The Land Where Magic Was Born (1)
I returned to the village with Veronica. As morning broke, the villagers who had stepped outside their homes thanked me one after another. I accepted their gratitude and made my way back to the inn. Tirsi had probably gone to collect the party members who had finally risen from their sickbeds.
“Is this the one thou hast brought?”
Veronica was gradually getting used to casual speech. We had talked the entire way back, so she seemed to have relaxed a little. The one she was stroking right now was our hamal riding pet, Clatter.
We had stopped by the stable to check on our transportation home.
“Fucking stinks of straw in here.”
“Thou hast grown so thin. Poor thing.”
“Hrrrng!”
Clatter seemed to enjoy it when Veronica tickled its chin. The creature was easily five or six times my size—how the hell could she call it thin? If this bastard landed a kick, an ogre’s spine would turn into a xylophone with all the keys popped out.
Oh, now that I think about it, these guys are descendants of that divine horse too.
I recalled the four-legged bio-tank I had seen in my dream. Sleipnir, the divine horse, and its descendant Grani. Bloodline-wise, Clatter should have been on equal footing with Veronica, yet the way it basked in affection made it look like nothing more than a gentle old nag.
“It doesn’t reject your touch either?”
“We are distant kin, after all. I am not human myself.”
“Ah, right. I keep seeing you in human form, so I keep forgetting.”
“……S-Should I transform back into my horse form?”
“Stop overthinking every little thing. You’re allowed to speak freely.”
“U-understood.”
This was driving me insane. Fuck.
When I sighed, Veronica chewed her lip. Damn it, I didn’t know what to do anymore either. Time would fix it. Awkward relationships usually improved once people kept talking. I stroked Clatter’s neck. The moment I scratched its mane, it let out a happy whinny.
Veronica, now completely sidelined, gave a bitter smile.
“It seems the creature knows thou art the one who lifted its curse.”
“Why not ask it yourself instead of telling me?”
“What a foolish thing to… No, that was not foolish. Ahem. It appears thou hast misunderstood for a moment. Unlike thee, I am not fluent in the tongues of every beast.”
Veronica spoke carefully, still adjusting her tone. I see. So even though both sounded like plain neighing to me, Grani’s hihihi and Bicorn’s huhihi belonged to completely different linguistic families. She could probably only understand threats or warnings.
While I kept petting Clatter, Veronica gave it a thorough examination. She was even more clinical than a veterinarian, coldly checking for spasms or rashes.
“It is as I expected. Only half of Grani’s curse has been lifted. It can now carry humans, yet it cannot exert even half its original power.”
“What was its original power?”
“According to the records of the ancient civilization that humans speak of, Grani was said to resemble our divine lord most closely in body alone. Yet does this fellow not appear terribly sluggish? It only has four hooves, after all.”
Veronica lifted one of Clatter’s legs. The limb was covered in a luxuriant mane that would have made any Telmore weep with envy, but the hoof itself was just an ordinary horseshoe.
“Grani should have two hooves on each leg, front and back, for a total of eight. Only then would it match our divine lord in number of hooves. That is the proof that its body is the most similar.”
After releasing Clatter’s leg, Veronica massaged her stiff neck.
“Perhaps thy power only lifts the curse that prevents contact with humans. Even if thou art the guide of the prophecy, how thou wilt obtain the method to fully dispel it remains……”
“We’ll figure it out one step at a time. No need to rush.”
After comforting Veronica, I left the village together with the other party members Tirsi had brought.
“I heard the ogre is dead. Failed to spare it. Very sad.”
“You’ll be Silver Class now, so be satisfied with that.”
After receiving treatment for their burns and fractures, they mounted the hamals loaded with sacks of flour. Passersby were startled by the creatures’ nimble movements, but we had no reason to explain ourselves. I tied the bag filled with rune stones to Clatter’s saddle and climbed up behind Tirsi.
Veronica, whose legs were still slow, transformed into a pony half her normal size and clung to me. Her cat form clung to me as well. Of course, since my shoulders were too broad to sit in front of Tirsi, Veronica ended up wedged between us, flailing her legs from the curse’s backlash.
“Uck…… Tirsi. Forgive me, but couldst thou sit a little farther forward……”
“I-I am already sitting as far forward as possible. Please stop complaining.”
Thanks to Veronica the judge’s relentless virgin verdicts, Tirsi’s voice trembled as she answered. I couldn’t see her face from behind, but her earlobes had turned beet red. Having her virginity announced every five seconds must have made it impossible to stay calm.
