Chapter 16
A first-rate craftsman must be well versed in materials engineering, no matter the era.
Carbon nanotubes, cutting-edge synthetic fibers, heat-resistant materials, and the like have brought innovation not only to industry, but also to the world of hands-on craftsmanship.
In the old days, blacksmiths established workshops near mines and iron-sand deposits in search of high-quality iron, while carpenters carefully learned the properties of building materials and chose them according to the structure they were constructing.
By understanding materials and using good ones, a craftsman can dramatically improve the quality of his work.
I'm the most dexterous man in the world, but when it comes to materials engineering, I have to admit I'm barely more knowledgeable than a layman.
As the world's only and best Wandmaker, I need to master not only how to process magic stones and Gremlins, my materials, but also their properties.
I'm not one to let my guard down. Even after making Cuanos and Aleister, my path of study is far from over.
Back when I was making money selling anime merchandise through online auctions, inferior copies of my work—apparently made with a 3D printer—started circulating and stole my market share.
At present, there is no magic-wand craftsman better than me.
But if I rest on my laurels, newcomers will copy my techniques, overtake me, and eventually sneer, "He used to be amazing, but look at him now. What a has-been. Ha-ha."
My dexterity isn't something that can be copied easily, but if some technological innovation brings the precision machinery gathering dust back into use, everything could change in an instant.
Never, ever let my guard down.
A year after the abduction and confinement incident, I had completed the reverberatory furnace in the hills behind my house and begun my Gremlin-melting experiments. Gremlins were important, readily available general-purpose materials that formed the cores of magic wands. If I wanted to deepen my knowledge, this was the place to start.
I lit the furnace, pumped air with the foot-operated bellows, and reread my notes to review the experiment.
It was well known that the larger a Gremlin or magic stone was, the greater its magic-amplifying effect. But even the largest naturally occurring Gremlins were only 28 millimeters in diameter. If I wanted a larger mass, I would have to make one artificially.
Gremlins that were shaved down and fitted together, or joined with an adhesive, were not treated as a single mass. So I wondered: If I simply melted a large quantity of Gremlins at high temperatures and then cooled them into a solid, wouldn't I get one enormous mass?
Gremlins were milky-white crystals resembling quartz, so they looked as though they ought to melt like quartz.
Of course, this was an idea anyone could come up with. The Witch of Rekindling had tried it long ago. Apparently, the Blue Witch had also taken part in a Gremlin melting-and-synthesis experiment conducted shortly after the Gremlin disaster, and she told me the results from back then.
The Witch of Rekindling's experiment had failed. The low-powered beginner fire spells could not melt the Gremlins at all, while using the most powerful fire spell did not melt them—instead, they turned to dust and vanished while emitting violet lightning.
Based on these results, it was theorized that Gremlins, which grew by absorbing electricity, contained and stored the electricity they absorbed. Energy experiments to extract and use electricity from Gremlins were then underway, but they remained suspended after the experimental facility and research materials in Minato Ward burned down and the researchers scattered.
It was a fascinating result, but a failure was still a failure.
Still, they say failure is the mother of success.
The Gremlin experiments had been suspended indefinitely because of the destruction of Minato Ward, but that same destruction had also revealed a new fact.
Minato Ward had been destroyed when a giant monster came ashore.
Fires that broke out in the buildings destroyed by the giant monster spread unchecked, with no one left to put them out, reducing Minato Ward to ashes.
From the burned-out wasteland that Minato Ward had become, Gremlins that had melted and then cooled into solid masses began turning up one after another.
Gremlins that were supposed to emit violet lightning and turn to dust when exposed to high heat had somehow been found in Minato's ruins after melting once and solidifying.
I attributed this to the difference between magical fire and natural fire.
For example, ice created by the Blue Witch's Great Glacier spell could not be melted by ordinary fire. It required magical fire.
Even now, a year and a half after the monster's death, the work of thawing the whole of Hamura City, frozen by the Great Glacier spell, was only about 50 percent complete. The ice had resisted every attempt to melt it with anything other than magical fire.
In magic, then, magical fire and natural fire were different things and behaved differently.
