Chapter 15

The reason the town had been so giddy and noisy that day was because it was the day of the festival celebrating the discovery of the magic stone mine.

I had not noticed until Kururu pointed it out, but there had not been a single beastfolk among the people making merry all over town.

“From the beastfolk side, the discovery of a magic stone mine would mean the discovery of the root of all evil—the thing that had overthrown them when they were once the protagonists of the world. So of course you wouldn’t see beastfolk around.”

If that was the case, then the reason Iiria and Kururu had been despised and mocked at that ceremony was probably the irony of the situation itself: humans with beastfolk blood participating as honored guests in a festival about the magic stones that had driven the beastfolk out of this world.

At the same time, I realized that the fact that beastfolk were working in the magic stone mine was cruel in itself as well.

“There’s still a lot about this sort of thing that I really don’t understand yet…”

“Well, I didn’t think of the church either. But once she said it, it made sense.”

The Orthodox faith, which was currently established as the state religion of the Doflore Empire, had apparently been founded during the era of the ancient empire two dynasties before the current Empire.

The savior sent down from heaven had taught people how to use magic stones and enabled them to reclaim the land made by God from the savage beastfolk, and it was this church that worshiped that god.

In other words, the church kept detailed records of the war from that time, and those records also included the legendary magic circles that the savior had supposedly been taught by God.

And of course I now understood why Kururu had added that it would be impossible for her.

The history of the church was also the history of the shedding of the blood of beastfolk like Kururu.

“Now that you mention it, I feel like there were patterns carved for magic stones all over the church building.”

I too, as a person of this world, had occasionally gone to church out of social obligation.

“Kururu-san did say they were remnants from the era of the Great War.”

Back when all the land had still belonged to the beastfolk, people had apparently gone to the battlefield under the banner of magic stones raised by clergy, fighting the beastfolk and expanding their territory.

That was why what was built on the front lines were churches that also served as fortresses, and to defend themselves against attacking beastfolk, magic stones had supposedly been embedded all throughout the churches so they could strike back.

“That also means they were able to mine magic stones in really abundant quantities back then.”

“I heard that in the old days, even things like gold, silver, and oil were easy enough to get through open-pit mining.”

I remembered reading something like that when I had been researching resource companies.

Silver in particular had apparently been profitable enough even with an extremely crude method where people simply set fire to a mountain and collected the silver that melted out.

“Yorinobu, you really know a lot of weird things.”

“I was always reading books for the sake of making games. But it’s just knowledge. I don’t know much about practical work beyond the company I used to work for.”

“If you say that, most consultants are basically all knowledge too.”

Kengo laced his hands behind his head and, as he walked, twisted his body until his bones cracked loudly.

“I wish I’d studied more things.”

“I guess I should’ve trained my body more. Ah, though this body belongs to someone from this world.”

“When it comes to strength training, right now is always the best time to start!”

Dodging Kengo’s overheated recruitment pitch, I arrived at the church located in the square.

The square was full of rowdy drunkards, but the inside of the church, with its doors flung open, looked quiet.

“I thought it’d be packed with people, but it doesn’t seem that way.”

“Maybe because they can’t exactly drink and make a racket inside the church?”

“The biggest buyer of alcohol and meat from our company is the priest of this church.”

Churches had always been profitable businesses, and they had always tended toward corruption too. The priest who ran this church was more like a greedy merchant than a clergyman.

Kengo gave a shrug with his broad shoulders.

“Maybe they’re just telling everyone to keep quiet because he’s in bed nursing a hangover.”

Saying that, he walked into the dim interior.

The stone floor, worn smooth by years of human footsteps, and the wooden pews blackened by grime and the sediment of time looked exactly like churches from the old world. The candles set in the candelabras only made the familiar scene feel all the more complete.

It did not seem that a service was being held, but scattered here and there on the pews sat people earnestly offering prayers.

As I was struck by the solemn atmosphere, Kengo poked me on the shoulder.

We had reached the center of the nave, the main hall for worship, and Kengo was pointing at the floor beneath our feet.

“This…”

If you did not consciously look for it, you would probably take it for some minor bit of religious decoration. The pattern on the stone floor had been worn faint by the passage of so many devout people, but if you looked closely, it looked exactly like the magic circles carved into magic stones.

“What do you think? Is it from the old era?”

“I feel like the density of the figure is higher than current ones, maybe. I’d like to copy it, but…”

The pattern carved at our feet was scaled to the size of a human body. Naturally the circles and triangles were large too, but if that size itself carried meaning, that would become a problem.

