Chapter 77
I took a bath and purified myself, got plenty of sleep the day before to clear my head, put on a samue, donned work gloves, offered a prayer to the Octameteorite, and sat seiza-style on the workshop floor to welcome the arrival of the Demon Lord materials.
Hiyori came in carrying a huge box bearing the American national emblem, flinched, and said, sounding a little put off.
"W-What's gotten into you...?"
"I'm showing it the proper respect."
"I see. There are two more boxes. I'll bring them in."
So there are three boxes in total!? Yay! Lots of Demon Lord materials!
My joy was short-lived. When I saw the third box emblazoned with a huge fluorescent radiation warning symbol, I retreated to the far end of the room at full speed and pressed myself against the wall.
Whaaaaaat!? Don't bring dangerous stuff into the house!
"This is bad, this is really bad! Why is there a nuke!?"
"Apparently it's radioactive material used to observe the cleavage planes of Gremlin. Let's see... The main components are cesium-137 and strontium-90. It's vitrified waste, made by mixing liquid waste from spent nuclear fuel with glass...? Ah... Apparently it's harmless because it's sealed in lead and concrete. Here, this is the packing list. Read it yourself."
"Huh? Are you sure it's safe?"
"If anything happens, I'll heal you with healing magic."
Hiyori handed me the packing list and said that so casually that she seemed infinitely dependable, putting me at ease.
Healing magic strong enough to cure radiation exposure is absurdly powerful. Is it the strongest spell in the world?
The packing list I was handed contained several lengthy pages detailing the materials harvested from the Demon Lord, along with their specifics and valuations. The original was in English, but it came with a proper Japanese translation of the same content, making it easy to understand.
The list made one exception: no value had been assigned to the "corpse of the Mutant absorbed by the Demon Lord." There were no corpses among the three boxes, either.
There was a note on the list: "As agreed, 0933 has priority rights to acquire everything obtained from the Demon Lord, and corpses are no exception. However, please allow the heroes who gave their lives for America to rest in their homeland." If I approved this, they would pad the total amount of Demon Lord materials I received.
Of course I agreed. I made money off America's unnecessary worry.
Transcendents often have unusual physiology, so if you ignored ethics, corpses would probably be extremely valuable research materials. I understood the logic.
But no thanks. Human dissection is scary.
If I were a magical doctor instead of a magic wandmaker, I might have done something like a medical autopsy, but I'm in a different line of work.
All the Demon Lord materials had been exposed to radiation from nuclear bombardment, but all radioactive contamination had been completely cleansed by the Saintess's magic, so apparently I didn't need to worry about that.
The Demon Lord was as enormous as Daidarabotchi or a giant kaiju, so shipping all its materials to Japan would be inefficient. That meant the three boxes sent this time were only a portion of the whole. They were samples so I could decide which materials I wanted after seeing and touching them in person.
I immediately opened the boxes and began checking the loot. I'd been waiting for this moment.
The material harvested in the greatest quantity from the Demon Lord was blood.
It had been sealed in ampoules, and there was a sample kept cold with ice and a freezing magic circle. It was thick, purple blood that looked thoroughly inhuman. According to the documentation, it was 80% water, 18% solid components of terrestrial origin, and 2% Gremlin.
Like a dragon, the Demon Lord apparently melted Gremlin in a furnace inside its body and circulated the molten Gremlin through its bloodstream to power itself up. Strong.
Blood didn't appeal to me much, but I wanted to take a few ampoules as souvenirs.
The next most abundant material was bone. Its main component was calcium, just like the creatures of Earth, but it also contained an unknown metal. According to the American investigation, it was a new metal unlike any known metal.
The unknown metal in the bones was present only in trace amounts. America had merely discovered its existence and knew nothing about its properties yet.
This is really interesting! I want lots of it.
A magic wand carved from the Demon Lord's bones sounds like the quintessential fantasy weapon. Though it could also become a genuinely cursed item.
The unknown metal component sounded interesting, too. Apparently it was different from the alloy used for magical writing. It had to have some special properties. It might be useful for making magic wands.
The next most abundant material after bone was the epidermis.
Apparently, the Hero party had shredded it so thoroughly that there wasn't much well-preserved epidermis left.
Just as Hiyori said, it looked like writhing black tentacles tangled together. Even through my gloves, it felt slimy and disgusting. This stuff is gross. Ew, keep it away!
This disgusting epidermis apparently had magic resistance. According to Hiyori, its resistance had fallen dramatically compared to when it was alive, but its defensive ability was still so high that it could scatter even an Ice Spear spell. Despite its soft, squishy feel, which made it look easy to cut or crush, its physical strength was also considerable.
But it's gross...
If I ignored its appearance, I could probably make some strong armor from it, but it's gross, so I don't want it. I'm not an armor craftsman, anyway.
After the blood, bones, and skin came the limited-quantity rare drops.
In other words, the horns, organs, magic stones, and Gremlin.
