Chapter 9
After a ninety-minute lecture on the magic language from Professor Ohinata, I learned its fundamentals.
I couldn't memorize the phonetic symbols, grammar, rhetoric, and so on all at once without getting my head tangled, but the professor gave me her seal of approval, saying I had grasped the basics. Being praised as an excellent student doesn't feel bad.
I learned all sorts of things, but mastering the "safety sound" was an especially significant benefit.
The safety sound was a safety system devised by magic-language scholars who often caused magic to go berserk during their research.
The magic language's pronunciation is completely different from Japanese, so there's no danger of accidentally casting a spell and causing it to go berserk during everyday conversation. Magic-language scholars are different, though. They speak the magic language every day, and there's a real danger of accidentally triggering magic while discussing it with other scholars.
It would be terribly dangerous if a freezing beam suddenly went off the moment someone said, "I'd like to ask about the Freeze school..."
That's why magic-language scholars have developed the habit of putting a short fricative at the beginning of every sentence when speaking the magic language.
This fricative is a sound not used in any currently identified magic-language phonemes, and it is believed to be a pronunciation that doesn't exist in the magic language.
Therefore, mixing this fricative into the magic language makes the pronunciation incorrect, guaranteeing that the spell will fail.
A safety-device sound to prevent magic-language spells from going berserk. Hence, the "safety sound."
The safety sound is short, soft, and difficult to hear, so unless you listen very carefully, you'll miss it as mere background noise. Adding it doesn't interfere with conversation.
The safety sound is unnecessary for witches and wizards, but it's incredibly useful for ordinary people like us.
It could certainly be called one of the magic-language scholars' fine research achievements.
That said, during experiments with detour incantations and modified incantations, they have to activate magic, so they can't add the safety sound and make the spell fail. Even after learning the safety sound, magic-language scholars still can't escape fatal accidents.
Magic-language scholars need more fundamental countermeasures and new methods to protect themselves from incantation accidents.
After the lecture, I gave the exhausted Ermine Professor some canned juice poured into a small dish, then took a break myself. It had been a long time since I'd used my brain so intensely, and I was beat.
When I went to the toilet—a pit toilet—and was heading back to the workshop, the Blue Witch peeked out from the study and called me over.
"Dairi. Is the lecture over?"
"It's over. Even if she taught me more, I probably wouldn't be able to remember any of it today."
"Then come over here for a bit. I need to ask you something."
I entered the study as she beckoned me over. The Blue Witch fidgeted with the hair spilling from beneath her mask and mumbled awkwardly.
"Actually..."
"Yeah?"
"Um... This is hard to say, but..."
"Yeah?"
"Please don't get angry when you hear me out..."
"Those words alone make me feel like getting angry. Just spit it out. One socially inept person is enough for this household."
When I urged her on, the Blue Witch finally began to speak.
"Actually, I wrote a check I can't cash. I mean, I didn't explicitly promise anything. I was vague and said I'd think of a way to deal with it. But basically, as payment for this magic-language lecture, I've ended up having to solve Japan's food problem—at least throughout the Tokyo area."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
What kind of conversational leap was that?
How could things possibly have turned out that way?
It made absolutely no sense.
After hearing the details, I learned that there had apparently been a political negotiation at the Witches' Gathering.
The Foresight Wizard protecting Professor Ohinata was actually the minister in charge of the food crisis, and the deal was apparently that we would help with the food-production project we were running in exchange for lending us one of the minister's subordinates.
I was subjected to a long explanation of how severe Japan's current food crisis was, but that was the gist of it.
"You made the promise, Blue Witch. You deal with it."
"I don't know much about agriculture. My only experience is growing morning glories in elementary school. You do home gardening and work a rice paddy, don't you, Dairi?"
"Don't lump personal gardening together with an agricultural problem on a national-policy scale."
"But you know more than I do. You made Cureanos, didn't you? Can't you make a magic wand capable of causing an agricultural revolution?"
"Don't give me that crap. That's asking way too much."
I considered it as I spoke.
