Aiming For A Breakthrough

“…And so, if you draw this figure with non-elemental ink… it produces rotational force.”

“I see… then here’s a question. For example… if you were to spin something about this size… let’s say a wooden pot lid, how much force would this figure be able to spin it with?”

I used my hands to indicate about this size.

“A-a pot lid? You’re going to spin a pot lid?”

“I said for example, didn’t I? The pot lid isn’t the main point.”

“I-I see. Hmm, if it’s a wooden lid, it would spin with quite a bit of force. Probably enough that you’d hurt yourself if you touched it with your bare hands.”

“I see…”

I groaned as I looked at the figure drawn on the paper.

At the moment, I was in one of the castle’s reception rooms meeting with a certain person.

That person’s name was Oscar.

He was a magic-tool engineer I had hired personally, and a formerly bald man who, from a certain day onward, had become a long-haired pretty boy.

Honestly… there had not been only one or two times I’d wanted to punch that face.

This guy is the enemy.

Of humanity… no, the enemy of half of humanity…

A truly outrageous scumbag.

Such casually committed sleaziness in everyday life…

When I once read the report on this guy’s daily routine, I almost went all the way to Yōntsu’s capital to White Flame him.

Actually, just remembering that report is making me want to punch him again.

Should I just hit him and rip it all out?

“Bro…? What’s wrong? Why are you suddenly clenching your fist?”

“No, it’s nothing. I just remembered someone I’d like to punch.”

“Whoa… anybody hated by you must be in serious trouble, bro. If you want, I can go give him one good whack for you.”

“Yeah… I’d really like you to give him a good hard snip.”

“Ahaha, what part of him am I supposed to rip off?”

“…”

The hair on your head.

…No… that kind of thinking is unworthy of the Overlord.

More importantly, let’s move the work discussion forward.

This time, what I had Oscar develop was a new mechanism, or rather, something that did not exist in conventional magical circuits.

That said, it was not anything grand, just as Oscar had said earlier: merely a circuit that created rotational motion.

“Ha… I’ve calmed down now. Let’s continue. First, let me confirm one thing. If a magic tool were to produce about this much wind, roughly how expensive would the tool need to be, and how much would the running cost be?”

I took the stack of paper sitting beside me and fanned Oscar rather strongly with it.

“This much wind…? Um, do you mean continuously? Or just for a moment?”

“Continuously. As for the running cost… let’s say it’s used eight hours a day. About how much would that cost in a month? A rough estimate is fine.”

“…Um, eight hours is… one-third of a day, so…”

Oscar wrote down the conditions I had given him on paper and started working through the calculation while muttering to himself.

He seemed to be writing all sorts of numbers down… and writing at an incredible pace… but his handwriting was remarkably neat.

Maybe because his work requires dexterity, his handwriting is neat too?

As I waited while thinking that, Oscar finally stopped writing and raised his head.

“Um, roughly speaking, if it’s a magic tool that keeps blowing a constant amount of wind, it would cost about fifteen gold coins… and the running cost, just for the wind mana stones… might be around five gold coins a month.”

“That’s… a considerable amount.”

At those words from me, the same man who had once tried to hand over ten thousand gold coins as development funding, Oscar gave a small smile.

“And besides, it would need regular maintenance… so in reality, I think it would cost even more. If we’re thinking of it operating almost all day, then the mana stone consumption would be heavy, and the tool’s durability would also become a concern.”

“I see… by the way, that magic tool you developed this time that only rotates… or rather, the circuit? If that were operated for about the same amount of time, how much money would it cost in a month?”

“Hmm, if you were spinning something about the size of the pot lid you mentioned earlier… the circuit design for a magic tool is pretty simple, so the technical fee wouldn’t even require one gold coin. But a magic tool can’t exist on the circuit alone, so there’s also the cost of making the outer casing. That part would depend on the materials and the craftsman. As for running costs, non-elemental mana stones are enough, and the consumption isn’t heavy, so… I think it would stay under one gold coin a month.”

Well, in reality, there would probably be more air resistance than spinning a pot lid, so the mana stone consumption might end up heavier.

“I see. Compared to a magic tool that blows wind, it’s much cheaper, but… would it still be too expensive for ordinary people to use?”

“Yeah. What you want is a magic tool that can be used in everyday life, bro, and when you think of it as part of daily living costs, I think it’d still be too tough for ordinary people.”

The price Oscar had roughly calculated certainly wasn’t cheap, and considering that the living expenses of an ordinary household were about one gold coin a month, it would definitely be a bit too much.

What I wanted to make was an electric fan.

It had already been more than half a year since I came to this world…

Naturally, the seasons had changed, and I had already experienced summer…

The humidity wasn’t particularly high, but hot is still hot.

Why didn’t I choose ice as one of Fels’s affinity elements…?

I truly regret it.

Fire, lightning, darkness, illusion…

They’re all completely useless!

There are magic types like water and ice that seem so much more useful, aren’t there!?

Well… fire might be useful in emergencies…

but fundamentally it’s attack magic, so even if I try to burn something, it just turns into charcoal.

At best, it seems like all I could do is burn everything around me to keep warm.

The Overlord’s way of warming himself would be an awfully extravagant one.

Anyway.

Well, that’s why I thought I’d ask Oscar to try developing an electric fan, but since he said that magic tools that simply generate wind already existed, I figured I might as well try developing one in a way that reduced costs.

According to Oscar, when selling a magic tool, the majority of the price comes from the technical fee.

Each one has to be made by the hands of a magic-tool engineer, and because delicate work is required, it takes a great deal of time, so unless it’s sold for a certain price, it doesn’t pay for itself.

After that, the next biggest expense is the mana stones.

In this world, there are mana stones imbued with an element and mana stones with no element at all, and the former are expensive while the latter are relatively cheap.

