The Forbidden Book
What makes a trump card a trump card, after all?
It means a move you only pull out at the absolute last moment, doesn’t it?
I really didn’t want to contact him…
But for the sake of my wallet, it was something I had to endure.
I opened the Returnee Gallery and stirred my mana.
Today, rather than wandering the community, I focused on something else entirely.
The dimensional coordinates flowing in through the gallery.
Whenever someone streams or posts, mana seeps out from their coordinates. Think of it as a kind of IP address.
I locked onto one of them and sent my thoughts laced with mana. That way I could deliver a message much like the sponsorships I usually sent.
Normally it would be impossible, but after funneling mana through sponsorships so many times, I’d gotten rather good at it.
That didn’t mean it was a power I could fling around freely, though. It burned through a lot of mana and came with plenty of restrictions. If they weren’t streaming, I wouldn’t even consider using it, but…
No choice.
Unlike Eunae, I didn’t have friends—but I did have people I’d been in contact with for a long time. If memory served, excluding me, he’d been one of the first five to enter the gallery.
I was in the middle of sending a message to that guy right now. At the same time, the mana settled into place, ready to transmit.
But before I could say a word, a reply came from the other side.
I’d been wondering what I’d do if he didn’t pick up, but it seemed he’d just happened to have the gallery open.
Always going off on tangents.
The interpretation of my notebook sitting at the very top of the gallery.
This crazy bastard was the culprit who’d translated my Korean notebook and freely distributed it to the returnees. A weirdo who still hadn’t returned even though he could.
Lethe spoke as if he were extremely wronged. Of course, that wasn’t my problem.
The shame and embarrassment I’d felt while that post was up defied description. When I was little, thinking my handwriting wasn’t half bad, I’d practiced by writing the books in my head in Korean. To everyone else’s eyes, though, it looked like worm scribbles. And the content was closer to a diary, which made it even more mortifying.
I was getting too lazy to even correct him now. This old man really didn’t listen.
I sifted through a few places in my memory.
This side has a dragon, so it’s hard to reach… excluding that, across the sea is the closest.
After thinking a moment, I told Lethe about one place that came to mind.
It was a book of no particular note, so I hadn’t taken it myself—but Lethe would have plenty of uses for it.
Before I could finish typing, Lethe’s shriek carried even through the screen.
What was it?
Yeah. That was a not-so-secret secret I’d spilled back when I first asked him to take the post down. When he’d been interpreting my writing on stream, there were too many similar places—he couldn’t not know even if he wanted to.
But why did that matter?
I could feel Lethe hesitating. After a few seconds of silence, a chat came flying in.
Huh? Was that the problem?
That law had been made while I was still there, after all.
Witches always carried their grimoires clutched tight, so I’d forgotten. Even without that, researching old grimoires had been popular at the Academy.
This was nostalgia too.
As I was briefly lost in reminiscence, a chat arrived from Lethe.
When he put it that way, I was a bit troubled.
My money!!
I needed to sell that to make cash… what was I supposed to do?
Still, he seemed to be reviewing it positively in his own way.
At times like this, I shouldn’t flinch—I needed to push hard from my side. That was the basic technique of negotiation.
Not working…?
Time for the final negotiation card. The ultimate technique: sulking.
I quickly wrote out the method to obtain the grimoire, posted it, and left the chat room as is.
There was no firm confirmation he’d pay, but if I cornered him like this, he wasn’t the type of old man who wouldn’t come through.
To think the godfather of the Returnee Gallery and the greatest alchemist was such a sucker.
Heh heh.
I laughed inwardly.
Anyway, I’d get some pocket money. Shall I browse the community?
Alchemist Lethe took off his glasses and let out a hollow laugh.
“Huk—Master laughed…?”
The disciples watching that sight couldn’t hide their shock. Regardless, he couldn’t hold back his laughter.
Ha… the Lady is always an interesting person no matter when I see her.
Look at that my-pace attitude. Most psychopaths wouldn’t even dare hand over their business cards in front of her.
Her personality wasn’t bad, but when talking, you always felt like you were speaking from below. For someone who always talked while looking down on others from above, it was a novel feeling.
They were just talking about how to drag the Pope out anyway.
This’ll sell for a high price.
Having judged so, Lethe looked at the chat she’d left describing the method to obtain the grimoire.
Amazing. How could she know in such detail? Even he, who’d spent twenty years here, didn’t know the inside of the Holy Empire well.
And a more amazing point.
Lady. The forbidden book law was from over a hundred years ago, and it was re-designated just five years ago.
Eunha, who’d already been on Earth for twenty years, naturally wouldn’t know that.
So had she been lying?
“Someone from over a hundred years ago, huh.”
She herself didn’t seem to have any intention of hiding it, but realizing it was quite startling.
“You lot.”
“Y-yes?!”
The disciples who’d been quietly watching him laugh jumped in surprise at the sudden call and answered.
“Bring me all the records from over a hundred years ago. From major incidents to the crop yields of rural villages—everything.”
They sighed inwardly, thinking here we go again. When he was curious he searched himself, but when ordering, he ordered them.
“Hurry it up, will you?”
Lethe, who’d been a famous professor before returning, was a human who knew how to work people.
Ah, right. I need to send the Lady her money.
Hmm… it had dropped quite a bit.
Even if the number of returnees had clearly decreased compared to before, the quality of those returnees had definitely risen. Clearing an Impossible-difficulty tower wasn’t easy just because you’d survived another world.
A first-year rookie cleanly aiming for the 98th floor. Heavenly Demon was the weird one, no matter how you looked at it.
Normal people never chose that kind of difficulty. The option didn’t even exist for them in the first place.
Even so, every year countless awakeners challenged Impossible difficulty and died. Returnees mocked them for the stupidity while watching, but I figured it was because they knew just how hard it really was.
No matter how much power they lost upon returning, there was always a difference between people who’d clawed for survival and people who suddenly gained power in modern society.
That was why every country had established Academies—educational institutions to keep awakeners from dying. The target was every citizen born after Babel’s appearance.
Eunae kept asking if I wanted to go with her, but I refused every time. An outsider like me at school? I’d be lucky not to get bullied.
That was when it hit.
An enormous surge of mana.
And belatedly, Seoul’s emergency broadcast erupted.
But my body was already moving.