With that, we set off from the village.
“Giddyup!!”
“Fuck!!”
Despite still recovering from a fracture, Bigen and his driving partner Arthas—who somehow achieved zero-to-sixty in five seconds—took the lead. Tirsi gave Clatter’s reins a short tug. We rode for roughly eight hours, taking occasional breaks. Once the sun set we couldn’t continue, so we decided to light a campfire and rest for the night.
True to adventurers who believed living like civilized people was “eco-friendly,” we cleared away the meadow grass and used the free firewood we had received from the village. The injured trollers began snoring the moment they lay down. Tirsi and I took the first night-watch shift. Veronica was dozing off from the aftereffects of virgin motion sickness—the term itself was fucking hilarious.
“When I think about it, traveling with you always turns into an absolute circus, Tirsi.”
I took a sip of water I had heated with Burning Hand and continued.
“An intelligent ogre? Never saw that coming. A few days ago when we camped around here, I was still trying to figure out how to track down orcs.”
“I’m the one who’s surprised. You called it footage from a rune stone, correct? Norde. Are you planning to write a paper on it?”
Perhaps because she held a scholar-like profession, Tirsi’s eyes sparkled at the mention of research material. I had given her a vague explanation so she wouldn’t report the ogre to the guild, yet she believed me without even seeing the evidence.
—Norde wouldn’t lie about something like this, right? she had said.
“I’m thinking about it. But before I start writing, I want to check whether anyone else has already published on the same topic. If someone beat me to it, I’d just be wasting my time.”
I pulled out the lecture ticket from Spearwoman Eye-na as I spoke. Back on Earth, a laptop or smartphone was all you needed to check for duplicate papers. Most academic databases even displayed citation indexes.
But this world where information technology is completely fucked is a different story.
I couldn’t simply look up papers the way I could in twenty-first-century Korea. I would have to visit a university or a research institute in a major city to properly investigate. The thought of some professor reading the paper I had poured my blood, sweat, and tears into and saying “Oh, I’ve seen this before” made my balls tremble with rage.
There was also the chance that someone else had already fulfilled the rune stone’s activation conditions. I had to look into it.
Still, since I’ve never heard of it, the odds that it’s already been researched are probably low.
Listening to me, Tirsi scooted her hips slightly away from the campfire. I had heated the water because the night was cold, but she seemed to find it too warm. Maybe one of her ancestors came from a frozen kingdom.
“Will you visit a university for your research? The central region?”
“No. Once Dana finishes restoring the map, we’ll head there. I plan to stop by the university in that area.”
I lowered my voice, remembering the saying that mice listen to nighttime conversations. The map of the ruins we discovered in the Underground Tower! Once Dana restored enough of it to pinpoint the location, our family would be heading abroad for a while. We also had to check whether it was a trap, so we would naturally visit the local university. This wasn’t something Bigen and Arthas should overhear, so my explanation was deliberately vague, but Tirsi—sharp career woman that she was—understood perfectly.
She twirled a lock of hair, looking a little disappointed.
“You’re going abroad. I’m jealous. Unfortunately I have work, so I won’t be able to follow.”
“Heh heh heh. Your adventurer rank is about to rise too, and you still need a promotion in the Mage Guild. You’re not far from becoming a six-star mage, right?”
“Not far? One or two years won’t cut it. My goal was to reach six-star before turning thirty, but it’s starting to look hopeless. I’m in trouble.”
“I want to shake off the ‘master’s degree’ label before I turn thirty too. No matter how I look at it, it’s going to be tough.”
“Hehe. You have it rough as well, Norde.”
“Still, lately it feels worth all the suffering. It’s all thanks to my wives, really.”
—Twitch!
The moment my mouth automatically spat out another devoted-husband line, Veronica’s body trembled. I didn’t know why, but it seemed she hadn’t been asleep after all.
By the way, six-star before thirty.
To me it sounded as reckless as declaring I would pass the level-six civil service exam in my twenties, but this was a world where a single person’s ability could equal a hundred. If the talent was there, it wasn’t impossible.
A six-star mage in her twenties—youth and ability combined. That was the path Tirsi had chosen to reach her goal.
……She did say she was thinking of marrying a Romanian noble.
For a fallen noble like Tirsi to regain noble status in Romania, the only path was to marry in as a wife. That made sense. Even on Earth there had been countries where offices were bought and sold, but nations that allowed fallen power-holders to be reinstated after losing a power struggle were extremely rare.
The fact that a fallen noble can still enter a noble household as a wife is actually quite lenient legally.
