Chapter 115
The sparkling summer passed, and the season arrived when bell crickets and crickets held nightly concerts in the garden.
I sat on the veranda and watched Mokutan diligently crack walnut shells using the sharp, massive spine jutting from the back of the Spider Witch, who sat motionless like a garden stone.
Gourmet Mokutan's favorite food was charcoal, but they apparently loved charcoal made from walnut shells too. They carefully placed the cracked shells in one basket, then tossed the actual nuts carelessly into another. Huh. We really do have different ideas about food's value.
As I sat there absentmindedly fanning myself with a round fan, Hiyori brought over two cups of strong barley tea and sat beside me.
"Here."
"Oh, thanks."
"The barley tea bags were running low, so I bought more."
"Thanks for that too."
I replied casually, then suddenly realized that more and more of the things Hiyori bought lately seemed to be accumulating in the house.
The barley tea bags, for one, but Hiyori also bought milk, curry powder, and other things.
She used to drink tea from one of my spare cups, but now she had brought one of her own. There was Hiyori's personal shampoo in the bathroom, and her pillow had been left in the bedroom. She also had her toothbrush and an ornamental plant here.
Since she came over three to five days a week, it was only natural for her belongings to pile up, but whenever the Spider Witch noticed Hiyori's things increasing in our home, she always seemed to have something to say about it.
I didn't really get it. As long as nobody touched the workshop's interior, I didn't care whether Hiyori's things or Spider-san's things increased around here. Mokutan had also gone and turned the space under the shoe cabinet by the entrance into a treasure stash, stuffing it with junk. I thought everyone should just do as they pleased.
"Oori, you know..."
The two of us sat close together, watching Mokutan diligently crack walnuts, when the bored Spider Witch, with Mokutan riding on her back, struck up a conversation.
"You aren't going to catch any bell crickets...?"
"Not really. Why?"
"Because you caught rhinoceros beetles. I wondered if you liked bugs..."
"Oh, it's not that I like bugs. Catching rhinoceros beetles and stag beetles is just a man's instinct. When you see a big one, you can't help wanting to catch it. That's men for you."
"Huh... I don't really understand that kind of sensibility..."
"Men like things that are big and strong. Spider Witch-san, you're big and strong, and you're a spider too, so you could probably tickle my manly heart to death. I love you, basically."
"Huh, huh...?"
The Spider Witch clicked her mandibles, looking rather pleased, and Hiyori's half-finished barley tea suddenly froze.
"Ah... um. Right, the Blue Witch is big too... Her magic power, I mean. And she's strong. I guess she really strikes a chord with Oori's manly heart...?"
"I don't think there's a man who dislikes the Blue Witch. After all, she's the world's greatest in magic power, the world's strongest, the world's most beautiful, the world's best girlfriend, and the world's cutest."
I counted them off on my fingers, then marveled anew. Good grief, how many things can you be number one in? You'd run afoul of some kind of antimonopoly law.
"Mimi. But I am Mokutan Kawaiina. World champion of cuteness. I won't lose."
"Ah, there's also a theory that cuteness is a tie for first place."
Mokutan stopped cracking walnuts to challenge her, so I nodded in agreement. Satisfied, they puffed out a little shower of sparks. Mokutan sure was cute!
"........... Now that I think about it, it's a good thing Oori's communication skills are dead. If he had average communication skills, he probably would have seduced another twenty or thirty witches by now."
"That might be true..."
Hiyori and the Spider Witch nodded solemnly at each other. Stop having incomprehensible conversations. The only witch I've seduced, past, present, or future, is Hiyori.
We talked for a while about the world's largest insects, and in the course of the conversation, I learned that the Spider Witch, who had registered her shed skin as the world's largest spider molt with Guinness, had put it up for a charity auction and donated the ¥8 million proceeds to medical organizations in developing countries. I was left speechless by how pure her heart was.
Seriously, there are people who are afraid of such a good witch? She's more saintly than a second-rate saint—no, she's a holy spider.
"I might put something up for auction too."
"Oh, if you're going to donate it, consult me about the recipient. There are quite a few organizations that claim to be charities but are really just cushy landing spots for retired bureaucrats..."
"No, I didn't mean something that's a hair's breadth from the dark side of society. I've been wondering for a while how much my wand would fetch if I put it up for auction."
Back when the Internet was still alive, I was merely a maker of fan-made anime merchandise.
After I became a magic wandmaker, the world was too busy recovering from its collapse, and wealthy people capable of throwing huge sums of money at auctions were rare.
But now, things were different.
Compared to the dawn of magic, the world had become far more peaceful, the gap between rich and poor had emerged, and the rich had entered an age where they had money to burn.
Suppose I made a new magic wand—a work by the legendary magic wandmaker 0933—and put it up for auction.
How much would the wealthy put up for it?
I was extremely curious.
"Hmm. An auction. But I'll warn you: Internet auctions haven't come back."
"Of course not. But what about an auction where everyone gathers at a venue?"
"Ah. Those have come back. You have wanted to put a wand up for auction for a long time, Oori. Shall we submit an application for the next major auction?"
"Absolutely!"
And that's how it was decided.
I was going to put one up. A magic wand made by the legendary magic wandmaker 0933, resurrected in the modern age like a phoenix. I was going to put it up for auction.
Whoo! I'm getting fired up!
Now then.
Before making a wand and putting it up for auction, I first had to decide on its specifications.
