Chapter 135
Having passed through customs at the border and entered China, we reached Shenyang a few hours later.
Shenyang, in the Liao River basin, was a major city of one million people, making full use of the vast, fertile land the great river provided to feed its population.
The cobblestone boulevard was bursting with life, and steamboats belching thick clouds of smoke traveled busily up and down the great river as it meandered through the city. The smoke was billowing like crazy.
The moment I got out, the smoky air assaulted my throat. It was incredibly scratchy. And there was a faint stink, too. It smelled like garbage.
As I squinted through the irritation, Hiyori took my hand, hailed a Tiger Taxi, and headed for the outskirts.
A city of one million people was a major metropolis by the standards of this era.
Cities like Tokyo, which had maintained a large population continuously since the previous era, were rare. According to Hiyori, cities that had suffered drastic population declines in the Gremlin Disaster and regained metropolitan status through rapid redevelopment generally had some kind of distortion.
Busan hadn't smelled strange—though perhaps I just hadn't noticed over the spices—but its administrative procedures had been sloppy, leaving Hatobato-san free to do as he pleased.
China had more thorough entry procedures than Korea, including confirmation of vaccinations against Shadow Sickness and Mushroom Sickness, but apparently it also had pollution problems.
Garbage disposal was inadequate, and the city was kept running by burning low-quality coal, oil, and anything else combustible at full blast, so the air downtown was terrible. It was like London during the Industrial Revolution. Japan had gone through a period like that, too, so perhaps developing cities everywhere were more or less alike in every era.
However, once we left downtown and arrived at a hotel in the outskirts, with ranches and fields all around it, the air was much cleaner and the smell of garbage was gone. I could finally breathe a sigh of relief.
While Hiyori handled check-in, I looked out the window at golden wheat fields stretching across the vast plain.
And at gray rocks rolling around in the ranch plots set among the wheat fields.
What are those...?
The rocks were moving around on their own, as if they were alive. Were they magic beasts?
I'd heard that China's Gremlin industry was thriving.
They grew huge amounts of crops on their fertile, expansive land, used those crops to raise huge numbers of magic beasts, and harvested huge, large-grained Gremlins from those beasts.
If Japan's main magical secondary industry was magic wands and America's was magic metal, then China's was primary industry. It was the starting point of the magical industry, responsible for producing the Gremlins indispensable to making magic wands and magic metal. I used quite a lot of large-grained Gremlins from China myself.
Given those circumstances, those were probably magic beasts used to harvest Gremlins.
But the only Chinese specialty magic beast I knew of was the Carbuncle.
After checking in and returning with the room key, Hiyori followed my gaze and waved the paper in her hand.
"I just got a brochure for a tour of the ranch. Want to go tomorrow?"
"Hmm, what should we do? Those rocks are magic beasts being raised at the ranch, right? What are they like?"
"What was the Chinese name again...? In Japan, they're called Pearl Rocks."
"Oh?"
According to Hiyori, the round rocks that rolled around on their own were called Pearl Rocks, and in theory, they were magic beasts capable of producing even eight-layer Gremlins that surpassed Kyanos.
Pearl Rocks were Hei-1-class magic beasts with self-regenerating Gremlins. Even if their Gremlins cracked or chipped, they repaired themselves, and even if the entire thing was lost, a new one grew back.
While many monsters became ill, weakened, or even died when they lost their Gremlins, types like Pearl Rocks were rare.
The magic-beast industry had taken notice of the Pearl Rocks' Gremlin-regeneration ability and was attempting to produce multilayered Gremlins through farming rather than processing.
In principle, it was similar to pearl cultivation.
First, they extracted the Pearl Rock's Gremlin.
They shaved the extracted Gremlin into a small sphere and thinly coated its surface with a metal film.
When they returned the coated Gremlin to its original location, the Pearl Rock formed a new Gremlin layer around its now-smaller Gremlin and repaired it.
Once the outer Gremlin layer had grown thick enough, they extracted it again.
At this point, from the inside out, the Gremlin had a three-layer structure: "inner core—metal layer—outer shell."
They then made a small hole in the outer shell and poured in an acidic solution to dissolve and remove the metal, completing a two-layer Gremlin.
By repeating the same process, they could increase the multilayered structure to seven layers, eight layers, a hundred layers, or as many as they wanted. Amazing!
...But this was only theoretical, and of course there were problems.
Pearl Rocks could regenerate their Gremlins, but if they regenerated while incorporating impurities, they became ill and did not live long.
At present, two layers was the limit. And if two layers were all you needed, Carbuncles had lower upkeep costs and larger grains.
If they could establish even a method for managing the Pearl Rocks' health, they could mass-produce multilayered Gremlins surpassing Kyanos's seven layers, but for now, that was nothing more than a pipe dream.
Even so, people couldn't stop chasing that dream, and experimental farming of Pearl Rocks was apparently continuing in various places.
I see.
Mamono-kun was also working hard on research into training and breeding ghost monsters, so research in the magic-beast field was pretty exciting, too. It was full of possibilities.
"Hiyori, do you think the apology gift we send the Wuxian Group should be related to magic beasts after all? They're interested in wands too, since they bid on the Golden Rule Jade Staff, but I'm starting to think the main thing their customers want is magic beasts."
"I don't think an apology is necessary as long as we've honored the sales contract... But honestly, wouldn't anything do? The Wuxian Group seems to have bought it for the technology used in the Golden Rule Jade Staff, rather than for the staff itself."
"I see? Then maybe I'll send them some interesting technology."
I crossed my arms and nodded, and Hiyori gave me an uneasy look.
