Obsidian Research
The laboratory.
I slowly scanned the list of delegates for this upcoming mission.
Overall, the roster was quite satisfying.
Elena, James, Charlotte, Enya, Isabella, Claire, and Claris.
Every single one of them was a member capable of fulfilling their respective roles in this diplomatic delegation.
‘I practically screened the entire student body, but the results were obvious.’
Still, when I actually made the selections, it turned out I had ended up picking only the main NPCs.
Elena, Enya, Isabella, Claire.
These were the characters who had always played major roles no matter how many times I had replayed this game. Naturally, they had all been included in the delegation to the Dwarf Allied Kingdom.
Even so, a couple of new extras I hadn’t known about before had joined the team.
Charlotte and Claris.
Originally, these two had been complete extras in the game—characters I had never even encountered.
I had only learned about Charlotte by chance during the entrance ceremony, and this was my very first time meeting Claris at all.
Yet even though she was a complete newcomer, the shock I felt upon seeing her still lingered vividly in my mind.
It was almost baffling that someone like her hadn’t become a major NPC.
-Please introduce yourself.
-Claris Lianter. I am a half-elf.
She was a half-human, half-elf hybrid.
Now that I knew, her appearance made perfect sense. She possessed a beauty so striking it practically screamed “elf heritage.”
Her skin was as pale and flawless as a blank sheet of paper—a classic elven trait—and her long, wavy golden hair immediately caught the eye.
-What is your reason for applying?
-I want to go meet my youngest uncle.
Her youngest uncle.
The man she referred to as her youngest uncle was none other than Altarion, the Divine Archer of the Eldar Kingdom.
And Altarion was famously known as an elf with deep connections to the dwarves.
He was, in fact, the only elf the stubborn dwarves had ever accepted as a true friend.
-Wait… then… Candidate Claris… you’re of elven royal blood?
Moreover, Altarion was the younger brother of Gideon, the King of the Elf Kingdom.
In other words, calling Altarion her uncle meant Claris was the daughter of the king’s younger sister.
Claris readily admitted the truth.
-Yes, that’s correct. But I would appreciate it if you kept it a secret. There are certain circumstances within my family.
She had asked that the fact she was the daughter of an elven princess remain confidential.
It seemed there was some family matter she wanted to keep hidden, so I decided not to press her any further on the subject.
Anyway, moving on from the questions, it was time for her to explain why she was absolutely necessary for this mission.
Claris answered without hesitation.
-I have some skill with spirit magic. And if my uncle is currently staying in the Dwarf Allied Kingdom, this delegation’s task could become much easier. As you know, my uncle is a close friend of the current Dwarf King, right?
The current Dwarf King’s close friend was Claris’s uncle.
It was an offer far too attractive to refuse.
We decided to make full use of this opportunity and accepted Claris as the final member of the team.
And as I welcomed her aboard, a thought crossed my mind.
‘The reason Claris was nothing more than an extra… it might be related to the destruction of the Eldar Kingdom.’
The Eldar Kingdom.
This small, city-sized kingdom where roughly twenty thousand elves lived was destined to walk the path of destruction about a year from now.
An ancient calamity that had been sealed away for a thousand years would awaken and devour the World Tree—the very heart of their entire civilization.
‘Claris probably died caught up in that disaster as well.’
My thoughts naturally drifted toward her death.
She possessed an incredibly powerful setting as a member of the royal bloodline, yet she had been reduced to a mere extra. The reason was likely because she died before any major events could truly begin.
For some reason, she had been staying in the Eldar Kingdom, and she met her end alongside its fall.
Coincidentally, around a year from now was also the time when the number of students going missing or dying would gradually begin to increase.
“One year… that’s cutting it pretty close.”
No matter how many times I had replayed this game, the Eldar Kingdom had always met its tragic fate.
Could I really change that destiny within a single year?
The ancient calamity was one of the worst lifeforms even Elena would struggle against.
What’s more, starting from the second year, the servants of demons would begin appearing more frequently. The Empire would be thrown into chaos both internally and externally.
“…For now, I should focus on the tasks right in front of me.”
There was no point in getting impatient.
If I handled the given tasks one by one, a path would surely reveal itself.
As proof of that, even though my Engineering Thinking skill was still stuck at Level 3, I had successfully created a primitive computer architecture.
Applying the Von Neumann architecture proposed by the father of computers himself, I had built a basic Arithmetic Logic Unit capable of input and output.
Input Unit
Output Unit
Memory Unit
Control Unit
Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU)
Von Neumann.
He was one of the greatest geniuses in human history.
It was hard to believe, but by the age of six or seven he could already perform mental arithmetic with eight-digit numbers. He had even taught number theory to Eugene Wigner, a future Nobel laureate in Physics, when he himself was only eleven years old.
By twelve, he had already surpassed the level of university mathematics majors.
This monstrous intellect was fluent in seven languages, mastered a medical degree that normally took seven years in just two weeks, and left behind monumental achievements in economics, quantum mechanics, functional analysis, set theory, topology, computer science, geometry, numerical analysis, statistics, and countless other fields.
He was quite literally a walking computer.
Let me share one particularly shocking anecdote.
It happened while Von Neumann was studying at the University of Zurich.
