Chapter 129
A full year had passed since I came back to life. It was April, the season of dancing cherry blossoms, when Hiyori and I set out together for the Rus Kingdom to repay the debt we owed for being taught resurrection magic.
The Rus Kingdom is a country in the former Russian territory. It is an isolated, landlocked nation with poor access. We would travel 12,000 kilometers by taking ships and steam trains, then walking wherever there were no transportation networks. According to Hiyori, we would arrive in roughly two months.
We took a steam train to Lake Biwa, then rented a two-person tiger demon beast to take us to Fukuoka.
On the very day we arrived in Fukuoka, we booked a first-class cabin on a passenger ship to the Korean Peninsula departing from Hakata Bay, and Hiyori immediately began the departure procedures at customs while lecturing me. Since the Blue Witch was treated as a dignitary, we were directed to a separate lane from ordinary travelers as soon as we entered customs.
The security inspector in a crisply pressed uniform bowed to us, and I casually hid behind Hiyori's back.
"Hello. May I see your passports...? Aoyama Hiyori-sama and Oori Kenji-sama, correct?"
"Yes."
"Yeah..."
"If you are carrying any designated magical artifacts, please present them."
"Yes. This is my Transcendent Certificate, and this is the Dragon Furnace-Carved Seven-Layer Blue Magic Wand, Kyanos."
"T-the Prototype Demon Lord Wand, Reficle, and an Octameteorite..."
As Hiyori handed over her card and wand, I followed suit, submitting my own wand and the Octameteorite fragment kept in my amulet case.
As part of our departure, Kyanos and Reficle had their security upgraded.
The components that melt and resolidify inside the silent-casting mechanisms were replaced with uniquely colored Gremlins made by mixing in the owner's blood, so the wands would respond only to the owner's magic.
In other words, Kyanos could cast magic only with Hiyori's magic power, and Reficle only with mine. That was a powerful security lock.
Even if someone stole or seized them, they would be nothing more than sticks with gemstones attached, so there would be no danger of them being misused.
Hiyori hated letting anyone else handle her wand, but even she handed Kyanos over with a sour look, trusting the new security lock.
The inspector's hands trembled slightly as they examined two of the world's only three silent-casting magic wands.
Fuhahahaha! Impressive, aren't they? It's like nuclear weapons are leaving the country.
Two strategic-class magic wands, each worth at least one hundred billion yen, made by an unprecedented legendary master craftsman!
...Thinking about it that way, it's amazing we can leave the country through such a simple procedure. Still, it's much better than being subjected to a convoluted, absurdly tedious process and held up for days.
The security inspector carefully examined the designated magical artifacts before returning them to us. They wiped the cold sweat from their brow and looked relieved, as though they had finally let go of a bomb that could explode at any moment.
"All right, that's everything. Please proceed to the clairvoyance magic area over there. We apologize for the inconvenience, but please deactivate any defensive magic that might interfere with the scan until you have passed through the area. Take care."
"Thank you."
"Thanks..."
My first time leaving the country involved a lot of unfamiliar procedures, but in principle it was the same as in the pre-magic era.
In short, important cultural artifacts and nuclear weapons are checked when taken out of the country.
They also check whether you are carrying anything dangerous.
Naturally, there are passport checks and identity verification as well.
X-ray inspections had simply been replaced with clairvoyance magic, and the checklists had been adapted to the magic era. There was nothing worth bracing myself for.
Once we had cleared departure inspection, we boarded without delay. The black-painted steamship with a chimney jutting out of it looked as though it had traveled backward through time, but this was the cutting edge now. We climbed the gangplank and opened the door to our first-class cabin, revealing a spacious room like a hotel suite.
There was one king-size bed, along with a refrigerator and a closet. Magical fire burned in a lamp fixed to the writing desk. An avant-garde painting I couldn't understand hung on the wall, completing the stylish decor.
While I rummaged through the refrigerator, closet, and drawers, checking what was inside, Hiyori put the hand luggage we had brought into the built-in safe.
"There isn't much in here. The window's huge, but it doesn't open...? Oh, maybe the salt air would damage the interior."
"Is this your first time on a passenger ship, Oori?"
"I've been on fishing boats. Big ships don't rock much, do they?"
"It'll probably rock a little more once we set sail."
While we chatted about this and that and gazed at the scenery of Hakata Bay outside the window, we spotted something strange.
Plastic trash was floating on the surface of the sea.
The turmoil immediately after the Gremlin disaster was one thing, but plastic production had ended eighty years ago. Why was there still this much trash floating around?
"It's a negative legacy from the pre-magic era..."
"What are you talking about? ...Ah, that isn't plastic. It's a marine ooze carcass."
"What's that? Wait, I feel like I've heard of it somewhere... or maybe not."
According to Hiyori, the marine ooze problem had been growing steadily more serious in recent years, and nations with coastal regions had held talks about it repeatedly.
Marine ooze is a type of slime that lives in the sea. It drifts across the surface like a jellyfish and eats any inanimate object it spots. In the pre-magic era, the enormous mass of marine garbage floating in the world's oceans—150 million tons, the equivalent of 1.2 million Tokyo Domes—was gradually and thoroughly eliminated over the course of decades by marine ooze that had slowly proliferated.
That did not mean beautiful seas had returned to Earth.
Marine ooze sits low on the food chain and serves as food for the monsters living in the sea, but it has thick, flabby skin.
Marine predators eat only the insides of the marine ooze, then spit out the tough, unappetizing skin that is difficult to digest.
The result is that, instead of vast amounts of marine garbage, vast amounts of marine ooze skin drift through the oceans.
The sea becomes covered in translucent, flabby skin resembling the corpses of jellyfish. Apparently, walking along the coastline the morning after a major storm presents the unpleasant sight of a beach seemingly covered in thick plastic.
