Chapter 59
The Blue Witch has saved Tokyo three times so far.
The Iruma Coup.
The Giant Monster Invasion.
The Arataki-gumi Assault.
Unquestionably the strongest witch, the Blue Witch had always been spoken of with fear: she was merciless and hard to approach by nature, but lately her popularity had begun to rise.
After moving into the university's Ice Tower, she had more opportunities to be seen, and her personality had softened a little.
Even her clothes had been completely revamped, from a ragged black coat straight out of the end times to an elegant, high-quality robe.
She often took off her mask when I wasn't looking, and with her tremendous achievements, fashion sense, and good looks combined, it seemed the Blue Witch was the subject of squealing admiration at the university.
Just as celebrities and actors sometimes become fashion leaders, the Blue Witch's rising popularity had started a trend of equipment modeled after hers.
The three-wand style—using a multilayered wand as the main weapon, with a Sage's Staff and a short wand specialized for control and equipped with a backflow-prevention mechanism (without a core) stuck through one's belt—is currently the pinnacle of magical armament.
As for armor and accessories, the reliable choice is a magic-fabric robe plus an Amulet.
Equipping the full set grants five benefits: "Increased Spell Power," "Improved Spell Control," "Increased Defense," "Increased Mana Recovery Speed," and "Mana Training Unlocked."
It looks like something straight out of fantasy, and it really is powerful.
Amulets in particular had become highly sought-after, and several manufacturing workshops were being newly established.
Thanks to the invention of mana training, humans could increase the amount of mana they possessed. Since an Amulet recovered a percentage of one's mana, there was almost no point in wearing one with only 1K or 2K mana.
But if mana training could increase one's reserves, the benefits of an Amulet grew dramatically. At last, the times had caught up with Amulets.
An Amulet worked at full effectiveness regardless of its shape or size, as long as it was made from a Marble Gremlin, so its design potential was excellent too. It could be a ring, a necklace, a brooch, a tie clip, or even earrings.
However, since the Blue Witch wore a necklace-type Amulet, necklaces had become the mainstream. Fashion's influence was incredible.
As demand rises, production increases, and as production increases, brands take shape. Rumors such as "That company's products are high quality" and "That workshop has terrible designs" were what formed a brand.
Naturally, the top brand in Tokyo was "0933." It was generally recognized as the go-to brand for members of the Witches' Gathering, but since 0933 also supplied the magic university, apparently shoppers had flocked to the university store at this summer's open campus hoping to get their hands on 0933 products.
That said, I keep only a small number of wands in the store, and my prices are high; while I've had them put out order forms for Amulets, those are expensive too, and I decide whether to accept an order based on my mood. Only a tiny number of people managed to get 0933 products at the open campus.
But that was fine.
I'd decided to pursue the high-end market.
Cheap mass production could never beat the competition, so my target was the segment seeking luxury goods. I wouldn't hold sales, nor mass-produce at the cost of quality.
Workshops in the central wards were likewise divided between the high-end and mass-production camps. For example, the "Red Water Gate Workshop" in Kita Ward was a high-end magic-wand manufacturer producing wands second only in quality to 0933. It mainly supplied the ward security forces that fought monsters. Prices started at 20,000 new yen.
Many of its employees were alumni of the Gremlin Engineering Department, and the workshop also served as an intermediary, bringing the university's latest research to the private sector and helping spread it.
The "Asakusa Waterwheel Center," on the other hand, specialized in mass production, and most magic wands distributed to ordinary Tokyo residents were made there.
It was a large workshop located in one section of a complex of facilities powered by the waterwheels built along the Sumida River, and it continued mass-producing huge quantities of wands day and night using a manufacturing system. Prices started at 2,980 new yen (using small-grained Gremlins).
It was also the source of the abrasive made by crushing Gremlins.
Among famous magical-item shops besides wand manufacturers, there was "Atelier TODOROKI." It was the industry's largest manufacturer, boasting over 70 percent of Amulet sales.
Its selling point was its turnaround speed: place an order and provide a blood sample first thing in the morning, and your Amulet would arrive that evening. Customers could choose a design from twelve in the catalog. Custom orders were also possible, but those took a week. Prices started at 2,500 new yen.
It currently had five stores, with stores six and seven being prepared to open. Incidentally, the second store, which had opened in Bunkyo Ward, had apparently suffered heavy losses after the Arataki-gumi ransacked it. Scum.
