Amulet

If you want to gain something from an enemy, first know your enemy.

I began researching this mushroom biohazard pandemic so it wouldn't end as a mere calamity, using the mushroom that had grown on my head.

Wars, disasters, and epidemics are all better avoided, but there are things we can learn from them.

War advances science, disasters lead to better preparation and prediction each time they occur, and epidemics advance medicine. I hope the same will come of this pandemic.

I hear that in central Tokyo, medical teams from each ward are working tirelessly to determine the cause and prevent a recurrence through autopsies and other means. I want to put this mushroom to use in my own way, too.

Specifically, I hope to make magic-sealing staves, magic-absorbing staves, and self-repairing staves from the mushroom.

The severe-case mushroom seals away the magic of its host.

When the mushroom is plucked, it rapidly sucks away magic and vitality, then undergoes extraordinary regeneration.

If I can determine the principle behind this and apply it to staff production, the possibilities are endless.

As a precaution, I built an isolated dissection tent in a corner of the backyard and began by dissecting the nauseating human-faced mushroom.

The basic structure of this mushroom was similar to that of ordinary mushrooms. It had a cap, with gills underneath. A stem extended from the cap, and mycelium spread from the stem's base to parasitize its host.

But when I split open the stem, I found a fibrous mass inside that looked rather like a heart. Creepy.

Was it an animal? A fungus? I had no idea. The university's monster studies department would probably investigate that.

When I opened the fibrous heart, I found a tiny, tiny Gremlin buried inside.

The fact that it contained a Gremlin proved that this mushroom was definitely a type of monster. I often saw animal monsters, and occasionally plant monsters, but this was my first encounter with a fungal monster. This was my first time seeing one of its Gremlins, too.

The Gremlin I extracted with tweezers was, as usual, almost spherical, measuring about 0.1 millimeters in diameter. It was smaller than a flea—truly microscopic.

However, when I placed it in a Petri dish and examined it with a magnifying glass, its unusual nature became clear.

The Gremlin taken from the mushroom had an unevenly striped pattern of milky white and gold.

I had never seen a marble-patterned Gremlin before. Fascinating.

Every Gremlin I had seen until then had been a single color.

The Gremlin that had grown by feeding on electricity was a plain milky white, exactly one of the two colors in this mushroom Gremlin. Gremlins obtained from monsters came in a wide range of colors, but they were still single-colored.

Magic stones sometimes contained impurities, but their overall color was also monochromatic.

And yet this one had a marble pattern. A rare Gremlin species never seen before.

Was this marble pattern unique to this particular mushroom? Or did every mushroom contain Gremlins with patterns like this?

I couldn't tell from the single mushroom that had grown on my head, so, though the Blue Witch was still recovering, I entrusted her with a letter and asked the Future-Seer to obtain fifty mushroom samples.

Half of them were mushrooms from mild cases, and the other half were from severe cases.

There was a striking difference in the size of the Gremlins obtained from the mild-case and severe-case mushrooms.

The mild-case ones were 0.1 millimeters in size.

The severe-case ones were 0.5 millimeters.

The difference was quite clear. Severe-case mushrooms sucked up magic far more aggressively than mild-case mushrooms, so the difference in the amount of magic absorbed must have appeared in the size of the Gremlins. If anything, I would have expected an even greater difference in size.

The Gremlins from both the mild and severe cases had marble patterns.

They were two-colored marble patterns, with one color always being milky white. The other color was random.

I lined up all fifty-one marble Gremlins, but there was no particular pattern to their colors.

I hypothesized that the difference in the colors of the marble patterns came from the blood of their hosts.

Previously, I had determined how to dye Gremlins through a melting and resolidification experiment.

The colors of Gremlins obtained from monsters came from some component in the monsters' blood.

If the same were true of humans...

If some component in human blood appeared as coloration in the Gremlin through the mycelial route by which the mushroom absorbed nutrients from its human host...

Of the two colors in a marble Gremlin, the fixed milky white would come from the mushroom.

The other, random color would come from the blood of the human host.

That would make perfect sense.

To test this hypothesis, I made a syringe, drew my own blood, and mixed it into melted milky-white Gremlin derived from electricity before allowing it to harden.

