5 — 4

(Eek!! What an incredible number of medicinal herbs! Flowers I’ve never even seen before!)

“Hey, Noel-sama. What’s that?”

Beth was already full of curiosity about everything inside the Magic Institute that Noel had shown her around.

After all, Beth was a dyed-in-the-wool country girl.

She had lived on the edge of the forest all this time, and the only places she knew were the village, the town, and the inside of the forest. It was her first time going to the royal capital, too, if the time she had been mistaken for a witch and kidnapped before did not count, so she was a dyed-in-the-wool country bumpkin.

She had never in her life seen a building larger than the village office.

She leaned back at the size of the Magic Institute’s door, was moved by the beauty of the carpet laid in the hallway, was overwhelmed by the magnificence of the lighting inside, and had been excited nonstop by the plants in the greenhouse, so she had been asking Noel questions over and over since earlier.

“Hm, that? That is something made by crossbreeding subspecies of Sleeping Mushroom. If it works well, its effect will triple, but it is still in the research stage.”

“What about that one? I’ve never seen a flower like that!”

“That is a type of lily of the valley whose number of flowers has been tripled with magic. If it goes well, potion ingredients can be harvested in large quantities all at once.”

The magician had introduced himself as Noel.

Noel was the chief magician of the Royal Magic Institute and said that he was the person in charge here.

He said the greenhouse of the Magic Institute was filled with many precious medicinal herbs and plants, and Noel had brought Beth all the way to this precious greenhouse, saying there was a plant he wanted her to look at.

This greenhouse, which was under strict management, had required several kinds of magic just to open the locks for Beth to enter.

“If something unregistered tries to enter, this reacts.”

The statue he pointed to as he said that was apparently one of those golems.

“An intruder will not return alive.”

Noel said that plainly, and Beth felt a chill run down her spine.

The contents of the greenhouse she had gone through such trouble to enter were wonderful.

It was filled with plants different from the ones living in the forest.

Flowers said to have been brought from a southern country, plants from a land of ice, and plants divided from specimens given by witches were growing thickly, packed with precious plants.

The greenhouse building itself was covered with glass so large she had never seen anything like it, and magic had been applied to its entire front surface.

There was a small moonlight room that gathered only moonlight and was brightly lit by moonlight even during the day, a room where mist containing magical elements drifted, and a room of complete, pitch-black darkness. It was divided in detail into twenty-three rooms by use, and in each of those rooms, magically important plants were being raised.

“Wow, how amazing… Noel-sama, is all of this magic? Hey, what about over there?”

Even though Beth had only just seen real magic for the first time a short while ago, large-scale, extremely high-quality magic had been lavishly applied all over the building itself here.

It was more magnificent and on a larger scale than the magic written in the magic books Beth treasured and read.

The magic she saw in reality was far more majestic than Beth had imagined.

With her eyes sparkling, Beth busily looked around to the right and left.

“You know, you are the only one in this royal capital who calls my name so casually…”

Noel had apparently explained pompously on the way that he came from a great noble family and that his father was an important person whose name Beth had heard somewhere before, but to Beth, a country girl, humans could only be divided into nobles and everyone else, and magicians and everyone else.

Noel, who seemed dissatisfied with Beth’s reaction, ignored Beth as she became absorbed in the greenhouse plants and magic, and strode over to pick up a potted plant with small white flowers at the edge of the moonlight room, completely covered by a glass cover.

“This is it.”

And then he carefully removed the glass, as if it were precious.

The dainty white flowers were about the size of violets, and he said they lived only by bathing in moonlight and taking in moisture from morning dew.

“Even if I give them magic power, and even if I give them heavenly light, they simply will not bear fruit. I have been struggling with this flower for three years now.”

Noel sighed. It seemed to be a plant he treasured considerably. Magic to keep the temperature constant had been cast on the pot, and a formula had been set up so that the inside of the glass would remain sterile.

“Please.”

This man, who had a rather arrogant side, looked straight into Beth’s eyes.

Beth nodded once, then held her breath and observed this small violet-like flower intently.

When she listened closely, she felt as if this violet-like flower were speaking to her somehow.

Beth closed her eyes.

She slowly matched her breathing to the flower, inhaling and exhaling. She gradually let go of her consciousness, and into the consciousness she had let go of, she slowly accepted the flower’s consciousness into her heart, matching it with the flower. Before long, Beth’s consciousness and the flower’s consciousness mingled and became one.

Whether Beth was the flower or the flower was Beth, the boundary that made each individual separate faded away.

Beth, who had emptied her mind and faced the flower, after a while turned suddenly toward Noel with a serious face.

“You’re fussing over it too much.”

“Huh?”

“Noel-sama, you touch this child too much. Apparently, because it’s touched, watched, and fussed over every day, it can’t calm down at all, so it doesn’t bear fruit. The care itself seems reasonably good.”

“Eeeh???”

It was true that Noel had been taking records on this flower every hour, day and night, in shifts.

Thorough humidity management and observation. That was what had made Noel an excellent researcher.

To Noel, who was standing there blankly as if he had been struck hard on the head, Beth pressed on.

“Just think about it. Noel-sama, if you were about to slowly bear fruit, but humans kept staring at you and kneading your body around, wouldn’t you feel unsettled and want to be left alone for a little while and breathe some outside air? Just take off the glass cover like this, take it out of the greenhouse, put it outside for about a month, bury it in ash or something, and leave it alone.”

Confused, Noel asked Beth. After all, this was completely different from the difficult plant-management method Noel knew.

“Is that really all it needs?”

“That’s right! If it bears fruit properly, you’re going to show me magic, so there’s no way I’d lie.”

“…That is true. There is nothing you would gain by lying. It is exactly as you say.”

After that, she simply conveyed the voices of various slightly unwell plants in the greenhouse here and there, then received a mountain of royal capital sweets from Noel as souvenirs, and Beth happily set off on her way home. That should have been all.

One month later.

“Come immediately!!!!”

As Beth was leisurely grinding flour as usual, Noel suddenly appeared, approached her, roughly grabbed her arm without a word, twisted his beautiful face in fury, lifted her onto his shoulder like a large piece of luggage, and shoved her into a carriage.

It was déjà vu. Completely.

“I’m telling you!! I didn’t do anything!!!”

Beth made a huge fuss, but now that it was the second time, once she had been put in the carriage, she already knew the destination.

“What are you, witch?!”