Chapter 114
The day after I went swimming in Okutama with Hiyori, the Mermaid Witch came rowing up the Tama River bearing her O-chugen gift.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, the Mermaid Witch whom I had saved began rowing up the Tama River frequently to bring me gifts.
In time, the custom of giving gifts took on a more formal shape, and every year on August 16, the Mermaid Witch began towing a small boat loaded with treasures from the sea.
Among the Okutama Friends, it came to be called "O-chugen."
It had always been the fire lizards' job to receive the O-chugen gifts, but now that Tsubaki and Sekitan had left the nest, the task fell to Mokutan.
Apparently, Mokutan and the others had been doted on quite a bit by the Mermaid Witch, so I went down to the riverbank with Mokutan and a tin bucket to thank her as their owner.
The riverbank breeze blew pleasantly past with a moderate chill and dampness, but the sunlight was harsh all the same. The Mermaid Witch had stopped her small boat in the shade of a great tree whose branches stretched over the river and was resting on a small rock. When she spotted us, she smiled broadly and waved. Then she called out a greeting in a loud voice that could compete with the cicadas' chorus and the sound of the river.
"Hello!"
"Hello, Mermaid Lady. Look, look! I emerged! I've grown big and strong."
"Mokutan? Wonderful. Good."
Mokutan ran up to the Mermaid Witch and spun around to show off the whole of their body. The mermaid hugged Mokutan tight, patted their head, and kissed their forehead over and over. It was unbearably clingy and hot. It was midsummer, for crying out loud.
The Mermaid Witch had not changed at all since the last time I saw her.
Her long golden hair reflected the midsummer sun and shone dazzlingly, while the lower half of her body resembled a fish's tail fin. Her features probably had not changed either, though my memory was vague. I had trouble telling apart the faces of beautiful people other than Hiyori, but her distinctive blond hair made her easy to identify, which was a relief.
I put the tin bucket over the Mermaid Witch's head so I would not have to look directly at her bright, gentle-looking face, then greeted her politely.
"Hello, Mermaid Witch. It's been a long time. It seems you've taken care of our pet for quite a while. Please let me express my gratitude. Thank you very much."
"??? Bucket, why?"
"Ah, please don't worry about that. I heard you brought us some pretty good coal, crude oil, seafood, and all sorts of things every year."
"Ah. Right. Human, cute. Gave food."
"Thank you very much. Even though Mokutan is my pet, thanks to everyone's care, I was able to see Mokutan grow into such a fine fellow. Mokutan, what do you say to the Mermaid Witch?"
"Thank you!"
The Mermaid Witch laughed ticklishly as Mokutan licked her hand all over to show their gratitude. Good, good. You did well, Mokutan.
The Mermaid Witch played with Mokutan for a while, then rubbed their belly and spoke thoughtfully.
"Your voice... I heard it long ago. I remember. Long ago... very, very long ago...
...
...!
Teacher?"
"Ah, then I'm probably that teacher, if by that you mean the doctor who performed the emergency surgery. Though, you have a pretty good memory."
I could barely remember the face or name of the doctor who had performed my appendectomy, yet the Mermaid Witch apparently remembered me.
When I nodded, the Mermaid Witch, still wearing the tin bucket, hugged both Mokutan and me.
A chill ran over my entire body, and my mind went blank.
Idiot, stop, aaaaahhhhhh!
"Mgh...!"
"Teacher, thank you. Teacher, happy. Met family. Can talk. I am alive. In the sea. Good. Long, happy life."
"Ugh...!"
She whispered words of gratitude right beside my ear. Feeling the Mermaid Witch's heartbeat and body heat, I felt my breakfast rise back up to my mouth along with stomach acid. My whole body had gone rigid with terror, yet I could not muster the strength to push her away. What a contradiction!
What the hell, you worthless moron! Some "thank you" that is! Are you trying to kill me, idiot!? You're welcome!
Mokutan—what a lifesaver—rescued me just as I was about to panic and hyperventilate. When Mokutan saw my pallid face, they hurriedly pulled me away from the Mermaid Witch, and I narrowly escaped with my life.
With me lying on the riverbank, barely breathing and on the verge of death after having 99 percent of my physical and mental strength drained in an instant, Mokutan protested on my behalf.
"Mimi! Mermaid Lady, Oori die. Oori doesn't like this."
"? I'm sorry?"
"Look. Oori turned into fish that's almost dead. Say sorry more."
