Chapter 111
The concept of controlled experiments that we learned in elementary school is truly magnificent. After all, it even has a say in cutting-edge experiments connecting to ley lines.
At Professor Ohinata's suggestion, I summoned my merry companions from Okutama and conducted experiments connecting to ley lines through the Golden Spiral Structure. We made several dozen Golden Spiral magic wands, subtly varying the materials, the scale of the spiral, and other factors, then tested them one after another while collecting data.
First, the Spider Witch and Blue Witch were in the Transcendent group. One had insanely good magic control and the other was hopeless at it, making for a nice comparison.
Fuyou, Mokutan, and Mamono-kun were in the demonfolk group. One was a Transcendent's child and another was the result of a Gremlin implantation, making for a good balance.
Professor Ohinata and I were in the ordinary-human group. Here too, we could compare a beast mutant with a truly ordinary human.
As for Gazer-kun, I handed them a Golden Spiral Wand, but they fiddled with it curiously with their tentacles and snapped it in half, so I removed them from the experiment right away. They're engrossed in playing with the statue, so let's leave them be.
"Oori. I'm certainly eight-legged, but even if I equipped eight Golden Spiral Wands, wouldn't that make the effect eight times as strong...?"
"Ah, it didn't work?"
"No. When Blue Witch held two, it wasn't any different from when she held one, right? I'm the same... If I hold them for too long, I just start feeling like I'm going to throw up..."
"I feel nauseous too when I try to take magic power drawn up from the ley line into my body. It isn't unlike the feeling of running out of magic power, but if I had to compare it to something, it's closer to the nausea you feel when you try to eat despite being full."
"Ah, yes, exactly. It feels like I can't take any more..."
While the witches complained of feeling full and nauseated, Professor Ohinata and I exchanged wands and tilted our heads at each other.
"Professor, try this one next. Feel anything?"
"...Hmm. I don't feel anything from this one either. Could it be a question of whether we can control magic power?"
"I don't feel anything either. If you don't, then it probably isn't a difference between the sexes."
"The witches and demonfolk can use magic control to prevent the magic power drawn up from the ley line from mixing with their own. If it mixes automatically, that means our magic power already contains leyline magic, so the nausea doesn't seem to be caused by the mixing itself."
"Shoot—Aaaah! ...Hmm. Even with the magic power mixed in, it doesn't interfere with activating incantation magic. Oori-san, I'd like to check for changes in the amount of magic power we possess. Do you have a magic-power meter?"
Since I hadn't made a new magic-power meter, I handed Professor Ohinata the Demon King Wand Reficul so they could use its built-in meter, then called out to the demonfolk group, who were happily playing.
"Hey, quit playing and help with the experiment properly, will you?"
"Okaaay♡"
"Look, Fuyou! Dual-wielding. Mamono-kun, prepare yourself. Mimimimi!"
"Oh my. I yield, I yield. I surrender. Mokutan-san, you're very strong."
"I win. Mamono-kun, you've got a fine beak, but you still have a long way to go."
Mokutan wanted to play sword fighting while holding a Golden Spiral Wand in each hand, and Fuyou and Mamono-kun indulged them with cheerful smiles. It was heartwarming.
But what about the experiment...?
Perhaps because they could finally hold wands, unlike when they were a Fire Lizard and had four legs, Mokutan had gotten completely overexcited. They were fooling around like an elementary schooler who starts playing in the middle of a science experiment.
Just when I was thinking that it was fine as long as Mokutan was having fun, they lay facedown on the ground, held wands in both hands and both feet, and began shouting, "Four-Wand Style!" Mamono-kun left Mokutan in Fuyou's care and quietly came over to me.
"We don't feel nauseated either. In fact, we can't sense the existence of the ley line at all. That's probably a matter of magic-control precision, though. I can tell that magic power rises through the Golden Spiral and mixes into my own."
"Hmm...? Even with it mixed in, you don't feel nauseated?"