The Witch of Rekindling had conducted her Gremlin-melting experiment with magical fire, naturally.
But the great fire in Minato Ward had been a natural fire.
The fierce heat of that natural conflagration had melted the Gremlins, which then cooled and solidified after the fire died out on its own. This hypothesis seemed worth testing.
First, I tried melting a Gremlin in a campfire.
As expected, it failed.
A campfire reached only about 800°C at most. Lead would melt, but copper would not, and neither would glass. Gremlins wouldn't melt either.
If ordinary natural fire as weak as a campfire could melt them, Gremlin melting-and-synthesis technology would have spread long ago.
In this post-apocalyptic world, where the electricity had disappeared and survivors had long since used up the gas and gasoline, securing a heat source stronger than a campfire was difficult.
But this experiment was worth the effort. The result might be uncertain, but the odds of success were high.
According to data I found by breaking into a fire station, the temperature generated by a great fire could reach as high as 1,200°C.
If Gremlins melted at 1,200°C, that temperature could be reached in a climbing kiln used for crafts and the like. Building one would be difficult, but it wasn't impossibly hard.
However, if I was going to the trouble, I wanted enough heat to melt iron as well. I had used up all the conveniently available iron plates to install iron sheeting in the walls of the workshop the dragon had wrecked, so a furnace capable of melting iron would also be useful for manufacturing iron goods in the future.
So I decided to begin construction on a reverberatory furnace capable of reaching 1,600°C, hot enough to melt iron. Among furnaces that did not use electricity or gas, a reverberatory furnace was an advanced design capable of producing some of the highest temperatures.
The reverberatory furnace required a huge amount of brick, so I asked the Blue Witch to transport bricks from home-improvement centers, gardening stores, and the like in Oume.
The Blue Witch had also done me a great many favors besides delivering bricks, such as casting the "Lost Child Fog" spell over the whole of Okutama.
The "Lost Child Fog" spell produced a wide area of mist that caused intruders other than the caster to lose their sense of direction, but the Witch's uniquely precise mana control excluded me from its effects.
What's more, she was considerate enough to leave the rice paddies and fields out of the fog so they could still receive sunlight. Seriously, that helped a lot. Even if I used the Lost Child Fog spell, I couldn't manage anything that delicate.
As thanks, I gave her a rare card that had once sold for a record ¥16,000 at a card shop, but she didn't seem all that pleased.
Anyway, with the Blue Witch's help, I steadily built a reverberatory furnace in the hills behind my house using old furnace blueprints obtained from the National Diet Library through Professor Ohinata, along with an idol group's fan book as reference material. But a problem arose partway through.
I discovered that once a Gremlin had been melted and solidified, it lost its function as a medium for activating magic.
This became clear when Professor Ohinata, after hearing about my experiment from the Blue Witch—who became absurdly loose-lipped specifically around Oume residents—sent me a sample of remelted and resolidified Gremlin collected in Minato Ward.
No wonder the Gremlin melting experiments had been shelved. The loss of the research materials was part of it, but more than anything, the results had basically said, "This probably doesn't work."
Even if I melted small Gremlins together and solidified them into one giant Gremlin, all I got was an ordinary milky-white crystal. Even magic cast nearby elicited no response. It had become nothing more than a rock.
I was depressed to learn that the experiment had already failed before I began, but I recovered by setting a different goal.
A Gremlin-melting and coloring experiment.
Gremlins were basically crystals that grew by absorbing electricity, but monsters also possessed Gremlins. Unlike the milky-white Gremlins that grew by absorbing electricity, the Gremlins belonging to monsters were colored. The Gremlin I had obtained from a rabbit monster long ago had been red.
In terms of performance, it was no different from a milky-white Gremlin, but the mere fact that it was colored gave it a special feeling and made it incredibly cool.
Remelting and resolidifying Gremlins could help uncover the secret behind these colored Gremlins.
Could they be colored by adding metal compounds, as with glass? Or did they require the addition of nonmetal compounds? What color would a red Gremlin and a milky-white Gremlin become if mixed together? There were many things I could do with melting experiments using the reverberatory furnace.
