Progress 1%

The parts that made up the Demon King Gremlin were each 0.4–2.2 mm across. Their sizes varied depending on the type of part. They were mostly about the size of grains of sand, and when Hiyori came to tour the workshop, she blew away the parts I'd neatly lined up on my workbench with a puff of breath (I had a hard time collecting them all afterward), so I've barred her from the workshop during disassembly.

After three days spent removing 6,000 parts from the main body, my progress had finally reached 1%. My estimate that I could finish disassembling everything in six months at most had been overly optimistic. It looked like it would take about a year.

This is a problem with my memory.

Once the number of disassembled parts passed 800, the three-dimensional blueprint in my head started getting tangled.

If all I had to do was take things apart, I could work at double speed.

However, when I had to remember which parts connected to which others and how—in other words, remember everything well enough to reassemble the disassembled parts exactly as they had been—the speed dropped.

I was confident in my ability to remember mechanical structures in three dimensions. But when the total number of parts reached approximately 600,000, memorization alone was obviously no longer enough.

Because I started taking notes as I worked so I could put the disassembled parts back together correctly, the projected completion date slipped considerably.

I'd only disassembled 1% of the whole, so there was still very little I'd learned. If anything, there were more things I no longer understood than things I did.

The clearest example of what I had learned was that there were a great many parts of the same type.

Many of the 600,000 parts followed common specifications. Dozens, or in some cases even hundreds, of parts so precisely machined that even my eyes couldn't tell them apart were used—parts that could only be called twin Gremlin parts.

The precision was astonishing, without even the slightest deviation.

I'm not saying I couldn't imitate it, but if I tried to carve all 600,000 parts to this degree of precision, I'd die of old age before finishing.

Even this one aspect of the precision gave me a glimpse of the advanced technological civilization of whoever had created—or perhaps made—the Demon King Gremlin. It was comparable to, or even surpassed, the cutting-edge manufacturing technology of Earth's scientific civilization at its peak in 2024, during the previous civilization.

I had no idea whether this was the work of manufacturing machinery or a genius craftsman like me. For that matter, it was also possible that the Demon King had simply acquired such biological parts at the end of its evolutionary process, though I couldn't rule it out completely.

Conversely, the most representative example of something I'd learned that only raised more questions was the Gremlins' variations.

Every part that made up the Demon King Gremlin was a Gremlin, but their properties differed from part to part.

A regular Gremlin. That made sense.

A Melt-Resolidified Gremlin. That made sense too.

But the Elastic Gremlin, with its soft, springy elasticity, made no sense at all. It could be used as a medium for activating magic and had the same functions as an ordinary Gremlin, but it was squishy like rubber.

There were also Gremlins that looked like ordinary Gremlins at a glance but lost their function as magic activators when a magnet was brought near them.

Some Gremlins had greater strength in exchange for reduced hardness.

What astonished me was that the Demon King Gremlin, which incorporated Gremlins with such a wide range of properties, functioned as a whole like a single ordinary Gremlin.

It was a miracle like mixing sugar, salt, vinegar, and chili pepper into one seasoning, then having it taste only like sugar. It had gone beyond technology and reached the realm of art.

I suspected that all these diverse Gremlins were made by processing, altering, or refining ordinary Gremlins in one way or another.

It wasn't as though I had any clear evidence. It was simply my instinct as the world's greatest craftsman when it came to precision-processing Gremlins. Still, I didn't think I was far off the mark.

As for one of the materials used in the Demon King Gremlin's parts, the Melt-Resolidified Gremlin, even Earth's civilization—which had known magic for less than ten years—already understood how to make it. As research progressed, we would surely learn how to make Elastic Gremlins, magnetically reactive Gremlins, high-strength Gremlins, and so on.

Glimpsing what lay beyond magical technology and magical civilization through the Demon King Gremlin drove home how Earth's magical civilization was still in its toddling infancy.

Research and refinement—that's all there is. Before I died as a tottering old man, I wanted to create an extradimensional magic staff surpassing the level of the magical civilization sung of in the Nameless Epic and leave behind a legend.

Now then.

When I get too absorbed in my work, I sometimes enter a state of hyperfocus. I forget to sleep and eat, and often look at the clock thinking I'm strangely hungry even though I just ate, only to discover that ten hours have passed.

Disassembling the Demon King Gremlin was fascinating work, and I kept coming close to entering a state of hyperfocus, but I'd die if I worked on a task expected to take nearly a year without eating or drinking.

This wasn't a job I could finish all at once. It would be a long-term task requiring patience. Therefore, I had to settle in and work on it while taking plenty of proper breaks... or so Hiyori insisted.

It was a perfectly reasonable opinion.

But what did that have to do with her swimsuit?

"We promised last year that we'd play in the river again this year."

"Did we...?"

"I said it a week ago, too. That we'd go play in the river next week."

"Did we...?"

"I said it yesterday, too."

"I kind of remember you saying something about it...?"

As I tilted my head, Hiyori poked me with the nose of an inflated orca float.

"You're in danger. Seriously. You're devoting too many of your brain's resources to your hobbies. Your daily life is starting to fall apart. Make sure you take proper breaks."

"Oh, well. Then I guess we'll go to the river today. Ah! Right, so that's why there was a beach parasol by the entrance? I'd noticed something was there."