"No. Though, hmm, it's difficult to put into words. When I absorb the mixed magic power again, I get something like a synesthetic sensation—as if I were eating or drinking something. As though I were drinking mineral water or thin rice gruel."
"I see...? So the magic power has a faint flavor to it?"
Mamono-kun nodded thoughtfully, then continued while looking toward Mokutan, who was laughing in surrender with their belly exposed as Fuyou tickled them with vines.
"Mokutan-san's testimony is a little unclear, but they seem to feel roughly the same way I do. As for Fuyou-san, they apparently don't feel anything in particular. Rather, they only feel the same vague connection to the earth that they had sensed all along. It seems they had mistaken that for sensing the land's nutrients."
"Wait. You thought you were drawing nutrients from the land, but you were actually sucking up ley-line magic?"
"In a sense. They're drawing up the land's nutrients while also sensing and drawing from the ley line, so they're getting both. I'd like to test whether there is any difference between a wand based on Fuyou-san's innate Golden Spiral Structure and one based on the Spider Witch-sama's innate Golden Spiral Structure. What do you think?"
"Ah, so you want to compare Fuyou's materials with spider materials. That's worth trying. Mamono-kun, draw up the designs. I'll go get the materials."
"Spider Witch! Hey, listen! Shed shells from your subordinate spiders would be fine, but do you have any spider-based material that might work for a wand?"
We were so busy experimenting, theorizing, and verifying our theories that data on the Golden Spiral Structure piled up at an astonishing rate.
But given the nature of the experiment, it wasn't something we could finish in a single day. The sun began to set in the middle of our work, and the Kappa (and Gazer-kun) and the stoat reluctantly headed home. They took one Fuyou-type wooden Golden Spiral Wand and one spider-type chitinous Golden Spiral Wand with them, though, so when they next found time to come play, they'd probably bring their data with them.
For the next two weeks, I devoted myself to researching the Golden Spiral Structure. I obsessed over the materials and the structure. Hiyori and the Spider Witch gave me feedback right away, so the adjustments proceeded smoothly.
What I discovered was that the Golden Spiral Structure was not the best form for connecting to a ley line.
The innate Golden Spiral Structures possessed by the Spider Witch and Fuyou were subtly different. The way their spirals wound was different to begin with. Fuyou's wound to the left, while the Spider Witch's wound to the right.
I took this to be a manifestation of convergent evolution.
For example, sugar gliders and flying squirrels are separate species. However, they look so much alike that they share the same name in Japanese.
Water lilies and lotuses are also fundamentally different species from a taxonomic perspective, yet they look remarkably similar.
The phenomenon in which creatures that should be entirely different species look so similar in appearance or characteristics that they seem to be the same species is called convergent evolution.
Different creatures evolve toward the same appearance or characteristics. They converge because doing so is advantageous for survival.
The species to which Fuyou and the Spider Witch belong must have followed different evolutionary paths and acquired the same structure because possessing a Golden Spiral Structure was advantageous to their survival as magical creatures.
Using the Golden Spiral Structures possessed by the two of them as references, I devised a Golden Spiral Structure that was different from either one.
Judging by the results, the structures possessed by Fuyou and the Spider Witch were stages along the evolutionary path toward the optimal form. More specifically, I discovered that the optimal form was a spiral plotted from a sequence created by substituting the Fibonacci sequence into the metallic ratio.
There was no doubt about it, since Hiyori had said, "This is the one that lets me feel the ley line most strongly." All that time spent hunched over my desk and wrestling with sequences for the first time since high school had paid off.
Whether it was geometry or sequences, magic was such a pain, with some pretentious math nerd constantly getting in my face. Still, I was the genius who handled and mastered it.
I leaned back against the chair in the workshop and surrendered myself to the heavy fatigue. I felt as though I'd used up about a year's worth of brainpower over those two weeks.