Even if we made a reduced copy, we would need tools in order to reproduce the proportions accurately.

“Let’s leave this for later and go look at the holy text.”

According to Kururu, many magic circles remained throughout the church, but many also remained in the holy text that recorded the teachings of the Orthodox faith. Since this was a world without even movable type printing, there were of course no bookstores, so if you wanted to read the holy text, the only place to do so was the church.

Kengo called out to a young assistant priest apprentice who was passing by and opened with the line that we wanted to come into contact with the teachings of the church.

Only after making a not-insignificant donation were we finally granted an audience with the thick holy text.

“We wholeheartedly welcome such devotion to learning the words of God!”

The one who came hurrying over with the holy text was a boy about the same age as Kururu, earnest-looking but with a slightly unreliable air about him. The boy in clerical robes introduced himself as Glood Clover and said his rank was assistant priest, so he was probably a fledgling clergyman in the world of faith.

“It was worth how often I urged you, Kengo-sama, to visit the church.”

“Well, about that…”

He hunched his back and smiled awkwardly.

There were probably deaths and injuries at the mine, so he must have seen people from the church often enough.

“And Yorinobu-sama as well,”

Clover said.

“I have heard about you from Yoshu.”

“Uh… well…”

For a moment I did not know what he meant, but then I remembered that Yoshu was the name of the boy who had come from the orphanage to work at the company.

“He told me you were a very diligent man. I heard him say many times that he wished Yorinobu-sama were the head of the company. Since you are such a Yorinobu-sama, I was certain that you would one day awaken to the faith.”

“Ah… haha.”

It made me feel rather guilty that we had come here to investigate methods of magic stone processing for the sake of our own lives and for profit.

“Please look to your heart’s content. If you have any questions, ask whatever you like.”

With that, Clover left the room.

It was perhaps what one would call a scriptorium, a narrow room with several reading stands, and on the shelves sat quill pens and inkpots.

Kengo picked up the chain extending from the holy text on the reading stand and gave a wry smile.

“Pretty tight security.”

“That’s probably because the book is made of animal skin. It’s extremely expensive.”

When I had seen books as merchandise at the company, they had been much smaller and thinner than this, yet I was pretty sure they had cost around twenty gold coins. In modern terms that felt like something like four hundred thousand yen.

For something this thick and splendid, it probably felt more like several million yen.

“All right then, let’s copy as much as we can.”

Kengo pulled out the writing materials he had borrowed from Kururu from his chest pocket.

The paper was coarse stuff made from rags, and the pen was just sharpened charcoal.

“We have to be careful not to stain it.”

The moment I opened the holy text, I found myself remembering the name of the artisans who illustrated books like this in the old world.

Illuminators.

The holy text, supported by religious passion, was filled to the brim with overwhelmingly solemn script and intricate illustrations.

Tormented also by my own lack of artistic sense, I somehow managed to copy as many of the magic circles written in the holy text as I could. After that, I listened to Clover’s earnest and no doubt well-meant sermon about God while doing my utmost to pretend I was interested, and only then was I finally released.

As Kururu had instructed beforehand, we tossed the paper with the copied magic circles through the gap in the barred window of a room facing the street at the mansion. She had said that she was the only one who went around cleaning inside the mansion, so that would be enough to get it to her.

We also made a copy for ourselves, but Kengo, who had his own room where he slept, would keep it. If I went around carrying something like that while living at the company, sharp-eyed Nodon might notice it. If Nodon caught wind of our plan and got angry, our adventure would end right there.

Also, after careful coordination, Kengo and I succeeded in creating magical time on paper and slipping two fifth-grade magic stones into it. Kengo later told me at the tavern that the stones, which had been removed by his hand at the point where they were being carried out from the mine and handed over to the Nodon Company, had safely been passed on to Kururu.

The fact that we could have this kind of conversation openly at a tavern was one advantage of being Japanese speakers.

As for the chisels and gravers for magic stone processing, Kururu said she already had some she had secretly obtained without Iiria knowing, and by the time I next went to get approval for the Bax Company transaction, Kururu told me she had already completed several trial carvings.

The results had been negative, but Kururu was of course not discouraged. She had not expected things to work right away, and said that what she had gained was confirmation that, just as she had thought, magic circles from ancient times really did seem to be drawn according to logic quite different from current ones.

Kengo and I also compared current magic circles with ancient ones, trying to grasp differences in their laws and converting the figures into formulas and tinkering with them in various ways.