"You only noticed now!? Honestly... Don't you notice anything else? Like something I'm trying to tell you?"

With that, Hiyori put her hands on her hips and puffed out her chest.

It looked like the same black bikini as last year—or so I thought, because the design was slightly different. Also, perhaps because she remembered the complaint I'd made last year, she'd wrapped a thin, skirt-like frilly thing around her waist to cover her lower half and reduce the amount of exposed skin. How considerate.

"Your swimsuit has changed."

"Yeah, I got a new one for today. What do you think?"

"The swimsuit? No, not particularly. It's last year's customized version, isn't it?"

"...Sigh."

As I stared at Hiyori from head to toe, I noticed something strange.

Her figure hadn't changed since last year. Her skin still had the same luster. She had the air of an eternally beautiful eighteen-year-old girl.

Yet despite there being no physical changes, the impression she gave had changed.

This is strange.

"Hey, are you using any magic right now?"

"No? What are you going to say this time?"

"Really? Like arousal magic, or some kind of illusion magic?"

"Why would I use that!? I hate mental manipulation magic. It reminds me of Iruma."

She raised her voice and flatly denied it, deepening the mystery even further.

"Then that's strange. You look the same as last year, but you look prettier than you did then."

"!?"

"You're cuter than last year, too, and looking at you makes my heart race more than it did last year."

"Huh...?"

"That's weird. Your species seems to have a long lifespan, but you still age, right? Probably. Can someone really get prettier as they grow older? You're already the most beautiful girl in the world, but you're becoming even more beautiful."

"Aah..."

"Hiyori, are you all right? It was fine when you lived in Ome, where there was no one around, but now you're living in an ice tower you built at the university, right? Aren't male students constantly hitting on you? When I look at your face, I start worrying about what I'll do if some bad man manages to lead you astray."

"Hee..."

As I worried while gazing at her beautiful face, Hiyori turned bright red and lowered her head.

Then she stopped responding no matter how much I spoke to her.

Oh, come on, she's broken again. Could you have a serious conversation with me for once? I'm talking about something serious here.

You don't realize it, but you were once led astray by a bad woman—the Witch of Tsugibi—and got turned into a mother, you know? You've got a record. I'm worried that you'll be led astray by someone else again.

According to the Spider Witch-sensei, Hiyori malfunctions whenever I praise her. She also breaks down when I don't praise her, but apparently that's only because I'm unaware that I'm praising her.

Hmm? Hiyori was blushing, so she was embarrassed.

If she'd malfunctioned because she was embarrassed, then something I'd said must have unintentionally sounded like praise.

Does simply stating the facts and worrying about her count as praise...? Interpersonal communication is way too difficult. How do people in this world manage to complete such a high-difficulty mission every day?

It took Hiyori quite a while to reboot, but this year too, we headed out to the Tama River to play in the water beneath a perfectly clear blue sky.

At first, Hiyori moved stiffly and awkwardly, like a robot, but after our lunch break, by the time we'd started piling up huge stones to build a dam in the river, she'd returned to normal. Water leaked easily through the gaps between the stones, but the water level really was a few centimeters different upstream and downstream of the dam, which was pretty funny.

After playing in the river all day, we finished with a barbecue and went our separate ways.

This year was fun too.

But it would have been even more fun if the Spider Witch and the professor had been there...

Why does Hiyori only invite me to go play in the river? It's a little strange.

It was a mystery why the Blue Witch, who loved Kei-chan so much, didn't invite the stoat.

The stoat didn't seem to dislike water, either, as far as I knew.

Not inviting the Spider Witch was... well, understandable.

Hiyori apparently didn't like the Spider Witch's decoy.

I understood. Anyone would find it creepy if they had their own doppelganger.

The Spider Witch was also very deferential to the Blue Witch, who had tried to destroy the decoy. Still, the decoy was stored in the hollow in the Spider Witch's abdomen, and even if it was shattered, it would regenerate, so there was no real harm in destroying it. It seemed healing magic could repair it too.

But that was like saying that it grows back anyway, so shaving your head bald should be fine, right? Having the decoy destroyed didn't hurt and it would return to normal, but of course she hated it.

Speaking of the decoy, it reminded me that the feel of carving it had seemed similar to that of the high-strength Gremlins used in the Demon King Gremlin's parts. I didn't think they were the same, but they were quite similar.

Hmm?

The Demon King Gremlin might be based on the workings of the natural world (?) after all.

Earth had swimsuits based on sharkskin, honeycomb structures based on beehives, and so on. Incorporating particularly excellent things from nature into engineering was common practice.

There was also the Dragon-Furnace Gremlin, an example of a naturally occurring multilayered Gremlin. If I examined the body structures of witches, wizards, and monsters, I might find things similar to the Demon King Gremlin's structure and parts.

Once I'd made enough progress with disassembling the Demon King Gremlin to grasp its characteristics, it might be a good idea to have the Magic University departments of Monster Studies or Mutation Studies investigate whether there were any monsters or Transcendents with similar structures.

For that purpose, I had to keep progressing with the disassembly and analysis.

This was work only I could do, and it was far deeper and more enjoyable than I'd initially expected.

Not only was it fun, but I could even expect to acquire new technology. This was the best!