The Wall of a Normal Person
“Ughhh.” Chris wailed. I’d always thought succubi couldn’t cry, but apparently that wasn’t the case. My gaze shifted to the culprit who had wrung those tears from her.
Flora
Holy Year 2335 ~ Holy Year 2363, October 26th
Dreaming of eternal life, she rests here for a moment.
It was a perfect epitaph. Once again, I felt the excellence of my own sense of style.
Chris rubbed the corners of her eyes and muttered quietly.
“I was supposed to have a smoked-meat party with Lady Flora…”
“That’s a shame. Shall we have one ourselves?”
“Lady Ruina. Do you really have no heart at all?”
Chris stared at me with a straight face. The tears had already vanished. Facing the beams shooting from her eyes, I answered with a sense of injustice.
“But I promised I would resurrect Lady Flora. There’s no need to cry.”
“……Right now?”
“Of course not right now. Later.”
“Really?”
Chris’s face brightened. I wondered if she knew that crying and then smiling could sprout horns on a cook’s pouch.
“What a relief. I thought it was a permanent goodbye.”
“That could never happen.”
“Then I can rest easy and scoop up Lady Flora’s hot spring water, right?”
“Wow.”
I felt a wall. So that was it. The wall that Flora and Kelton had spoken of—the one I would eventually face—was this. It was simply too enormous; my spirit broke. To overcome something like this? It was utterly impossible.
“You win, Lady Chris. I am but a mortal.”
“Wait. Don’t turn people into trash. You started this, Lady Ruina.”
“I don’t know anything.”
When I made a move to slip away, Chris hurriedly poured out her words.
“Listen carefully, Lady Ruina. The rumor that the Evil God’s priests attacked Lady Flora’s inn has probably already spread all the way to the capital, right?”
“We did make quite the spectacle, after all.”
“Hot spring water that even the Evil God’s priests coveted! Now on sale! How about it?”
“I see.”
I was certain. This girl was no succubus.
“Before me stands one of the primordial shadows—the Apostle of Greed?”
“Lady Ruina. So, are we not doing it?”
“Let’s do it immediately.”
Business is business, after all.
“Lady Ruina. Lady Chris.”
At the solemn voice, we finished paying our respects to the gravestone and left the cemetery.
Flora had surprisingly little wealth. Of course, that was “little” for a high-ranking mage; to an ordinary person, it was still a staggering amount. All of Flora’s assets had been handed over to the Mercenary Guild. She had used their inheritance management system. This way, they would moderately nibble at the entrusted money while maintaining the grave until a legitimate heir appeared.
“According to our Mercenary Guild’s judgment, the legitimate heir is you, Lady Ruina. You’re her disciple.”
“I am not Lady Flora’s disciple. And she never said she would give me the money.”
What Flora had promised to give me was the Star Silver. The rest of the estate belonged to someone else. Who knows—maybe Flora had once raised and then forgotten about another disciple. I left the Mercenary Guild and headed toward Flora’s half-destroyed hot spring.
While I was looking around the place that had once been the hot spring inn—now nothing more than old memories—Chris was grunting as she filled a wooden barrel with hot spring water. I walked over to her.
“You’re really going through with it.”
“Lady Ruina. Help me.”
“Even if we pass off some other hot spring water as Lady Flora’s, no one would be able to tell the difference, right?”
“Lady Ruina. The foundation of a merchant is trust. No matter how much we skillfully avoid saying certain things, we can never tell outright lies.”
“Understood. Put that down.”
Chris set the wooden barrel down at my words. I snapped my fingers and summoned wooden soldiers.
“So convenient.”
“It’s a marvelous spell.”
The wooden soldiers endlessly repeated the task of emptying the other hot spring water from the barrel and refilling it with Flora’s. I watched the scene with my arms crossed, then spoke to Chris, who had also folded her arms.
“You’ve gone back to cross-dressing? It’s truly fascinating how you can hide the fact that you’re a succubus just by wearing loose clothes that conceal your figure.”
“We’ll be setting out soon. And I’m not a succubus, Lady Ruina.”
“Shall we eat some meat?”
Lunch was the smoked meat we had packed. It was from the restaurant Flora had recommended.
“Ughhh.”
Chris sniffled as she set out the smoked meat. The sight was so funny that I pulled out my pipe and spoke.
“You’re coldly scooping up hot spring water right beside me, yet you’re still crying. Won’t that hurt your credibility in this situation?”
“But what can I do when the tears just come?”