The resolidified Gremlin had turned gold.

The marble Gremlin taken from the mushroom that had grown on my head had stripes of milky white and gold.

I compared the two, and they were exactly the same colors.

Phew—jackpot!

Nothing feels better than when a hypothesis turns out to be exactly right!

I was getting carried away, so I reined myself in and went to get another sample, just to be sure.

With only one set of data, there was always a chance it was a coincidence. Of course, I asked the Blue Witch to provide the blood.

It hadn't even been a month since the Blue Witch had hovered between life and death.

She would have been perfectly justified in refusing my request to draw her blood, but she didn't particularly object. She answered the call through the eyeball familiar and came all the way to Okutama to donate blood.

The Blue Witch held out her arm over the towel spread across the workbench in the workshop, but tensed up when I approached with the syringe.

What are you, a child?

"Don't worry, it'll be over in a moment~. Here comes a little prick~. And... all done~. Keep pressing the cotton ball down for a while, okay~?"

"?! I-it's over? Already? I didn't even feel a prick!"

"I'm dexterous."

"That isn't an all-purpose excuse. But whatever."

It wasn't as though I had managed to draw the Blue Witch's blood without pain simply because I was dexterous. I had just picked up a few tricks while drawing my own blood. Then again, perhaps that really was just dexterity after all...

The Blue Witch was no longer needed once the blood had been drawn, but she said she wanted to watch, so I had her observe the Gremlin melting and resolidification process with the blood components mixed in.

The Blue Witch didn't say much and really did nothing but watch, but a calm, pleasantly relaxed stretch of time passed.

The melted and resolidified Gremlin I took from the reverberatory furnace had been dyed a vivid, eye-opening blue. Hmm. It really does seem as though the color of the blood appears in the Gremlin. Whether it's a monster, a human, or a witch, blood components color the Gremlin. When I tried this with the blood of a wild crow, though, it didn't produce any color... There must be some kind of rule behind that.

That interests me too, but right now the mushroom's marble Gremlins are the focus of my research. I won't get sidetracked; I'll concentrate.

Next, I would mix the two colors of Gremlin together into a single marble-patterned lump. At the very least, it should look something like the mushroom's marble Gremlins.

Since they had been melted and resolidified, they would probably lose their function as magic activation mediums, but comparing artificially produced marble Gremlins with natural ones should still yield some useful information. For example, how the marble patterns mix. I also suspected that the boundary between the two colors might make them more fragile.

As I lit the furnace again and melted two batches of Gremlins, one white-and-blue and one white-and-gold, the Blue Witch, who had been sitting on a tree stump and thinking about something, spoke to me.

"About those Gremlins colored with blood..."

"Hm?"

"They're the same color as the eyeball familiar's eyes. Mine are blue, and Dairi's are gold, right?"

"......Ah, you're right?"

I thought back and nodded.

Come to think of it, she was right.

There were individual differences in the magic of the eyeball familiar.

When I used it, it produced a golden eyeball that looked like a gemstone cat's-eye.

The Blue Witch's familiar produced bluish eyeballs that looked almost sickly.

The Eye Witch's familiar apparently had a different color from ours as well.

Hmm. Blood vessels ran through the eye. Judging from the incantation for the eyeball familiar's magic, it wouldn't be strange if the familiar's color reflected the user's own blood and unique magical color.

We discussed individual differences when casting the same spell while I tended the reverberatory furnace, and eventually I took out the prototype marble Gremlins.

I had taken them out too soon, so cracks caused by rapid cooling had spread through them, but both the white-and-blue and white-and-gold marbles had mixed together more or less as intended.

Hmm. A slightly shorter heating time should produce cleaner stripes.

As I used fire tongs to pick up the finished marble Gremlins and inspect them from various angles, the Blue Witch suddenly snatched one away from me.

"Oh, hey!"

"Wait. This is... This is...?"

"What? What is it? Say it."

"Quiet. I'm checking something right now."

After saying that, the Blue Witch stood motionless, still holding the Gremlin between her fingers.

I waited, growing a little irritated.

Apparently she was checking something, but what? Had she noticed something that clicked?

After making me wait for well over ten minutes, the Blue Witch finally rebooted and returned the Gremlin to me.

