Chapter 126
By the time winter had passed and bright rapeseed flowers began blooming in the early-spring backyard.
It was a warm, mild, comfortable midday, and Hiyori was at the base of Fuyo.
Surrounded by the fragrance of the spring flowers Fuyo had brought into bloom, she was sitting on a picnic sheet with the Spider Witch, having a girls' get-together.
Mokutan was there too, its belly puffed out roundly and soot smudged around its mouth as it napped on its back atop the Spider Witch. A nose bubble was swelling at its nose. Cute.
"Hiyori, Hiyori. Hey."
"Hm? Oh, Oori, do you want some?"
When I called to her, she took a sandwich from the lunch box and held it out to me.
It looked delicious, but I had just eaten lunch. I shook my head.
"No thanks. I made you an engagement ring, Hiyori, but do you even want one?"
"...............Hm?"
When I put it bluntly, Hiyori froze while holding her teacup.
The Spider Witch froze too.
Fuyo had been poking Mokutan's peacefully sleeping cheek with the tip of a vine, and Fuyo froze as well, but recovered first and wrapped a vine around my waist.
"If the Blue Witch doesn't want the engagement ring, maybe I'll take it? Right, Uncle?♡"
"Ah! Hey, stop, Fuyo! What if she takes that seriously!? Oori, no, absolutely not! If you're giving the engagement ring to someone, give it to me. Don't give it to anyone else!"
"O-oh. Got it. Here."
Hiyori came at me with such fury that I took her left hand and slipped the engagement ring onto it with a pop.
Good, all set. I could return to the workshop and make a final push on disassembling the Demon King Gremlin.
I had finished what I came for and was about to leave when Hiyori grabbed me by the hem of my clothes and nearly made me fall.
"Wait, wait, wait. Hold everything. That was way too casual. What is this supposed to mean?"
"Huh? Was there not enough emotion in the enchantment?"
"What are you talking about? Am I supposed to take this as meaning we're engaged—that this is what you mean?"
"??? I don't really get it. You sometimes look anxious, Hiyori, right? So I made this ring to give shape to my feelings—that I love you and will always be by your side—in the hope that it would reassure you. Basically, I just turned the invisible 'I love you' into something visible."
Apparently, giving Hiyori an engagement ring hadn't gotten my feelings across very well, so I honestly explained my intentions.
I worried that I had caused another communication error, but after hearing my explanation, Hiyori blushed, closed her right hand around the engagement ring, and smiled. It seemed like I was in the clear.
"I've never been happier to have fallen in love with you than I am today. I'll treasure it."
"But Professor and Mamono-kun both broke up after getting engaged, so I can't help feeling that an engagement is the beginning of the end."
"I've never had my mood plummet this hard. I'm going to beat the crap out of you, you insensitive jerk."
Hiyori's face reddened for an entirely different reason than it had a moment before, and the raging power of her anger froze the flower garden around us.
Eek! Why!? She'd been giving off such a we're-safe vibe!
"Don't worry, Uncle. If you two break up, I'll take you in.♡"
"Fuyo, don't provoke her too much… And Oori, apologize right away. I know you didn't mean it that way, but…"
"Achoo!! Mimi? It's cold. Did winter come back?"
The cozy atmosphere of the picnic, which had been so peaceful before I arrived, began to fall apart.
Apparently I had said something offensive without realizing it. After profusely apologizing to furious Hiyori, I left awkwardly.
Giving her the engagement ring had gone well. I thought it had been almost perfect communication. But I had messed up at the very end.
Good grief. It looks like it'll still take quite some time before I completely master perfect communication with Hiyori.
The engagement-ring gift had been marred, but Hiyori's mental state stabilized after that, one way or another.
Her late-night phone calls became less frequent, and I felt that her words and actions had gained a little more composure. It might have been a temporary change, but even so, the gift had been worth it.
When Hiyori calmed down, so did I. Since the Second Iruma Incident, nothing particularly eventful had happened, and the Demon King Gremlin was finally fully disassembled at the end of February.
