The Spent Magic Stone Alchemy Workshop
Time in the underground prison flowed differently from the world above.
With no sun or moon to mark the hours, I could only judge the passage of time by how many times Nenn brought my meals.
Seated in the middle of my newly comfortable little fortress, I focused intently on my work.
Swish.
[Space Stitching Needle] bracelet.
It had originally been an emergency combat tool, but now I was modifying it by applying 2nd Tier magic.
“The noise is annoying.”
The firing sound wasn’t that loud, but I wanted to reduce it even more.
If I was going to strike an enemy’s vital point in secret, it would be meaningless if my position was exposed the moment I fired.
So I etched a minute 2nd Tier sound-dampening formula into the bracelet’s interior.
Working with the tip of a needle to scrape away at the bracelet’s surface.
Thanks to Ultra-Precise Vision and the Mana Needle, it wasn’t a difficult task.
“Again.”
—!
This time, no sound came out at all.
Without any warning, the needle sank deep into the rock wall ten meters ahead.
“Excellent.”
I kept going, taking out and improving the Invisible Ejection Bracelet as well.
Now that I’m at 2nd Tier, I can’t keep using things I made back when I was 1st Tier.
These were tools I’d already made.
As my level rose, I planned to infuse them with stronger magic and sharpen their abilities.
This place was, to me, the finest workshop and the best playground.
Infinite mana, uninterrupted time, and inspiration spilling over.
When training grew dull, I made new formulas; when making formulas grew dull, I went back to mana control and trained again.
Using the formulas I created that way, I even installed new magic circles.
A warning circle that alerted me when someone approached.
A structural reinforcement circle that kept the interior from collapsing even under impact.
A luminescent circle that lit the dark room.......
And so several days passed.
I was checking the magic circles as usual when—
“Huh...?”
My eyes widened.
The three medium-grade magic stones I’d embedded in the core of the Acceleration Magic Circle on the cave floor.
When I first installed them, they’d only used up about half their mana.
But now...
Those stones were blazing with an almost blinding blue light.
“Could it be...?”
I picked one up and examined it.
Heavy.
The density of the condensed mana was so intense it seemed to press against my palm.
No way... they’re fully charged?
Impossible.
I could hardly believe it.
But there was no mistaking it.
The mana is packed in tight, with no gaps at all.
They were filled with mana far purer and more powerful than the new magic stones sold at the magic tower.
“Ha....”
A helpless laugh escaped me.
“So something like this can happen.”
By all the common sense I’d ever known, this simply shouldn’t have been possible.
I’d never seen a single book mention recharging a magic stone after it had been used and then reusing it.
But here, it’s possible.
The infinite mana stored in the ancient circulation magic circle.
The mysterious sealing formulas that kept the mana from leaking out.
I only placed the magic stones in that channel.
In theory, the magic stone should only have served as a conduit.
But the mana pressure here was so intense that the mana flowing through the channel had been deposited directly into the stones themselves.
“This is... a miracle.”
My heart was pounding like mad.
Magic stones are consumables.
Once used, they wear down, and once they wear down, that’s the end of them.
The reason most mages spend their entire lives struggling with money was precisely because of these damned magic stones.
They were more expensive than gold, and even then, there were never enough.
And yet.
Now all I had to do was pick up spent magic stones that were practically trash and stick them in here.
Then they became new again.
Those stones worth more than gold.
For free.
This... works?
This fact must never, ever leak outside.
If the count found out, he’d try to keep me as a slave for the rest of my life.
Then—
Wooooong!
The warning circle at the entrance gave off a faint hum.
A sound only I could hear.
Someone was coming.
“I brought your meal.”
It was Nenn.
Today’s menu was smoked salmon, freshly baked soft bread, and vegetables.
There was even fine wine to go with it.
As always, it was a carefully prepared banquet.
I could feel the consideration Ellen and Nenn had shown me.
“Eat up, Hans.”
“Thank you. As always. I’ll enjoy it.”
After finishing the meal deliciously, I spoke to Nenn.
“Nenn, I’d like to ask a favor today.”
“What is it? Do you want something to eat?”
“No, not food. Could you perhaps get me some spent magic stones from a branch of the magic tower or somewhere like that?”
Nenn looked puzzled.
“Spent magic stones? You mean ones that have been drained of mana?”
“If possible, medium-grade or high-grade spent stones would be best. If not, low-grade is fine too. As long as they aren’t broken.”