It wasn't as though becoming an expert in Gremlin coloring had any particular benefit, but that was only true at this point in time.
Research that seemed useless now might someday prove extraordinarily useful somewhere. Or it might remain useless forever. That was basic research—and the materials engineering expected of a craftsman.
Besides, a craftsman with mountains of interesting knowledge that wasn't actually useful had a really cool "go-getter" vibe.
Unlike Professor Ohinata, who could only pursue research that was "quickly useful" because his funding was tied to the future-seeing mage and, by extension, the Tokyo Witches' Assembly, I was free. I could research whatever I wanted, for as long as I wanted.
The solitary life often cost me and made things inconvenient, but at times like this, I was glad I liked being alone.
I reread all the research history and theories I had written in my notes, but the reverberatory furnace still hadn't reached its full temperature. I had to keep pumping air with the bellows for about two more hours.
I kept pumping the bellows without pause, wiping away my sweat. This was harder than I expected. My back feels like it's about to give out.
After finishing that plain, grueling labor and becoming utterly exhausted, I finally confirmed two hours later that the Gremlins packed into the crucible inside the furnace had melted into a sludge. Then I slowly began lowering the furnace temperature.
Gremlins seemed crystalline, so I figured cooling them too quickly would cause them to crack as they solidified. I gradually reduced the fire over a long period of time, and once it went out, I sealed the furnace vents with soil and waited a full day for the temperature to drop naturally.
After spending three hours weakening the fire until it went out, I finished a total of six hours of furnace work and trudged back home to take a bath. The heat, sweat, and soot had left me smelling of smoke, my throat was dry, and I was thoroughly miserable.
Tossing charcoal into the furnace to replenish the fuel had also been surprisingly hard work.
Still, it had been a good workout. If I did this regularly, I might actually build some muscle.
The reverberatory furnace, carefully designed and built from the ground up, operated smoothly without any problems and provided me with a huge amount of experimental data.
To cut to the conclusion, it seemed that components in monster blood were involved in coloring Gremlins. A three-legged crow the Blue Witch had hunted in Okutama possessed a pale-green Gremlin at the base of its beak. When I mixed the component obtained by boiling down and drying that crow's blood into melted Gremlin, it turned pale green.
Doing the same thing with the blood of an ordinary crow produced no color, so there was no doubt that something unique to monster blood was affecting the Gremlin's color. Powder made from bone or skin did not color it, either.
As a side result of the coloring experiments, I also learned that using magic while a Gremlin was encased in remelted and resolidified Gremlin doubled the amount of mana consumed—a drawback piled on top of a drawback.
It was seriously useless, but if I made prison cells or something out of remelted and resolidified Gremlin, I might be able to interfere with prisoners' use of magic. Maybe. Probably.
Since it only doubled mana consumption, a spell could still be activated normally by spending twice as much mana, so it was not particularly reliable as an anti-magic function.
Well, this sort of experimental data would probably be useful someday, too. Probably.
At the very least, the principle behind Gremlin coloring wasn't useful for my main business of making magic wands, but it was useful for my side business of making accessories. Looked at that way, it wasn't bad at all.
Now then.
While I was building the reverberatory furnace and amusing myself with hobby research and fabrication that was completely useless for rebuilding collapsed Japanese society, reconstruction continued in the cities, led by the Tokyo Witches' Assembly as people worked together—sometimes cooperating and sometimes not.
Of all the reconstruction stories I heard about through Professor Ohinata's letters, the one that startled me most was that train service had resumed.
It wasn't a sleek iron box, but a freight train made by coupling together low-powered charcoal-fueled cars, and it was limited to a roughly 25-kilometer section of the old Tokyo Metro Marunouchi Line. Even so, the return of public transportation apparently lit a great beacon of hope among the citizens. Professor Ohinata attended the opening ceremony, where supposedly half the people were crying and the other half were celebrating.
Seriously, it was amazing. I understood that it was theoretically possible, but actually accomplishing it in such a short time with so few supplies and so little labor was truly incredible.
