Chapter 133
While I was transporting the more notable documents I'd swiped from Hatobato-san's mansion to the inn and examining them meticulously, Hiyori busied herself running around on matters related to Hatobato and reporting back to me.
Hiyori's investigation turned up a great deal of information.
The biggest revelation was the new fact that if I listened to the information Hiyori had worked so hard to gather while lounging around on the bed, she'd get angry and stop talking to me; the second was that she would forgive me if I apologized with genuine sincerity.
The third was Hatobato-san's history on Earth.
According to Hiyori's investigation, conducted by leaning on the Korean police through her Transcendent authority, Hatobato-san had casually arrived in Busan three months ago. His whereabouts before then were unknown.
Hatobato-san had nothing that could serve as identification, but he could read and write the magic language, the international common tongue. Thanks to that and his ability to control magic power, he was recognized as an educated mage, and a family registry entry was prepared for him as a citizen of the True Korean Republic.
Mages are respected in most countries. Besides, the rapidly growing and chaotic True Korean Republic had an underdeveloped legal system, with bribes and slapdash rulings running rampant, and nobody paid much attention to minor details. The groundwork was there for Hatobato-san to slip casually into society.
Hatobato-san had come to Busan alone. But as a first-rate magic-wand craftsman, he quickly made a fortune and bought a mansion. Alone in that enormous mansion, Hatobato-san began adding new servants almost every day.
The servants must have been those dolls. To make dolls with that level of performance at a daily production rate... Hatobato-san's skill was unfathomable.
The trick behind Hatobato-san's sudden fortune as a magic-wand craftsman became clear when I examined several magic wands Hiyori had acquired that he had made himself.
Hatobato-san was a user of duplication magic.
Every wand Hatobato-san had made was a precision copy of a branded product from the True Korean Republic's luxury magic-wand manufacturer, LG Wandworks.
The True Korean Republic's police and Hiyori had concluded that they were merely counterfeit brand-name goods, but my eyes couldn't be fooled.
Their components were perfectly identical in every detail, far beyond mere imitation or reproduction. I could do the same thing by hand, but considering the production speed and efficiency, making more than ten in three months would be unrealistic. If even I couldn't do it, there was no doubt it had been accomplished with magic.
Hatobato-san had made an easy fortune by copying high-end wands with duplication magic, mass-producing them, and selling them.
Hatobato-san was truly a dollmaker. He didn't seem to have any pride as a magic-wand craftsman.
I had predicted the existence of duplication magic long ago, so I wasn't surprised. In fact, the Demon King Gremlin had used a huge number of components that were so identical they looked as though they had been copied.
Whether Hatobato-san had been involved in manufacturing the Demon King Gremlin, or duplication magic was commonplace in the magical civilization, either seemed possible. I couldn't say for sure.
That Hatobato. Every time I tried to solve one of his mysteries, he created another one. I knew that already, but he was not to be underestimated.
Once he'd made his fortune, bought a mansion, and increased the number of servants, it seemed he had spent his time doing one of two things: making dolls at the mansion or visiting antique dealers. There had been no bad rumors about him.
Hatobato-san only left the mansion to go shopping.
He scoured used bookstores for books about electricity and robots.
He collected robots from the previous era and antique dolls from antique shops.
He also sometimes bought Gremlins and monster materials. Apparently, he had been at the pharmacy to buy monster materials as well. Judging from the documents Hatobato-san left behind, I assumed he used them as materials for making dolls.
He also bought fried chicken and kimchi like any ordinary person. The proprietor of his favorite food stall remembered Hatobato-san as the man who would buy huge amounts of Mixed Meat, a Korean dish, with extra broth.
Listening to all this was strangely deflating. Despite being steeped in an ideology so incendiary it could cause severe burns, he seemed to have lived an incredibly ordinary life.
Hiyori had assumed that he must have had a hidden side and loudly vowed to expose his dark misdeeds, but after hearing that he had carefully repaired a child's stuffed toy while waiting for a Tiger Taxi, she reluctantly admitted that Hatobato-san wasn't a bad guy. For now, at least.
Until the moment dolls surpassed humanity, Hatobato-san was simply a kindly old man who loved dolls.
The only problem was that the instant that moment arrived, he would become an utterly terrifying enemy of humanity.
