6

(I certainly did say it. Beth would become incredibly busy from the next day onward.)

One night after the lily sprouted, their busy days began.

From the day after the Immortal Lily sprouted, just as Beth had declared, she became busy with all sorts of things and worked everyone in the Magic Institute hard… no, gave them instructions, and everyone became dizzyingly busy.

But.

(Somehow… this is a little different from what I expected…)

The days that awaited Noel were completely different from the busyness he had imagined.

“Rodney-sama, please hurry and catch a blue butterfly! That one is white. I said blue!”

“Huh? Beth, the blue ones are quick, and magic won’t work on them.”

“There is an insect net right there, isn’t there? If you go into the forest, you can catch two or three right away. Hurry!”

The man being made to hold an insect net, wear a straw hat like a child, and be driven into the forest was the man called the youngest genius magician in this country.

“Naranda-sama, please thin three of the fruits from the right branch on that mandarin orange tree. No! Not one, three. The green ones. That one is too ripe! Ah! Not the left one, the right one! Honestly, Naranda-sama, you really are careless!”

This noble person, who had been entrusted with managing the greenhouse in Beth’s place until the lily bloomed, was being sighed at by the braided girl for managing things too carelessly.

If he recalled correctly, this beautiful man was a noble of such standing that he was registered at the very edge of the royal family, and a magician evaluated as the finest mind in this country.

“No, it is too cold. Do it again! Did you cool this with magic? Please properly run and bring it from the well.”

“Huh?! You said it was too lukewarm earlier.”

“We need freshly drawn cold water straight from the well. Please do not be lazy and cool it with magic.”

The woman who was a magnificent blonde magician was the only daughter of a duke’s family.

The girl who had been praised as the flower of high society and, for her perfect beauty and perfect magic, even called the Doll Princess, was merely a lazy girl when Beth was involved.

“Ezra-sama! Do not slack off! I need something properly woven from straw. Please finish that mat by tonight.”

“What? But this is my first time weaving a straw mat. It’s impossible. My hands hurt.”

“Grandpa! Stop being spoiled and move your hands already! Please soften it properly with a wooden mallet before you weave it. See? The weave here is too wide. I will massage your shoulders when you are done, so do your best.”

As for Ezra, he had reverted to childhood, becoming a troublesome old man in a state of refusal, and was being scolded by Beth.

If he recalled correctly, a research institute bearing this man’s name existed in the royal military department.

The noble magicians this country prided itself on were being worked quite hard by Beth, the daughter of a waterwheel mill.

And as for Noel, the person in charge of the Magic Institute and likely the one who stood at the pinnacle of the magicians in this country…

“Please hold it properly. Noel-sama, you are careless, so you do not seem able to do anything else, and that alone is fine.”

She must still have remembered what happened with the Centennial Grass.

Beth had classified him as someone useless, and with only the order to hold the washtub containing the Immortal Lily in place, Noel was blankly sunning himself together with the lily under the light.

Who knew where she had obtained it from, but she had even prepared an old rocking chair that creaked noisily, so she was very well prepared.

“Ah, the angle of the sun has changed a little, so please move a bit more. I will open the window now and let the wind through.”

For Noel, who had spent every day under tension and overwork, the experience of doing nothing but following the sun all day and blankly holding a washtub with the pleasant scent of pine was somehow uncomfortable.

“Beth, is it necessary for me to do this job? If I have time to do something like this, I would rather do other work.”

Noel appealed to Beth like that, but…

“Noel-sama. You are going to make medicine using this child’s petals, right? This child says that when it grows, unless it is magic power it became familiar with, it does not want to accept that magic power when medicine is made. So until this child grows, please keep watching over it and hold it properly, and let us have this child think of Noel-sama as its mother.”

She smiled like that and rejected Noel’s appeal.

Noel and Naranda looked at each other and turned deathly pale at Beth’s statement.

Beth’s casual words were an extremely important magical observation.

There were rare plants with the habit of magical imprinting, in which they aligned their own magic power with the magic power they first became familiar with after birth. When processing such plants with magic power, it was always necessary to accustom them to the processor’s magic power from the time they sprouted.

The ecology of the Immortal Lily had many mysteries, but if the reason for its extremely rapid deterioration from the moment it was picked lay here…

“For now, let us listen to what Beth says. For people like us, that is all we can do.”

Naranda maintained his composure, but with trembling fingers and cheeks flushed from excitement, he thinned the green fruit and cut his finger.

For that reason, Noel’s greatest job at present was to hold the lily and sit there blankly.