“Then I suppose you have to cry.”
Hiss. I lit the pipe and looked up at the sky. Snow was falling. Getting snowed on while having a barbecue in the land of snow—it wasn’t a bad combination at all.
“Lady Ruina. Can’t you make something like a wooden roof the way Lady Flora did? It’s snowing.”
“I can create a similar effect, but not like Lady Flora. Just wait.”
When I snapped my fingers, a wooden giant sprang up and acted as a roof. Chris’s mouth fell open.
“Do you really have to go that overboard?”
“It’s the opposite. This is the only way I can do it.”
What I had obtained through the trade was only Flora’s unique magic. Not her entire magical system. Therefore, the only magic I could use right now was Flora’s unique spell, Growth.
If I applied Growth creatively, I might achieve a similar effect, but I could never use magic that was truly identical to Flora’s.
“Let’s just eat.”
We placed plates on a table we had salvaged from the half-destroyed inn, lit a bonfire, and devoured the smoked meat. I took a swig of honey wine and turned to Leon, who had been quietly sitting beside us the whole time.
“How does it feel to have gained holy power?”
“Not bad.”
Leon had awakened holy power this time. In the priests’ terms, he had received the Call. He had shed his apprentice label and become a full-fledged paladin.
“It feels like vitality is overflowing inside my body. I feel like I could do anything.”
“Be careful. People who have just awakened their power tend to have accidents exactly in that state.”
“I will be careful.”
Leon quietly stared at the firewood. His expression was as serious as always, but now I clearly understood the reason. His family had been killed by the Evil God’s priests. The method had probably been burning at the stake. Knowing that past, it made sense that he hated the Evil God’s priests and that his eyes would darken every time he lit a bonfire.
“Lady Ruina! I just had a brilliant idea!”
“I get anxious every time you say something like that, Lady Chris. What is it?”
“How precisely can you control those wooden people?”
“Hmm. I don’t think they could play cat’s cradle, at least.”
“What about driving a carriage?”
“That should be fine.”
“Then don’t we no longer need to hire people? Lady Ruina can just do it instead. Wow, we’re saving money.”
“……”
I stared at Chris. She blinked and tilted her head.
“Lady Ruina? Is there something on my face?”
“No. It’s nothing.”
“Lady Ruina? When you say it like that, it feels like I did something wrong. Did I mess up?”
“Geniuses never understand the hearts of ordinary people. It can’t be helped.”
Chris displayed a speed of thought in money calculations that would put even the greatest archmages to shame. A normal gold enthusiast like me could never catch up.
I exhaled pipe smoke toward the snowy sky and continued slowly.
“In the end, Lady Chris would even see me as money. Sob sob.”
“Lady Ruina. Everything was good until that crying sound—it was way too fake.”
“Oh dear.”
After the meal, we finally soaked our bodies in the hot spring water of Flora’s inn.
“Sir Leon sure is shy. You even had to put up a wall for him.”
“We’re fine with it, right, Lady Ruina?”
“Exactly.”
“Haa.”
From beyond the temporarily erected wooden wall came the sound of Leon’s sigh. The water must have been too hot. I leaned my back against the edge of the spring and stroked the massive block of Star Silver, its surface now encased in marble.
“So this is Star Silver?”
“Yes.”
“It’s huge. You’re really going to turn all of this into a lantern?”
“That was the promise.”
Since the original owner had requested a lantern, turning it into one was only right.
“Don’t you feel it’s a waste? If you split it up and use it, it’ll just become ordinary Star Silver.”
“Of course I’m going to use all of it. I already have a method in mind.”
“Alchemy?”
“Alchemy has quite a few useful techniques.”
The most representative technique in alchemy was compression. The price would be considerable, but it was the cost of using this much Star Silver all at once. It was worth paying.
“Then it won’t be too heavy… Star Silver is light, so it should be fine, right?”
“Probably. I haven’t tried it, but even after compression, it shouldn’t weigh as much as ordinary metal.”
“The metal from the stars really is useful in so many ways.”
“That’s why everyone and their mother is out searching for it.”
After finishing the barbecue party and the hot spring bath, we did one last check of our luggage and climbed into the carriage. I snapped my fingers, summoned four wooden soldiers, and had them take the reins.
“Will it work?”
“It works.”
“It really does.”
Having successfully gotten the carriage moving, I patted the chunk of Star Silver crammed into the back and spoke.
“Let’s set off now.”
“Toward the imperial capital!”