The Magic Kingdom of Morian (4)
The sound echoed at regular intervals. Swoosh. Splash.
A massive wave rolled across the sandy, rocky ground, only to lose its strength the moment it reached its destination and retreat back to where it came from. The sight was reminiscent of ocean waves breaking on a shore, yet this was no sea. As if to prove it, there was no salty tang in the air that reached my nose. Instead, a thick floral scent—almost like someone had sprayed perfume—filled the surroundings.
“Lady Laila, would you care for a cup of tea? This one has detoxifying properties.”
“Oh my, thank you, Chrome. To be honest, I was just wondering if I should replace all the air around us. Blue Light has a hard time directly interfering with the human body, so it’s rather inconvenient at times like this.”
“Well, everything has its pros and cons, doesn’t it?”
No matter how much of a cheat this imperial princess was, if she had used White Light instead, she wouldn’t have been able to wield such absurd firepower or defense. Right?
“That’s true, I suppose. By the way, this water bottle still feels warm. Is this oddly shaped container a magic tool as well? I can sense a very faint trace of mana from it.”
“Ah, the heat retention is a property of the bottle itself. It’s difficult to maintain an airtight seal, so for now I’m borrowing the power of a spell formula, but I plan to replace that with something else soon. The labor cost differs drastically depending on whether a craftsman who can handle mana gets involved. I’ll make sure to gift you one once the prototype is ready.”
“Hehe, I’ll look forward to it.”
The cube business was profitable, but I couldn’t keep selling from the same well forever. Since making them myself would be a waste of time, I occasionally passed new product ideas to Theo Midas or Dolf to test out. Whether it was because of mana or the influence of ancient civilizations, the technological level here was strangely inconsistent. Sometimes they created things that made me wonder if it was even possible. Every successful venture brought me a nice dividend as a bonus.
Hmm. The color of the fog has changed again. Earlier it had a hazy, whitish tone that looked somewhat plausible, but now it’s turned pink. The path ahead, the scenery beside us—everything outside the carriage was completely obscured by the fog, yet the lake’s appearance remained crystal clear, every single ripple visible as if right before our eyes. It was a truly bizarre landscape. If we marketed it as an exotic tourist spot, it might actually become popular.
“Come now, Sir Valkius, stop burying your head in your knees like that and have a cup of tea as well. If you’d like, I can prepare gifts for the court mages later as well—”
“That’s not what’s important right now!!”
“Goodness, why the sudden shouting?”
The youngest court mage, Valkius Andex, let out a frustrated “Gaaah!” and roughly tousled his hair. His face flushed bright red as he finally burst out.
“One of the carriages that was clearly running right beside us has vanished without a trace! The coachman and horses disappeared long ago, yet the carriage itself continues down the road as if nothing’s wrong! We’re surrounded by fog that shifts colors every second—far more than even a rainbow could manage—and we have no idea where we are! So why in the world are you so relaxed about all this?!”
Aaah, I see. So that’s why he looked like he was about to die. He was taking the situation deathly seriously while the people next to him were chatting away happily. And since one of them was an imperial princess, he couldn’t even vent his anger. I could understand how his insides must be burning up.
But still.
“What exactly do you expect me to do about it? Even if we try to leave the carriage, the moment we regain our senses we’re back inside again.”
“That’s exactly why we need to figure out how to overcome this situation! You’re supposed to be my escort, aren’t you?!”
Apparently unable to raise his voice at the princess, Valkius pointed his finger only at me instead of saying “you people.” That’s right. We were currently the joint party of Valkius’s expedition team exploring the Lake of Wisdom and Her Highness the Princess, who had asked, “Why are you working in a place like this?” In other words, we had become lost children inside the fog.
At the beginning, Count Pendevig had prepared four rather spacious carriages for us. With only seven people, we could have all fit in one, but he must have judged that he couldn’t put the princess or his own children in such a cramped environment. Or perhaps he wanted to show how cooperative he was being. Or maybe he simply wanted to slip in more spies disguised as coachmen. We’ll never know.
However, our stubborn princess refused, saying it was too much, and the number of carriages was reduced to two. He then tried to put Her Highness and the Pendevig siblings in one carriage and the rest of us four—including me—in the other, but that too was rejected by the princess. At this point, I almost felt a little sorry for him.
After several inspections, our group finally approached the area where the Lake of Wisdom was said to be located—
—and the next thing we knew, we had somehow become separated from the carriage carrying the others and ended up in this situation.