"Sorry. I was manipulating magic power. I checked, and apparently this promotes magic recovery."

"Promotes magic recovery?"

I was a little surprised.

It has a recovery-boosting effect? On this? Like a power stone with healing effects?

The entire point of this series of experiments had been to discover some kind of effect, so I wasn't surprised that it had produced one.

But not magic absorption, magic sealing, or self-regeneration? It promotes magic recovery?

That wasn't what I expected.

"Specifically, what does it do?"

Intrigued, I asked her to explain in greater detail, and the Blue Witch gave me her impressions while pointing at the two marble Gremlins, the white-and-blue one and the white-and-gold one.

"The flow of magic is behaving strangely. The white-and-blue marble Gremlin, the one with my blood in it, promotes my magic recovery. The magic flows like this..."

The Blue Witch stroked the air with her fingertip as if conducting an orchestra, but abandoned the explanation halfway through.

"No, explaining it this way when you can't sense magic probably wouldn't mean anything. In any case, there's no doubt that when I have the white-and-blue marble Gremlin, my magic recovery is accelerated. It's based on subjective sensation, but I would estimate the increase at around two or three percent."

"However, even if Dairi has the white-and-blue marble, Dairi's magic recovery isn't accelerated. It's the white-and-gold marble over there that accelerates Dairi's magic recovery."

"Aha. So carrying a marble mixed with your own blood increases your magic recovery rate?"

I summarized her explanation simply while stroking my chin, and the Blue Witch nodded.

"Strictly speaking, you don't have to be carrying it. As long as the marble is near you... within one or two meters, it should have an effect."

"So my magic recovery speed is boosted right now?"

"Yes."

"...... I don't feel anything..."

"No, I can tell. It's slight, but your recovery speed has increased. There's no doubt about it."

The Blue Witch stated it with complete confidence.

Even so, I couldn't tell at all. Being told that my magic recovery speed had increased didn't give me any such sensation whatsoever.

Well, she had said it only increased by two or three percent, and humans couldn't sense magic in the first place, so there was no way I could physically feel an increase in magic recovery speed.

If the Blue Witch hadn't been there, I might never have noticed this effect. I'm glad I called her—the Blue Witch.

I rolled the marble Gremlin around in my hand and thought.

An increase in magic recovery speed was not only interesting but also a valuable effect.

If the magic I used recovered immediately, I could cast spells one after another even with a small magic reserve.

But only a two- or three-percent increase? That really was nothing more than a token increase.

...No! The low recovery rate might be because the marble was cracked.

There was a good chance that a larger Gremlin would provide a higher recovery rate. With Gremlins, the bigger they are, the better.

It was too soon to be disappointed.

I had gained a foothold for profiting from mushroom disease, the embodiment of calamity.

All that remained was data. I needed to gather data. Once I did, something would become clear.

Over the next month, I made a large number of marble samples in the reverberatory furnace and compiled statistical data.

The data revealed that the maximum increase in magic recovery speed from possessing a marble Gremlin mixed with one's own blood was five percent. The color of the marble didn't matter. The increase was the same for witches and humans.

The factor with the greatest effect on the increase was the mixing ratio of the milky-white Gremlin—which could be made using an electricity-derived Gremlin—and the Gremlin of the user's unique color. A ratio of 2:8 maximized the recovery speed. The ratio was important; how the marble was mixed and its size were almost irrelevant.

The effect disappeared if the ingredients were mixed so thoroughly that the marble pattern could no longer be distinguished, or if the size was less than 0.1 millimeters. As long as the marble pattern was discernible and the size was at least 0.1 millimeters, the increase in recovery speed was five percent.

Cracks in the marble also had no effect on magic recovery speed. As long as it wasn't completely broken, a few cracks were apparently no problem. Its shape had no effect on magic recovery speed, either.

In the end, even after optimizing it as much as possible, the effect was tiny, but there was no downside to increased magic recovery speed. Embedding it in a staff could improve the staff's performance. Five percent might be a mere drop in the bucket to ordinary people, but for someone with an absurdly huge amount of magic like a witch or wizard, it was nothing to sneeze at.

But I decided not to embed the marble inside a staff.

I didn't think it was suitable, mainly from a design perspective.