The problem would be solved if we lent Cureanos to the Foresight Wizard and had them fire off super-amplified abundance magic, but apparently the Iruma Wizard had left behind a disastrously bad precedent. Considering the risk of history repeating itself, the Blue Witch said she absolutely couldn't lend it out.
Well, I had no idea what kind of person the Foresight Wizard was, either.
If the Blue Witch said she wanted to trust them but couldn't bring herself to trust them completely, then that was probably how things stood.
"Why don't you take Cureanos and travel all over the country dispensing abundance magic? ...Oh, you don't want to leave Ome, do you?"
I came to that conclusion myself before the Blue Witch could answer.
Then using Cureanos to deal with it was out of the question. The same went for Octameteorite.
"How about a human-wave strategy? It's not like I made them in anticipation of something like this, but I've got around three hundred general-purpose, double-layered magic wands made from Gremlins sleeping in the warehouse. If I teach ordinary people that abundance magic and have three hundred of them go around casting it little by little..."
"A human-wave strategy won't work. Abundance magic contains unpronounceable sounds. Only witches and wizards can use it."
"Seriously?! Wait, Professor Ohinata said she was researching something like that. Research into bypassing the unpronounceable sounds and modifying spells so humans can chant them!"
I snapped my fingers and pointed at the Blue Witch.
The information connected in my head. So that's what Professor Ohinata meant when she said she was conducting research with immediately practical applications.
Wait, then Professor Ohinata would solve the problem even if we did nothing! Just as I began to relax, the Blue Witch slowly shook her head.
"At this rate, Kei-chan will definitely die before completing her research. The fatality rate for incantation experiments is far too high. I intend to somehow persuade her to stop experimenting, but then there won't be a single magic-language researcher left."
"Oh, right. They've died off so much that only one is left, huh? Hire some new people."
"More than ninety percent of magic-language researchers die in the line of duty. Their mortality rate is higher than that of the security forces. They say they're recruiting, but no one applies."
Every idea I offered was shot down, and I was about ready to lose my temper.
Then what the hell am I supposed to do?!
"We're completely screwed."
"Yes. That's why I'm troubled. I want to borrow your wisdom, Dairi."
"No way."
I'm just your average legendary wandmaker, you know?
If professors smarter than me and politicians with a million times my social skills couldn't solve the problem, then I couldn't solve it either.
I threw in the towel as the obvious conclusion, but the Blue Witch stubbornly continued to plead with me.
"I understand why you'd want to say that. But please, at least think as hard as you can about whether there's some way to solve it. I'll think, too."
"...Just think about it?"
"Yes, that's all right. That would be a great help. Sorry for asking the impossible."
The Blue Witch bowed, looking relieved.
I wanted to hole up as a legendary magic-wand maker and casually watch the world from the sidelines. I had dumped all external negotiations on the Blue Witch precisely so I could do that.
Don't saddle me with Japan's future, okay? I'm begging you. Seriously.
I could think about it, I suppose. But it was weighing heavily on me.
We had ended up talking for quite a while, and I remembered that I had left Professor Ohinata unattended while taking my break. We had planned to start the question-and-answer session after the break.
Terrified that she might be angry, I quietly returned to the workshop. Professor Ohinata was curled up atop a lap blanket, sleeping soundly.
S-so cute...!
I unconsciously reached out to pet her, but while she slept, she licked my fingertip with a tiny tongue.
What is this shamelessly adorable creature?!
She has a human mind, so she doesn't need discipline; she can provide her own food and doesn't make any noise. Is she the ultimate life-form or what?
"..."
As I let her lick my finger with her warmer-than-expected tongue, the reality of the situation gradually sank in.
I see.
If things continued like this, this adorable little animal would conduct a reckless experiment and die.
I didn't like that. It was sad.
I should give this some serious thought.
A way to solve Japan's food problem and prevent the Ermine Professor's accidental death.
The deeply sleeping Professor Ohinata was placed in a basket lined with a fluffy blanket, then carefully carried home by the Blue Witch.
