Would It Be an Insult to My Humble Life?
“No one will ever think Grand Duke Oskar ordered it.”
After all, I had staged the whole thing to reek of black magic. And if Oskar had truly meant to strike at Julian, he would never have sent anyone alone—no matter who it was.
“At least, none of the soldiers who saw me will think that.”
“The soldiers who saw ‘me’?”
“Ah. A slip of the tongue.”
“Somehow that didn’t sound like a slip at all… So it really was you…”
Oskar shook his head in disbelief.
“In any case, the thing you’re worried about will never happen.”
“Is that so… If you say so…”
After that, Oskar quickly signaled the frantic soldiers and servants to stand down.
“Ha… Hahaha!”
Then he burst out laughing.
“Looks like I still have an eye for people after all…!”
Oskar threw his cloak back on with a thoroughly satisfied expression.
“With a man like you serving her, I can already tell what kind of character the princess possesses.”
Meanwhile Veronica had been jabbing me in the side for a while now, her face demanding an explanation.
“Do you finally have the leisure to hear me out?”
“Of course. Now I can properly receive my guests again.”
The place Oskar led us to was, of course, the same restaurant as yesterday.
“So, who is the woman beside you?”
“Someone who will be useful in our conversation.”
I gave her a subtle look. Veronica clumsily pinched the sides of her dress and bent at the waist.
In a word, the motion looked painfully awkward.
“I-I’m Veronica.”
“Hmm, a fine name. Veronica, and…?”
“And… what?”
He meant for her to give her family name after the given name, but Veronica only tilted her head, uncomprehending.
Like Laward, Veronica had no surname.
Only then did she grasp what Oskar had been asking. Her face flushed scarlet.
“I gave her a separate name for when she accompanies me on duties. Veronica is enough.”
I mixed a little lie into it. Oskar was steeped in aristocratic authority; there was no telling what nitpicking he might start if I told him the truth.
“Oh, I see—a codename! Understood.”
Oskar actually looked pleased, as if a princess’s knight ought to have at least one secret agent of that sort.
The real secret agent was Lucia, of course.
“W-who said I was accompanying you…?”
Veronica muttered under her breath and tapped my arm again, though she didn’t seem truly offended.
She always snapped and grumbled, yet she was so easy to read.
“Shall we have a drink?”
He asked, but the glass was already in front of me.
Faced with that blatant pressure to drink, I downed it in one go just as I had the day before.
A glass was set before Veronica as well, but she eyed it as if it were an enemy and hesitated.
“You don’t have to drink it,” I whispered when Oskar wasn’t looking.
Veronica shook her head vigorously.
“If I say you’re still a child, he’ll understand.”
“Who are you calling a child? That’s not it—I just thought I might try a sip.”
“Better if you don’t.”
“This stuff looks insanely expensive. It even smells expensive.”
You can smell that too?
“Smells better than the basement of the Houndry hideout, anyway. Wouldn’t it be an insult to my humble life if I didn’t drink something like this? I don’t think I’ll ever get another chance.”
Judging by the look in her eyes she was actually about to drink it, so I snatched the glass and drained it myself.
“Hey! What do you think you’re doing?!”
“Didn’t seem like a good idea for a lot of reasons.”
“Honestly… Fine, there’s probably nothing good about it anyway… I never liked the stuff to begin with. My parents always yelled at me about how if only they hadn’t drunk that night, blah blah. If I drink this, maybe I’ll suddenly end up with a kid too, right?”
“……”
The sudden black comedy left me mentally reeling.
She’d meant it as a joke… right?
Just what kind of lives had the people from District 7 lived?
“I’m kidding. Why are you so shocked over something like that? Are you really Karma?”
Veronica grinned, teasing me.
There even seemed to be a barb in that last line.
Had she started doubting me ever since we met Fred?
“And according to that guy, you did something pretty serious last night… What exactly—”
“What are the two of you whispering about?”
Oskar turned his head just as we were murmuring.
Perfect timing for an interruption.
“First, tell me everything about last night in detail! I’ve been dying of curiosity!”
Oskar slammed his glass down on the table as he spoke.
…Not so perfect after all.
“About last night… you say.”
At those words Veronica’s ears perked up as well.
“Yes! The rumor that you walked into the heart of the enemy camp alone—is it true?”
“It is… true, but—”
“A frontal assault! You’re a real man!”
Oskar declared forcefully before I could even finish.
Suddenly being praised like this was hard to get used to.
And he was practically demanding I brag about myself.
While Oskar beamed, Veronica wore the expression of someone who considered evil deeds perfectly natural for Karma.
My unintentional doubts had apparently been wiped away.
“I wish I had a knight like you myself.”
“A knight?”
“More importantly.”
I cut Veronica off before she could react to the word “knight.”
“I found a jewel in Julian’s room, and something about it was strange.”
Calling it a jewel was an understatement; it had been an enormous statue.
“You even stole it…?”
“A jewel?”
“Yes. One I’d never seen before.”
Ignoring Veronica’s dismayed sigh, I continued.
“And it was enormous. I brought it with me, so take a look. You too, Veronica.”
“Very well. But where is it?”
I slipped my hand into the Subspace Pouch and carefully drew out the statue.
Just like yesterday, a sharp, tingling sensation ran through me as I pulled it free.
With a heavy thud, the naked statue appeared before Oskar’s eyes.
“What in the… world…”
He was more shocked by my pouch than by the size of the statue.
Veronica, of course, was the same.
But only for a moment.
