Chapter 145
According to Hiyori, the Chengdu Concession west of Wuhan is a remnant of China's unification.
Long ago, China borrowed Britain's strength when unifying its territory. Britain crushed the small countries that were China's enemies, then stationed its army in the countries it had defeated. That became the Chengdu Concession.
Nominally, it is Chinese territory, but the Chinese military cannot enter the Chengdu Concession. English education is provided, and Chinese is treated as a second language there. The top positions in nearly all major industries are held by Britons. In practice, it is a British exclave. You could even call it a colony.
Apparently, Britain and China have been at loggerheads over the Chengdu Concession for ages.
The climate around the Chengdu Concession suits Duns, so tiger monsters thrive there.
Duns are this magical age's equivalent of automobiles. In other words, the Chengdu Concession is a major automotive center, and Britain intends to hold on to it at all costs.
Well, no wonder they're at odds. If I got my hands on land with a magic-stone mine, I wouldn't give it up either.
Apparently, there's an agreement to return it to China after a few more decades, but who knows if that will actually happen.
Hiyori is acquainted with the British noble who rules the Chengdu Concession, so we decided to stop there to check the geography.
We're traveling through India on our way to the Kingdom of Rus, but there's a mountainous region between China and India. Hiyori says it has been more than fifty years since she last passed through it. To learn about the current situation, it is best to ask someone familiar with the area.
If only we had the internet, we could pull up the latest map in an instant. What an inconvenience.
When we entered the Chengdu Concession riding a Dun, the place already looked thoroughly British.
The brick-built townscape evoked the Industrial Revolution, with streetlamps lining the streets.
Smoke billowed from the chimneys, making the air a little smoky.
Gentlemen in black or gray frock coats, carrying magic wands of sedate design, walked along the streets. Ladies holding shopping baskets or parasols chatted at street corners. Their clothes... kind of look like Hiyori's. Or rather, they're witch-like robes. They have a certain charm.
"Mimimi... The air tastes great!"
Tsubaki trotted along beside the Dun carrying Hiyori and me. The tiger was afraid of the burning Tsubaki and refused to let her ride. She took a deep breath and beamed.
Well, you would. If a fire-aligned creature were coughing and wheezing in smoky air, it would be better off changing its affinity.
"Do you like it?"
"Mimi. This place seems like Sekitan's kind of place. The smell of coal is everywhere. I like it here too, but I won't claim it as my territory."
Tsubaki said that while biting down on the handle of Salamandra.
Apparently, she liked the feel between her teeth. Tsubaki often chewed on Salamandra's handle. It was made of metal, so it had no tooth marks, but it was always grimy with dried drool and ash. To a fire lizard, that was proof that she cherished it, so judging her as treating it carelessly by human standards would be missing the point.
Even so, as its maker, I wished she would use it a little more cleanly. I had mixed feelings about it.
About ten days had passed since it was made, but Salamandra still had not demonstrated its full potential. It was merely a high-temperature, high-pressure wand. Apparently, forming a minor core could not be accomplished overnight.
As we reached downtown, Hiyori dismounted from the Dun. She handed the reins to Tsubaki, smoothed the wrinkles in her robe, and adjusted the angle of her witch's hat.
"This should do. Oori, I'm going to the Stuart residence. I'll arrange for us to have dinner together at the inn, so wait for me there."
"Count on me. Bring back a good job for us."
"Who knows? He is a man who cares about the quality of things, but he is also a man who cares about decorum."
As a potential buyer for magic wands made from the fine wood Kinrenka had prepared and the high-quality Gremlins I had bought along the way, I had set my sights on the noble lord who ruled this Chengdu Concession.
If Hiyori brought back a promising job, high-end wandmaker 0933 would surely deliver the high-quality wand he wanted.
Gathering information to make our route to the Kingdom of Rus safe and reliable was important, but I wanted her to work just as hard on promoting my wands.
"I'll be going, then. Tsubaki, take care of Oori. The inn is the one with a sign reading The First Oriental, straight down this road and on the right... Can you read English?"
"I can. A-B-C-M-E-F-G!"
"Uh, Oori?"
"Leave English to me. Until we get inside the inn."
I pinned down the route to the inn and left the check-in conversation to Tsubaki. Perfect teamwork.