She had been saddled with Japan's food problem, transformed into an ermine, and forced into one-on-one lessons with a socially inept man. She must have been exhausted in both body and mind.
I hoped she wouldn't die from overwork before she could die in an accident. The world was being far too hard on a sixth-grade girl.
Once my visitor had left and my comfortable solitude returned, my thoughts began to flow more smoothly.
I organized the problem and reached the conclusion that all I had to do was reduce the fatality rate of magic-language experiments to zero.
Even if I couldn't make it completely zero, getting it close would be enough.
If the fatality rate of magic-language experiments dropped sharply, people would apply to work in magic-language research. Professor Ohinata would no longer be a one-person team, drastically reducing her burden. The Blue Witch, who couldn't stop worrying about Ohinata Kei, would be relieved as well.
Research efficiency would improve, and the completion of the detour incantation for abundance magic would come sooner.
Once an abundance spell anyone could chant was completed, the three hundred general-purpose magic wands sleeping in my warehouse would finally see action. If three hundred weren't enough, I could produce more.
Even unprocessed Gremlins could serve as inefficient magic-activation mediums, so even if we ran short of wands, all we would have to do was spread the incantation for the modified abundance magic. Then we could use a human-wave strategy to cast low-output abundance magic everywhere and solve the food problem.
So how could I lower the fatality rate of magic-language experiments?
It was a difficult problem, but my strength was world-champion-level dexterity. No one could match me at making magic wands. I should make use of my strengths and create a magic wand that lowered the fatality rate of magic-language experiments.
I had heard about several deaths caused by failed magic-language experiments, and it seemed that many could have been avoided if the power had simply been reduced.
In the accident where someone's blood boiled and killed them, reducing the power so that their blood merely warmed would have resulted in nothing worse than improved circulation.
In the accident where a sudden increase in blood caused someone's body to burst apart, reducing the power would have left them with nothing worse than an increased tendency to get nosebleeds.
Even the ermine transformation could have been reduced to nothing more than ermine ears or a tail growing out if the power had been lowered.
Every magic wand I'd made so far increased the spell's power. Compared to an unprocessed item, the increase was at least twofold. Cureanos had such a high enhancement multiplier that we still didn't know whether it amplified magic dozens of times over. The Blue Witch had said it might even reach a hundredfold.
So I looked at it from the opposite direction.
If processing could increase a spell's power, couldn't it decrease it, too?
The problem was that the enhancement multipliers were two or three. If I could make a magic wand with an enhancement multiplier of 1/1000, then even if an accident occurred during a magic-language experiment, it shouldn't be powerful enough to kill anyone.
I would make a negative-enhancement magic wand.
Once I had a goal, the rest was my specialty.
I just had to develop a processing method like that and make it.
I spent a full day and night poring over my drafting board, thinking up one processing method after another. The floor became covered in discarded scribbles, and I groaned over the problem while eating a bento from the Blue Witch that had been delivered by Uber and hung from the workshop doorknob.
If processing a sphere increased the enhancement multiplier, then processing the opposite shape of a sphere should decrease it.
But what was the opposite of a sphere...?
Was there even such a thing as the opposite of a sphere...?
A mathematician specializing in geometry might have had a flash of inspiration, but I was completely stumped.
Still, a geometric approach seemed necessary, so I pulled my high-school and university mathematics textbooks out of the closet and searched for a good idea.
Of course, processing a Gremlin into a random, irregular shape lowered the output, but only to about one-half or one-third.
Many spells were powerful enough to kill people even at half strength. Using a Gremlin with an irregular shape could also make the spell fly in a direction other than the one intended. If a killing spell aimed at a target malfunctioned and flew back at me, it would be disastrous. Irregular processing was out of the question.
Processing that used spheres or spherical shapes probably strengthened magic.
Maybe spirals? Or cubes?
I tried carving Gremlins into spiral shapes and cubes on a whim, but both only reduced the power to one-half or one-third. On top of that, the natural-frequency beams that should have flown straight bent sharply and went off in completely the wrong direction. It was far too dangerous. No good.