If there were magic-wand manufacturers and Amulet manufacturers, one might expect magic-armor shops too, but Tokyo had no local businesses. The Tohoku Hunting Association had a hunting-clothes shop, and the Hokkaido Magical Beast Farm had a magical-beast leather armor shop, but in Tokyo there were only branch stores of those two shops in Minato Ward.
However, since the Spider Witch had recently increased her spider-silk production and started putting it on the market, if the Steel Sheep's steel-wool output continued to grow, Tokyo might get magic-armor shops as well.
Well, I'd already presented the Blue Witch-sama with the strongest robe made from steel sheep wool and spider silk, though. Stay on the cutting edge, Hiyori.
That's the state of magical goods in the city. As for me, lately I'd been devoting myself to producing structural-color Gremlins—in other words, mana measuring devices.
The Sage's Staff I gave Hiyori was certainly an excellent, compact mana-training tool, but it was more difficult to process than the coffin type.
When I gathered skilled technicians and had them attempt to reproduce it based on the blueprints I'd sent to the university, they succeeded, proving that the Sage's Staff could be made by someone other than me.
But!
At the same time, they reached the conclusion that it was completely impractical in terms of time and labor.
With the time and personnel needed to make one Sage's Staff, they could make ten coffin-type meditation chambers.
Apart from portability, the Sage's Staff and the coffin type had exactly the same performance.
To meet the demand of the more than two million people who wanted to undergo mana training, it was far better to focus on producing the coffin type.
Sadly, I didn't receive any orders from the big names of the Witches' Gathering, either. Apparently they'd all secured coffin types before I developed the Sage's Staff, so the Sage's Staff no longer looked appealing. Since you could meditate only once a day anyway, there wasn't much point in forcing yourself to carry one around.
If Tsugihi were here, she would have ordered a matching Sage's Staff for no reason other than "Blue-chan-san has one," but fortunately—or unfortunately—she was sealed away at the moment. Nothing to be done.
So, instead of the Sage's Staff's lackluster reputation, what saw demand skyrocket was the mana measuring device.
I had known it was originally in high demand mainly for research, but it had become urgently necessary alongside mana training.
Determining the limit of mana training required either a witch or wizard to visually inspect mana fluctuations, or a mana measuring device to check them. We couldn't have the Transcendents, who had been especially busy lately because of the Class A monsters' abnormalities, attend ordinary people's mana training, so in practice a mana measuring device was essential.
And as it happened, I was the only one who could make mana measuring devices.
Naturally, demand had no ceiling.
Even I could produce only one 1-cm piece of structural-color Gremlin—the mana measuring device—per day.
Even shipping them out as soon as I made them, supply couldn't keep up with the growing demand at all.
Even at the gouging price of three million new yen per unit, I still kept hearing, "We'll pay double—please give us more."
Well, it was like I was the only person in the world who could make rulers. I was shocked by the excessive demand at first, but thinking about it, it made perfect sense.
If anything, even the university's order forms seemed to place structural-color Gremlins above magic wands in importance, which I found deeply offensive.
I'm a Wandmaker, not a Rulermaker.
Day after day, I did nothing but make structural-color Gremlins.
While I was holed up in the workshop, absorbed in work that tired both my eyes and hands, the lingering summer heat faded, and autumn arrived before I knew it.
Perhaps thanks to getting help from Fuyou, the plant herself, in tending this year's rice paddies, the harvest was better than usual, and I felt satisfied looking at the six rice bales stacked in the storehouse.
Having more rice in the storehouse than I could ever eat was genuinely reassuring. If I hadn't lived through the food-shortage era immediately after the collapse of civilization, just looking at bales of rice wouldn't have stirred these feelings.
Food. It's important.
After keeping up a one-structural-color-Gremlin-per-day production system for more than a month, then harvesting, threshing, and polishing the rice, I was thoroughly exhausted.
The mana measuring devices had reached one per administrative ward for the Tokyo Witches' Gathering, and I had given four to the Eye Witch, whose territory was enormous. I should have sent enough to the university, too (but they kept saying they wanted more no matter how many I sent, so it was endless). I sent two each to the Tohoku Hunting Association, the Hokkaido Magical Beast Farm, and the Lake Biwa Accord.