It needed to be vastly more powerful than a run-of-the-mill wand, but still nowhere near as powerful as Kyanos. I had to keep it within that range.
Otherwise, the world's balance of power would tilt. The fact that the world wouldn't break just because its balance tilted was proof of how much it had advanced.
First, the generally accepted limit for a multilayer structure was three layers.
However, the current cutting-edge fabrication method—teleporting out a Gremlin's insides, carving the body hollow, and putting them back in—still had room for development. A four-layer processing method might be developed in the not-too-distant future.
Therefore, the core of the wand I made would have five layers. Not too strong, not too weak.
As for the anti-backflow mechanism, the technology had branched into two systems: a prevention mechanism and a recovery mechanism.
The prevention mechanism consistently delivered excellent backflow prevention.
The recovery mechanism had weaker backflow prevention, but returned some of the magic power lost to backflow. Its performance was like getting a partial cashback on the magic power consumed.
The recovery mechanism clearly had more room for development. At present, however, the prevention mechanism still had far more advantages. I would go with the prevention mechanism.
The magic power measuring device was technology far beyond humanity's current reach—something humans still hadn't managed to reproduce even in part. I would implement it while showing off to my heart's content.
The Kvant-style magic compression ring had been recreated, ugly though it was, and despite its high cost had become standard technology.
Advances in processing technology had made it possible to carve thick chain loops from large Gremlins obtained from Class 2 or higher monsters.
Here, I wanted to show the difference in class with a thin, elegant chain ring. Don't underestimate me. Nobody carves chains better than I do.
I would not add an emergency defense attachment because of the limited stock of its material, magic stones. Magic stones had been precious in the past, but their price had risen even further in modern times. It wasn't something one could just make casually.
I would certainly have liked to add an anti-theft curse mechanism, but there was no telling who would win the auction. Since curse mechanisms were effectively custom equipment, they were a poor fit, so I would leave that out too.
The magic spiral was the hottest new mechanism around.
There was no way I could leave it out. However, it would be a problem if merely possessing the wand caused magic power to be converted into self-enhancement automatically, so I would make it so that twisting the grip reshaped the internal mechanism and allowed the spiral to be switched on and off.
Finally, the chantless mechanism.
This led to a pretty major argument with my advisor, Hiyori.
According to Hiyori, chantless magic was incredibly powerful. I had seen Iruma wreak absolute havoc with chantless magic myself, so I thought I understood how strong it was, but apparently it was far stronger than I had imagined.
If chantless magic spread, the world would change dramatically. It wasn't a matter of whether it might. It would.
Being able to use magic without chanting was a major advantage, but more than anything, the ability to create original magic was what made it so powerful. In the extreme, it might even produce an upgraded version of puppet magic that could control someone completely just by glaring at them!
Even the simplest chantless mechanism incorporated into my prototype Demon King Wand Refikle could be imitated through reverse engineering, and it could be made more complex. Of course, it would become far larger than anything I could make.
It was not hard to imagine a situation in which engineers all over the world joined forces to reverse-engineer the chantless mechanism I had made by reverse-engineering Demon King Gremlin. The world would be flooded with mechanisms that were a second-generation downgrade of a mechanism that had already been downgraded from Demon King Gremlin.
Even if their performance was two steps below that of the original, they would be incredibly dangerous... That was Hiyori's argument.
I understood Hiyori's sense of danger, but I didn't think it needed to be treated as quite that dangerous.
Even if I kept it secret, humanity would eventually reach the chantless mechanism anyway.
Yamagami-san's magic calculator had been seriously impressive. If humanity's Gremlin geometry had advanced far enough to produce that, then even if I didn't reveal the chantless mechanism, humanity would eventually create one on its own.
Could I guarantee that whoever invented the chantless mechanism someday would be a good person? No.
The worst possibility would be for someone like Iruma—a rotten-to-the-core piece of garbage with an exceptionally brilliant brain—to invent the chantless mechanism independently someday. The world might be destroyed. Alternatively, I might be kidnapped, as Iruma had tried to do, since I was currently the only person in the world capable of making a chantless mechanism.
The most dangerous thing of all was for a bad person to monopolize the technology.
Therefore, even if I auctioned off a wand with a chantless mechanism to satisfy my timid pride and arrogant shame, it wouldn't lead to the worst possible outcome. I could even say it would create a second-best, better situation.
The spread and advancement of technology could not be suppressed forever.
In the end, Hiyori backed down on the logic that 'As long as Sage Oori keeps leading the technological cutting edge, there won't be a problem.'
In reality, I was the strongest because I had control of Demon King Gremlin, the source of the chantless mechanism. As long as people were conducting catch-up research behind me, they would never catch up with my research.
I would make cutting-edge, high-performance luxury wands, while ordinary craftsmen would mass-produce wands inferior to mine.
I couldn't mass-produce them, and ordinary craftsmen couldn't make high-performance wands.
Surely that was where the balance would settle. That was how things had worked until now, and it was probably how they would work from now on.
And so, the specifications for the magic wand to be auctioned were decided.
Five-layer core.
Latest anti-backflow mechanism.
Magic power measuring device.
Kvant-style magic compression ring.
Magic spiral.
The simplest chantless mechanism.
That was all.
Once the specifications were decided, all that remained was to make it.
I began making the magic wand to submit to the world-famous auction being held in Tokyo the month after next.
How many hundreds of millions of yen would it fetch at auction?
I was already looking forward to it!