Chapter 17

The change of seasons had made the company busier too, and because I had not been able to meet Kengo, I had neglected to keep track of how things stood.

After hearing from Iiria about Kururu’s condition, I felt I had to talk with Kengo as soon as possible, so I threw myself into finishing my work and rushed to the tavern.

By the time I headed to the tavern, night had already completely fallen, and Kengo, who had been merrily making noise with the beastfolk, spotted me and turned serious. It seemed he already knew about Kururu.

“I finally heard about Kururu-san.”

When I opened with that, Kengo grabbed at his shaggy beard with one hand and let out a sigh.

“We really did something awful.”

I had heard that if a human touched a fish with bare hands, it would burn it.

What we had done might have been something like grabbing a fish with bare hands and moving it just because the neighboring pond was bigger.

“Lady Iiria gave these to me…”

As I said that, I pulled the two magic stones from the hidden pocket I had made inside my clothes to keep my savings in, and placed them on the table.

They were magic stones shaved down to the absolute limit, to the point where no further pattern of any kind could possibly be carved into them.

“Lady Iiria told me these were Kururu-san’s heart.”

Kengo let out another deep sigh and reached for the paper-thin magic stones.

“I had my reasons, so I did stop by the mansion to check on things. I had noticed that Kururu-chan’s state had grown strange partway through, that’s true.”

The sort of person who could push himself relentlessly and keep striving to the utmost tended to assume others could do the same.

Even if Kururu had looked worn down, maybe Kengo had thought it was something normal enough.

But this was not the old world.

This was a place where even a minor injury might prove fatal.

“What do we do?”

That of course did not mean what to do about compensating for the magic stones that had been used up.

“We can’t drag Kururu-chan into this anymore.”

I said that to Kengo as he set the stones down and took a sip of his drink.

“But… will Kururu-san give up?”

Iiria had used the word attachment.

We had shown Kururu a hope she said was more painful than despair.

“…We were careless…”

Kengo’s groan made it plain enough what he was thinking.

Would Kururu really give up quietly? If that sharpness in her gaze reflected strength of will, then she might even steal magic stones herself and keep processing them.

We were the ones who had lit that fire.

“By the way, in the end, you still couldn’t solve the mystery of the magic circles?”

I had not heard from Kururu about the latest results of the research.

When I turned the topic to Kengo, he made a grim face.

“Kururu-chan broke down the giant magic circles and searched for usable ones by brute force. And it seems she actually did find portions within the ancient giant magic circles that could be activated. There were also some pretty surprising things.”

“Surprising things?”

“You know those patterns inside the magic circles that look like letters?”

“Ah, yeah. But those—”

The magic stones in front of me had only figures drawn on them.

“It seems that even without those letter-like patterns, it doesn’t affect whether the magic activates.”

I looked at Kengo with my eyes wide, but he gave me a heavy look, as though trying to suppress the hope rising inside me.

“But if you ask whether there was any clear progress, that’s about it. If anything, the more I listened, the more I started thinking that the rules of the old magic circles might actually be unfavorable to us.”

“Unfavorable?”

Were the old magic circles not forgotten technology, but something discarded because they were old and inefficient?

That was what I thought as I looked back at Kengo, but after carefully choosing his words, he said this:

“Magic circles combine many kinds of figures and connect a number of them together so that they produce power. That fundamental principle doesn’t change even in the magic circles from the old era. But it seems possible that the old magic circles, which ought to be superior to the current ones, are slower to start up.”

What I pictured was the relationship between a big engine and its output.

“So… the bigger the magic circle gets, the easier it is for it to surpass the current kind, but if it’s small, the opposite happens?”

“Exactly. The reason the old magic circles look denser may be because they include more devices that only start to matter as they get larger. But everything becomes more efficient over time, and especially if magic stones are precious, energy-saving progresses too. The current magic circles may have been simplified so that even small magic stones can produce effects quickly.”

Processing itself was done by hand to begin with, and the more complex it became, the more mistakes would increase, so that too had probably been a motive for simplifying magic circles.

“I asked around a little among people who knew magic stone processing artisans, and apparently even current artisans don’t completely understand the rules behind magic circles.”

“They don’t?”