It was okay to call this the finish line now, right? The work was grueling and not interesting to make, and I was thoroughly tired and bored.
I told Hiyori to reject all new orders and settled into a leisurely gourmet vacation.
I tossed freshly harvested peanuts, taro, lotus root, and carrots, along with huge shiitake mushrooms that Fuyou had grown better than I could, into a pot, tore them up, and simmered everything slowly with homemade soy sauce to make a stew of seasonal ingredients.
The meat of a mutated deer monster that the fire lizards had brought down with flamethrowers near the reverberatory furnace was soaked in a secret sauce to neutralize its poison. I simply sprinkled it with salt and grilled it into steaks.
The meat of a large char caught in the river was cut into fillets and marinated with garlic, ginger, soy sauce, and a little wasabi. Then I put it atop freshly cooked new-rice and made a rice bowl.
Everything I ate was delicious!
Long live the slow life. The fact that everything was homegrown made it even better. With food production entirely self-sufficient within Okutama, I had no need to rely on anyone. Even if another major disaster struck, we'd be safe.
It happened one day, as autumn deepened.
While I was cooking rice over the fire of Mokutan, who had recently developed a taste for licking the scorch marks off the earthen hearth, I received a message from Hiyori.
She said they had succeeded in capturing that Black Gremlin monster alive, transported it alive to the entrance of Okutama, killed it there, extracted the Black Gremlin, and would bring it to my workshop before it disintegrated.
Since she wanted me to analyze it, I agreed without a moment's hesitation.
The Black Gremlin reportedly possessed by the Class A monsters that had been displaying abnormalities of late. The source of time-acceleration magic.
I'd been interested in it for a while.
Since it disintegrated and vanished with the passage of time, they hadn't been able to extract the Gremlin after killing one and get it to me in time, but capturing one alive changed everything.
As promised, Hiyori arrived about an hour later carrying a jet-black Gremlin. Its maximum diameter was 38.3 mm by my estimate. Hm, that's big. Probably a Gremlin from a Class A-2 monster.
I accepted the Gremlin and received a briefing from Hiyori as I led her into the workshop.
"It's a Gremlin from a Class A-2 monster with a frog for its upper body and a human for its lower body. I also had a green Gremlin, but I crushed that one while restraining the monster."
"How did you capture it alive? Its time acceleration would negate the monster tongs too, wouldn't it?"
"We clamped it between two monster tongs, one from above and one from below. Dairi did that when sealing Tsugihi, remember?"
"Oh, right. If you hit it with a powerful Slow practically equivalent to stopping time, a little acceleration wouldn't matter, huh?"
I placed the Black Gremlin on the worktable and examined it.
Its texture and coloration were ordinary. Gremlins came in this color, and for a Class A-2 it was only slightly small. I couldn't see anything particularly strange about it.
"The time until a Black Gremlin disappears varies from individual to individual. It can last as long as three hours, or fail to last ten minutes. Basically, the stronger the monster it came from, the longer the grace period before it disappears. This Gremlin probably has about thirty minutes left. Make it quick."
"Okay. Leave it to me."
If there was a time limit, I couldn't afford to dawdle.
I immediately set to analyzing the precious sample. It would be nice if I could learn something that gave me an idea for a magic wand. And I wanted to identify the cause of the Class A monster abnormalities.
First, I examined the basics.
Its hardness and weight were no different from those of an ordinary Gremlin.
I called Mokutan and had it breathe fire on a thin slice; it melted, so its heat resistance was ordinary too.
When I heated another thin slice with the spell Flame, it emitted violet lightning and turned to dust. This reaction was normal as well.
The cross-section left after shaving down a thin slice was ordinary black too, so it wasn't a structural color, either.
Basically, it was no different from a common Gremlin, but as I rolled it around and examined it with my fingertips, I sensed something off.
I left the Black Gremlin still, lightly placed a fingertip against it, closed my eyes, and concentrated to sharpen my senses.
"...It's vibrating? ...It is vibrating. This thing's vibrating a little."
"It's vibrating? Are you sure? I didn't feel anything when I was holding it."
"No, this vibration is seriously tiny. I thought I was imagining it too, but if you concentrate, you can clearly feel it."
"Then only Dairi can tell."
I focused my senses on my fingertip and felt the vibrations more deeply and carefully.
I felt like I had experienced this same vibration somewhere before.