"Tell me before you send it, okay...?"
"Why?"
"When you made Kyanos for me, you were thinking of it as something like a strong, cool magical wand, not a nuclear weapon, weren't you?"
"Ngh! I can't argue with that."
There were times when the world wound up foaming at the mouth and collapsing because of a wand I made while getting carried away.
There might even be times when the world was turned upside down by technology I presented as nothing more than an apology gift. To be safe, I would have Hiyori check it later.
Since I wanted to take my time making something suitable as an apology gift, we decided to stay at the hotel for seven days and seven nights.
Hiyori had been interested in sampling authentic Chinese cuisine, but the Chinese food from room service was good enough, so she went back to sitting in a chair in the corner of the room and meditating all day.
Hiyori meditates all the time, doesn't she? Still, thanks to that, I get to enjoy the benefits of translation magic, so I can't complain.
We decided on an "Iatros Glass" and a "Four-Dimensional Storage Box" as our apology gifts for the Wuxian Group.
I would make a box with the same effect as the void-storage function implemented in Kyanos, place a heavily modified Magia Glass inside it, and send it to them.
The Iatros Glass was a heavily modified Magia Glass that I'd tinkered with to pass the time on the train.
By combining its property of reacting to innate magic colors with the principle of the three-dimensional Apollonius problem, it could diagnose several magic illnesses.
What I had really been trying to do was somehow create a magic ruler that could be mass-produced, but I couldn't manage it.
I hadn't been able to make what I wanted, but what I made instead wasn't bad. It had to be an excellent item that would be a huge boon to the medical industry. And if I sacrificed some precision, craftsmen other than me could mass-produce it, too. That was a plus.
At present, magic illnesses such as being unable to use magic or developing an allergy to magic could only be identified after symptoms appeared.
Apparently, if one could control one's magic power, one could see obviously unstable magic power and determine whether an illness was present, but not what specific condition it was.
But!
With the Iatros Glass, you can identify several kinds of magic illness at a glance just by touching it! Not all of them, but several!
If I prepared around ten or twenty thousand of them, each with a different ratio between the volumes of the spheres inside the structure, then theoretically, touching every one of them should lay bare all the information about the properties of the user's magic power.
For example, Hiyori's magic was so compatible with ice magic that merely activating it and letting it flow freely made it cold, and the Iatros Glass could identify that as well. It might even be possible to make two types of magic react and determine whether their wielders were related by blood.
...In theory, anyway. I hadn't tested it because I couldn't handcraft tens of thousands of them one by one. I'd already had my fill of that kind of thing with Demon King Gremlin.
As I wrote the Iatros Glass instruction manual with a grin, Hiyori, who was inspecting the four-dimensional storage box and testing its performance, glanced sideways at me.
"Are you having that much fun?"
"I just thought this was pretty fantastical. We're heading into an era where touching a crystal tells you the amount and properties of your magic power, you know?"
"Yeah. A magic-power thermometer."
"...Well, yes, but still."
Her extremely down-to-earth analogy took some of the wind out of my sails.
There had to be something more like, you know...?
"What?! A wielder of seven-colored magic power with aptitude for magic of every attribute?! It's been a hundred years!"
Or something.
"You blew up the magic-power gauge?! Just how much magic power do you have...?"
Or something.
I thought a huge uproar over simply measuring someone's magic power was a fantasy staple, but Hiyori didn't really understand that sort of thing, which made me feel lonely. Our manga collection at home was mostly romance, gourmet, and slice-of-life series. Those were practically all she read.
Maybe I should have Hiyori introduce me to the manga she liked instead.
"Ah."
"Huh?"
While I was thinking about our manga preferences, Hiyori suddenly let out a startled cry.
The four-dimensional storage box Hiyori had been fiddling with on her lap was gone.
What?
I-it disappeared?
Why?
"W-why did it disappear? I haven't even put on the Spirograph Gear yet! It shouldn't be able to fold into the fourth dimension."
"S-sorry. I traced along the lines while twisting my magic power, and somehow it activated..."
"What...?"
Hiyori frantically made grasping motions at empty space, trying to pull the storage box out of the fourth dimension, but it was already too late. I hadn't installed the tensegrity structure yet, so we had no way to determine its coordinates.
It had completely drifted into the fourth dimension.
It was like sinking a smartphone with its signal blocked somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. We would never find it again.
"I didn't make it disappear on purpose! H-how do we call it back? The gear disappeared along with it. The gear should have stayed behind, shouldn't it...?"
"Well, to cut to the chase, it's already too late. You had an accident. Tough break. Four-dimensional technology is more dangerous than I thought."
If anything, it was lucky this had happened now.
Four-dimensional theory was still at a very basic stage. Not even that—I'm at the stage of applying, by feel, the foundational theory Yamagami-san constructed. Unexpected behavior could happen any number of ways.
It was lucky that the accident had only made something disappear into the void. If something like this was possible, it could have taken the surrounding space and Hiyori with it and vanished.
Too dangerous.
"Hiyori, calm down. It's okay. If anything, you're an incredibly talented debugger! A genius at finding bugs! It's a good thing it disappeared. Seriously."
"Ugh... Dairi's being nice..."
I calmed the shaken Hiyori and let out a small sigh.
It would be better to send only the Iatros Glass to the Wuxian Group as an apology gift.
The four-dimensional storage box was far too dangerous. If the apology gift malfunctioned, swallowed up the surrounding space, and annihilated it, that wouldn't be an apology—it would be terrorism. No joking matter.
It was a really good thing Hiyori had served as the product tester. Really good.
What you need is a girl who can debug!