1-11 Learning Magic

The church the Adventurers’ Guild had told me about was on the outskirts of the town of Elmia.

When I searched for it on the magic PC’s map, I found it right away.

How should I put it—there was something atmospheric about the place, something that made you feel its history.

Well, to be perfectly clear, it was just an old, run-down building.

The way the wall tiles were peeling was actually kind of nice.

Personally, I liked this sort of unpretentious charm.

Wasn’t the roof leaning a bit, though?

I wondered if it could even be repaired later…

I wasn’t exactly knowledgeable about architecture, but if the roof was crooked, that meant the whole building was badly tilted. It felt like rebuilding it from scratch would be faster than trying to straighten the roof.

I was sure that if you put a marble on the floor, it would immediately roll away.

The orphanage in my hometown had been the same. It started as a nothing-special facility built on postwar wasteland, then was relocated and rebuilt, and by the time it was rebuilt again recently, it had been a sixty-year-old ultra-vintage house.

It was the kind of structure that scoffed at multiple generations of earthquake standards, built as flimsy as tissue paper…

Just glancing at the photos posted on a real estate site for selling the land afterward, you could tell how thin the walls were.

After all, it had been standing long before I was even born.

When I peeked inside the church, it was full of children!

Some small kids who had been playing outside gathered around me in a friendly way.

“Where did you come from, mister?”

“Hey, shhh, that’s rude. You have to call him big brother.”

“Hahaha. Believe it or not, I’m actually pretty old.”

“Eeh, really?”

These casual little exchanges with kids were surprisingly fun.

Things had been relentlessly awful lately.

Ah, my heart felt cleansed.

Joking around with the kids, I moved farther inside.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed some older children leaning against the walls with their hands in their pockets, watching everything with blank expressions.

“Hello. Is the priest here?”

I asked in my specialty soft, coaxing voice.

“May I help you?”

The man who came out from the back looked to be in his mid-to-late thirties.

A gentle-faced man wearing what looked like church attire appeared.

On the clothes worn by this priest-like man was some emblem, stylized almost like a geometric pattern.

It was probably the symbol of the god they worshipped.

At the very least, it definitely wasn’t some Earth god like Jehovah.

“I’d like to learn healing magic. The Adventurers’ Guild introduced me to this place.”

“I see. In that case, the fee set by the royal capital’s headquarters is twenty gold coins. Is that acceptable?”

The priest said this, but he looked slightly tired.

No, it probably wasn’t my imagination.

I hardly saw anyone who looked like a nun here.

There was one elderly woman, but she wasn’t dressed the part, so she seemed more like a volunteer helper—just a regular old lady.

Other than that, there were only children. Just children.

“I’m a little short on cash right now, so I’ll go gather the funds.”

With that, I left the church for the time being.

Twenty gold coins, huh. That was insanely expensive.

That was like twenty million yen in Japanese currency.

Way beyond what I had on hand.

Ten times the reward money I’d received.

Still, if I thought of it as earning a medical license, the price made sense.

In Japan, you had to study like crazy from childhood, and it probably cost several times more than this.

But with that many kids…

Money must disappear fast.

At least they didn’t have to pay medical bills for the children—that was something.

I went around the town’s exchange offices, converting gold plates into forty gold coins per batch at five different places.

In total, I ended up with two hundred gold coins.

I figured I’d need money for a while, so I exchanged extra.

I was planning to head to the royal capital next, after all.

Even if some shady people took notice of me here, I thought I could handle it.

If I floored it in my car, no one would catch me.

I could enter the town freely now, so there was no need to rush—but I’d learned well over the past week that you never knew what was waiting ahead.

I also stocked up heavily on food and supplies in town.

While curiously admiring the medieval-style wooden streetscape for the first time, I focused on gathering goods.

I’d never actually been to Europe back on Earth, so I didn’t really know.

There was a place in Japan, around Wakayama, that had streets like something straight out of an anime—but it was a complete tourist spot, and since it was in a waterfront marina area, everything was kept neat and polished.