Washed-up marine ooze carcasses suffocate creatures living on the shore, while they also become tangled in steamship propellers and cause breakdowns. They simply ruin the scenery as well.
On top of that, pouch sparrows absolutely hate the distinctive smell produced by marine ooze. When forced to fly over the sea, they usually shed tiny tears, pitifully enduring the pain as they desperately try to complete their delivery duties.
Marine ooze became the sworn enemy of pouch sparrow enthusiasts, and stranded marine ooze and its skin were removed almost exclusively by charitable organizations devoted to that cause.
For all the harm it caused, the marine ooze's greatest advantage was that its skin contained a small amount of a mana-restoring component.
If the component was extracted and collected, it could be made into a perfectly respectable mana-restoring potion.
But extracting ten thousand yen worth of mana-restoring potion cost approximately three hundred thousand yen.
That was the result reached after more than thirty years of research and repeated attempts to lower the cost.
Marine ooze was an intolerable nuisance, yet the disposal costs kept piling up.
Monster scholars and magical-pharmacology scholars had more or less thrown in the towel, arriving at the long-view conclusion that if the carcasses were piled together and left for several hundred to a thousand years, they would naturally decompose and leave behind a mass of medicinal components.
"So after about a thousand years, we'd have deposits of mana-restoring potion ingredients formed in layers like geological strata? That's romantic. Sounds great."
"It doesn't sound great. A thousand years is far too long a planning horizon for ordinary humans. The problem is happening now."
As I waxed philosophical over the long sweep of history, Hiyori coolly called me out.
Well, yes. Even a policy planned on a ten-year horizon was considered long-term, so a thousand-year plan was a dream beyond dreams.
But obsessing over the scale of puny human beings was narrow-minded. Geologically speaking, one could even call a thousand years a short time to see results.
"The dead marine ooze will probably turn into something like guano eventually."
"Guam?"
"Guano. It's the stuff made from seabird droppings piling up and fossilizing, like a mound of saltpeter. Apparently, it was heavily mined as nitrogen fertilizer and a raw material for gunpowder, helping support modern industry. Not that I know all that much about it."
Coal and oil had originally been living things in the distant past.
The accumulated endeavors of living things brought abundant resources to the future across the ages.
From Sataishu's True-Core Theory to the replacement of animals with monsters, Earth was spending vast stretches of time slowly adapting to its new environment of magic.
The marine ooze problem was merely one current in the immense flow of Earth's history.
Our lifespans had become incredibly long, so there was no point getting worked up over problems right in front of us.
Let's look forward to seeing the deposits of mana-restoring potion ingredients that would have formed a thousand years from now.
"You're talking as though this has nothing to do with you, but it does. Trade ships sometimes get into accidents because of marine ooze and sink along with their cargo. The large Chinese Gremlin you ordered last year never arrived for the same reason."
"Damn you, marine ooze!"
This was unforgivable. The nations of the world needed to unite and deal with the marine ooze problem immediately!
You're too slow! What are you doing!? The people are in trouble right now!
I was genuinely furious, but Hiyori laughed, looking amused.
Strangely, whenever I looked at Hiyori's gentle smile, with all its former sharpness gone, my anger ebbed away.
The journey had only just begun, but it was already a little fun. Traveling abroad together every once in a while wasn't so bad.
Eventually, the ship's whistle sounded long and loud, and the ship began to move.
We were setting sail, and we were leaving the country.
We were heading for the Rus Kingdom by the southern route via Busan rather than the northern route via Karafuto because Tsubaki had reportedly been sighted this way.
If we managed to find her, I wanted to deliver the assortment of plant oils Sekitan had entrusted to me.
I wondered whether the last of my pets, the one raised in Okutama, was doing well.
As I contemplated the journey that would continue for the next two months, Hiyori murmured to herself.
"I hope nothing happens during our journey. I want to take my time and enjoy traveling with Oori."
"You're such a worrier. Traveling doesn't automatically mean we'll run into an incident."
"I want to think that. But whenever I spend time with you, Oori, I feel like something or other always happens."
"False accusation!"
Aside from the time we spent dead, Hiyori and I had known each other for about seven years.
Sure, a lot had happened, but it wasn't as though our lives had been nothing but incidents.
I began counting the incidents on my fingers.
In seven years, there had been the Giant Monster Landing, the Dragon Witch's Kidnapping, the Mushroom Pandemic, Tsugibi's Arson Rampage, my appendectomy, the Arataki Group Raid, the Demon Lord's Appearance, the Arrival of the Black Ships, the Mermaid Witch's Surgery, the Tokyo Christmas Earthquake, the Zombie Panic, my Death, my Resurrection, the Tsugibi Seal Release Incident, Tiamat's Arrival, and the Sealing of Second-Generation Iruma.
...
Aren't there too many incidents? Seven years had contained enough trouble for seven lifetimes. What on earth was going on with my life?
"All right, I admit incidents might happen. But let's try to avoid them as much as possible."
"Can we avoid them?"
"We can improve our chances of avoiding them. I'll try not to do anything strange, so you try to avoid using violence too, Hiyori.
Don't do anything strange. Don't destroy anything. Don't smack anyone.
Let's keep 'Ohashi' in mind."
"How does a modified slogan like that roll off your tongue so naturally? Well, fine. I understand. I'll refrain from using force whenever possible. If I can have a normal honeym... vacation, that would be ideal."
"Right?"
We had reached an agreement. There would probably be some trouble with the Quodenets investigation in the Rus Kingdom, but there was no need to get into a dispute before we even got there.
First, it would take ten hours to reach Busan Port in the True Korean Republic. We would stay quietly in our first-class cabin so we wouldn't get into trouble with the other passengers.