“Most artisans say they do it that way because it’s been handed down as tradition. Nobody has any trouble because there’s a base text, and to begin with, what is demanded as a product is standardized magic stones whose price can be set easily. So maybe some people in the very center of the Empire do understand the laws behind the magic circles, but even so, it seems certain that the standards for magic circles haven’t changed in decades, or even a hundred years. At the civilian level, it sounds like knowledge whose principles have already been completely lost.”

Even in modern factories, they said technology that had once been commonplace could disappear in as little as ten years or so. Even programs that ought to be reverse-engineerable could easily turn into black boxes once the person in charge changed.

In this world, where literacy was low and even business transactions were barely documented, the internal rules of something like magic circles would be even easier to lose.

And from a business standpoint, there was no need to understand the true essence of the laws behind magic circles, because preserving old procedures was enough to get by, while researching new ones would cost valuable magic stones.

Before anyone realized it, large magic stones had stopped being found, and the technology had become something that could never be recovered again.

Kururu’s line of thinking had been correct, and magic circles drawn according to laws different from current ones probably did exist.

But the magic circles of the old era were things that could only function in a time when giant magic stones could be mined in abundance.

“Kururu-chan wouldn’t listen when I told her my prediction. Apparently, when she carved combinations of old-era magic circles into this small magic stone, some of them felt stronger than current magic stones. That’s probably what made it even harder for her to give up.”

The heavy, grand magic circles meant for giant magic stones really could defeat the magic circles of the present day.

But if you stepped back and looked at the rules governing those magic circles, they were aimed in a different direction altogether.

“Kururu-chan seems to have thought she just needed to cram in as many magic circles as she could, but the tools she’s using are just chisels and gravers. Even the most skilled artisan would hit the limit right away. If only it were possible to exceed the limits of handwork, like miniaturizing IC chips…”

If that could be done with the technology of this world, it surely would have been done already. There were masters in every age, so perhaps a truly extraordinary artisan could manage extremely fine processing, but it probably would not be economical.

Or else, since the size of a magic stone was in a sense the capacity of the magic itself, maybe carving a giant-magic circle into a small magic stone simply would not work because it would run out of fuel.

To draw out tremendous power, one had no choice but to carve a magic circle with a complex algorithm, and to realize that on a small magic stone, the processing would have to become finer—but then the lack of capacity would make it meaningless in the end.

Magic was certainly magic, but it was governed by something akin to the physical laws of this world. What blocked people’s way was always the “reality” of the world they lived in.

“I also think the idea of a new magic circle itself isn’t bad.”

After taking a sip of his drink, Kengo said that.

“Since everyone has forgotten the rules of magic circles, if we could completely unravel the laws behind them, we’d be able to outmaneuver every magic stone workshop in the world. Magic stone artisans do business simply by upholding tradition, without thinking about the logic of the magic circles at all. They probably don’t even know that magic can be activated without those troublesome letter-like patterns.”

If you did not understand the principle, all you could do was imitate what already worked.

And if that caused no problems, the world naturally optimized itself in that way.

There was clearly room here to outmaneuver others, but research cost money.

There was logic to it, and probably light beyond it as well.

But a map was never reality.

“It was a brief dream.”

Kengo’s gaze rested on the two magic stones.

“At least we need to clean up after ourselves properly.”

That meant persuading Kururu, and compensating for the magic stones we had used.

“Can I leave the magic stone part to you?”

Kengo said that with a tired smile.

“I’ll take care of Kururu-chan instead.”

The right person for the right job.

I was a lackey of Nodon, Iiria’s enemy, so if I showed my face carelessly, it might only make things worse.

“Though even I feel like it’d be a shame to give up.”

When it came to magic circles, there might still be a whole untouched region waiting to be discovered.

And it probably really was there, but going on that adventure took money.

As Kengo and I stared silently at the magic stones, the surrounding beastfolk, apparently thinking our conversation had reached a stopping point, came over to invite Kengo to drink. Or perhaps, seeing Kengo’s unusually downcast face, they had simply wanted to cheer him up. Kengo, of course, did not waste their concern.

I only went along in a token way with their rough drinking, then decided to head back to the company first.

I somehow ended up taking the magic stones Kururu had worked on back with me.

Even at the company’s loading area, there were still people awake drinking under the moonlight, so it was a little noisy.