The discovery of "Hatobato" was promptly reported to the major countries, and a search network was established. His portrait and distinguishing features were circulated among intelligence agencies worldwide, so from now on, Hatobato-san would be spotted almost immediately if he showed his face in a major city.
He hadn't committed any crime worthy of being wanted—on Earth, at least—so it was impossible to put him on a wanted list as a criminal. Apparently, they could even fabricate crimes that didn't exist, which was terrifying, but since we estimated that he would be safe for at least five hundred years, we were reluctant to provoke him unnecessarily. A search network had simply been put in place.
The fighting strength of Hatobato-san, whom the Blue Witch had judged troublesome to fight, could be rephrased as "capable of destroying a small country single-handedly." He was not someone we could casually make an enemy of.
Personally, I wanted to have more technical discussions and exchange opinions with Hatobato-san. It would be perfect if he could just forget his dangerous ideology. Things never seemed to work out that easily.
After doing everything she could regarding Hatobato-san and leaving the rest to the police, Hiyori belatedly began trying to digest the information she'd obtained from him.
In other words, she was researching how to reproduce translation magic, group return magic, and magic-power sealing.
I couldn't tell, but since Hiyori could see magic power, she had apparently been able to understand the flow of magic power in the spells Hatobato-san had used.
Just as Iruma had selfishly learned the silent magic of the magical civilization from the punishment spell of Octameteorite, Hiyori tried to work backward from Hatobato-san's magic and reproduce its silent spells.
The pure and innocent beautiful girl Hiyori didn't possess the kind of evil intelligence Iruma had, so she couldn't pull off the feat of sleeping one night and declaring, "All right, I've mastered it!"
Even so, she had the finest magical instincts humanity had to offer and humanity's greatest magic wand, Kyanos. She also had more experience handling silent magic than any other human.
To me, Hiyori looked as though she did nothing but sit in a chair at the inn all day with her eyes closed, frozen in place, but apparently she was repeatedly experimenting with one thing after another. Sometimes she became utterly exhausted just from sitting there, then carried me to bed in a daze and fell asleep.
In reality, before we reached the Rus Kingdom, we would be passing through various countries. Group return magic aside, if she could learn translation magic, the journey would become much more comfortable. It had been worth extending our stay in Korea to challenge ourselves to reproduce the magic.
While Hiyori struggled to learn a new spell, I was also struggling to develop new technology based on the documents Hatobato-san had left behind.
I couldn't properly read most of the documents because they were written in the magic language, so I had sent them to Professor Okojo by international mail and no longer had them with me.
My focus was on the unfinished doll and its blueprints.
If my guess was correct, I could use them as a reference to give a wand a four-dimensional storage function.
I should be able to pull a wand out of nowhere or store a bulky wand in empty space.
In the first place, four-dimensional storage itself was a familiar phenomenon. The pouch-like stomachs of pouch sparrows and dragons, which ignored volume and weight, were exactly that.
They said Quodenents was also a four-dimensional entity, so there was no doubt four-dimensional technology was involved.
But whether we could explain it theoretically and reproduce it technologically was another matter entirely.
Humanity made extensive use of pouch sparrow stomachs, but we still had absolutely no idea how they worked.
It was like how, in the previous era, 99.999 percent of humanity had used smartphones to their fullest without understanding their operating principles.
Being able to use a smartphone and being able to make one were two different things.
Using the fourth dimension and being able to create the fourth dimension were two different things as well.
However, the documents Hatobato-san left behind contained a breakthrough regarding the fourth dimension.
In my view, the "fourth dimension" understood scientifically by the people of Earth and the "fourth dimension" understood magically by the magical civilization had rather different meanings.
Just as a biologist explains humans as living organisms while an economist explains them in economic terms.
They were looking at the same thing from different perspectives.
While I was eating room-service Mixed Meat at the inn where I was breaking my record for consecutive nights and furiously sketching the blueprints for a testing device, Hiyori returned after going to the front desk to collect a letter.
"A reply came from Yamagami-san and Kei-chan. As for the magic language in the materials Hatobato left behind, apparently it has such strong dialect-like characteristics that analyzing it will take some time."
"A dialect...?"
"The characteristics of the writing are completely different from the Unknown Epic. Kansai dialect and Tsugaru dialect are both Japanese, but they're still different, right?"