Following the memory prompted by the feel of the vibration at my fingertip, I remembered the abnormal Gremlin vibration from when I made the Möbius Loop Tin Staff Hariti and the Thirteen Ritual Implements.
That's right. The vibration was different in magnitude, but it was very similar to that.
"Is it causing abnormal vibrations? Hiyori, can you hear anyone chanting nearby?"
"...No, I can't. I can't sense any movement of mana, either."
"Then what is it? I dunno. Wait, if it's an abnormal vibration, would shaping it into a Möbius strip stabilize it?"
I tried to shape the Black Gremlin into a Möbius strip to test my idea, but before I finished, the Black Gremlin turned to dust and vanished. The melted-and-resolidified pieces and the thin slices all vanished at the same time. Time's up.
"Agh! Damn it! If only I'd had five more minutes...!"
"It can't be helped. Learning even one thing is a huge gain. So? How much did you figure out, and what did you figure out?"
I gave Hiyori, who was trying to comfort me, a detailed explanation of the abnormal vibration I'd sensed from the Black Gremlin.
After hearing me out, Hiyori tilted her head.
"Does that mean someone is casting multiple spells simultaneously on the Black Gremlin?"
"Probably. In theory...?"
"The Witch of Hell?"
"Or some unaffiliated twins or triplets. Or ritual magic."
A Gremlin's abnormal vibration occurred when multiple spells were forcibly cast simultaneously through a single Gremlin. If the abnormal vibration became severe, the Gremlin shattered.
The inexplicable part was how tiny the vibration was.
A spell's effectiveness didn't change at all whether it was chanted loudly or whispered. It wasn't that the abnormal vibration was small because someone was casting simultaneously in an extremely quiet voice.
So why was it vibrating abnormally so faintly? Abnormal vibration could be eliminated by shaping it into a Möbius strip, but the Black Gremlin was already nearly spherical and had only the tiniest vibration.
What was...? Why...?
As I tilted my head, Hiyori, who had also been lost in thought, raised a hand slightly and spoke.
"I was thinking. Could someone be chanting simultaneously from an extremely long distance? What if the size of the abnormal vibration is inversely proportional to distance?"
"Huh? You mean there's someone outside Tokyo shouting a spell at the Black Gremlin in a ridiculously loud voice?"
"Even farther than that. I think it may be from overseas."
"What? Why overseas?"
The subject—and the distance—had suddenly leaped far away. How did we get there?
How loud would someone have to be to make a chant from overseas reach Japan? Even the Witch of Hell couldn't manage that, could she?!
"You know Future Sight's prediction, right? The Class A monster abnormalities will peak at the end of this month."
"I heard. It sounded pretty bad, but now that magic-stone wands have been distributed, we're barely managing to deal with it, right?"
"That's right. Starting next month, the Class A monsters' 'migration' will begin. The Class A monsters that have been causing the abnormalities will cross the sea and depart to the far east. The far east. Across the sea—overseas."
"Someone at the eastern edge of the world is chanting something at the Class A monsters' Black Gremlins...? No, that's just too much... No... Hmm?"
It felt like we were piling assumption on assumption, but when I connected the information we currently had, it sounded like it might actually be right.
The eastern edge of the world. Somewhere over the Pacific, Hawaii, or perhaps America or Brazil.
Could a chant really reach Japan from somewhere that damn far away? Well, considering the advanced radio networks of the pre-collapse era, I couldn't categorically say it was impossible. But this went beyond merely having a loud voice; the technique involved would have to be utterly extraordinary.
"Well, it does all fit together. But surely that's too unrealistic."
"Don't be so sure. Dairi does things more than unrealistic enough without magic. Besides, magic itself is unrealistic."
"That's a tough argument to counter."
We debated this way and that, but in the end, we reached no conclusion.
The sample had vanished, so there was no way to investigate further.
Hiyori ended the debate, picked at some freshly cooked rice that had gone a little mushy and some venison, then took the data I'd gathered to the university.
The university was full of scholars smarter than us. If we sent them the data, they would figure something out.
It would be good if they discovered some new fact based on my analysis.
Even if they didn't, there was no immediate crisis. Future Sight had foreseen that things would remain peaceful for a while once we got past the 'migration,' so there was no need to brace ourselves too much.
We could take our time waiting for the university's experts to finish their deliberations.