No matter how I looked at it, using the marble as a separate item would allow for a wider range of designs than embedding it in a magic staff.

In other words, instead of embedding the marble in a staff, I would process it into an accessory such as a ring or necklace.

The fact that changing its size or shape didn't improve magic recovery speed meant, conversely, that I could make it any size or shape I wanted. I could turn it into an amulet with whatever design I pleased.

Not every function needs to be built into a staff. An internet-connected, bipedal rice cooker would be more trouble than it was worth, after all. Some functions are better kept separate.

In fact, unlike a magic staff, which you only need to hold when casting magic, it was better to enjoy the benefits of accelerated magic recovery at all times. An accessory you could wear constantly while keeping both hands free was superior in that respect, too.

As the culmination of this experimental research, I made a 30-millimeter white-and-gold marble melted and resolidified from a Gremlin mixed with my blood. Taking inspiration from the meteorite Octameteorite, a gift from outer space that had been my starting point, I carved it into a star and made it into a pendant amulet.

I hung the amulet around my neck, held the Octameteorite in my hand, and struck poses in front of the workshop mirror, reveling in the sight.

Nice! Really nice! I look so much like a wizard!

This wasn't mere cosplay. Both the amulet and the wand had proper purposes and magical abilities hidden within them. They had principles behind them and involved ingenuity; they had become magical items for reasons that made sense.

The thought filled me with emotion and stimulated my excitement circuits beyond measure.

As I struck various poses in front of the mirror and lamented my inability to take selfies, the Blue Witch, who had often visited the house during my research and helped test the amulet's performance using a witch's magical control, poked me with Kyanos.

"What about my amulet?"

"Huh? I didn't make one."

"Why not?"

"Why? You hate accessories, don't you?"

When I said that, the Blue Witch tilted her head in puzzlement.

"No...? Did I say that?"

"Huh? I feel like you said something like that when I gave you an accessory before."

"I don't remember."

"Didn't you?"

The two of us tilted our heads in unison.

Well, if neither of us remembered clearly, it was probably just a mistaken memory.

"Ah, so that's why you kept giving prototype accessories to Kei-chan? Because you thought I disliked accessories?"

"I was wrong? Huh?"

"I don't remember saying anything like that at all... Huh? ... Well, I never said I disliked accessories. Yes. If Dairi makes me an amulet, I'll gratefully accept it."

I didn't really understand, but apparently the Blue Witch's accessory equipment slot was open.

In that case, I would be happy to make one for her.

I also had a desire to see her dressed like a witch, since she called herself one. When we first met, she had been doing nothing more than clutching an unprocessed magic stone, after all.

And now that poorly equipped girl was going to carry a magic staff and wear an amulet. Look how she'd grown. Waaaah.

I made and gave the Blue Witch a snowflake-crystal-shaped pendant amulet from a white-and-blue marble Gremlin mixed with her blood.

A snowflake crystal is the artistic harmony of nature and cold produced as a snow crystal grows its ice tree. It was a fitting design for the Blue Witch, a wielder of ice magic.

The Blue Witch seemed to like the amulet I had made especially for her. She hooked a finger through the pendant hanging around her neck and spun it around happily.

I'm glad she liked it.

The fruits of over a month of research, the amulet felt rather underwhelming considering it had come from a monstrously huge disaster like the mushroom pandemic.

But then again, perhaps my previous multi-layered processing that massively boosted spell power and my eighty-five-percent reduction in magic backflow had simply been abnormal.

Normally, this was what the beginning looked like.

At first, cars were slower than horses.

At first, airplanes could fly for only a minute.

But technology advanced.

Even though the amulet's increase in magic recovery speed was capped at five percent for now, I believed its performance would eventually rise to ten percent, then fifty percent.

And I was going to leave the research into improving its performance to the Magic University.

Because gathering all the data myself was exhausting. This wasn't my job; it was the university's job.

Besides, I heard that the university, which had suspended classes, would reopen next month. It was probably about time I dumped some work on them and let them improve it, too.

Well then, I'm going to make a grotesque seven-branched-sword-shaped magic staff and play with it to unwind.

I'm leaving all the rest of the amulet research to you. I'm counting on you~!