6-4 Mari’s Secret

“W-w-what… even if I didn’t know, this is an outrageous discourtesy!”

Huh— the king just knelt to Mari!

Why!?

His attendants panicked.

Some tried to stop His Majesty, while others followed his lead and knelt as well.

The first king’s younger sister—was she really that important?

If the real Mari-san saw this, she’d be blinking in disbelief.

Of course, I’d already recorded every second of this disgraceful spectacle.

Because I planned to send the video file to Mari-san.

“Your Majesty! No, no. What are you saying? All of you, too! Listen to the end. I introduced this girl as the guardian of the labyrinth, didn’t I? Listen carefully. The first king, Takeshi Funabashi, lost his parents early and struggled while raising his younger sister—ten years younger—by himself. And then this happened. Even though he made a teleportation bracelet because he wanted to go home, he never made it back. Still, he wanted to see his sister even once. So he created her. Her name and appearance were taken from his younger sister, Mari Funabashi.”

I rattled that off in one breath, then took another and continued.

“And as he approached the end of his life in this other world, the first king made her a sanctuary in the depths of the dungeon. So that after his death, Mari wouldn’t be targeted by bad people. There’s also the guardian dragon down there, after all. And he entrusted the legendary ring and this country’s future to her. She told you she waited a thousand years, didn’t she?”

“S-so that is how it was. Come to think of it, yes. It happened so suddenly that I panicked. Hmm. So this is the face of the first king’s younger sister. Indeed, I can see the resemblance to the first king’s portrait. Our true progenitor, the first king, is still honored in this country even after a thousand years have passed. And if she is of his bloodline, she is not someone we can treat lightly—no, she stands above even me.”

That far?

Well, I just got myself another excellent piece of ammo to tease Mari-san with.

“By the way,”

I produced a huge tablet—about 1.5 meters tall.

The image quality being a bit rough couldn’t be helped.

It was basically closer to an LED board.

The gigantic one in Las Vegas had been decent even for live-action footage.

“This is a nearly life-size photo of his younger sister.”

I said, showing a photo of the real Mari-san.

Compared to this Mari, you could tell even from this photo that the real Mari-san had grown a bit more adult.

“O-oh!”

He seemed shocked in multiple ways.

“So this is her… Can you speak with her, by any chance?”

“Sorry. There’s no radio signal here, so talking is a bit impossible.”

I took out my smartphone and explained a little.

“This is a mobile phone—a tool that lets you talk with someone far away. Normally, you can speak even if they’re on the other side of the world.”

“Extraordinary.”

His Majesty widened his eyes, burning the otherworld artifact into his mind.

“But we can’t use it here because there’s no infrastructure. The first king had one too, you know. Now that I think about it, it wasn’t among his effects in the treasury, was it? He must have left it with Mari as a keepsake. I had preparations, so I can keep mine working, but if you came here with nothing but the clothes on your back, it would turn into junk in less than a day.”

“So that is how it was.”

“If it’s in the form of a video mail—like a recorded message—I can deliver your words to Japan. And in reverse, it should be possible for us to receive her words from Japan as well.”

“Is that truly possible!?”

“Normally, you could do it with this smartphone alone, but since it has no service, I can’t send it as-is. And either way, we’d have to extract the footage, so let’s use our video camera. It’ll record more cleanly.”

I said that, then set up a tripod and mounted the video camera.

Just in case of a recording failure, I also deployed a recording pod.

It had invisibility on it, so people couldn’t see it.

Dogs might bark if they sensed something, though.

Ah— I’m not using it for anything bad, okay~.

“Your Majesty, is this alright? Recording has already started.”

“Oh. I just speak as I am?”

“That’s right.”

Then His Majesty spoke for about three minutes, and at the end, he bowed his head deeply.

I removed the microSD card from the camera and inserted it into the tablet via my item box.

Then I enlarged-copied the tablet, brought it out, and played the video.

Everyone stared in shock at the sight of His Majesty speaking on the screen.

“This will reach Lady Mari, then?”