Oskar examined the jewel and nodded.
“This is a rare mineral from my mines.”
So that was it after all.
I was relieved he recognized it.
“How did Julian get his hands on this… and such a large piece at that.”
“I heard it was difficult to obtain.”
“Of course it was. Honestly, that bastard pulling something like this behind my back…”
Oskar looked ready to spit curses, then cleared his throat as if there was no point insulting a dead man.
“We call it Light-Eating Stone.”
He went on to explain the meaning of the name as well.
Light-Eating Stone—shikgwang.
It eats light.
“In my mines we use mana excavators, but this thing—”
Oskar carefully pointed at the statue.
“—reflects mana waves and light the moment it touches mana. Something about tiny regular polyhedral fragments all tangled together. It absorbs light and mana, then scatters them chaotically in thousands of directions.”
When Veronica and I just stared blankly, Oskar added one more line.
“Simply put, it turns transparent.”
“Transparent, you say?”
Looking at it again after hearing that, the black color seemed to have faded a little, like a pair of jeans that had lost their dye, compared to when I first saw it.
Even so, it still gleamed.
“Yes. Completely invisible to the eye. Even mana detection fails.”
It scrambled mana waves so thoroughly that detection became impossible.
I had heard that description somewhere before.
Ring of Disguise.
Beneath the table I quietly lifted my hand and glanced at the black gem set in the ring.
Had they used a gem like this one?
But the properties seemed completely different from turning transparent.
Still, because I possessed something similar, I listened to Oskar’s words more carefully.
“That’s why the mining difficulty is extreme. Use a mana excavator and it vanishes. But if you try to use people without mana, the veins are too deep.”
“Too dangerous to send ordinary miners, then.”
“Exactly. Even ordinary miners are valuable manpower to me. I can’t casually throw them into a death trap. It’s a mineral we extract only after setting up multiple safety measures and proceeding with the utmost caution. A jewel whose price is whatever the seller asks… and somehow Julian managed to get his hands on this much of it.”
Had Julian wanted Amelia’s heart that badly?
If only he had put that dedication to better use.
At the words “price is whatever the seller asks,” Veronica’s head snapped around.
“People pay a fortune for this?”
“They do, Lady Veronica. The mysterious light it gives off while turning transparent makes it very popular. Even refining it to just the right stage isn’t easy. That rarity only makes more people want it.”
He seemed to have settled on “Lady Veronica” as her form of address.
“I just can’t understand how rich people think…”
“Why is that? If our guest chose you as his attendant, you must come from a rather well-known family yourself!”
Hearing that, I was extremely glad I hadn’t mentioned Veronica’s origins from the start.
Helpful uncle or not, this man was an aristocrat down to his bones.
Anyway, this Light-Eating Stone.
Its stealth property was what mattered.
“If you made weapons and armor from this, would those become invisible too?”
“Of course.”
Oskar answered at once.
“Invisible swords, invisible armor—both perfectly possible.”
Then the applications would be quite diverse.
Not just statues, but invisible soldiers as well?
That would make them true ghosts.
“But as I said, money is the problem. It would be the same as forging a sword out of diamonds. Who would do such a thing?”
Is that so?
I knew of artists who had made entire skulls out of them.
As for me, the moment I heard the words “invisible sword,” I wanted to try making one.
I didn’t have some grand plan. It just sounded cool.
“What a ridiculous thing it is. The most valuable jewel is the one you can’t even see. In many ways, isn’t that just like life?”
I ignored the uncle who had come down with a sudden case of proverb disease.
And I deliberately refrained from pointing out that only “ordinary people” could reach those depths—that would have gone against his entire mindset.
Then I glanced at Veronica and whispered.
“You heard the explanation. Can you do it?”
“Probably. No—since it’s a mineral that makes money, there’s no way I can’t.”
There was no such thing as 100 percent for a mage, so she added the usual caveat.
“And the spirit told me not to.”
“Why?”
“If I dig up too much, the value drops. It wants me to nibble away at it little by little and trade it for money.”
“Sounds exactly like your spirit.”
True to a spirit that claimed the abundance of one’s wallet was the only true abundance, even now it thought only of money.
“What are you two talking about now?”
Oskar finally asked, unable to hold back any longer.
“You said mana excavators can’t mine it, and ordinary miners find it far too dangerous to reach the Light-Eating Stone deposits. In that case, we simply mine it without touching it.”
“What nonsense is that? Mine it without touching it? There’s no such method. If there were, I would have already—”
While Oskar was still speaking, I gave Veronica the signal.
She nodded and raised her hand a little higher.
And then—
Whoosh—!
The statue floated into the air and drifted to the left.
Better to show it than explain it in words.
“I’m a spiritist.”
“A spiritist… one of those rare…?”
Yes.
A spiritist rarer even than rare minerals.
Seeing Oskar so thoroughly astonished filled me with a strange sense of pride.
I was proud of Veronica, of course, but also of the fact that there were two spiritists right here.
“Due to circumstances I contracted with this particular spirit. I can handle any valuable mineral this way.”
“Grand Duke, if Veronica offers her help, what do you say?”
“What do I say? Of course it’s good! We’ll head to the mines at once and test—”
Seeing Oskar so thoroughly excited, I knew this was the perfect moment to bring it up.
The perfect time to reveal why I had come here.
Laundering the gold bars obtained from the Magic Tower.
Giving Veronica a variety of jewels.
And just now, one more thing had been added.
“There are conditions.”
That Light-Eating Stone.
I was going to take some of it myself.