"Ahh..."
I was disappointed to hear that we wouldn't know what was written there for a while, but it made sense, too.
We certainly should have anticipated that possibility.
Even on Earth, people used multiple languages, such as Japanese, Korean, and English.
The moment I learned that Hatobato-san, who came from the magical civilization, used something like translation magic, it was obvious that the magical civilization didn't have only one language. In fact, we were lucky that the difference between the Unknown Epic and Hatobato-san's speech was no greater than a dialect.
Hiyori handed me the letter from Yamagami-san, nibbled on some Mixed Meat, and sat in her usual chair by the window, entering that meditation-like state of concentration once again.
Mixed Meat is a meat dish that spread through Korea after the Gremlin Disaster. Several kinds of thinly sliced monster meat are marinated in a sauce packed with potent spices. It has a strong flavor, but becomes delicious once you get used to it. Humans get an upset stomach if they eat too much, but Hiyori seemed fine, and there were even reports of Hatobato-san binge-eating it, so he must have been fine as well. I was jealous.
In the end, I was the one who learned the new technology faster than Hiyori from the cryptic hints Hatobato-san had left behind.
It had been worth staying thirty consecutive nights at an inn where we'd originally planned to stay only one night. I had grasped one aspect of four-dimensional technology and brought it into reality.
I leaped up beside the experimental structure that had vanished from three-dimensional space in response to my unique magic power and struck a triumphant pose, then shook the shoulder of Hiyori, who was still sitting in her chair, transformed into a statue.
"Hiyori, Hiyori, lend me Kyanos for a bit! I did it!"
"..."
"Hiyori? Hey!"
"!? Hmm? What is it? Did you say something?"
"Lend me Kyanos. I'm going to upgrade it."
"What? I'm using it right now... It would be a problem if it became harder to use even if its performance improved. What are you going to do this time?"
"I'm going to install a four-dimensional storage function. I'll shape it so a Gömböc net can cover the entire wand without gaps, then close and assemble the net along the trajectory of a spirograph. That way, even if it's folded into four-dimensional space for storage, it will return to a stable state and can be taken out again. The tensegrity structure of the core will act as a stabilizer, so space won't invert and it won't drift away. That means we can call it back!"
Hiyori spent a full minute chewing over my explanation, then made a face that showed she hadn't digested a single character of it.
"Huh? What did you say?"
"Basically, I'll shave Kyanos down a little and reshape it, then install a tiny gear. If I run magic power through the gear, I can store it in four-dimensional space. The gear remains in three-dimensional space, so if I run magic power through it again, the wand will come back."
"...You mean you'll make it possible for the wand to disappear and reappear?"
"Yeah, basically."
Hiyori looked as though she still didn't quite understand, but it wasn't as if I understood it as well as I'd made it sound, either.
I had sent Hatobato-san's unfinished doll to Yamagami-san along with my notes, then taken the absurdly complicated theory he sent back and broken it down in my own way into a shape that could be realized technologically.
The latest magic wands were becoming impossible to make alone.
Yamagami-san alone would have nothing but an armchair theory, I couldn't understand the theory on my own, and without Hiyori, the finished product couldn't be operated.
I could somehow make a refrigerator by myself starting from gathering the materials, but making a computer by myself from the materials up was impossible.
Even my magic wands—the magic wands of humanity on Earth—were entering a field so advanced that producing them alone was becoming difficult.
Fuhahaha! Hatobato-san would be terrified and collapse in shock if he heard this.
Even if it was only possible because I had the groundwork from analyzing the Demon King Gremlin, in just thirty days I'd managed to catch the tip of my claw on the edge of four-dimensional technology!
I taught the panicking Hiyori how to call back the upgraded Kyanos after storing it in four-dimensional space and making it disappear. When Kyanos safely returned to my hand from four-dimensional space, I held it aloft and basked in my triumph. Take that.
I am the mythic magic-wand craftsman who has surpassed legend...!
When I learned that the Quodenents waiting in the Rus Kingdom was a four-dimensional geometric structure, I hadn't been confident that I could analyze it, but now I was beginning to think it might actually be possible.
Show me an opening, and I'll bite down and hang on, magical civilization. I'll unravel every bit of your advanced technology, refine it, and turn it into nourishment for my magic wands.