Kroon
Kroon
"Ada needs Patrasche!"
Ada was fussing in the arms of her father, Count Bradley.
Count Bradley had already completely melted at Ada's fussing, and he answered with a smile so wide it nearly reached his ears.
"Is that so? Our Ada wants to raise a puppy?"
"Yeah! A big dog! Ada wants a big dog that can even pull a carriage."
After recently reading the new picture book her brother had made for her, A Dog of Flanders, Ada had fallen into playing the tragic protagonist for a while and had made things difficult for many people.
In particular, she wanted to play the role of the picture book's protagonist, Nello, but there was no puppy in the mansion to play the role of Patrasche.
She had even carried out the eccentric act of pulling a handcart around herself.
Ada, still so tiny that she could not even pull a cart, had somehow gotten hold of a milk can, loaded it onto a cart, and was about to head out to make deliveries when she was caught.
Fortunately, Alain had seen that sight, been horrified, and caught her to stop her.
If he had not, a strange rumor that the count's young daughter was going around pulling a handcart would have spread.
When her plan to become Patrasche herself ended in failure like that, Ada trotted over to her brother as usual
and pestered him, saying,
"Ada wants to have Patrasche!"
But.
"No. Do you know how hard it is to raise an animal? Animals aren't toys you play with and throw away when you get bored."
Rupert, who usually granted almost any request when it came to Ada, firmly refused.
So Ada quickly shifted her target to her father, Count Bradley.
The count had always been someone who was utterly weak for Ada, his only daughter and the family's late-born child, and Ada instinctively knew it.
She knew that if she fussed in her father's arms, something good always came of it.
"Hmm, a big dog that can even pull a carriage."
Count Bradley tried to recall whether there were any large-breed dogs that big, but unless it was a monster, there were none.
'I can just have them bring back a roughly big puppy.'
Thinking that to a child's eyes anything above a certain size would look similar anyway, he decided to order someone from the mansion to obtain one, and he hugged Ada and rubbed his cheek against hers.
"Stop it!"
As her chubby cheeks turned red from the count's beard, Ada shook her head from side to side to avoid him.
But at her father's words asking whether she did not want to see Patrasche, she had no choice but to offer up her cheek with a gloomy expression.
Afterward, the count got an earful from Rupert and Alain when they saw Ada's reddened cheeks, but he was still satisfied because he had gained precious memories with his beloved daughter.
***
"Could it be that human beings were the material for the 'Gold Transmutation Stone'?"
Yustaf and Harun were reading a single book together in the office.
Originally, they had intended to buy several copies so each could read his own, but it was so popular that they had only managed to get one hardcover edition and one standard paperback edition.
Even then, because his disciple Xenia had thrown a tearful fit, insisting she absolutely could not give up the hardcover edition, they had no choice but to share the standard paperback.
Fortunately, the paperback was not of poor quality, so there was no problem with proceeding with their research.
The problem was the content.
It had not yet been precisely depicted in the manga volume, but to Yustaf and Harun, who could be called experts in their respective fields, the "Gold Transmutation Stone" was unmistakably an object made using people as material.
"To activate this Transmutation Circle, a person must be offered as a sacrifice. How could anyone do such a horrible thing?"
"This is no time to be sitting around. We need to check whether the number of missing people in the empire has increased recently."
The Gold Transmutation Stone.
The long-cherished wish of alchemists and a legendary object.
Since alchemy itself was originally a discipline born to create gold.
Research on the Gold Transmutation Stone, said to turn even an ordinary lump of stone into gold, had continued from the very beginning of alchemy until now.
But so many failures had piled up that the reality was that it was now treated as mere fantasy.
To think the answer would be found in a manga volume like this.
Harun, the empire's greatest alchemist, felt chills.
After calculating that creating the Gold Transmutation Stone would require offering a truly unimaginable number of people as sacrifices,
he realized why all attempts to create the Gold Transmutation Stone had failed until now.
This was an object that must never be created.
"To check the trends of missing people in the empire, we need the imperial family's help."
"That's right. No matter how wide our reach is, there are limits."
"Can you arrange a meeting with His Majesty the Emperor?"
A private audience with the emperor was by no means easy even for Harun, the head of the Alchemy Guild.