I sat down on the bundle of straw laid out in a recessed part of the warehouse and took the magic stones from my hidden pocket, placing them on the floor.

Looking at the magic stones lit by moonlight filtering in through the cracks in the ceiling, I thought in silence. There had to be rules behind the magic circles carved into them, and it was possible that the rules—or perhaps schools—of carving magic circles were not limited to just one.

The school currently dominant in the world was one adapted to a world where magic stones were precious enough that even one the size of a palm could cost a thousand gold coins. The other school was one developed in a time when enormous magic stones could be mined abundantly, large enough that even spreading both arms wide would not suffice to contain the magic circles carved into them.

“Ughhh…”

I groaned in front of the two thinned magic stones.

Because Kururu was not a proper artisan, she had realized that magic could function even without carving some of the unnecessary-looking patterns. That was an enormous advantage in magic stone processing.

Of course, those patterns might still serve some role in controlling the magic, and testing would be required.

And testing cost money, with the added risk that even spending the money would not necessarily produce results.

That was why Kengo had judged that reproducing old-era magic circles and using them to outmaneuver others was not impossible, but beyond our level of capital.

The constraint of reality lay across it all.

To discover something groundbreaking and dominate another world was just as hard as doing so in the old world. After all, the people of this world were neither incompetent nor lazy; they were, for the most part, no different from the people in the old one.

Whenever something in the world worked out, it was a miracle that only happened for the person who happened to choose the right path among all those who, like Kururu carving magic circles into these stones with desperate determination, kept trying and failing, turning back each time they learned it would not work, and continuing to search without giving up.

On the magic stones on the floor, the magic circles Kururu had carved still faintly remained.

Lit by the moonlight, they looked almost like the Tree of Life from the Old Testament, circles joined by many lines.

If this were a game scenario, you could have a development where knowledge of the Bible from the old world somehow overlapped with that of ancient times in this world… something like that. But they were geometric patterns, and there were any number of things that could look similar.

Kururu too had surely repeated that cycle—thinking she had hit on something, only to immediately realize it would not work and fall into disappointment. No matter how strong her heart was, that had to wear her down.

The stones had been carved again and again, scraped down, made thinner and thinner, and Iiria had said they were Kururu’s heart.

I thought she was probably right, and I could not help but vividly feel Kururu’s obsession in the way she had carved and scraped them until they became this thin.

And even a small magic circle was this difficult.

When I thought of the ancient giant magic circles we had seen at the church, I felt a chill at the thought of how they had even been developed in the first place.

Had they been achieved through sheer brute force, like building the pyramids, by pouring unbelievable numbers of people into the task? Or was there after all some kind of formula, so that the result could be reached just by combining elements?

Either way, it could only have been astonishing technical skill.

Even if the magic circles themselves could be specified, digging up giant magic stones would have been hard enough, and processing them to secure a flat surface would have required expert technique too.

And to carve a magic circle onto a surface too large even for outstretched arms to contain must have involved terrible pressure.

Because if you made a mistake, it was not something you could simply erase with a rubber eraser.

If, at the very last moment, the hand carving the magic stone had slipped…

According to Kururu, when an artisan made a mistake during processing, they shaved down the surface to erase the pattern and started over.

Since the power of the magic also depended on the size of the magic stone, the loss of volume lowered its value, and the artisan who made the mistake would be harshly rebuked.

If that happened with a giant magic stone, it would not be strange if the punishment were hanging.

The development sites of ancient magic circles must have been filled with an atmosphere cold enough to freeze the blood.

And on top of that, they had been in the midst of war with the beastfolk, so any delay in processing magic stones would have directly worsened the course of the fighting.

Thinking that way made me feel ashamed of how petty it had been for me to search for a new opening in the magic stone trade, whether to secure stability in this world or to save up some money for my old dream of making games.

That was how harshly the people of this world had lived, within the severe reality unique to this world.

Just understanding even a fragment of that might already have been a good lesson.

At this point, I had no choice but to stop dreaming sweet dreams and be satisfied with only what lay within reach.

To save a few small coins out of day labor wages, and live modestly without thinking too much about the future.

Just like the countless millions of people in the old world whose names were never recorded in history.

After that, I thought the least I had to do was somehow deal with Kururu.

