Survival, with Magic on the Side

Three months had passed since humanity lost electricity in the Crystal Disaster.

I had somehow managed to survive in a lone house deep in the mountains, far from any other people.

My plan to gather food from homes whose residents had disappeared hadn't gone very well.

Thinking about it, that was only natural: when the residents of those empty houses moved elsewhere, they had apparently taken as much of their food with them as they could carry.

Almost nothing useful remained—food, medical supplies, fuel, and so on. The general stores and greengrocers were the same.

So I mostly filled my stomach by fishing, trapping, and foraging.

Even without electricity—or rather, precisely because it was gone—the wisdom of a rudimentary hunting-and-gathering life came in handy.

I went into the mountains with a field guide to wild plants and mushrooms in one hand, caught rabbits and tanuki with traps I made using my anime knowledge and books from the community-center library, and fished with worms on a rod I'd found in a private home.

As a survival novice, my skills were pathetic, and hunting alone couldn't cover my daily calorie needs, but I managed to make up the difference by eating into what was now a worryingly small food stockpile.

Before the Crystal Disaster, I could just say, "Oh, what a pain," when wild animals ate the vegetables in my backyard garden. Now they made me want to kill them. Maybe I should just slaughter them and eat them.

Surviving alone was tough.

But I didn't want to go down into town and join up with the other survivors.

I knew because I'd seen zombie-panic movies. In a makeshift community of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world like this, even if things started out peacefully, food shortages and interpersonal squabbles would eventually bring it down.

My social skills were dead. If I got dragged into interpersonal squabbles, I'd be the first to die, and I had no special skills or knowledge to solve a food shortage.

Of course, reality probably wouldn't unfold exactly like a panic movie. But I was confident that living surrounded by a large number of people in an evacuation shelter would inevitably make me ill from stress.

That alone was enough reason to continue as a lone wolf.

In this bleak life with no end in sight, as my rice and canned goods dwindled little by little, my only source of comfort and hope was still the Octameteorite.

My secret treasure, my adorable, adorable magic-staff-chan, served as a medium for activating magic. By making it vibrate with a voice at its characteristic frequency, I could fire a white beam.

It was a fairly thick beam, about as thick as an elephant's leg, and it flew straight along the line connecting my mouth and the Octameteorite.

Its power was enough to make a kei car shake violently with a single shot.

It proved extremely useful for hunting.

I didn't have a gun, and of course I couldn't use a bow and arrows. I wasn't strong enough to use a throwing spear, either.

So even if I happened to run into a deer in the mountains, watching me from twenty or thirty meters away while munching grass, I had no way to bring it down.

If I didn't have my magic staff, that was.

A deer hit directly by the magic-staff beam didn't die instantly, but it was rendered unable to move, so I could walk over and finish it off easily with a knife. Truly, magic staff-sama was a lifesaver.

After more than two months of survival, my daily routine had settled down, too.

I used to be a hardcore night owl, but now I moved around during the day because fuel for lighting was too precious to waste.

After waking up in the morning, I drew water from the well, ate a meal I'd prepared in advance, and went into the mountains to check my traps.

On the way back, after gathering wild plants, I took my fishing rod down to the river.

After stopping for lunch, I did odd jobs like sharpening my knife, searching unexplored houses for supplies, and butchering and smoking the meat and fish I'd caught.

Then, after dinner, I practiced target shooting with my magic staff or read a book before going to bed.

I only took a bath once every two or three days because firewood was too precious.

That was how I lived, but today was a little different.

A very strange rabbit had gotten caught in one of my traps.

At first glance, it looked like an ordinary wild rabbit.

But a red gemstone was embedded in its forehead.

A tumor? A parasite? No, that wasn't it.

When I touched the thing, which was about the size of my pinky fingernail, it felt hard like stone.

It was a mineral.

The words "magical creature" flashed through my mind.

If there were magic stones and magic, then maybe there were magical creatures, too?