I was not all that sociable, but simply chasing a goal together with others was fun. But the thing I might have enjoyed most in the process of investigating magic circles may have been meeting Kururu. When she talked about magic circles, she no longer wore that irritable, sharp-eyed look—instead, her eyes shone the way a housecat’s would when looking at a toy.

What was more, I tried as much as possible not to look directly out of a certain sense of propriety, but her ears and tail were always flitting happily.

And so, while I continued our enjoyable secret research into magic stones together with Kengo and Kururu, I also took a step of my own toward facing the reality of this world.

I went to look for the boy who had broken his leg and disappeared from the company, and to visit him.

And simply by trying to find where he was, I came to feel deeply the dry, barren side of this world.

I had already known that Nodon would not know where the boy porter had gone, but I was still surprised that the other porters did not know either. Still, once I heard the reason, it made perfect sense—they either lived and slept at the company like I did, or wandered all over town without any settled place to stay. So no one had any way of knowing where a boy who had broken his leg, lost his income, and stopped showing up at taverns and the like had gone.

Everyone found it strange that I was searching for the boy.

But to me, it mattered.

I had seen that accident in the warehouse, and in order to protect my future in this world, I had joined hands with Kengo and Kururu. So leaving alone the boy who had become the catalyst for it all felt to me like abandoning the version of myself that might have existed.

“Huh? Why?”

When I finally found the boy and held out the bread and dried meat I had brought for him, that was what he said plainly.

Since broken bones were unavoidable in the mines, the famous bone-setting doctor in town was apparently a beastfolk. And since, on top of that, the examination fee was incomparably cheaper than that of human doctors, after the boy had been thrown out by the company, he had apparently been taken in by a bone-setting clinic run by beastfolk.

And because there was hardly any interaction at all between humans and beastfolk, none of the company people had known where the boy was, even though he had somehow managed to stay alive through the kindness of a beastfolk bone-setter.

“In the place I used to be, this is what people did when a coworker got hurt.”

I did my best to shove deep into my chest the fact that, even when coworkers had suffered power harassment from superiors, I had always pretended not to see it.

“Well, that sounds like a strange place.”

The boy said that, and then smiled with easy openness.

“So… what kind of work are you doing now?”

“Huh? I’m getting by with rope work. I did a lot of work at the port, so I know all kinds of ways to tie rope. Beastfolk aren’t very good at this kind of thing because of those big hands of theirs. So I teach knot-tying or repair rope, and in return I get food or a place to sleep, stuff like that.”

The boy sat on a road near the clinic, where there were more beastfolk than humans coming and going, his broken leg stretched out and reinforced with sticks. Surrounded by what looked like trash, he had looked no different from a beggar, but apparently those had actually been his work tools.

“I’m relieved to see you’re doing better than I expected.”

“Heh. I won’t be able to run for a while, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to how I was before, but I’m getting by somehow.”

Even as he spoke, the boy kept knotting rope and making loop after loop. They might have been for hanging up food to dry or something of that kind.

I could not think of anything more to say to him, and just knowing that he was safe for the time being made something like guilt slide from my shoulders.

“Well then,”

I said, and when I turned to leave, the boy, whose eyes had been on the rope, spoke.

“Thanks for the bread and meat!”

“…”

When I turned back and raised a hand lightly, the boy smiled and waved back, then immediately returned to his work.

That quickness in switching gears felt very much like this world.

Not just Nodon—many of those who stood above others in this world were perfectly willing to exploit people mercilessly and throw them away.

And yet those who were thrown away also seemed, unexpectedly, to survive tenaciously.

Taking some small comfort from that, I next headed to the cemetery at the edge of town. When I reached the section where unrelated people without family were buried all together, the warmth I had been feeling cooled a little.

The boy had survived, but the young porter whose name I had never even learned had died. Since I had not heard that his body had been sent to the mine, it seemed that not every corpse of an unclaimed person was necessarily sent there.

Still, I did not really know why I had come here.

I had probably died in my old world and come to this one.

So if I died here, where would I go?

There was no reason anywhere to expect it would be a better world than this one.

If I could return to my original world, that would of course be best, but at the moment I had no prospect of that.

Somehow or other, I had no choice but to keep living in this world.

And for that, the only option was to make the plan with Kengo and Kururu succeed.

“I don’t know which god I should pray to, but…”

Standing before a grave marker that was nothing more than a rotting wooden stick stabbed into the ground, I pressed my hands together.

The color of the sky was the same, and for just a moment, I found myself wondering whether heaven was the same as well.