It probably helped that her family hadn’t been toppled by something as serious as a coup. In any case, Tirsi had personal reasons for wanting to reclaim her noble position. That was why she was building her résumé and aiming for a strategic marriage. It also explained the half-serious joke she had made last time about whether I was interested in Romanian nobility.
Yet something about the whole thing felt slightly off to me.
Tirsi does have a calculating side, just like she self-described.
From our very first meeting she had volunteered to party with those brats purely to raise her guild evaluation. She always showed a sharp attitude toward anything that could improve her specs. Getting angry at that bald professor whose name I had already forgotten was understandable, but she had also cooperated with my paper-reclamation operation to quickly recover a thesis that could still be salvaged. And this time she had even bowed her head to me to speed up her promotion.
Of course, I didn’t think her calculating nature was a bad thing. Looking out for your own interests is only natural. If you don’t want to be called a pushover, you have to guard your own rice bowl.
The strange part was that Tirsi was almost the definition of a pushover.
You can tell she’s a good person just by watching her.
Inside the bag hanging from Clatter’s saddle were the belongings of the guild examiner who had been dispatched with us. Tirsi had wrapped them in her own clothes and taken care of them. Would someone with such an upright personality really mortgage her own marriage just to satisfy a craving for power and return to the nobility?
I didn’t think so. Perhaps regaining noble status was only an intermediate step for her, the same way I had no intention of ending my efforts once I obtained a doctorate.
—Slurp.
Lost in thought, I drank the water that had gone cold in the night air. Maybe I had been silent for too long, because Tirsi seemed to think our small talk was over. She focused on the night watch, warming herself by the campfire. She was one of the connections I had made in Sargadis.
I was an old graduate-student bastard who had already adapted to this world’s heartlessness. But the Confucian dragon inside me hadn’t died yet. Since we had grown close and formed a bond, I genuinely hoped Tirsi’s dreams would come true.
Though for some reason it felt like every friendship I made in this world was with women.
The only guy I befriended in Sargadis is probably just Dorka.
My relationship with Cromwell and the others was strictly business. Last time Franc threw a housewarming party, I heard Dorka had brought alcohol from his inn. I should drop by for a drink soon.
—Crackle!
A spark from the campfire landed on Tirsi’s robe. The robe, being proper adventurer gear, didn’t burn through, but it still left a smear of soot.
“Oh dear. Clean.”
“Begone. The remnants of impurity that defile the body. This is the wind of purification, the light breeze of the south. ⟨ Clean ⟩”
Whoosh────!!
Wow, fuck. It finally worked. After reciting the cringy incantation until my throat was parched, I achieved my first success. I still didn’t quite have the feel for it, so it was probably a lucky shot. I had no idea how long it would take to master. Magic with attached incantations really wasn’t easy.
“Thank you. I’ll practice the rest at home.”
“Y-yes. But, um…… Norde.”
When I bowed in gratitude, Tirsi cleared her throat and raised a finger like a doctor.
“When using this spell inside your wife’s body, please be careful. The wind used to disinfect foreign substances is temporary, but it can cause internal wounds.”
“Huh?”
“In other words, when cleaning up traces after intercourse, wait for it to disinfect slowly.”
Tirsi explained while pretending she wasn’t embarrassed. I finally understood why she had blushed at my request. The moment I said Dana had told me to learn it, she must have jumped to conclusions.
I muttered without thinking.
“……I was planning to use it to clean the underground storage.”
Even as I said it, a thought struck me. The application Tirsi had described was incredibly useful. Now that I knew it was possible, I would definitely be using it often on Franc and Dana. Dealing with semen after sex had always been a headache for our family. So maybe there had been no need to reveal my original purpose to Tirsi?
Look at her. Our party’s alchemist looked like her face was about to burst into flames.
“N-no, that’s not what I meant! I didn’t learn it to use it in that kind of place!”
With tears welling in her eyes, Tirsi began gesturing wildly like a pantomime.
“Foreign substances must not enter sealed potions, so I learned it for guild work. I simply… since there are often cases of Clean being misused between lovers, I was just giving a w-warning…… I didn’t have any strange imaginations or anything……”
“I believe you. Please calm down.”
And so I had to soothe Tirsi—who was acting like a middle-school girl experiencing sexual harassment for the first time—until our watch shift ended. After that I fell asleep, woke up, and we finally returned to Sargadis. The only thing worth mentioning is that we barely spoke a single word to each other the entire way back. Except for the occasional sound of the bicorn pony’s virgin allergy flaring up, of course.