Reviving a freight train only two and a half years after the Gremlin disaster was a shining demonstration of Japan's status as a technological powerhouse. Just as Tokyo had risen from the ashes after the end of World War II, it convinced me that Japan would surely rise again from the Gremlin disaster like a phoenix.
The next major reconstruction development was, of course, the spread of Fertility Magic, which, as in the previous year, was being vigorously promoted.
Fertility Magic's bypass incantation spread rapidly over the past year.
Since knowing it or not knowing it was a matter of life and death, the mastery rate among Tokyo residents aged twelve and up surpassed 95 percent. Apparently, the policy was generally not to teach it to children eleven and younger, out of concern over accidents in which they might recklessly cast Fertility Magic on crops in inappropriate ways, or suffer head injuries or falls after fainting from running out of mana. Children eleven and younger entering Magic University were an exception and could learn it.
This year's food production was expected to reach 97 percent of the required amount, with estimates indicating that next year, alongside the expansion of cultivated land, the self-sufficiency rate would reach 102 percent.
It was such a dramatic improvement that it was hard to believe people had been screaming, "Impossible! We'll be plunged into a hell of starvation!" as recently as last year.
But when you thought about it calmly, it was alarming that the self-sufficiency rate was still hovering around 100 percent even with a bug-like magic spell that could more than double the harvest almost instantly. Without magic, a simple calculation put the self-sufficiency rate at 50 percent. No wonder it would have become a vision of hell.
Even I, enjoying the life of a carefree bachelor in the countryside, had been enormously helped by doubling the yields of my fields and rice paddies. The people who had been rationing food in the cities must have been so happy they cried themselves dry.
As a technician, I was well aware that such dazzling reconstruction stories concealed blood-soaked effort and impossible challenges.
I manufactured and shipped general-purpose, mass-produced magic wands to Tokyo Magic University, which had begun trialing a one-year curriculum, and in return I received priority access to sugar, soy sauce, miso, seafood, clothing, and other supplies and luxuries that were difficult to obtain on my own.
But Professor Ohinata had it far harder than I did. While teaching classes as a professor, he devoted himself every day to recruiting people and conducting research to establish Tokyo Magic University as the center of magic research. Apparently, the magic wands were also proving extremely useful as bait for recruiting talent.
Though the wand's provenance was unknown, the theory that a Wandmaker was being sheltered in Oume was apparently popular among members of the Witches' Assembly and influential experts involved in government administration.
The Blue Witch, who possessed the Blue Wand Cuanos—an overtechnology with magic-amplifying power on the level of a nuclear bomb—had made Oume her base and established a powerful defensive system there. Professor Ohinata, owner of the inhumanly crafted regular-dodecahedron fractal wand Aleister, was also from Oume and had strong connections with the Blue Witch.
There was even a rumor that the Dragon Witch had kidnapped an Oume resident and had her legs torn off by the Blue Witch.
Anyone who didn't suspect Oume after all that would be an idiot.
In reality, I'm the Wandmaker in question, living the carefree life of a craftsman in neighboring Okutama. There was no way they could figure it out.
Thanks to the Blue Witch and Professor Ohinata protecting my secret and my safety (and to the Dragon Witch being threatened by the Blue Witch and forced to keep the secret), I was able to live alone in this collapsed world exactly as I wished. But when it came to magic wands, I had recently been feeling stuck and dissatisfied.
For the past year, I had done nothing but obsess over the wands' details, while making no progress at all on improving their performance or developing new functions. I did conduct the occasional useless experiment, but I couldn't think of any good ideas for advancing my wands. I was in a sort of slump.
At times like this, the only thing to do was listen to customer reviews.
When I asked Professor Ohinata, a heavy user of magic wands, in a letter, "Do you have any requests for a magic wand you'd like to see?" a reply came flying back almost immediately. It was a detailed letter saying, "I want a magic wand that prevents mana backflow."
The request was far more specific than I had imagined, and it piqued my interest.
Apparently, my magic wands were still considered lacking at the cutting edge of magic research and practical application.
Now that's what I'm talking about. This was exactly what I had been looking for. A craftsman's job was to answer a customer's "I want this!"
All right! The next wand I make is going to be a mana-backflow-prevention wand!