“Just what the hell is going on? The Star Lands, including the Lake of Wisdom, are places that normally can’t even be entered unless proper procedures are followed. Could the flow of internal mana be unstable?”
Perhaps because of his position as a court mage with abundant knowledge, Valkius seemed even more distressed by the situation. Someone who knows that the lights floating in the air near a graveyard are fireflies would laugh at a person making a fuss about ghosts. But if those fireflies suddenly grew thousands of times larger, turned into a dragon, and started spewing fire breath, that same person would probably lose their mind unlike those who simply chalk it up to ghostly mischief.
Due to excessively high mana, a kind of barrier forms around Star Lands, and it’s not something you can enter just because you want to. In that sense, the current case—where we hadn’t followed any procedures and had been forcibly dragged in merely by approaching—was an unprecedented anomaly among anomalies.
“The communication magic tools are naturally all dead. Sir Valkius, do you have any emergency measures prepared for situations like this?”
“I’ve been trying detection spells and communication spells since earlier, but everything is completely unresponsive. It seems this fog is the problem…”
The strange fog carried a peculiar floral scent, dazzled the eyes with its ever-changing colors, yet never obscured the lake itself even slightly. Earlier I had mentioned that the tea had detoxifying effects, but this wasn’t some universal cure-all from an RPG game. There was no such thing as a drug effective against every kind of toxin. What we had just drunk was effective against quite a variety of poisons, but if this fog fell outside that range, it would be useless. No, before that, it wasn’t even clear whether this was actually poison or not.
Past-life knowledge? If I had known about this situation in advance, I would have crammed all the party members into the same carriage no matter what. Anyway, the others didn’t have ordinary specs either, so I figured there wouldn’t be any major problems… Hmm.
While I was pondering like that, the carriage suddenly came to an abrupt stop. I leaned out the window to check and saw a fork in the road ahead. One path was filled with all kinds of flowers, while the other was a muddy, slushy trail. Wondering what we were supposed to do, I turned my gaze and noticed that the carriage itself had changed. Earlier when I checked, it had been completely empty—no coachman, no horses. But now, in the place where the horses should have been, a single goldfish with a horse saddle wrapped tightly around its body was floating in the air.
As I stared blankly at the creature moving its red fins from side to side as if it were underwater, Valkius’s frustrated voice reached me from beside me. He had also stuck his head out the window.
“Hey, what on earth is going on that you’re just staring off into—”
He looked at the front of the carriage and stopped mid-sentence. At that moment, the goldfish’s gaze met ours.
“…….”
“…….”
A brief silence. The levitating goldfish stared intently at our frozen forms for a moment, then made a gesture that resembled… nodding toward the path ahead. It was as if it were telling us to choose a road quickly.
“Uh… You look healthy.”
“Indeed. With fog this thick, there’s no worry about dehydration.”
After finishing that idiotic exchange, we pulled our bodies back inside the carriage. The princess, who appeared to have been observing the outside with a hand mirror, greeted us.
“One thing is certain. Whatever is behind this incident possesses both ‘intent’ and ‘intelligence.’”
At Princess Laila’s words, Valkius nodded in agreement.
“As Her Highness says. At first I suspected it was an abnormal phenomenon caused by mana, but the regularity is too distinct for that. If it were simply unique fog, that would be one thing, but the fact that the fog only reflects the lake, the carriage moving on its own, and above all, the fork in the road and that goldfish right in front of us… Perhaps the Morian side has done something.”
Wait, wait a second.
“Isn’t that a rather hasty conclusion? It’s not as if there aren’t other suspects.”
“They’re clearly the most suspicious ones in this situation, aren’t they?”
“Exactly, which is why it’s even less likely. They’re not going to advertise themselves as the culprits. An imperial commission party has arrived—would they really pull tricks on us? What kind of justification would that give them?”
“But…”
“Both of you, that’s enough.”
At the princess’s intervention, we closed our mouths. She closed her eyes for a moment in thought, then spoke.
“For now, let’s choose a path. Whatever being is capable of causing a phenomenon like this wouldn’t be doing it merely to play a prank on us.”
“But Your Highness, it could be dangerous.”
“Sir Valkius.”
Princess Laila smiled. An elegant smile that somehow overwhelmed those who saw it.
“If that turns out to be the case, we can simply make them pay the price when the time comes.”