This world had become awfully fantastical in just three months.

I carefully carried the dead, deformed wild rabbit home and examined it.

The first thing I learned from my examination was that the wild rabbit itself was more or less an ordinary rabbit.

I wasn't a veterinarian and didn't know the anatomy of rabbits in detail, but in the past two months I'd gotten pretty used to butchering animals. I could tell there were no striking features like two hearts, a missing brain, or some unknown organ. It looked safe to eat.

I set the dissected rabbit aside for the moment and turned to examine the pinky-fingernail-sized gemstone embedded in its forehead.

The gemstone was a slightly lopsided sphere, ruby red in color.

It's not unheard of for living things to produce minerals, or things like minerals.

Akoya oysters made pearls, ivory was prized as an art material, and bekko, the shell of a type of sea turtle, was worth more than some mediocre gemstones.

But I'd never heard of a rabbit producing a gemstone like this.

After thinking it over, I scratched the red gemstone with a small piece of industrial diamond.

It didn't scratch.

M-Mohs hardness eleven!

Could this be a magic stone, too?!

I went out into the backyard and exposed the red gemstone to a voice at its characteristic frequency. A thin white beam, far weaker than the Octameteorite's, came wobbling out.

It's a magic stone! So there was more than one!

My heart leaped at the new discovery.

I'd thought only the Octameteorite, carved from a meteorite, was special.

But that wasn't the case.

If that was true, then...

I gathered up the electric crystals that had fallen from the sky with the torrential rain and lay scattered by the roadside, then exposed those bead-sized crystals to a voice at their characteristic frequency. But there was no reaction.

Well, of course. If electric crystals could fire beams too, then the miscellaneous electric crystals scattered across the ground would have been firing beams like crazy while I played with my magic staff.

I had a pretty good idea how to solve that.

I sat down at my workbench and fixed an electric crystal in place with my tools.

Carefully and gently, so I wouldn't break the tiny electric crystal shaped like a snowflake, I shaved it into a sphere. Once I'd finished the delicate cutting, like drawing a picture on a grain of rice, I used polishing compound and the feel of my fingers to finish it into a perfect sphere.

When I exposed the resulting tiny electric-crystal sphere—small enough that I'd never find it if I dropped it—to a voice at its characteristic frequency, a feeble white beam trickled out, as unreliable as if it had wet itself.

It works! A beam! You were a magic stone too?!

Well, I guess? Is that what it is?

Once I knew the result, it seemed reasonable enough.

The day the Octameteorite fell into my backyard and the day electric crystals spread throughout the world were the same day. It would be stranger to think they were unrelated.

My otaku spirit blazed.

Electric crystals were everywhere. The material for magic staffs was everywhere.

I could mass-produce magic staffs.

Amazing, amazing!

Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha!

I am a world-class Wandmaker!

I'll make them, I'll make magic staffs! I'll make more and more!

...Though I have nowhere to sell them.

Ah, if only online auctions were still around. I could sell genuine magic staffs, make a fortune, and satisfy my pride as a craftsman. It would've been perfect.

Oh, well.

With this much material, I could finally try all sorts of processing methods I'd thought of but hadn't been able to test.

It didn't look like I'd run out of things to do anytime soon.

A year had passed since the Crystal Disaster.

After making it through a harsh winter, I was finally left staring blankly at an empty rice bin, a mountain of empty cans, and a completely empty salt jar.

Survival was freaking hard~! How did people in prehistoric times manage to live on hunting and gathering alone? I seriously respect them.

After a year of being suddenly forced into a survival lifestyle, my survival skills had improved by leaps and bounds.

I'd learned to hide my traps well and set them skillfully so they wouldn't fail. When fishing, I knew how to time my hookset, and I'd reinforced the fence around my home garden so nuisance animals couldn't ravage it.

I'd also gotten better at target practice with the magic-staff beam. Within roughly thirty meters, if the target didn't move, I was a hundred percent accurate.