After tearing up another blueprint, I was drawn to a column about fractal structures in my mathematics reference book.
Fractals. A geometric concept referring to shapes whose parts and whole are self-similar...?
The definition didn't click with me, but one look at the illustration beside it made it immediately clear what they were.
Oh.
Ohhh!
You could make fractals in solids, not just plane figures.
And they had recursion, too.
Fractal structures were shapes found in nature—in trees, coastlines, cumulonimbus clouds, snowflakes, and so on... Hmm, hmm, hmm.
It was just an intuition, but this thing called a fractal felt like a "magical" shape.
I hadn't understood it intellectually, but my godlike hands, honed through years of precision-processing and handling hundreds of magical stones, were tingling at the sight of the fractal shape.
I traced the regular dodecahedral fractal shown in the reference book's illustration with my fingertip and found magical meaning in it.
Professor Ohinata had mentioned that magic linguistics had something called the "Yoshida Conjecture."
According to the "Yoshida Conjecture," proposed by the late Assistant Professor Yoshida of the magic-language research team, the magic language contained five more unknown unpronounceable sounds in addition to the seven currently confirmed ones.
That made twelve sounds in total.
I didn't know how they knew that, since she had skipped the explanation. Even if she'd given me a technical explanation, I probably wouldn't have been able to keep up. Apparently, though, it was a highly reliable conjecture, treated within the research team as "a conjecture infinitesimally close to fact."
Twelve unpronounceable sounds.
A dodecahedral fractal.
Both were twelve. Was that coincidence or inevitability?
Hmm, I'd thought about it so much that I was starting to lose track of what made sense.
It was possible that I merely wanted them to be connected, and my wish was trying to link two completely unrelated things.
On the other hand, I also felt as if I had reached the truth through investigation, prototypes, and thought experiments.
Well, whatever. I would process one and see if I could actually make a regular dodecahedral fractal.
Judging from the illustration in the reference book, it looked like it would require dizzyingly complex and delicate processing, but trying was free.
Since this would be the most complex processing I had ever attempted, I chose the largest Gremlin I owned—the 28-millimeter specimen collected at the Yokohama Thermal Power Station, which was also the easiest to work with.
I realized almost as soon as I began processing that this wasn't going to be easy.
Cureanos's spherical, multilayered processing had been difficult enough, but fractal processing surpassed it. Carefully carving out an intricate structure in which the same structure was layered over and over made my eyes and hands feel as if they were malfunctioning.
I had been able to process Cureanos nonstop, but I couldn't maintain my concentration while working on the fractal. I took frequent breaks, soothing my eyes with steamed towels and resting my hands.
The work of making more than three hundred magic wands hadn't been wasted.
If I hadn't thoroughly accustomed my eyes and hands to the work and improved my processing precision, even I couldn't have managed this ultrafine processing.
If carving a Great Buddha from a grain of rice was Dexterity Level 1, then this was about Level 100. I wasn't exaggerating. It really was about that difficult.
Eventually, I became so absorbed that I lost all sense of time. When I finally finished the precision work that had seemed as if it would never end, my tension vanished and I nearly collapsed.
Oh, crap! I almost dropped and broke the prototype I'd worked so hard to process.
The prototype Gremlin with the fractal processing was hollow inside and extremely fragile. I would have to handle it carefully.
I would fill the gaps with resin later to reinforce it. Even if the prototype failed, I wanted to keep it as a memento of the effort I'd put into it.
Judging by the number of empty bento boxes stacked in the corner of the room, I had apparently spent three full days concentrating on the processing. No wonder I was sleepy. Even though my stomach was full, my brain was at its limit.
I would sleep after testing the prototype. I'd been too absorbed in the processing.
"Aaaagh!"
I held up the fractal-processing prototype and chanted my usual natural-frequency spell, but something seemed wrong.
A white beam didn't fire. Instead, the regular dodecahedral fractal was blinking on and off at regular intervals.
What? Something happened!
I'd hoped something might happen, but I hadn't really expected anything to happen.
My sleepiness vanished, and I examined the fractal that had caused the unknown phenomenon.