Hiyori looked a little uneasy, but after looking back at us several times, she parted ways and disappeared into the crowd. Now, now, leave it to us. I can certainly manage staying behind at an inn.
The inn where the two of us checked in was a lower grade than the places we had stayed before.
The windows were sooty, and tracing a finger through the grime left a faint smiley face. The stable where we left the Dun aggressively masked the smell of excrement with a strong herbal fragrance, leaving the tiger sneezing and squinting.
There was one huge bed, one sofa, and a fireplace. Since it was summer, there was naturally no firewood or ash in it; the fireplace had been cleaned out. Tsubaki stuck her face inside to sniff it, then breathed fire in displeasure.
"This inn no good. Fireplace here, but no ash spread inside. Bedmaking, disqualified."
"The cleaning's questionable, but this is probably normal. If you want ash, go get some from the kitchen."
"Mimimi, I will. I'll get some oil for a snack, too."
"..."
"..."
"Aren't you going?"
"The Blue Witch asked me to guard Oori. I won't leave Oori's side until the Blue Witch returns. I am strong. This time, I will protect the pack."
Tsubaki trotted over to my feet, gathered my wand and hammer into her arms, hugged them together, and curled up between my legs, mewing "Mimimi" like she had when she was a hatchling.
Cute. And admirable.
I had actually been attacked after someone broke through my guards and turned me into a puppet, so I couldn't call this overprotective even if my mouth were torn open. Though if my mouth actually were torn open, I suppose I could say it.
Tsubaki had failed to make Wuhan her territory and was traveling with us in search of a new utopia. For now, she wanted to inspect the olive groves around the Mediterranean, so our routes overlapped as far as the Black Sea, with the Kingdom of Rus as our destination.
Until then, I could spend time with this adorable pet. I wanted to dote on her until she found a comfortable territory and began living independently of her owner.
While teasing Tsubaki with my toes, I performed a light experiment on some large Gremlins I had stockpiled to kill time until Hiyori returned from negotiating with the British noble.
It was an experiment in processing teleportation magic.
A year had passed since I extracted the fire-lizard Gremlin and began training my magic. My magic reserves had surpassed 80K, enough to operate teleportation magic.
The lowest-tier teleportation spell, "Inanimate Exchange Teleportation," cost 50K magic power. Using it once would be no problem.
For an ordinary person who cannot control magic, using this spell requires a complicated procedure.
First, you have to build up static electricity in both hands by whatever means you can.
Electricity does not occur on a planet infested with Gremlins, but that does not mean absolutely nothing is generated. There seems to be some minimum voltage or something that makes Gremlins react, and truly weak electricity—too weak to make electronic devices respond—is ignored by them.
If every kind of electricity were completely suppressed, human bioelectricity would disappear and humanity would have gone extinct long ago. In that sense, it was only natural.
This time, I generated static electricity by rubbing synthetic fiber against my palms.
Once enough electricity has accumulated in your hands, they start tingling, so you know immediately.
According to a technical book I read while I was in Japan, this reaction occurs when static electricity rises above a threshold voltage, causing Gremlins to form inside the body and stimulate the nerves.
The tingling symptoms naturally subside within half a day to three days, depending on the individual. Healing magic can cure them as well.
Hiyori once told me that the hellish agony caused by the massive generation of Gremlins inside the body when one transforms into a Transcendent is reduced to a few-thousandths of that intensity in this milder form, and that mutation studies make use of it in various ways.
Once you've charged static electricity into your hands, touch your little fingers together and your thumbs together to form a loop. Be careful not to let any fingers other than the little fingers and thumbs touch one another.
Then spin around and around! You use centrifugal force to gather blood in your hands. You do not actually need to spin if you can get the blood to your hands by other means, but this is the quickest and easiest way.
"Mimimi. I won't do spinny-throw anymore. I'm an adult."
"No, this isn't—ah, right. Tsubaki is an adult, isn't she?"
Tsubaki must have remembered the game I used to play when she was a hatchling, when I would wrap her tiny body in both hands, spin around, and toss her into a pile of ash. She objected sulkily while moving away from my feet.
It was a misunderstanding, but I did not correct her and simply praised her. A real adult doesn't go around saying, "I won't do that because I'm an adult!" Not very often, anyway. Even when they're adults.
While I flailed both hands around and around under Tsubaki's suspicious gaze, I suddenly felt them go cool.