“Yes. Ah—if I don’t translate it, she won’t understand! I’ll translate it later and send it with the translation attached.”

“Good. I’m counting on you!”

And with that, the inspection ended… safely? I guess?

After that, as usual, it was time for the big tasting party with the kids.

There were about four more children than before.

And every single one was beast-eared.

It’s not like I was deliberately collecting them.

It’s just that in this world, beastfolk children tend to be the ones who get the short end of the stick.

Hey, compared to that neighboring country calling itself an empire, they were treated far better here.

This was the country Takeshi Funabashi, a Japanese man, had built.

While soothing the little one who was bouncing around again, I walked around the stalls too.

Eventually the kids’ bellies stuck out, they ran their batteries dry, and I gathered them all up, double-checked the roster, and teleported us back.

I mean, even if I forgot one by accident, it’d be easy—I could cast Fast on myself and sprint back to get them.

And the kids could make it home on their own from here anyway.

Adros was originally their home turf.

They’d lived here far longer than I had.

Even if this was a labyrinth city, monsters didn’t appear inside the city.

And even if one did, there were adventurers everywhere—so it would get hunted down instantly and converted into dinner or reward money.

I left the rest to the caretakers, translated His Majesty’s video mail… and I also attached the video of the king-kneeling incident (pffft)—then sent it all to Mari-san.

About an hour later, an email arrived from a frantic Mari.

“What are you doing, honestly~. The king is kneeling to me, isn’t he!? Um— I’ll record a video mail now and send it To think that even after a thousand years, his descendants still care about my brother that much… Ah, thank you for offering red-bean sweets at his grave~. Yeah, he loved red-bean dumplings too~.”

Now it was just waiting for her video mail, so I decided to take a breather in the dining hall.

“Good work. Here, coffee.”

With the pleasant smell of coffee, Mari came over.

“Thanks. Hey—what exactly are you? You look completely human, and you even feel soft if I poke you. I thought you were an android, but you can drink coffee like that, and you’re not some automaton-like machine, either. You’re not a monster. So… are you a golem or something?”

“Ah, I’m an artificial life-form created through magical alchemy.”

“Like a homunculus?”

“I suppose so, yes.”

“That’s an alchemist’s dream.”

“And you can create as much gold and whatever else as you want—up to and including orichalcum.”

Mari laughed as she said it.

Right, alchemy’s two big goals were those, weren’t they?

So me and Takeshi—two Japanese people—were monopolizing it.

And neither of us would ever get to present the results back on Earth—because we’d been exiled to an other world.

One of us had already died beyond the veil, too.

“By the way, does your body wear out? Magic power is the fuel, right? What about combat ability?”

“This body was made from magic. Pure magical power. Just like orichalcum. So I’m confident in its durability.”

“What?”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t know? Even though you keep mass-producing orichalcum yourself. Orichalcum is basically a lump of pure magical power. Mithril is holy enchanted silver. Silver—the only metal with sacred, anti-evil properties—was saturated with enormous magic power and transformed over a long time.”

I casually copied out a mithril sword and produced it.

“Thaaat’s why you’re special! Normal people can’t do tricks like that. Not even an S-rank adventurer, not even the royal court’s chief mage. You’ve never seen anyone else’s magic capacity, have you?”

“Yeah, I guess I haven’t.”

I really hadn’t, now that she said it.

“When you compress enormous magic power, it becomes a magic crystal—crystallized magic power. They’re born over vast spans of time in places where magic gathers densely—like the deep layers of a labyrinth. That magic crystal then keeps accumulating magic again from zero. And orichalcum is produced the same way, over even more time. It’s not something you can just find easily. You can’t even put a price on it.”

I casually copied out an orichalcum sword.

“Thaaat’s—why!”

“Yeah, but this takes insane magic power. Making one costs over two hundred billion MP. And when I make something bigger, I need over two hundred trillion MP, you know?”

“Ugh! Even if there were a Demon King in this world, they wouldn’t have that much—ah. The Demon King is right in front of me.”