“What are you planning to use them for? Spent magic stones are just dead little rocks that don’t even shine.”
“I’m bored, that’s all. I want to carve them into little sculptures and grind them into powder for some potion experiments. Just a hobby, really.”
I took out a gold coin and held it out to her.
“If it costs anything to get them, please use this. It includes a little extra for your trouble.”
Nenn waved her hands in refusal.
“No need. What would it cost to get something like that? If there’s any expense, I’ll speak to the count. He told me to bring you whatever you need.”
“I see. Then... please bring as many as you can. The more, the better.”
“Understood. Honestly, your hobbies really are unusual.”
Nenn shook her head and left.
* * *
The next afternoon.
Nenn kept her promise.
She dragged a large cart all the way to the prison entrance.
Rumble, rumble—
A heap of stones spilled through the bars.
Low- and medium-grade spent magic stones, all turned a dull gray.
Among them, I even spotted the occasional shell of a high-grade magic stone with a faint red tint.
High-grade magic stones were so rare that even their spent shells were hard to come by, so Nenn must have searched hard to find these.
“Where did you get all this?”
“When I told the count, he said they’d just been dumped in a corner of the family warehouse and to bring them to you.”
They were all spent magic stones the Valderk family had used and discarded over a long period of time.
Apparently they’d been collected with the vague intention of cleaning them out someday, and the pile was far larger than I’d expected.
“They were just sitting there, so I brought them without hesitation. Is this enough?”
“Perfect. Thank you so much, Nenn.”
“Don’t mention it. There are more of those spent stones in the warehouse, so just say the word if you need them.”
The moment Nenn left, I lunged at the pile of stones.
My eyes practically turned feral, like a tomb robber who’d just entered a treasure vault.
“Start sorting.”
I sorted the spent stones by grade.
Low-grade: 328.
Medium-grade: 52.
High-grade: 7.
An enormous amount.
What would happen if all of these were turned into fresh stones?
Low-grade magic stones were at least 1 gold piece each.
Medium-grade, at least 10 gold pieces.
High-grade, a full 100 gold pieces.
That was only the approximate market price.
If supply wasn’t steady, prices could easily skyrocket to two or three times that much.
If I sold all the low-grade ones, that’s 328 gold. The medium-grade ones, 520 gold. The high-grade ones, 700 gold.......
That came to a total of 1,548 gold!
And that was a conservative estimate.
That’s more than twenty times my stock assets.
1,548 gold!
A commoner could live a lifetime and never even see that much, let alone hold it.
It was the kind of sum only wealthy nobles, merchants, or high-tier mages could ever touch.
Just imagining it made my head swim.
At this rate... getting into the Amos Magic Tower won’t just be a dream.
Who would have thought I’d be making money in prison?
But that was only if all these magic stones were fully charged.
I wonder if I can really recharge that many.
I started testing immediately.
I laid down channels that conducted mana throughout the cave floor, then drew additional Charging Magic Circles along them.
First, the low-grade stones.
If I’d reached 2nd Tier, there was no reason low-grade stones wouldn’t work.
But it went far faster than I’d expected.
[328 low-grade magic stones: Fully charged]
In just three days.
The low-grade spent stones transformed into new magic stones, gleaming with a luminous blue radiance.
It felt like a dream.
Next came the medium-grade stones.
[52 medium-grade magic stones: Fully charged]
About ten days.
The spent stones came back to life, now filled with heavy, pulsing energy.
The problem came after that.
High-grade magic stones.
Will these work too?
Their vessel was on a completely different scale from medium-grade ones.
If a medium-grade stone was a teacup, a high-grade stone was a jar.
The amount of mana they had to hold wasn’t even comparable.
...Still, I should try.
As expected, what I’d feared came to pass.
Even when I placed it in the same spot, the high-grade spent stone didn’t light up.
The mana is just passing right through.
Up through medium-grade, the mana traveling through the channel had been enough to saturate them.
But for high-grade stones, that amount wasn’t nearly enough.
More mana was escaping than entering, so they would never fill.
...I need to make the mana pool there more stable.
There was only one way.
I changed the magic circle’s formula.
I twisted the current of mana flowing through it so that it swirled in a vortex inside.
It wasn’t easy.
I had to dismantle the magic circle and rebuild it from scratch, so it took a full day.