One of his professors was the renowned mathematician George Pólya. One day, Pólya presented an extremely difficult theorem to the class—one on the level of the Riemann Hypothesis or the Poincaré Conjecture. At the time, it was one of the great unsolved problems that no one had been able to prove.
Then, five minutes later, Von Neumann suddenly raised his hand.
He walked up to the blackboard and began writing.
In just five minutes, he had proven an unsolved problem.
Pólya later recalled his feelings at that moment like this:
‘That was when I began to fear Von Neumann.’
“…….”
Anyway, the man was extraordinary.
Thanks to the Von Neumann architecture he designed, modern humanity had accelerated the information age by leaps and bounds, enjoying all its benefits.
“Was he actually possessed by someone from another world?”
The more you heard about his life, the more his stories made your jaw drop.
Maybe he had a status window too. Perhaps touching a floating hologram allowed him to use an overpowered cheat ability like Engineering Thinking.
Those primitive modern humans, lol.
……Anyway, I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Using the accumulated knowledge of countless scientists, engineers, and mathematicians from modern humanity, I was completing one piece of equipment after another that would save this world.
I had become the Von Neumann and Willis Carrier of El Pandor Runtera.
What would I become next?
If I spread the concepts of classical mechanics in this world, I would be Isaac Newton. If I proved that time flows differently depending on the axis of spacetime, I would be Albert Einstein.
If I proved the Big Bang theory, I might even become Dr. Stephen Hawking.
However, I wasn’t conducting research here to achieve academic fame.
Saving the world.
Saving this world that I had never once been able to save—that was my one and only mission and goal.
Of course, the reason I pursued that goal was the faint hope that clearing the game might allow me to return to Earth.
I missed modern human infrastructure, where pressing a single button could get you fried chicken delivered in fifty minutes.
“Wee-woong~?”
At that moment, Fix approached and called out to me.
It seemed he had discovered something.
I immediately followed Fix and checked the data he had found.
It was research material on the process by which Obsidian absorbed “hatred” and converted it into energy.
“As expected. The mana was absorbing brainwaves and vaporizing them.”
“Wee-woong~!”
After thoroughly reviewing all the materials, I nodded and gently stroked Fix’s head.
With this, I had nearly unraveled the secret of Obsidian.
So, what kind of experiment had allowed me to uncover its secret?
To understand a phenomenon, one must reproduce it exactly.
With Elena’s permission, I obtained a Madness Potion and administered it to a lab rat.
I wanted to confirm that the core mana stone of Obsidian absorbed “hatred.”
-As expected, it didn’t work.
The result was a failure.
The lab rat squeaked and rampaged wildly inside the test tube, but there was no reaction at all.
Simply consuming the Madness Potion was not enough to activate Obsidian’s mechanism.
-Sorry about this, buddy.
So I anesthetized the rat and carefully made a small incision in its skull.
Then I took the extremely rare Emerald Mana Stone I had obtained with great difficulty, split off a tiny fragment, and implanted it into the rat’s brain.
This was to allow it to handle mana.
-Squeak!! Squeeeeeeak!!! Squeak-squeak-squeak!!!
After that, I injected the Madness Potion into it once more.
The rat began racing madly around the test tube, pouring out rage and hatred.
And when I performed “Mana Transfer” on it…
-Shiiiiiii…
A red haze began rising from the rat’s body.
At the same time, Obsidian absorbed the red haze and began generating black mana.
Once mana was injected into the lab rat, Obsidian’s mechanism had finally activated.
Based on this result, I was able to prove the hypothesis I had formulated.
The following hypothesis:
1. The “red haze” is a byproduct created when mana and the emotion of hatred combine.
2. Obsidian uses this byproduct as an energy source to secure black mana.
Now.
Since I had successfully proven the hypothesis, it was time to dig deeper into the details.
I decided to start with number one.
I would research how emotion and mana combined.
However, I already had a rough idea of the method.
BCI.
In other words, I already knew about Brain-Computer Interface technology.
So how exactly does one connect the brain and a computer?
Surprisingly, our brains transmit all information through electrical signals.
Therefore, if a computer converts its digital signals into electrical signals and sends them to our brain, we become capable of “interpreting” those signals.
In other words, if a computer sends an image of Enya to the brain as electrical signals, I would perceive it as if I were actually seeing Enya, even if she wasn’t in front of me.
That led me to form this hypothesis.
Did the Madness Potion contain some property that linked brainwaves carrying hatred with mana receptors?
And when mana combined with the emotion of hatred circulated throughout the body, did it produce the red haze as a byproduct?
I gave Fix the order to research this hypothesis.
And just now, Fix had perfectly proven my hypothesis and shown me the results.
He had done something so impressive that I almost wanted to give him a kiss.
“Now… all that’s left is to combine positive emotions with mana.”
Since I had roughly figured out the principle, it was time to reverse the process so that positive emotions would combine with mana instead.
After all, Obsidian—which the dwarves had once proudly boasted about—had originally been a holy sword that absorbed courage and valor to emit powerful holy power.
“If I can turn Obsidian back into a holy sword and display it at the upcoming Iron Hammer Exhibition…”
There was no need to even say it.
The dwarves’ reaction was obvious.
The Empire and the Dwarf Allied Kingdom would once again return to a friendly relationship.