When I ran into a bear-san that had failed to make it through the winter, I wet myself, but I managed to drive it off by slamming it with five or six beams. That thing was dangerous. It would have killed me if I hadn't had my magic staff.

My life was stable, and I'd acquired a way to ward off danger, but there was no overcoming the food shortage.

I'd dug up and restored a nearby abandoned rice paddy and made it usable, so I could harvest rice in the fall, a few months from now.

It was amateur work, but I'd played rice-farming games and read a rice-cultivation manual I'd found at the agricultural cooperative, so I expected a decent harvest.

But the immediate food problem remained unsolved.

I had to somehow keep eating for the next few months until the rice harvest.

Fishing, trapping, and hunting with my magic staff simply weren't enough, no matter what I did.

A magic staff was convenient, but it couldn't solve everything.

My reliable partner, Octameteorite-chan, was enshrined as the guardian deity of my home, and lately I'd been carrying around a mass-produced magic staff.

This magic staff, "Hendensho," was carved from electric crystals I'd gathered at the Okutama Substation during the winter and processed with a new method. It was quite capable.

The processing principle had been inspired by the red-jewel rabbits.

The Crystal Disaster seemed to have affected wild animals. After I first found the red-jewel rabbit, I repeatedly encountered animals with gemstones in their foreheads, bellies, chests, arms, and elsewhere.

They were truly "magical."

They used astonishing techniques, like deer that wrapped themselves in lightning and fled at super speed with a cry, or tanuki that stared me down and paralyzed me with a cry, then escaped while I was helpless.

They always cried out when using magic, so just as I used my voice to create resonance when using magic, they probably used their cries to resonate the gemstones they carried.

Well, I didn't know the details. I'd never managed to bring down a wild animal that used magic to escape, so I couldn't observe one up close or capture one for analysis. The only sample I'd obtained was the red-jewel rabbit.

When I examined that red gemstone in detail, I discovered that it had a double structure. It consisted of two layers, with a layer of gemstone surrounding the central core.

When polished and shaped into a perfect sphere, the rabbit gemstone produced a beam far more powerful than its size warranted, astonishing me.

Based on the data I'd gathered so far, I knew that a magic stone's beam power was proportional to its size.

Yet the beam from the red gemstone, which was the size of a pinky fingernail, had the power of a gemstone the size of a thumb's fingernail, according to my calculations.

I suspected the secret of its high output lay in its double structure and attempted to verify my theory.

First, I carved a fairly large electric crystal into a sphere and split it cleanly in half. Then I carved out the inside to make a spherical cavity and inserted a crystal sphere I'd carved to fit it perfectly. After that, I just glued the shell back together, and it was done.

In theory, this should have increased the power, but it didn't. It only produced the power of the electric crystal used for the central core.

Apparently, once a magic stone was split, it lost its magical properties. My plan to create a giant crystal by piecing together small fragments had failed, too, so this approach was probably a dead end.

So I decided to build a bottle ship. I made a small hole in a spherical crystal, inserted a hook through it, and carved out the inside, creating a sphere within the sphere without breaking it.

An ordinary person probably couldn't perform such delicate work.

But I was extremely dexterous. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was effortless, but I managed to carve a smaller sphere inside a marble-sized sphere without too much trouble.

Then I filled the gap between the inner and outer spheres with resin, successfully reproducing the same increase in beam power as the rabbit crystal.

As an added bonus, the tiny hole I'd made to carve out the inside became the beam's muzzle, increasing its directionality.

And that was how I completed the general-purpose, mass-produced magic staff "Hendensho."

Armed with Hendensho, I planned to descend the mountain and head into town.

Then I'd recover supplies like food and medical supplies and return!

I had absolutely no idea what the city center looked like now.

It might have become a ruin, or perhaps a survivor community had somehow continued to thrive, allowing its residents to enjoy a stable life.

Either way, all I could do was pray that I wouldn't meet anyone during my expedition.