"I'm sorry..."
"Good. Mermaid Lady said very sorry to Oori. It's okay, can you do that?"
The conversation was conducted in extremely dubious Japanese, but I understood what Mokutan was trying to say.
I nodded while lying half-dead on the cold gravel of the riverbank, and Mokutan, apparently satisfied, breathed fire from their mouth.
"Make up. Good."
"Good? Teacher limp. Still. Teacher's teacher. Call."
"Ah, please don't. The most helpful thing you could do would be to go home right now, or something. Sorry..."
"Really...? Worried."
"No, honestly, you getting the hell out of here right now would be the best medicine..."
"Oh... then goodbye. Teacher, again. We met today. I was happy. Goodbye. O oldest of our ancestors, may his journey be blessed even to the farthest reaches where the sound of waves cannot reach."
At the end, the Mermaid Witch cast a somewhat auspicious-looking spell while still wearing the tin bucket and pointed her tail at me. Then she beached the small boat loaded with O-chugen gifts firmly on the riverbank before rowing away downstream.
The benevolent threat disappeared from view, and at last I could breathe more easily. If I hadn't put that bucket over her head, I would have thrown up. That was close.
Mokutan curled up beside my stomach with a worried look and warmed me. Thanks, Mokutan. But it was hot and humid.
"Mokutan, could you cast healing magic on me? The weakest one is fine."
"Okay. Pain, pain, fly away."
"...Thank you. Could you use the next strongest one too?"
"Okay. After a thousand years, I finally made fate stumble."
Bathed in the gentle light of the healing magic, I felt better and was able to stand up.
I rested in the shade of the tree for about two hours, then started unpacking this year's O-chugen gifts with Mokutan.
The Mermaid Princess's treasure boat was packed with cargo. Brilliantly colored seaweed covered in countless small floats—possibly mutated marine plants—had been stuffed into wooden crates of various sizes as packing material to protect the precious items inside.
First, the seafood boxes contained huge, fine swimming crabs, horsehair crabs, and kuruma prawns, all packed in ice that kept them perfectly fresh despite the midsummer heat. One of the prawns twitched when I poked it, and the strong scent of the seashore lingered in the air. They had been freshly caught. Dinner was decided. There was also a magnificent sea bass. It looked like we would be eating seafood for several days.
Another box held a large jar of seaweed salt with a label from some manufacturer I had never heard of. The label proclaimed, "Mermaid Brand!" so apparently the Mermaid Witch had some kind of sponsorship arrangement. The Spider Witch ran a spider-silk apparel business, and Tsugibi's family owned a freaking huge corporation, so perhaps it was normal for modern witches to have connections with one company or another.
There were boxes filled with treasures from the sea, too.
A lump of ambergris with a certificate of appraisal. Colorful branch coral. All sorts of beautiful seashells. A bag of rusted coins. A ridiculously huge conch-shell flute. Some kind of bones and strange, unidentified pebbles. It was an indulgent grab bag that practically screamed, "We packed in every treasure-like thing we found in the sea!"
After checking that no Tamatebako had gotten mixed in, we busily carried the treasures the Mermaid Princess had given us.
"Mokutan. Your hands are empty again."
"! I forgot."
Mokutan had a habit from their days as a juvenile of holding things in their mouth. They had even gone searching for charcoal to eat while already holding charcoal in both hands, so they were still far from used to their human form.
The Spider Witch joined us partway through to help carry the cargo, so collecting the O-chugen gifts was finished quickly.
We put the food in the earthen-floored room and left everything else at the old temple the Spider Witch used as her base. Apparently, the long-lasting gifts from previous years were stored in a bank vault in central Tokyo. I wouldn't have minded if she had sold them off, but there were a lot of scrupulous witches around me.
Could it be that all witches are scrupulous creatures? ...No, there are the Dragon Witch and the Tsugibi Witch. I guess it's just an individual difference.
Even after receiving healing magic, I still felt worn out, so I had the Spider Witch—or rather, her artificial bait—make me grilled seafood drizzled with ponzu for lunch. Once the food and my mood had both been refreshed, I began dismantling Demon King Gremlin.
I had sent Yamagami-san a list of questions, helped improve Mamono-kun's costume, and dealt with events like today's. I had not been able to focus exclusively on dismantling Demon King Gremlin. Even so, I had made it through 40 percent of the whole thing.