It was also annoyingly far from my house, and I’d never gone there even once.

It was so far that going via Osaka was probably faster than driving straight along the coast.

They had hot springs and a seafood market, and sometimes even tuna-cutting events, so I’d wanted to go.

But now, even if I thought about going, it was already far too late.

Well, maybe someday I’d work hard enough to get my own tuna.

At the very least, unlike medieval Europe, this world actually had proper toilets.

The shops felt like something out of Japan’s Showa era.

Greengrocers, old-style general stores—those kinds of places.

Shops straight out of a classic family anime world were now rare even in Japan.

When I was a kid, the town had been full of those mom-and-pop stores.

After all, I’d lived right in the heart of the Mikawa region.

If it were the early Edo period, my hometown probably would’ve had origins tied to being “under the shogun’s immediate domain.”

In the town’s shops, I found fried bread, fruit, skewered meat, crude cookie-like sweets, sacks of wheat, various fabrics, thread and needles, cooking oil, vegetables, parchment, pens, and ink.

And then—amazingly—I found candy.

Even on the frontier, this was still a town in a well-developed country.

It seemed this world had sugar candy too.

It was treated as a luxury and priced accordingly.

Various dried meats, soup bases, clothes, underwear, sandals, and more.

My item box filled up with all kinds of loot.

In the afternoon, I returned to the church and asked to begin the magic lessons.

After copying various items, I donated them, and the children erupted in cheers.

Had they not eaten yet?

Apparently, there usually wasn’t any lunch.

I somehow understood that without needing an explanation.

Even on Earth, wasn’t eating three meals a day a relatively recent development?

The donated food vanished in an instant.

The priest’s wry smile as he watched left an impression.

The guild staff must have known about the church’s situation when they introduced me here.

I felt a small warmth from the kindness that still existed in this harsh world.

Things had been so brutal lately that my heart had been close to breaking.

After noon, once the small children were fed and put down for naps, the magic training finally began.

My remaining funds were one hundred ninety-two gold coins, eight silver coins, thirty large copper coins, and four hundred fifty copper coins.

The lessons weren’t free, either.

An orphanage full of children burned through resources fast.

Looking at financial reports on Japanese orphanage websites, you could tell how tough it was.

My region had been part of a relatively wealthy western Mikawa area, so it had been better off.

Government funds were distributed uniformly by size, but after that, differences in prefectural wealth made a big impact.

Naturally, donation amounts differed due to economic disparities.

People didn’t go out of their way to donate to facilities in far-off prefectures.

In poorer regions, it could even affect the quality of meals.

The lessons treated me as an assistant, taking on real patients.

First came someone with a broken bone.

With an injured leg, walking looked extremely difficult.

The priest examined him and activated healing magic.

As I analyzed it closely, I felt the mana circulating through the priest’s body converge toward his eyes.

This was that familiar sensation—my “usual thing.”

Cheers for real-life cheats back in Japan.

I sensed mana being emitted from deep within the priest’s body.

Oh—looks like I could learn magic properly!

It seemed to flow out from his arm as light, accompanied by the chant—or magic name.

At least, that was how it looked.

Since I was perceiving it through mana, that was probably why.

Or maybe it was just my “usual sense” forming visual imagery in my brain.

In my line of work, when things were urgent and I had no time, I’d sometimes see the contents of stacked shipping containers as if they were transparent diagrams showing their internal structure.

That was no exaggeration.

Even I would rub my eyes in those moments, but it was just ESP manifesting as visual imagery in my brain, making it seem like I was seeing it directly.

Of course, I couldn’t do ridiculous fantasy nonsense like seeing through women’s clothes.

It only activated during intense work situations when my eyes were bloodshot.

Even an unknown thing like magic might end up looking like this when filtered through the Seventh Sense.

Well, I was used to it, so I didn’t worry.

It seemed the magic PC automatically bundled the process into something like a skill package.