The age when I could get by brute-forcing all the processing with Dexterity was over. The times had advanced, and magical theory had progressed. Most things that could be done by inspiration alone had already been tried. From now on, I'd have to use my head properly.
Though, come to think of it, in the old days I'd left the brainwork to the university while I handled the processing, so I had been using my head both then and now... But that was beside the point...
As I sat in the chair, nodding off, the doorbell announced a visitor.
I stood up to see who it was and found that Hiyori had brought Mamono-kun, who was carrying a shrunken Gazer-kun in their arms.
After two weeks away, Mamono-kun was visibly excited and rattled off their words at high speed.
"Hello, Oori-san! A major discovery! This is a major discovery, I tell you. We still have follow-up tests to do, but there's no question it's a major discovery. I thought I had to tell you about it first."
"Calm down, Mamono-kun. Are you planning to chant Flame Magic or something?"
I had no idea what Mamono-kun had discovered, but they were so excited that their IQ seemed to have dropped. Gazer-kun was also whipped into a frenzy by Mamono-kun's excitement and kept screeching, but Hiyori poked them with the tip of Kyanos and quieted them down.
Some kind of hierarchy has formed here. Is Hiyori really the strongest creature alive?
Mamono-kun petted Gazer-kun, using monster therapy to calm down, and then began explaining the so-called major discovery in earnest.
"When I was posted to Chichibu Ranch, they gave me a full set of tests. A health checkup and physical-fitness measurements. They measured my magic power too. This is the result of combining those measurements with data taken every five days over the past fifteen days."
As they spoke, they thrust several sheets of paper at me.
They were Mamono-kun's various test results and a graph compiling them.
"Uh... Your magic power is going down... while your grip strength is going up. Your sit-up count too. Standing broad jump... lung capacity... Well, everything's improved a little. So what? Have you been strength training this past week, Mamono-kun?"
From a quick look at the graph, Mamono-kun's physical abilities seemed to have been gradually improving in measurements taken every five days. There was nothing particularly strange about the way they were increasing. The improvement wasn't small enough to be dismissed as day-to-day health variation, but it wasn't large enough to be startling either. It looked like a reasonable rate of growth—about what you would expect from ordinary strength training.
The drop in magic power was the only thing that gave me pause.
When I tilted my head, unable to make sense of the data, Mamono-kun traced the figures with a finger and continued, looking desperate to explain the rest.
"No, I haven't done any strength training at all. If anything, I've been short on exercise because I've mostly been doing desk work. Look here. My magic power is slowly decreasing, isn't it? Meanwhile, my physical abilities are slowly improving."
"I haven't taken any magic-power recovery potions, and I haven't contracted Shadow Loss Disease. I haven't suffered from magic-power depletion either. In other words, there is no known reason for my magic power to be decreasing."
"The only thing I've done is take the mixture of my own magic power and leyline magic into my body. You could also call it absorption."
"...Huh? You used the ley line to cast body-enhancement magic without an incantation?"
Unable to grasp what they meant, I asked for confirmation, but Mamono-kun shook their head.
"No. This isn't a temporary enhancement caused by magic. It's a lasting enhancement."
"In exchange for a decrease in my maximum magic power, I've gained a permanent improvement in my physical functions."
"I believe this is a kind of training mechanism. The secret behind the physically impossible abilities of monsters and Transcendents must be this."
Only then did my understanding finally catch up with me.
Once I realized why Mamono-kun was so excited, I was stunned.
Come on, seriously?
When I heard that we had connected to a ley line, I'd hoped that, if we were lucky, we might be able to draw an infinite supply of magic power from it.
But then—of all things, the impossible happened.
I never dreamed we'd uncover part of the secret behind the Transcendents.
Mamono-kun stroked Gazer-kun repeatedly as they spoke with excitement.
"They were mixing their own magic power with leyline magic through the Golden Spiral, then letting it integrate into their bodies to magically enhance their physical functions!"