But I couldn't figure it out...!
I had absolutely no idea what was happening!
I measured it with a metronome and learned that the fractal's white flashes repeated at regular intervals.
And I couldn't figure out anything beyond that. It wasn't hot, and it wasn't vibrating. It was just flashing brightly. It might be useful for an electronic signboard.
Since examining it hadn't helped, I shouted once more.
"Aaaagh!"
The instant I shouted, a thin white beam shot out, struck the target on the wall, and feebly faded away without even making the paper target stir.
Whoa?! It's weak! The power's dropped insanely! I don't know why it glitched the first time, but it's seriously weakened!
Could this actually work?!
"Freeze!"
This time, I chanted the freezing spell I'd just learned.
But it failed to activate again, and the fractal began flashing blue-white.
Hmm?
This is...
"Freeze! Hah, I knew it. Is it waiting for activation? Freeze, Freeze, Freeze, Freeze. No doubt about it. Then, Vaara... completely unresponsive."
After chanting the spell repeatedly to test it, I learned that this fractal-processed item entered a magic-activation standby state after the first incantation and activated after the second. It didn't react to an improper incantation.
On top of that, its power had been drastically reduced.
A natural safety lock that required two incantations to activate!
Massively reduced power meant a massively reduced accident rate!
Either one of those would have been a fantastic function, but this had both.
I trembled at my own genius. It had turned out even better than my ideal.
Lately, I'd thought of myself as the world's greatest genius wandmaker, but I might actually have been the greatest in the universe.
In high spirits, I began putting the finishing touches on my great invention.
I filled the gaps in the structure with resin and hardened it, then encased the whole thing in resin and carved it into a diamond shape. Wand gems were traditionally spherical, but making this one spherical might increase the power I'd gone to such lengths to reduce. A diamond shape wasn't bad, either.
The finished wand looked like a white regular dodecahedral fractal suspended inside a transparent, diamond-shaped crystal.
Pretty damn cool, huh? Looks great!
For the wand's handle, I lavishly used a 120-centimeter length of paulownia. It was a soft material that developed a beautiful sheen when polished, and the lightest domestically produced wood, so even a large wand wouldn't be burdensome. Unlike Cureanos, it had no metal core, making it less durable, but that should be fine since it was for use in a laboratory, not combat.
It was a lightweight wood, but it was still 120 centimeters long. It was far too large for its stoat-sized owner, but that wasn't a problem.
Because I like small creatures carrying huge weapons!
A little girl swinging a fucking enormous hammer is one of my kinks, too.
I wanted her to struggle enthusiastically to carry a huge wand completely unsuited to her size. Just imagining it made me grin.
For the design carved into the handle, I incorporated the crest of the university where her father had taught. Professor Ohinata seemed like a total daddy's girl, so I figured she'd like it.
Who could have imagined that the book of university crests I'd bought when watching a college-war anime a few years ago would be useful here? Even the Foresight Wizard couldn't have seen that coming.
Finally, I engraved Aleister in a stylish font as the name, after Aleister Crowley, the greatest magician of the twentieth century. Then it was complete.
As I finished the wand, wrote its instruction manual, and tested how it felt to hold, I happened to sense someone quietly approaching the room.
Perfect timing. I opened the door to welcome the Blue Witch, who had come to deliver my bento.
The Blue Witch flinched when the door suddenly flew open from the inside.
"Good morning!"
"G-good morning. It's evening now, though. Are you taking a break?"
"Something like that. Anyway, about the solution to the food problem you asked me to find..."
"Yes?"
"You said all I had to do was think about it, right?"
"Yes."
"Well, I think I made something."
"...What?"
"A solution to the food problem. I made one."
"...!?"
"Here are the Regular Dodecahedral Fractal-Type Magic Wand: Aleister and the instruction manual. Professor Ohinata will understand once you give them to her. Well, I'm counting on you. I'm going to bed."
Sorry I'm a genius!
My only redeeming feature was my dexterous hands.
But I was going to solve everything with these hands alone!