We were the ones who had stirred her up.

“I hope Kengo manages it well.”

Should I also contribute some money and prepare something tasty for her?

Or since she was a girl of that age, would some kind of ornament be better?

Fortunately, the Nodon Company traded broadly enough that it should not be hard to find something like that cheaply.

The problem, if there was one, would be my own lack of taste… and it was just as I was thinking that.

A clamor of footsteps came from beyond the corridor leading into the warehouse, and I hurriedly reached for the magic stones.

Magic stones were not something an ordinary commoner could lay hands on.

But my panic, combined with how thin the magic stones had become from being shaved to the limit, worked against me.

They were pressed flat against the floor with no gap beneath them.

I couldn’t pick them up properly, and meanwhile the voices and footsteps of the drunks were drawing closer—

“Ah!?”

The cry escaped me because one of the stones, which I had barely managed to catch with my nail and lift, snapped and shattered with a crack.

The drunks passed right by the warehouse, so they were probably headed to the well in the back yard for water.

Relieved by the fading footsteps and voices, I bent to pick up the broken fragments of the magic stone.

The stone had already been thin, and since incompletely erased magic circles had still been carved into it, that only made it easier to break.

Thinking about it that way, the fact that people in ancient times had carved such huge magic circles into stones and carried them into war suggested how much care transport must have required too. No, more than that—processing, transporting, and operating magic amidst a battlefield… weren’t people back then just absurdly strong?

There was that common setting about an ancient super-civilization, and at least in this world, it might not be entirely wrong.

“More importantly… damn it, I can’t… pick it… up…”

Grumbling that Kururu had really done an impressive job making them this thin, I tried to gather the fragments together and see if I could lift them that way.

Or maybe I should just smash them completely and throw them away somewhere as they were. Surely no one would know.

Thinking that, I picked up one of the sun-dried bricks that had been left lying there—whether from repairs to the warehouse or whatever—and raised it high.

The broken magic circle, lit by moonlight.

Something about the sight made my hand stop.

“…Huh?”

For some reason, what I saw in front of me caught my attention in a strange way.

A broken magic stone.

Magic circles carved into it, not fully erased.

“…”

I lowered the brick, then casually pressed on one of the larger fragments with the pad of my finger and slid it, setting it beside another large fragment.

They did not fit together perfectly, but there was undeniably the remains of a failed magic circle there.

“Ah!?”

Like lightning, all sorts of things connected in my head at once.

The giant ancient magic circles, and the ancient people who had supposedly used them.

The technical ability to carve complex magic circles into unimaginably huge magic stones, under conditions where failure could not be allowed.

The more I thought about how they had accomplished such a thing, the more impossibly mysterious it seemed.

But then—no, wait, could it be?

“No… that’s right, um… yes, if—if that’s really how it was…”

With trembling hands, I moved the fragments, and in response the things inside my head began to connect.

The existence of giant magic circles that the ancient people had supposedly used in their legendary war against the beastfolk.

To carve those, they would obviously have needed colossal magic stones that could never fit within both arms.

That alone already made ancient civilization feel bizarre enough, but after seeing how Kururu actually processed magic stones, I had come to think their processing technology had also been impossibly far ahead.

And on top of that, they had needed to transport them, bring them to the battlefield, and make them usable by mages.

When I thought through all of that in concrete terms, the magical operations of ancient people seemed so unrealistic that they felt explainable only by a super-civilization.

But if that were true…

Then I felt like the pieces did not fit.

“No, in practice, that’s wrong. So…”

So maybe we had overlooked something enormous.

Like the part where those letter-like patterns carved into the magic circles actually had no effect on activation.

I picked up the sun-dried brick once more and brought it down onto the fragments of the magic stone.

Again and again, I brought it down, smashing them further.

As though destroying evidence.

So completely that even if there were such a thing as a god, it would never be able to find it.

“This should be the last thing to try.”

Kururu had exhausted herself completely and collapsed.

But Kururu was Kururu.

Wouldn’t this please her more than kind words or comfort?

“If this is true, it’ll turn the world upside down. Before giving up, there’s one last method we should try.”

I gathered the shattered fragments of the magic stone with my hand, closed my fist around them in my palm, stood up, and ran toward the tavern where Kengo ought to be.