“Hey. That’s cruel.”

“Oh, right—there’s something even above it.”

As if she’d just remembered, Mari abruptly changed topics.

“Huh?”

“There’s a magic metal above orichalcum.”

“Oho?”

Now that was interesting.

That was the kind of topic that stirred a Demon King’s heart.

“Takeshi said it. In theory it should exist, but that level of magic compression is impossible—naturally or artificially. He said you could tell by analyzing orichalcum.”

“Huh.”

Like those elements that should be possible in theory and might exist someday, but don’t exist in reality yet.

Didn’t the periodic table go up to like element 170 already?

I immediately analyzed orichalcum.

Ah—she was right.

This was… kind of like polishing sugar?

Like that fine Japanese sugar.

With magic metals, though, it condenses without separating out.

How did mass work here, anyway?

Maybe it didn’t matter because it was a lump of magic power.

Was magic ignoring physics again, as usual?

How far could I refine it?

I tried making a magic crystal.

I formed it into a two-meter-long crystal.

It was beautiful.

Yeah, I couldn’t let this reach the public either.

I copied about a thousand of them, converted them into orichalcum, and fused them.

Then I got orichalcum of the same size.

Enough for one of those large magic swords.

That cost about two hundred trillion MP.

Then I slowly applied magic power with the image of refining it further…

…and it exploded into nothing.

“Hey! You! What did you just do!?”

“Well… what did I do…”

My MP had leveled up for the first time in a while.

Over two quadrillion MP of immense magic power dispersed beautifully.

And by the way, it had zero impact on the world.

Even if I absorbed enormous amounts of mana through leveling or time recovery, it was negligible compared to the amount of mana blanketing the world.

At most, the mana in this area wavered a tiny bit.

Mari was only especially sensitive because her entire body was made of magic power.

A normal person wouldn’t notice at all.

And then, using the same image as before, I performed the condensation again.

This time, the orichalcum successfully became Besmagil.

Its size also shrank down to about one normal orichalcum sword.

The magic power dropped from 576 quadrillion MP to 556 quadrillion MP.

So I’d consumed 20 quadrillion MP.

I see—making it consumed enough MP to create a thousand orichalcum swords.

Mithril shone with a silvery-white light, and orichalcum with a golden-yellow glow, but Besmagil was a strangely transparent metal with a faint bluish tint.

Maybe this was closer to a crystal than a metal.

But its strength, magic resistance, and the power it output when channeling magic were on a completely different order from orichalcum.

Maybe the strength difference was about a thousandfold?

So the MP you fed it really did become quality.

“…Unbelievable. You really went and made a substance that only exists in theory. Did I… say something I shouldn’t have…?”

“Did I surpass Takeshi Funabashi?”

“You’re about even. That man was ridiculous too.”

“Bwahahaha!”

“Is that really something to laugh about…?”

A super magic metal that didn’t even exist in this other world—Besmagil.

The name probably came from something like “best magic metal.”

The strongest magic metal, casually created from tea-time chatter between a most monstrous Rare Visitor and the homunculus made by a former Rare Visitor king.

“Alright—done.”

“Done with what? May I ask? Whenever Takeshi said that, he’d always show me something ridiculous afterward.”

This one had long since stopped calling me “Master,” huh.

Well, apparently Takeshi had never restrained himself either, and she’d probably scolded him constantly.

Maybe my thoughts had leaked onto my face.

Because I heard Mari mutter quietly:

“Pot, meet kettle.”

She’d learned that kind of phrase too, huh.

“It’s nothing—something good. A magic battery for you. I tested it: Besmagil at that size can store up to 20 quadrillion MP. I made ten of them and filled them completely, so you keep all of them.”

“Thank you. For you, that’s actually a nice idea.”

Why was it?

I’d done something good, and yet I felt mildly insulted.

I made some for myself too—ah, and my MP leveled up again.

My MP became 14 quintillion, 7 quadrillion, 456 quadrillion MP.

Mari noticed and glared at me with an exasperated face.