Progress: 100%.
After more than eighty years, the work of disassembling the Demon King Gremlin was complete.
The total number of parts I had disassembled entirely by hand, one by one, was 524,288.
Even for me, hailed as the personification of dexterity, it had been an unprecedentedly long and arduous project.
It was a magnificent achievement that would go down in my personal history. No, it had really been difficult.
But it had been worth it. More than worth it.
I had also obtained information that could never have been discovered without completely disassembling it.
For example, the Demon King Gremlin's total part count of 524,288 is a power of two. It is exactly 2 to the nineteenth power.
I can state this with certainty: it was unquestionably done intentionally.
I had never even considered the significance of the total number of parts in a Geometric Gremlin until I finished the disassembly.
The Demon King Gremlin makes use not only of geometry, but also of squares.
With information like this coming to light, I needed to broaden my perspective even further.
The Demon King Gremlin might be a conglomeration of far more fields of study than I had imagined.
I'm an engineer by trade, so I can only analyze the Demon King Gremlin from that perspective.
It may simply be that my lack of knowledge has left my antenna too insensitive, but there was a good chance that leading experts would be able to discover entirely different things.
Materials engineering, particle physics…
Crystallography, organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, chemical engineering, structural biology, developmental biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence… There was no end to the fields that might be relevant.
Even an expert in one of those fields would be completely lost if the Demon King Gremlin were simply handed to them.
Because it looked like nothing more than a black gemstone.
However, by disassembling every part and creating exploded diagrams, I had made it possible for various specialists to analyze it from various perspectives.
In fact, Yamagami-san had used the documents I sent to the Magical University long ago to create a magic-power calculator.
If I handed the raw data I had painstakingly gathered through disassembly to experts around the world, surely it would lead to many more new technologies and discoveries.
In the first place, I had disassembled the Demon King Gremlin to use as a reference for making wands.
Now it also served as a warm-up before analyzing the Quodenenets of the Rus Kingdom, but its original purpose had been wandmaking.
The ownership of the Demon King Gremlin clearly belonged to me, and I had no obligation to hand its technology or information over to the world.
On the other hand, there was little point in keeping it all to myself.
The Demon King Gremlin was not something I could fully utilize on my own.
Yamagami-san had created a magic-power calculator from fragmentary information about the Demon King Gremlin.
The magic-power calculator would evolve into a calculator, and then into a computer.
Combined with a magic-power communication device, it could even become a smartphone.
The road would not be easy, but I could see the roadmap to the destination.
If I could extract the technology of an advanced magical civilization from the Demon King Gremlin, then a magic-power source would surely be more than a dream.
I had absolutely no idea how to accomplish that, but if the Gremlins overflowing throughout the world could be repurposed as a power source, we would no longer need to run steam engines on insanely expensive oil.
If I made the Demon King Gremlin's information available to the world, some genius might discover a magic-power source.
Computation, communication, and power.
If we secured those three things, this would no longer be a world of collapsed civilization.
Humanity would surely return to being an advanced civilization.
We would use the relics of the magical civilization that had destroyed the world to rebuild it.
Speaking of advanced civilization, web manga!
Online games!
Streaming dramas and movies!
Anime merchandise and gourmet foods from around the world delivered to your home with just a few clicks!
Information that appeared instantly with a search, without having to flip through thick reference books!
Woooooo! Long live advanced civilization!!
If dumping the Demon King Gremlin's data on the world would bring advanced civilization closer, then I would gladly do it.
Once I gathered up the Demon King Gremlin's exploded diagrams, the models used for verification, and all the duplicate parts we had enough of to provide, it amounted to a considerable quantity.
Thinking that I could simply send it to the Magical University as usual, I went to ask the Spider Witch-san, who was dozing in the Old Temple's nest, to deliver the huge load.
After hearing me out, the Spider Witch-san said pensively,
"This feels nostalgic. I feel like I've seen a movie like this before… What was the title? It was about analyzing a UFO that crashed long ago to advance science, or something like that…"
"Yeah, this is basically the same situation."
