken off in some bizarre supernatural phenomenon. We couldn't afford to let our guard down. Disasters always struck without warning.

Even during the Foresight Wizard's active years, there had been cases where disasters that should have come suddenly weren't sudden anymore, but that was beside the point.

"I've been thinking. Ideally, the best solution would be for me to become one of Hiyori's kind. That would solve all sorts of problems. What do you think? Is it possible to become one after birth...? I mean, could a human who was unaffected immediately after the Gremlin Disaster become a Transcendent after some time had passed?"

The period I lived through was the seven years after the Gremlin Disaster, when steamships had only just begun linking the world together. Things that we couldn't understand due to a lack of data back then were probably known in the modern era.

As expected, Hiyori answered my question smoothly.

The conclusion was that I could not become a Transcendent.

The first was that there had never been a case of the static-electricity constitution that marked a Transcendent developing after birth.

The second was that Transcendents had a fixed quota.

The number of Transcendents was capped. This quota was said to correspond to the characters appearing in the Nameless Epic, and the prevailing theory, based on population distribution and other factors, was that there were between four hundred and five hundred slots.

Some Transcendents hid what they were. Some lived in seclusion in remote regions, while others were kept secret as their nations' trump cards. The exact number of slots was therefore unknown.

At the peak of the previous era, Earth's population had been eight billion. Since there was one Transcendent per five hundred thousand people, even counting those who died because they could not withstand the mutation, simple arithmetic said there should have been sixteen thousand Transcendents.

But that was not what happened.

First, about 450 Transcendents were born immediately after the Gremlin Disaster.

Transcendents who couldn't control their suddenly awakened powers died fairly easily, either by letting their magic run wild or by being killed by monsters. It was only natural. Even Hiyori apparently had trouble controlling her powers right after awakening.

After the disaster, monsters multiplied rapidly, and in densely populated areas, food shortages, fires, epidemics, riots, and other problems caused the population to plummet all at once. Before long, the world's population had fallen below two hundred million, by estimate, and the number of Transcendents born after that was limited accordingly.

When a Transcendent died, that person's slot became vacant. Once the loss of magic from the corpse reached a certain stage, or the damage became too extensive for resurrection magic to be used, a new Transcendent was born to fill the vacant slot.

So, in reality, the births of the Transcendents who appeared immediately after the Gremlin Disaster were delayed by several days to more than ten days. That only became clear after years had passed and data had been gathered from around the world.

The cycle of a Transcendent dying, a slot becoming vacant, and another Transcendent mutating into that same slot has occurred intermittently. For example, the Wizard of Arakawa, who had once belonged to the Tokyo Witches' Gathering, died about twenty years ago. Not long afterward, a wizard with exactly the same species and learned magic was born in America.

In recent years, most Transcendents born to fill vacant slots have been babies with the static-electricity constitution. Children and adults with that constitution have already mutated into Transcendents.

So it was safe to say that Dairi would never become a Transcendent. The vacant slots were already filled, and if a new one opened up, a baby with that constitution would take it. There was no place for me in the process.

"Those who die because of mutation become deformed corpses that cannot be resurrected. Stay as you are, Dairi."

"What? That's scary."

Hiyori's matter-of-fact explanation sent a chill down my spine.

So becoming the same species as Hiyori was impossible. It was disappointing, but there was nothing to be done.

We spent the entire day discussing it and decided that, for a while, we would wait and see how our relationship developed. I had gotten rather ahead of myself because of what happened last night, but we'd only been dating for two months. It was far too soon to settle all our plans for the future.

As far as I was concerned, we'd wait and see for a while.

To Hiyori, it meant the two of us taking things slowly for a while.

Our lives were still long. There was no need to hurry. We'd already moved our relationship along too far in a single day yesterday.

The matter of the Quodenenets in the Kingdom of Rus was nagging at me, but even that wasn't a problem that needed to be solved immediately.

Let's take it slow.