That meant the second stage was complete.
I regulated my breathing, then brought the tips of my little fingers and thumbs together at a single point.
The four fingers formed an infinity symbol.
Finally, I separated my hands and made one loop with each hand. It looked like a hand position some Buddhist statue might use.
These two loops were used to designate the targets of the teleportation magic.
I could exchange the object I viewed with only my right eye through the loop in my left hand for the object inside the loop in my right hand.
At most, an object approximately 50 mm in diameter could have its position exchanged through space.
Demons and Transcendents, on the other hand, could use this spell without going through such a ridiculously tedious procedure.
They only had to designate the teleportation target through magic control and chant the spell normally.
On top of that, the size of the target was not restricted as long as they had enough magic power. They could teleport a one-meter rock or even a ten-meter house.
What a difference!!
It really drove home the advantage of magic control in a magical civilization.
Ordinary people who could not do the "normal" thing that demons and Transcendents took for granted had built up years of painstaking research just to make teleportation magic usable.
I had filled the eighty-year gap by devouring papers and technical books centered on Gremlin engineering, so I was not well versed in mutation theory or incantation theory. Even so, every field had certainly advanced in a manner befitting eighty years.
Eighty years ago, there was no way anyone could have discovered such an incomprehensible procedure!
"Let's exchange. Don't hold back; we're friends, aren't we?"
I peered at the Gremlin on the table through the hole in my left hand and imagined the range of the teleportation.
I visualized it intensely, solidifying the image until I could almost see an illusion, then chanted the teleportation spell. The inside of the large Gremlin was hollowed out into a sphere, and the hollowed-out contents appeared inside the loop formed by my right hand.
"Oh! I did it, I did it. So this is what teleportation feels like. I see."
"??? Oori, why do you do something so incomprehensible? It's easy if you just do it normally. Let's exchange. Don't hold back; we're friends, aren't we? ... See, I did it."
While I basked in my modest sense of accomplishment, Tsubaki, genuinely puzzled and without a hint of malice, used the remaining Gremlin on the table to do exactly what I had done.
Y-you little...! Showing off like that! Of course it's easy for a demon!
Since I had the chance, I compared the Gremlin I had hollowed out with the one Tsubaki had hollowed out. Much to my chagrin, Tsubaki's had been hollowed into a proper sphere. Mine was a little warped, with a blurry-looking roughness on the surface.
The difference was probably whether one used magic control to operate the spell properly or forced it through with tricks despite being unable to control magic.
I had thought my dexterity might make it work somehow, but it did not. The wall between being able to control magic and not being able to was enormous.
If this was the quality I ended up with, it would be better for me to process the material by carving it with my hands instead of using teleportation magic.
I also came to understand that someone with magic control as skilled as Hiyori's could use the teleportation magic processing method to make magic wands of reasonably presentable quality. So that's why modern wand processing had developed.
People who were far clumsier than me had devised all sorts of ingenious methods and built up their techniques. I could not underestimate them.
As I jotted down my impressions from this hands-on teleportation experiment and compiled my analysis, Tsubaki, who had been untying and retying my shoelaces at my feet, raised her head and stared at the door.
A short while later, I heard footsteps, and Hiyori opened the door and returned.
"Welcome back, Blue Witch. I kept watch properly!"
"Hmm, yes. Good work, Tsubaki."
"Welcome back. You look kind of... off. Couldn't you get the noble to order any wands?"
The minister in charge of sales negotiations, wearing a vaguely troubled expression, opened and closed her mouth several times in hesitation.
When I tilted my head, wondering what had happened, Hiyori asked cautiously:
"Oori isn't trying to become famous or gain power by selling wands, is he?"
"Well, pretty much. I want the wand to become famous so I can grin about it, but I'm fine with remaining unknown myself. Why?"
When I asked her in return, Hiyori looked a little relieved.
"It is a nuisance. But I judged that this could also serve as political backing. I will absolutely protect you, but having more allies is still better. So... I agonized over this quite a bit myself, but..."
"Spit it out. What happened?"
Prompted by the witch's indecisive mumbling, Hiyori cleared her throat and spoke.
"Oori, how about making a scepter? I secured a commission to make a Regalia that will legitimize the throne of a noble who is about to declare independence from Britain."