The Japanese have a long history of reverse-engineering the guns brought to Tanegashima, so we're good at this sort of thing.
"Yeah. That's why I think this is a political matter, not a university matter, honestly…"
"A political matter."
"Yes… Because this is too big. When we received the Demon King Gremlin, we were dealing with the American government too, right…?"
"Oh, true. Handing it over would be a political matter too? That makes sense."
What she said was perfectly reasonable, but this looked like it was going to become a real pain.
Once the state got involved, things would become incredibly tangled over vested interests and all that. What a drag.
Back then, the bureaucracy had been broken, so the Blue Witch's power-play negotiations had worked, but that would be difficult now. Right? It would be difficult, wouldn't it?
"Could we run this by the Foresight Mage and have her look into a future in which this messy situation lands softly…? Wait, is she dead? No, her son and daughters are in Hokkaido, right?"
"They are. My eldest son, the Foresight Mage who can produce sounds impossible to pronounce, is the governor of Hokkaido… but he isn't really suited to national politics, so I don't recommend bringing it to him…"
"Huh? Even though he can see the future? Is he high-spec but has a terrible personality or something?"
Thinking of Iruma, I asked anxiously, and the Spider Witch slowly shook her head.
"He was prime minister until fairly recently… but his reputation wasn't very good. His ability only extends to a prefectural scale, so we can't entrust national-scale matters to him…"
Apparently, the future-seeing eldest son had become prime minister with an unprecedentedly high approval rating, but he repeatedly changed policies from one day to the next, and his popularity plummeted. He resigned after one term and returned to his hometown in despair.
He didn't seem to be an incompetent person by any means, but his downfall was his inability to use his future-sight ability as well as his father.
He would look into the future and formulate policies based on what he saw, but whenever he saw a better future, he would change the policies accordingly.
Then, if he saw an even better future, he would change them again.
When repeated shifts in policy threw the people on the ground into confusion and dissatisfaction mounted, he would use his future sight to resolve the confusion and dissatisfaction.
Then the policies that actually mattered would be neglected.
He also sometimes misinterpreted the meaning of scenes he saw in the future, or allowed future sight to become a source of rigid preconceptions rather than deep strategic thinking.
After being tossed around by his own remarkable ability, the reputation of the future-seeing prime minister was terrible. The people had expected so much of him that their disappointment was apparently all the deeper.
Even that future-seeing eldest son was doing well in his hometown.
Apparently, he could make full use of his future-sight ability when dealing with politics on Hokkaido's scale.
The problem was that dealing with a nation-sized scale gave him too much to see and left him confused.
I see. So basically, he lacked the capacity for it. Though anyone capable of serving as governor already had considerable capacity.
It reminded me once again that for Transcendents, their personal qualities mattered just as much as their abilities.
Foresight Magic seemed stronger than Freezing Magic, yet the Blue Witch was actually the stronger one.
Foresight Magic seemed more impressive than Vampire Magic, yet the Vampire Mage was considered the more capable of the two.
Perhaps it was rare for a person's qualities and their magic to mesh perfectly.
"If the Foresight Mage is no good, then I'll leave everything to you, Spider Witch-san."
"What…? W-well… I can at least speak with the Witch Party and get it put on the agenda for the next summit…"
"Damn, that's powerful. If you can pull off something that incredible, why do you sound so unsure of yourself?"
"…I'm afraid of doing something that benefits the enemy."
"What? Ah, Iruma!? That bastard! He gave Spider-san trauma!
No, it's okay! Have confidence! You're capable! Spider-san is capable! And kind! Strong, cool, considerate, big, a spider, and a refined lady! Hey, Yamato Nadeshiko!"
Spider-san had become depressed, but after I showered her with praise for a while, she recovered her spirits, promised to spread the results of the Demon King Gremlin's disassembly throughout the world in the best way possible, and carried the luggage away.
What a relief. As expected, a spider is the friend to have, and a giant spider is the one to rely on!