Tsueet! Tsutsutsutsu!
From that point on, the mana that had been escaping began to whirl violently around the spent stone.
Good! The formula took effect.
I held my breath and watched.
Faintly.
Very faintly.
A single red dot appeared deep inside the stone.
That dot gradually spread, then quickly flooded the entire stone.
“......It worked!”
I’d done it.
I picked it up and examined it.
“It really worked...”
The light pouring from the stone in my palm.
It was on a completely different level from the low-grade and medium-grade ones.
A blazing scarlet flame of mana boiling up from within.
A mass of condensed mana.
It was maddeningly beautiful.
Just looking at it makes me feel like I’m getting pulled in.
I was seeing it for the first time in my life.
Something I had only ever encountered in books.
A treasure worth 100 gold pieces apiece.
...This is a high-grade magic stone.
My heart pounded hard.
As a mage.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it for a long time.
This isn’t the time to be staring. I should recharge the rest.
Once one opened the path, the rest was only a matter of time.
[7 high-grade magic stones: Fully charged]
It took about twenty days.
“Crazy....”
I’d suspected it might work, but I never thought everything would actually be fully charged.
The spent stones had been perfectly transformed into new magic stones.
This wasn’t luck, and it wasn’t a fluke.
As long as I had spent stones, it was something that could happen again and again.
I’ll have to ask Nenn to bring me more spent magic stones.
But then I ran into a happy problem.
“Where... am I supposed to keep all this?”
For now, I was digging holes in the ground and burying them in one corner.
If the amount kept growing, even that would reach its limit.
More than anything, the real issue was if I had to leave this place unexpectedly.
I couldn’t exactly stuff this ridiculous amount of magic stones into my pockets and walk out with them.
If I were discovered, there would be trouble.
“I need a warehouse.”
A secret vault no one could see, one that could store an infinite number of things.
Subspace.
Normally, people used artifacts like spatial expansion bags or dimensional pouches made by high-tier alchemists.
But those items were hard to obtain, and even then, they had limited capacity.
Besides, I was imprisoned right now. There was no way I could get my hands on one.
“Then...”
I’d just make one.
If I didn’t have the tools, I’d do it my own way.
“Space... is basically cloth, after all.”
The dimensional membrane that made up this world.
If I thought of it as cloth, couldn’t I just tear it, make a pocket, and sew it back together?
Conventional magic theory created new space by consuming enormous amounts of mana through extremely complex formulas.
But what if, instead of making new space, I cut, patched, and stitched the existing space?
“Let’s try it.”
I stabbed the air with the mana needle.
Paak!
A tearing sound rang out.
But space didn’t open.
Only the flow of air twisted briefly out of shape.
“Too hard.”
The wall of dimensions was harder than steel, harder than diamond.
At my current level, only a weak 2nd Tier beginner, I couldn’t even scratch it.
Maybe if I were at 3rd Tier.
Not the normal way, no. But if I compress it and repeat endlessly...
If I stabbed space with infinite mana stitching, maybe even 2nd Tier power would be enough.
This would undoubtedly be a method no one had ever tried before.
Even if someone had thought of the idea, it would have been impossible to cast infinitely.
If there were another place like this one, where mana was supplied without limit, then maybe it would work.
But not just the Empire—the vast continent itself was unlikely to hold another strange place like this.
This can only be done here.
Fortune had found me in the middle of a prison that felt like despair itself.
I stitched at empty air, saving even my sleeping time.
2nd Tier mana compressed to the limit at the needle’s tip.
Piercing through microscopic gaps.
The grain of space... there’s definitely a gap there.
Just as every fabric in the world has spaces between its threads, so too does space have its gaps.
“Please... open.”
I spent the night wrestling with the void.
My head felt like it was about to split open.
Messing with space meant burning my brain’s computational power all the way to its limit.
* * *
In the meantime, the situation in Rowen was moving with alarming speed.
Bergen Count’s manor.
“Damn it! Bergen Shipping’s stock has fallen again? You useless fools! What have you been doing to let it come to this?”
The Count of Bergen shouted curses at the top of his lungs.
The office was filled with the silence of terrified retainers.
As the logistics crisis in the eastern seas dragged on, the Bergen family, whose main business was shipping, had been hit with a fatal blow.
Stock prices plunged day after day, and the family’s source of funding was drying up.
“My lord... if this continues, we’ll run into liquidity problems.”