"If I say it's urgent, he would probably meet with me."
But if it was a request from Yustaf, it was possible.
He was the former head of the Magic Tower, the headmaster of the Imperial Academy, and furthermore the continent's greatest wizard.
However, even for someone like Yustaf, while securing the meeting was possible, persuasion was uncertain.
The only things that could be called evidence were the materials they had uncovered through their research so far.
The problem was that the research had been done through a manga volume.
If the conclusion had been derived from a book submitted by a renowned scholar or wizard, the emperor would have agreed.
But if it was a conclusion drawn from the contents of a manga volume, there was a high chance it would be dismissed.
What was frustrating was that to obtain definite proof, they needed the imperial family's help to track the missing people, so the order of things was effectively reversed.
"Still, we have to try. Isn't this a matter of people's lives?"
"You're right. I will prepare as much material as I can to help persuade His Majesty the Emperor."
Yustaf immediately left the laboratory and headed for the imperial palace, while Harun remained alone, preparing to edit the materials he had analyzed and organized so far into a presentable form.
However,
"No! You should have left the book behind...."
Actually, there were parts he had not been able to see properly because they had been reading together earlier, and he had wanted to look at them again, but Yustaf had taken the manga volume with him.
Harun thought Yustaf had taken it unintentionally, but he did not notice that Yustaf had in fact deliberately grabbed it when leaving the laboratory.
***
"I am not a suspicious dwarf!!!"
"How dare you spout nonsense after trying to force your way into the Somerset family mansion!"
At the main gate of the Somerset mansion, soldiers surrounded a bound dwarf and a terrified girl beside him.
"Kroon is... not a bad dwarf... He just wanted to meet the author."
Perhaps because she was extremely nervous, the girl trembled and defended the dwarf in a small voice, doing her best to protect him.
But to the guards protecting the mansion, he could only seem suspicious.
For one thing, it was their first time even seeing a dwarf, and that first sight had been of him trying to force his way through the mansion's main gate.
Moreover, there had been many suspicious people trying to sneak into the mansion lately, so they had expanded the guard force, and suspicion was unavoidable.
Of course, far more often they were catching people trying to flee from inside, claiming they were getting off work.
"What is all this commotion in front of the mansion!"
"Sir! Captain, the situation is... a dwarf was causing a disturbance at the mansion's main gate and has been apprehended."
A dwarf?
Mullers, the guard captain who had until recently been the territory's only knight, wondered for a moment whether the soldier had been drinking on duty.
Dwarves were that small, shaggy race, and they disliked humans, so only a very few interacted with them, making them difficult to encounter.
And such a dwarf was causing a disturbance at the mansion's main gate?
"You lot must be mistaken. There's no way a dwarf would show up in a place like this... It really is a dwarf?"
But when he saw that there really was a bound dwarf, Mullers was at a loss for words.
Why in the world would a dwarf be here, not in the imperial capital but in this rural southern region?
"Untie this at once!!! I must meet the author of the manga!"
Mullers got a headache watching the dwarf shout at the top of his lungs with such confidence despite being caught and bound by the guards.
If he meant the author of the manga, that would be Master Rupert.
There was absolutely no way he could let a suspicious person meet him.
"Why exactly did you cause a disturbance?"
"When I went to the main gate, didn't they refuse me, saying that anyone without an appointment could not enter!"
"That is only natural. Do dwarves just show up unannounced at someone else's home, and a noble's mansion at that?"
"That's...."
At Mullers's reasonable point, the dwarf was at a loss for words and hung his head deeply.
In any case, Mullers was troubled over what to do with this dwarf.
If he had been human, Mullers would have thrown him in jail immediately and taught him a lesson, but since he was a member of another race, Mullers was flustered.
If he mishandled him, it could escalate into a diplomatic problem with the Dwarf Kingdom.
This was not Mullers's groundless assumption; after the old race war, there had been an incident in the empire where a lord had arbitrarily imprisoned an elf, and it had nearly led to war.
'First, I should report this to Master Rupert.'
There were too many elements that could grow into a bigger problem for him to judge on his own.
So Mullers decided to report to Rupert.
But Mullers did not find it strange that, even though Count Bradley, the lord, was still perfectly present, he naturally skipped over him and went to report to Rupert.