Once I'd dismantled forty percent, I could vaguely make out the whole picture, which let me infer certain things.
The thing I had recently become certain of was the limit of magical civilization's technology, as inferred from the duplication of its parts.
Demon King Gremlin did not manufacture its parts one by one. It probably copied a single original.
I did not know whether the parts had been copied industrially or magically, but all of Demon King Gremlin's identically shaped parts had been mass-produced through copying.
Different types of parts occasionally meshed with discrepancies on the order of nanometers, yet parts of the same type were completely identical down to the last detail, without a single exception. That would not happen if each part had been manufactured individually with advanced precision technology. Or rather, I couldn't make them that way.
At first, I had mistakenly assumed the parts were made one by one and had been terrified by the unbelievably advanced processing technology. But as I continued dismantling it, I became certain that was not the case.
I had sent Yamagami-san a list of questions and was having Yamagami-san examine the matter from a theoretical perspective, but it seemed that rather than combining a wide variety of geometric Gremlins for efficiency and miniaturization, Demon King Gremlin chose to combine a small number of types, even if that made it inefficient.
Put simply, the processing technology of magical civilization was probably not on the level of Earth's scientific civilization at its peak in 2024.
Of course, Demon King Gremlin's design theory and mechanisms themselves were far ahead of humanity's.
Perhaps the best way to put it was that it implemented theories more advanced than humanity's using processing technology inferior to humanity's...
No, there was no denying that perfectly copying parts for mass production was impressive. Even so, not one of its smallest parts was less than 0.4 millimeters in size. There were plenty of parts I could make smaller than that.
Geometric Gremlins had something called an optimal volume, and oversized geometric Gremlins were inefficient in principle. Therefore, the smaller a geometric Gremlin was, the better.
Consequently, it was impossible that Demon King Gremlin had been made with deliberately oversized parts.
This was the result of miniaturizing it as far as possible.
Even magical civilization, which had still seemed unimaginably far ahead, had weaknesses. It had not surpassed Earth civilization in every single respect.
The processing technology I used could be replaced by twenty-first-century electronic manufacturing technology. If humanity's electrical civilization had survived, we might have been able to miniaturize—and therefore optimize—Demon King Gremlin with superior processing technology, even without understanding its principles.
It was a meaningless thought, but it made me a little proud.
Don't underestimate Earth, magical civilization! Even if it's limited to a tiny single field, there are things we can do that you can't.
It was outside my area of expertise, but Professor Ohinata had also spoken a little about the mismatch between Earth civilization and magical civilization.
He had said that the magic alloys used in magic script were probably easy to manufacture on Earth, but had been extremely advanced materials in magical civilization.
According to the Sataish True-Core Theory, Earth's metals are gradually being replaced by magic metals through the workings of the Earth's core. In another several tens or hundreds of millions of years, nearly all the metal on Earth will have been replaced by magic metal.
If that happens, obtaining ordinary metal will become difficult instead.
The Earth of today is only just beginning to develop magic, so magic metals are difficult to obtain while ordinary metals are easy to acquire.
In a fully mature magical civilization, however, magic metals would probably be easy to obtain, while ordinary metals would be difficult to acquire.
Therefore, the magic alloys used to write magic script were presumably extremely advanced materials by the standards of magical civilization.
This was another example of something easy for Earth civilization being difficult for magical civilization.
If magical civilization handled what was difficult for Earth civilization, and Earth civilization handled what was difficult for magical civilization...
If we could have interacted peacefully in that way, the world would have been at peace.
But because of the Gremlin disaster, which was practically an invasion, Earth civilization was destroyed and collapsed, and peaceful exchange was no longer possible.
America, which had once defeated the Demon King, said:
"Demon King Gremlin may become a clue to discovering what magical civilization really is."
I was dismantling Demon King Gremlin for reverse engineering, and sure enough, I was beginning to see hints not only of magical technology, but of magical civilization itself.
If I completely dismantled Demon King Gremlin and then used what I learned to fully investigate Quodenenets, the mass of supertechnology surpassing Demon King Gremlin that awaited in the Kingdom of Rus, perhaps I would be able to solve mysteries such as what magical civilization was and why the Shantak meteor shower had caused the Gremlin disaster.
I spent a while lost in speculation and wild fantasies about the world's mysteries, then pulled myself together and returned to dismantling Demon King Gremlin.
Even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. To unravel such monumental mysteries, I first had to dismantle another 360,000 or so one-millimeter parts.