So what I aimed for was simplifying the work process and reducing mana stone costs.

When I had Oscar think of a way to generate rotation, something that could be applied across all sorts of fields, more simply and more cheaply, he brought me a prototype without taking much time at all.

Apparently magical circuits that move parts already existed to begin with, and he had applied that knowledge to create a circuit specifically for rotation.

What’s more, he had done it using only non-elemental mana stones, which were considered cheap.

That was probably because he understood my initial intention when I explained that I wanted something that could spread as widely and cheaply as possible.

At first, he began with something that rotated slowly, at about the speed needed to gently stir a pot, and now he had apparently gotten it to spin at considerable high speed.

Since I had commissioned it as basic research, Oscar himself did not seem to understand what it could be used for…

but this was a fairly groundbreaking magical circuit.

The electric fan is just the first step, but with this rotational circuit, we might even be able to make things like washing-machine-like devices, mixers, grain mills, or even cars and motorbikes.

Since I apparently was not much of an intellectual, I can’t reproduce the ins and outs of science from my original world here, but I do remember basic things like, electrical appliances moved in this kind of way.

If I can have Oscar somehow work those out, and create products whose insides are different but whose results are the same…

then we can make money and improve the standard of living for the people, getting nothing but good results all around.

Still, even though I’m the one who thought of it, a washing machine seems difficult.

There’s no way it gets things clean just by spinning, right…?

It seems like it could at least manage spin-drying, though.

Well, to make large appliances a reality, non-elemental mana stones alone probably won’t be enough, so we’ll need to keep experimenting in various ways.

For now, I should just be satisfied that developing the rotational circuit this time was a great success.

Pleased with the result Oscar had brought me, I decided to ask him a small question that had occurred to me.

“…By the way, how do you obtain mana stones?”

It’s not like they’re generated by absorbing people’s mana the way ours are…

What is it, then?

Do they come from monsters or something?

I don’t remember seeing anything like that when I was hunting monsters…

though I never actually dissected the corpses, so maybe they’re inside them.

“Mana stones are basically mined. They’re often dug out of places like mines, but I think you could even find them if you dug up ordinary soil. Well, the ones near the surface are called junk mana stones, and they’re basically worthless.”

“Oh. So that’s how it works…”

So they really are completely different from the mana stones we have.

Come to think of it, could our mana stones be used in magic tools?

Should I try handing one over to Oscar?

“And this is just rumor-level stuff, but apparently in the great magical nation to the east, they’re advancing research into something called artificial mana stones.”

“Artificial mana stones… so that means the conditions for generating mana stones have already been determined.”

“Apparently so. I don’t know the details, though… but if I ever get the chance, I’d like to go to the great magical nation. It really is the cutting edge of magic and technology related to it.”

Oscar said that with a hint of longing.

Well, I’m pretty interested in a place called a great magical nation too.

“A great magical nation, huh… someday I’d like to install a mana collection device there.”

“D-does that mean… you can even teleport to the great magical nation?”

“That’s right.”

“B-bro, your scale really is outrageous… I got to help study that device a little too, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of how it worked.”

So he had been involved in the installation of the mana collection device I asked Otonoha to handle…

Oscar had helped with that too, huh.

“Apparently for humanfolk, their aptitude for mana sensing was too low, so it was impossible.”

“I’m technically one of the heavenly folk myself, though…”

“…Heavenly folk?”

That’s a term I’m hearing for the first time.

“Huh? Don’t people where you’re from say heavenly folk?”

“Aren’t you humanfolk?”

I had never heard of a race called heavenly folk…

What, was this guy born special?

Is he seriously the protagonist or something?

Should I rip it out?

“I am humanfolk. Around here, people call humanfolk who have magical aptitude heavenly folk, and those who don’t earth folk. Well, they look exactly the same, and their blood has mixed so much that people don’t really divide them anymore. Apparently they used to be more like the humanfolk heavenly breed and humanfolk earth breed. Kind of like how the fairy-folk have the elf breed and dwarf breed.”

“I see… since they looked exactly the same, the boundary disappeared as they kept interbreeding.”

“That’s right. If even a little heavenly-folk blood is mixed in, they can use magic… so basically, most humanfolk are categorized as heavenly folk.”

“And earth folk can’t even use magic tools?”

“Apparently not. On the other hand, the stronger the heavenly-folk bloodline gets, the more amazing magic they can use, so apparently the great magical nation is all about bloodline supremacy.”

That’s a phrase I can’t really ignore…

I had imagined the great magical nation as something like a bunch of magic-research maniacs…

but it sounds more tangled and ugly than I expected.

“I didn’t know that. Still, if they have high magical aptitude, then maybe people from the great magical nation could install mana collection devices.”

“I think that’s possible. But the people of that country are pretty proud… so whether they’d actually lend a hand is…”

“The phrase bloodline supremacy already makes them sound like they’ve got a chosen-people ideology. Well, before the great magical nation, we’d probably be asking the dwarf country for cooperation first.”

Distance-wise, the dwarf country was overwhelmingly closer than the great magical nation…

or rather, I don’t really know where the great magical nation is, just that it’s somewhere to the east.

“Dwarves, huh… I’m interested in them too. They’ve got magical tools made with technology completely different from the kind I make.”

I had gotten a similar report from Otonoha too.

“Once we’re able to establish relations with the dwarf country, I’d like to do some technological exchange as well. If that happens, you’ll take part too, Oscar.”

“If that happens, I’d want to beg my way into participating from this side. Thank you.”

“That doesn’t mean relations are decided yet, though.”

“If you’ve decided to do it, bro, then I feel like it’ll become reality before too long.”

At Oscar’s mysterious trust in me, I gave him a fearless grin.