Housebreaking
I followed Unit 1 into the room, and what waited there was a bookcase shoved aside, with a dark passage yawning open behind it, barely wide enough for a single person to squeeze through.
Ah. Why hadn't I thought of that?
The hint hadn't been tucked inside the books at all. The suspicious bookcase itself had been the door. Honestly — I took one look at that shelf and still didn't put it together. My instincts must have gone completely dull on the way here.
…Which meant telling Unit 1 to read the books had been a waste of time.
Well. People always say books are food for the soul, so I could just pretend I'd served her a meal. A skeleton can't eat real food anyway. If this counted as stocking up on nutrients, so much the better.
"Nice. You found it."
Embarrassed for no good reason, I gave her shoulder a couple of light pats by way of praise. She straightened at once, spine rigid, looking oddly pleased with herself.
Come to think of it, she was nothing but bones, and yet I could swear that face had an expression.
The passage ran far deeper than I'd expected. At first I'd pictured some secret vault piled with treasure, but the owner of the house clearly hadn't built a hidden space for anything so simple. Even so, carving a room like this out behind a bookcase would have been serious construction. There must have been something worth hiding.
"What on earth did the owner of this mansion do for a living…?"
Abandoned mansions in games always came with some deep backstory, but this one's felt unusual even by those standards.
Not even moonlight reached the inside of the passage. It was pitch-dark. By the setting, the undead had decent night vision, enough to wander a midnight mansion comfortably without a lantern — but not enough to see clean through darkness this thick.
Without thinking, I set a hand against the wall, then yanked it back at once. Dust, stone grit, and cobwebs clung to my fingertips, and the feel of them got under my skin. An undead with disease immunity probably had nothing to fear from a little filth, but the sensation itself was hard to stomach.
So instead I caught hold of Unit 1's arm bone. Unlike me, she seemed to see quite clearly in the dark, stepping forward without the slightest hesitation. The moment she felt my grip she faltered, just for a second, then matched her pace to mine.
My summons had better sense than I'd given them credit for. This might actually be convenient. The bone still felt a little damp… but even so, dried wolf spit had to be more hygienic than dust and cobwebs.
By the time my eyes had grown somewhat used to the dark, Unit 1 and I arrived at a small room.
"Oh…"
Shelves packed tight along the walls, long glass bottles lined up on top of them. On the table sat metal tongs, a stone mortar, withered plants, fragments of nameless minerals, and so on and so on. This had probably been some kind of laboratory. Hiding a place like this inside a noble's mansion didn't strike me as a particularly wholesome hobby.
If this were still a game, a mage in a black robe popping out as the boss wouldn't have been strange in the slightest.
…Right. I'd forgotten. This was the world inside the game.
So one could still show up.
I looked around belatedly, on my guard, but there was no sign of any black-robed mage about to appear. No — strictly speaking, one already had. Because right now, I was the black-robed dark mage myself.
I let out a hollow laugh at my own reflection in a cracked mirror. Honestly, none of this felt real yet. How should I put it — like the whole thing was a dream? Of course it did. Reborn inside a game? Fun as a story, but nobody actually believes that kind of thing happens. For all I knew, everything from the car accident onward had been a dream, and tomorrow I'd wake up back in reality. Nothing about that would be strange. In fact, that was exactly what I was hoping for: to fall asleep and open my eyes in the real world again.
…Then again, I'd spent the whole day being chased by wolves, found this mansion, and hadn't slept a wink, and I still wasn't tired. Did I even get sleepy anymore?
Whatever. For now, focus on looking around. If this was a dream, then it was a dream. If it wasn't, there was nothing I could do about it.
The room was so cramped to begin with that searching the whole place didn't take long.
"Hmm…"
Less here than I'd thought. Most of the bottles on the shelves were empty, and whatever remained had hardened ages ago — turn a bottle over and the contents didn't so much as shift. A few books were visible, but unlike the ones shelved outside, these looked ready to crumble the moment I touched them.
Even Unit 1 couldn't read these.
Well, if they were falling apart, they probably hadn't been that important. One scrap of parchment tucked between the books, though, was in decent enough shape that someone might still be able to read it. Not me, of course. I handed the note off to Unit 1 and looked around again.
By this point in a hidden room, shouldn't a chest have shown up? Or at least a button? For a secret room, there was an awful lot of nothing.
…Don't tell me I'm supposed to start pushing walls again.
Hard pass on that kind of grunt work. If I were on the other side of a monitor, just pressing buttons, maybe. Physically going around knocking on every wall is incredibly boring. If there was truly no other way, I'd have to…
At that moment—
"Huh?"
Something under the desk caught my eye. I crouched down, robe and all, and lowered my head for a better look.
"A jar?"
Oh, this one's in pretty good shape. No cracks anywhere, nothing chipped off. By the standards of this room, it was remarkably well preserved. Even so, I lifted it with care so it wouldn't break, and examined it closely.
A ceramic jar about as tall as a forearm. Silver vines were worked over a deep navy ground across the body, and the handle was carved with the delicate shape of a bird's wing.
"This looks like it might be worth something."
I didn't know the going rate for antique-type items — I hadn't traded them often — but I remembered that even junk sold for more at a shop than ordinary goods, so long as it had a rarity tag. Would this fetch a good price too?
It was heavier than it looked, though. Something was inside. Not liquid. Powder, maybe? I tilted my ear closer to listen, then stopped short when I noticed the handprint I'd left on the jar.
…Dust.
What I'd taken for navy glaze had been dust all along. So this thing had originally been white? Ah, shit. Shouldn't have touched it.
I wiped my hand on my robe and grumbled.
"Should've brought a few of the Unit 2s in from the lobby…"
Set them on a job like this and they'd have had it cleaned up in no time.
…Wait.
Now that I thought about it… did I even need to bring them? Using the summoning skill wasn't that hard. I could just summon again right here. This place was no less of a dust pit, so the odds of getting the same kind as Unit 2 were high. And if it wasn't them, another summon would be welcome all the same.
If my guess was right and the environment really did change what got summoned, something new might come out of this laboratory. Who knew. Maybe a golem that helped with experiments. Or an alchemy spirit.
"All right."
I set the jar on the floor and held out my hand. After calling up a whole crowd of those charcoal-soot things earlier, the sensation was already familiar: drawing mana up from inside my body and letting it flow outward. Before long, a pale haze began to gather.
What would answer this time?
Shhhk…
The mist drifted around the room a little, then gathered toward the jar I'd set down.
"Uh…?"
All at once, blue light began to leak from inside the jar. Something was off. Light had never come out when I summoned before. The blue glow wavered as it drank in the mist I'd made, and then a palm-sized cluster of light rose slowly into the air.
Flutter.
This was…
"A butterfly?"
What I'd summoned was a blue phantom butterfly.
"This is a summon…?"
Pretty, sure, but… I poked it with a baffled look. It didn't look like a combat unit. It probably couldn't clean, either. And obviously it couldn't read. If I had to find a use for it, maybe a temporary lantern? The light coming off the thing was faint to the point of being negligible, but in a room this dark it was still enough to paint the gloom with a little color. Shut it in one of the glass bottles nearby, and it might actually be useful.
While I hunted for a bottle of the right size and tried to invent some purpose for the creature, it fluttered in front of me a few times, then flew out of the room without a moment's hesitation.
"Hey. Where are you going all of a sudden?"
Was it running away? Had it read my mind? Was that why it was fleeing? I watched, worried — and then it stopped in place and simply hovered, wings beating. As if it meant to lead me somewhere.