The two curved horns that had grown from the Demon Lord's head had absurdly high strength. They were so hard that processing them apparently wasn't practical. The documentation emphasized their extraordinary durability with the statement that even Hero Conrad's magic sword had barely managed to leave a mark, though that wasn't exactly an expression I could visualize. They weren't impossible to process, but attempting it would require an impractical amount of labor.
They were interesting materials. But if they were practically impossible to process, then...
Searching for ways to process new materials was one of the joys of being a craftsman, but only two horns had been harvested, and their estimated value was ridiculously high. Acquiring the horns would mean giving up everything else.
Still, processing the Demon Lord's horns or uncovering the secret of their strength could produce astonishing weapons and equipment. They could be useful not only in combat but also in industry, agriculture, and every other field. I understood why they had such a high valuation.
I was interested, but if you asked whether I wanted them badly enough to spend most of my material acquisition rights, the answer was no. If they had a slightly more reasonable valuation, I might have wanted them, but they just weren't worth it.
The organs were a jumbled mess.
They were full of organs that no creature on Earth possessed, and I couldn't make heads or tails of them. Apparently, the only one whose biological role was understood was a Gremlin-melting organ similar to one found in dragons.
Their research value was high, but they didn't appeal to me much. I'll leave the study and utilization of organ materials to people in the fields of biology and medicine.
The magic stones were practically on sale.
The Demon Lord had apparently spat out no fewer than eighty-eight magic stones.
Whatever happened to magic stones being rare?
America had lost nineteen magic stones, but the Demon Lord had apparently collected magic stones that humanity hadn't discovered from all across the United States.
All the magic stones were unprocessed, with a wide variety of sizes, colors, and brilliance. Just looking at the twenty magic stones sent as samples and the color illustrations of the remaining sixty-eight made me giddy.
I want to make magic wands out of magic stones! I could even splurge and use three magic stones in a single wand.
I could also turn a beautiful blue magic stone into a Hiyori figurine. The ultimate waste of money.
But even that huge quantity of magic stones paled beside the star item among the Demon Lord's rare drops.
Fortunately, the Demon Lord's Gremlin hadn't vanished. It had remained intact.
The Demon King Gremlin's material valuation was unquestionably the highest of all the materials.
Its color was the same pitch-black shade I had seen during the Class A monster incident. It was a sphere 122 millimeters in diameter, setting a new world record for size. On top of that, it had a naturally occurring two-layer structure.
Processing Gremlins and magic stones into multilayered structures was my specialty. However, some monster species naturally possessed Gremlins with multilayered structures. The most famous were wild dragons, and in America, naturally multilayered Gremlins were prized under the name Dragon Reactor Gremlins.
There were also Class C monster species with naturally multilayered Gremlins, so having a multilayered Gremlin didn't necessarily mean a monster was powerful. However, the magic it used was unquestionably more powerful.
Being the world's largest Gremlin and naturally multilayered was already remarkable, but the Demon King Gremlin had another unusual feature.
Its cleavage planes were strange.
A cleavage plane is a "surface that cracks easily" found in a crystal structure. A Gremlin's cleavage planes are normally invisible, but exposing them to radiation causes the color to fade and makes the cleavage planes temporarily visible.
When this cleavage-plane visualization process was performed on the Demon King Gremlin, a feature was discovered that could not be seen in other Gremlins or magic stones.
The visible cleavage planes ran in orderly geometric patterns governed by some kind of rule. It wasn't biological in the slightest. If anything, it was engineering-like—extremely advanced engineering, at that.
Based on this, America believed that the Demon King Gremlin was an artificial object created by an intelligent life-form.
At the extreme, it could be called an invasion weapon.
The idea that Gremlins were invasive bioweapons had existed from the beginning.
It was an idea held in Japan, and in America, too. It had probably been proposed everywhere in the world.
Humanity lost electricity in the Gremlin disaster and suffered devastating damage from the monsters that poured out.
The idea of viewing this as an invasion rather than a disaster was highly persuasive.
The magic stones that rained down on Earth in the Shantak meteor shower were the first wave of a bioweapon invasion, serving as the source of spores that spread Gremlins and completely destroying humanity's electrical technology.
After using monsters to strike humanity another blow, the Demon Lord would collect the magic stones in the final stage of the invasion, absorb the Transcendents, strip humanity of its means of resistance, and deliver the finishing blow... Well, it sounded more or less plausible.
However, if Gremlins and the Demon Lord were biological weapons belonging to an invasion army, there were still many things that didn't quite fit.
First of all, monsters weren't hostile to humanity.
Of course, they sometimes drove humans out of their territory.
They sometimes ate humans when they were hungry.
They sometimes spread diseases among humans.
There were even monsters that preferred eating humans.
But Earth animals did the same things. It wasn't as though monsters alone were causing humanity special harm.