That, too, was thanks to “him”—my Seventh Sense.

When I checked my status, it showed this:

And in the skill list, there was

Yes! I learned my first magic.

Though some weird skill had appeared too.

It looked like Ikoma, the Seventh Sense within me, had compiled the procedure for learning magic into a skill the magic PC could activate.

Since mine was installed on a PC, it was probably more accurate to call it an app or software than a skill.

It wasn’t something I strictly needed as a skill, but having it was convenient.

The patient’s bone healed properly, but he didn’t seem able to pay much for treatment.

Even so, the priest accepted the small change with a smile.

He was a likable person.

Sure, getting money from me probably helped, but I knew without logic.

This was just the kind of person he was.

It felt like finding an otherworldly version of a compassionate country doctor.

Next came a sick patient.

I learned Cure Lv.1 and Clear Blood Lv.1.

Next.

Then came someone suffering from poison.

It looked like plant-based poison, with severe swelling.

Maybe something like poison ivy.

If I could find that plant, I might even be able to make lacquered bowls.

It could be fun to look for it.

That was a relief.

I hadn’t really considered how resistant my body was to poison.

That realization made me break into a bit of a sweat.

Well, now I should be fine.

Next came many lightly injured patients one after another.

I learned Area Heal Lv.1, an area recovery spell.

Then came a severely injured poison victim.

This time it seemed to be from a venomous snake.

Next was a critically ill patient.

An elderly person with what looked like pneumonia.

My own mother had gone through that when she got older.

An X-ray would show lungs completely white, sending the family into a panic.

Pneumonia was truly troublesome.

Hesitate even a little, and it was too late for the elderly.

Old people often didn’t speak up even when something was wrong.

Next came someone whose injuries required continuous healing.

This spell apparently required careful handling.

Because it worked constantly, overuse caused strong side effects or backlash.

Several people were brought in together, suffering from insect poison symptoms.

“Amazing. We managed to show you just about everything today. That doesn’t happen often. Oh, you learned all the magic you saw? Congratulations. I’ve never seen anyone learn magic this quickly.”

That was just how I was—I always showed up at moments like this.

That was the Seventh Sense’s specialty.

Explaining that to someone from another world wouldn’t make sense, though.

Modern Japanese people didn’t understand it either.

Still, it helped me immensely.

Thanks, Ikoma.

“Thank you. Now I can travel with peace of mind.”

This priest was a highly skilled healing mage.

I knew it without logic.

Why was someone this capable stationed in such a desolate frontier, almost like a demotion…

But somehow, I felt I understood.

At my old company, there was a department like an internal secret police, always yelling at employees and bullying them in various ways.

People who were capable but kind-hearted couldn’t fit in there, and were punished by being sent off to remote branches.

Some even served as union chairmen but never got promoted, excluded from the so-called elite tracks.

Those kinds of people would say things like, “This might be good for the company, but…” in public, without meaning to.

It caused real trouble, but it was all true.

A common story, really.

That was the dark side of the insular mentality of Japan.

Maybe this priest had been treated the same way.

But I loved people like this.

At my company, those driven out by the secret police department were all good people, and I got along with them well.

Which was probably why I got chased out too.

I despised those promotion-crazed secret police types from the bottom of my heart.

After thanking him politely, I left the church.

Yes! I finally got the magic I’d been longing for.

In a world that didn’t seem to have proper doctors, healing magic was invaluable.

Wait.

That village attacked by bandits had a lot of injured people, didn’t it!?

Tomorrow, I should bring some care packages and visit.

There was no rush on my journey.

If you took meddling out of me, there’d be nothing left.

I’d lived that way for over half a century.

I wasn’t about to change now.

So I went shopping in town again.

Food, clothing, and various everyday goods from this world.

Most of what I had were questionable items brought from Japan.

After returning to the inn, I lightly reviewed the healing magic I’d just learned.

Yeah—now this journey felt reassuring.