“I know that! I know it, damn it!”
Count Bergen drew in ragged breaths.
The stage where money could solve everything was already over.
Now the only thing left was to borrow the power of authority.
“What about Sophia? What is Sophia doing?”
“My lady is currently sending people to the imperial crown prince’s villa, but....”
“And? Did His Highness meet with Sophia?”
The retainer lowered his head deeply.
There was no answer.
That was answer enough.
“Worthless! I dressed her in that expensive gown, and all she did was embarrass herself at the ball!”
A poisonous glint entered Count Bergen’s eyes.
Crown Prince Caisis.
If he showed interest in Sophia, this crisis could be turned around in an instant.
But there was someone blocking that path.
“Count Valderk... and that daughter of his, Ellen.”
Ellen Valderk, who had monopolized the crown prince’s attention at the ball.
As long as she remained there, Sophia would be nothing more than a supporting act.
“Make a gap somehow. Make sure His Highness loses interest in Ellen! With Sophia’s beauty, if she gets even the slightest chance, she can capture his heart.”
Count Bergen ground his teeth.
To survive, he had to drag Ellen down.
* * *
At the same time, in the Valderk manor.
“My lord, the Bergen family’s movements are highly unusual.”
At chief butler Sebas’s report, Count Valderk lifted his teacup with easy grace.
“They’re flailing, that’s all. Their shipping stocks are turning into scraps of paper—what else could they do?”
The count looked out the window with a satisfied smile.
There was nothing more pleasant than watching a rival collapse.
“Nenn.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Is the one underground behaving himself?”
“He spends all day carving spent magic stones or sewing.”
“And does he ask for anything else?”
“He said he needed more spent magic stones.”
“If that’s the only pleasure he gets, playing with useless little rocks, then I see no reason not to indulge him.”
The count waved a hand as though magnanimous.
“They’re trash anyway. Bring him all of them.”
“All of them, my lord?”
“Is there any reason to leave them sitting there? Clean out the warehouse while you’re at it.”
The count had no idea.
He had no idea that each of those seemingly worthless little rocks was turning into a new magic stone worth more than gold.
A little later.
After Nenn left the office and walked down the corridor, Ellen approached her.
“Nenn.”
“My lady?”
Ellen’s face was full of worry.
Two months had passed by now, but her father remained unmoved.
He showed no sign at all of releasing Hans.
“Is... Hans doing well?”
“Yes, my lady. He’s eating well and staying busy making all sorts of things on his own.”
“That’s a relief....”
Ellen let out a breath of relief.
But guilt still lingered in her eyes.
“I’m so helpless. I’ve locked up my benefactor in prison and still can’t do anything....”
“It’s not your fault, my lady. Hans understands that too. And he’s... stronger than he looks.”
Nenn remembered the look in Hans’s eyes down in the underground prison.
There had been no despair there at all, only a fervent, near-maddened intensity directed toward something.
It had reached the point where she wondered if it was Hans who had been imprisoned, or the count who only thought he had imprisoned Hans.
“Wait just a little longer. I’ll definitely persuade Father.”
Ellen clenched her fist.
* * *
In the underground prison, I was fighting solely for subspace.
Months had passed.
I had stabbed and stabbed without rest.
But the needle still only slid along the surface of space.
There had been no progress whatsoever with the subspace.
“Damn it... was it impossible after all?”
Creating subspace with nothing but my bare hands, without an artifact, was a realm even great mages didn’t dare to attempt.
Had it all been my delusion?
Was this just a ridiculous attempt?
I barely managed to hold my exhausted body upright and drew in a rough breath.
All around me were piles of glowing magic stones.
Even the spent magic stones Nenn had brought me later were now fully charged and turned into new magic stones.
I can’t leave all this behind.
These were my assets.
I couldn’t leave a single one behind.
Clenching my teeth again, I rose to my feet.
Then I pointed the needle toward the empty air.
Break through.
Willpower and obsession.
I wrung the mana core dry.
Toward the seams of space.
Toward that invisible, microscopic fracture.
With the feeling that this would be my last attempt.
One strike that risked everything.
Paaat—!
At that instant, the mana core convulsed violently, and a shiver raced through my entire body.
Wooooong... woooonng....!
This is...?
Had I reached the threshold?
My reckless effort of the past several months!
At last, it had struck the wall that had been shut tight and woken it up.