From the time of the Gremlin disaster until now, no monster had been confirmed to eagerly kill humans for no reason other than killing them. Monsters often came into conflict with humanity as a result of trying to survive and thrive themselves, but if you asked whether they were malicious bioweapons of invasion, I had to wonder.
Suppose there really was an intelligent invader hostile to humanity.
If it truly wanted to exterminate humanity and clean up the mess, it would only need to spawn huge numbers of monsters with lethal abilities, like the mushroom monster that caused the Mushroom Pandemic. Three or four worldwide biohazards on the scale of the Mushroom Pandemic, one after another, would be enough to wipe out humanity.
But that hadn't happened.
Was it unable to do so, had it chosen not to, or did it have no intention of doing so?
The same applied to Gremlins. They had destroyed electrical technology and set human civilization back by at least 150 years, but conversely, they had also become Prometheus, granting humanity magic technology. Their effectiveness as biological weapons for destroying civilization was inconsistent.
The Demon Lord was the same.
The Demon Lord's obsessive fixation had been on absorbing magic stones and Transcendents. It had paid no attention to ordinary humans. There had been no destruction for destruction's sake or slaughter for slaughter's sake.
Losing the magic stones and Transcendents would undoubtedly leave humanity in an unimaginably dire situation, so the Demon Lord was certainly a threat that could ultimately destroy humanity.
But if you asked whether destroying humanity had been the Demon Lord's objective, I had to wonder about that, too.
There was a theory that the Demon Lord had planned to crush every magic stone and Transcendent that could become a key to humanity's counterattack, then turn its attention to human extinction. I could understand the argument that it was humanity's enemy, but...
The ecology and internal structures of magical creatures were impossible to understand.
The regular geometric cleavage planes of the Demon King Gremlin might look artificial only from a human perspective. It was also possible that it was simply an ordinary creature that had evolved (?) to possess that kind of structure.
In America, the faction arguing that the Gremlin disaster and the Demon Lord were an invasion by a magical civilization had the stronger voice.
Considering that the Demon Lord had ravaged America so thoroughly, it was only natural for the country to bear a deep grudge.
However, because of all the strange points, America had refrained from definitively declaring that the magical civilization was an invading force.
The American materials attached to the Demon King Gremlin went on at length about its value and the significance of researching it, but in summary, they said this: "The Demon King Gremlin could become a clue to discovering what the magical civilization really is."
That was why the Demon King Gremlin's material valuation was outrageously high.
Its research value was simply too great, far beyond its value as a Gremlin.
I used the Gremlin cleavage-plane visualization device America had provided and examined the Demon King Gremlin with my own eyes.
The pitch-black color turned transparent, revealing cleavage planes running intricately through the inside and outside in geometric patterns.
"Huh. This really does look... kind of artificial, doesn't it? If someone made this artificially... Hmm..."
"Does it really look that artificial? All I see are cracks everywhere."
"You can't make out the fine details with Hiyori's eyes. You'd understand if we used a microscope... Wait, is there a regular dodecahedral fractal structure inside this? This part is like that, right? It is, isn't it? It's part of the structure, right? Is it a component...?"
I peered at the Demon King Gremlin from every angle, and the more I looked, the more fascinating it became.
The cleavage-plane visualization effect wore off after about an hour, the color returned to its original black, but that was more than enough time to settle my decision.
I checked the Demon Lord materials list once more and drew a large circle around "Demon King Gremlin."
That alone used almost all my acquisition rights, so I took three blood ampoules and one bone with what remained and called it a day.
The magic stones were tempting. I wanted more bone, too. If I were being greedy, I would have wanted the horns as well.
But I wanted the Demon King Gremlin far too badly. It was worth obtaining even if I had to give up everything else.
America seemed to value it highly as a way to approach the mysteries of the magical civilization, but from my perspective, it also had outstanding value as a material for making magic wands.
If I disassembled and analyzed the Demon King Gremlin, I would probably discover huge numbers of new geometric structures with magical significance. There was no way its cleavage planes forming a regular dodecahedral fractal structure could be a coincidence. I had only identified the fractal so far, and it was reasonable to assume that even more geometric structures were hidden within it.
Every part of the Demon King Gremlin's structure undoubtedly had magical significance. It was a treasure trove of technologies and theories that could be adapted for magic wand production.
"All right. Hiyori, send everything except the materials I marked back to America."
"Already? Shouldn't you examine them more carefully?"
"No matter how many days I agonize over it, my conclusion won't change."
With the Demon King Gremlin sitting on my workbench, I could hardly wait to get started.
First, I would observe it carefully, sketch it, and gather as much data as possible through nondestructive testing.
After that, I would disassemble the Demon King Gremlin along its cleavage planes, breaking it down into geometric components.
The total number of components would probably be somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000.
Taking it all apart without breaking any of the pieces would probably take six months.
But it was worth it. Without a doubt, it was worth it.
This was, in other words, reverse engineering.
If the Demon King Gremlin was an artificial object created by the magical civilization, then I would disassemble it, analyze it, and make that magnificent technology my own...!