As Expected of Alien Magic
As expected of alien magic...
The Raccoon.
One of the Yellow-Blue Clan, a transcendent being who had been granted a 'divine ring' by the Supreme Being.
His power could pierce mountains and cleave seas.
It wove a mystery that no otherworlder would ever dare to lay a hand on.
True, he currently possessed an ability far 'weaker' than usual, but that had posed no problem whatsoever when dealing with a mere user, and yet...
'That damned human...!'
How on earth had things come to this?
When he'd first heard the news, he'd flatly refused to believe it.
She'd found an item that had been marked 'discontinued' ages ago.
Worse, the person who'd dug it up was supposedly a strange otherworlder who looked just like Rika.
Absolutely impossible.
That pass was supposed to have been removed from the shop long ago, exactly as the report from above had instructed.
But so many things got erased and deleted in this place, and since the order had been 'discontinued' rather than 'disposed of', it had simply been shoved somewhere out of sight.
At a location no user could ever, possibly see.
Why not just delete it entirely? one might ask — but things couldn't always be wiped without a second thought.
Discontinued items occasionally went back on sale, after all.
Granted, remaking one from scratch wouldn't exactly be difficult, but...
"Which is exactly why you should have cleared it out."
"......"
Because I couldn't be bothered.
If it were an ordinary item, sure — but do you have any idea how tedious it is to craft something with the power of 'Administration'?
A single flick of the hand becomes ten whole flicks.
"Anyway, you're going to sell them, right?"
"......Hold still."
Dangling limply.
He was still suspended in midair by the scruff of his neck.
Let me think this through calmly.
If the discontinued item went on sale like this, there would be chaos up above.
To be precise, it wouldn't be Her — it would be the lackeys beneath her raising all hell.
'That Raccoon gets to laze around doing nothing, so why is it always me...!'
The more he thought about it, the angrier he became.
With even half his original power — no, a quarter of it — he could have blasted this insolent human away with a single blow.
So why, WHY did he have to suffer this humiliation at the hands of a creature smaller than a bug?!
"You're going to sell them, right?"
"......"
SQUEEEZE...!
"A-Agh!"
"Don't be dramatic. I barely squeezed."
"You squeezed plenty!"
"So. Your answer?"
"...Fine! I'll sell them, all right?"
Buy time, first.
Requesting more power from above would only magnify his own fault, and he couldn't call on that Raccoon fellow for help either.
The fellow wouldn't step forward for another two years.
The others were on similar schedules.
Summoning anyone in the current situation would only deepen his debt.
And above all, this wasn't an item broken enough to warrant crushing the balance over.
'It's just a transmission pass. Who cares.'
It granted no combat power whatsoever, so there was hardly any reason to fuss about it.
In fact, if only the order to discontinue it had never come down, there would have been no reason not to sell it in the first place.
Thud.
His body dropped to the ground.
Freedom, at long last.
Chime!
His honor drained away, and full ownership of the passes passed entirely into her hands.
"Lily Elbrit."
"Yes?"
'...The moment my power returns, you're dead.'
The day his strength came back in full.
He would kill the wretch, revive her, and then kill her again.
'I WILL make you pay for this humiliation!'
"Oh, nothing. Get lost already."
"I don't think it's nothing."
"Wh-what? What do you—"
"You seem to have something more you'd like to say."
Lily fluttered the passes and tilted her head with a grin.
...What a menace of a woman.
"Get moving, nyyow?!"
SQUEEEZE!
His head took a fist to it.
"Eek!"
"Your inner thoughts are showing."
"Why, you—!"
"What? Want to go a round?"
Lily drew out her hammer.
The divinity steeped in that pristine white weapon exuded an overwhelming pressure.
The Raccoon froze for a moment — then huffed out his own aura, pointed an accusing finger at her, and snarled.
"No!"
Fortunately, thanks to the Raccoon's cooperation?, she managed to purchase every single pass.
Ten per bundle, four bundles — forty in total.
◈ Type: Ticket
◈ Restriction: —
◈ Stats: —
◈ Magic: Expansion | Connection | Consumption
◈ Notes: Connects an external network to a specific object, usable for 12 hours.
A Rare-grade consumable item.
It could link up an external network on par with a Setting Room and sustain it for twelve hours of use.
By price alone, a Setting Room ran about 100,000 won per hour — so each pass worked out to roughly 1.2 million won, and with forty of them, the lot was worth around 48 million won.
For a mere 400 reputation points, that was quite the bargain.
And yet it still fell woefully short of the time I'd need to build the picture in my head.
"That's about twenty days. And since we won't burn all twenty-four hours in a day, if we're frugal it should stretch to eighty, ninety days or so?"
Yena, evidently taken with the passes, plucked one from my hand and turned it over idly.
Yes, if you spent six or seven hours a day, that math checked out.
"But that won't do. My goal is semi-permanent use."
"Semi-permanent?"
"That's right."
Starting now, I was going to take this thing apart.
The pass held three spells within it.
Expansion, which added a network with the Setting Room's full performance.
Connection, which linked that added network to a physical object.
And finally, Consumption, which erased the pass after use so it couldn't be spent twice.
"So, of the three — which do you suppose is least necessary to us?"
"...Consumption?"
"Consumption, probably?"
"Exactly."
A day passed, and the next morning I wrapped up a brief round of experiments and gathered everyone in Lecture Hall 1 of the newly completed Eli Academy to begin my class.
The walls bore the two weapons that symbolized Eli Academy — a hammer and a spear, inlaid in splendid relief.
In the classroom were Yena and Redberry. Redberry had recently met with me, and since this lecture would benefit her, I'd invited her along.
As for the passes, she didn't need much of an explanation — after what she'd witnessed on the island, nothing much surprised her anymore.
Standing at the lectern, I drew an X over the word Consumption among the three phrases written across the blackboard.
"The Expansion I mentioned earlier is, for all practical purposes, the entire pass. Which means tampering with the Expansion spell is no easy feat."
A crystallization of system-driven magic.
It pulled information from beyond the dimensional veil — a critically important function — so unless you went in with genuine, deliberate precision, piercing it was impossible.
And even if you did pierce it, since this was magic rather than science, you'd have to account for the risk of it warping into something strange.
"This is work that calls for brains far more than brute force. So we don't touch the first spell."
"Truly the magic of aliens..."
"There's even magic you can't handle, Miss Lily?"
"Even I don't know everything."
As fluent in magic as I was, magic was, in the end, the domain of the demonkin.
With the blood of a celestial in my veins, there were certain limits I couldn't cross.
"And the second one, Connection... isn't all that important."
It was the spell that tethered the expanded network to an object.
Simply put, think of it as the monitor cable.
"A computer doesn't stop running just because there's no monitor, right? The computer is running — it just has nothing to display itself on."
Which meant we were free to meddle with Connection all we liked.
Tap!
"And now the third, and most important."
"We need to eliminate Consumption."
"Correct."
I nodded at Redberry's words.
That was why the item was called a usage pass — not an expansion pass, not a connection pass.
"Our homework is to neutralize this Consumption."
Consumption was a spell entirely separate from the other two.
When its trigger fired — the passage of a fixed span of time — it cleanly severed both Connection and Expansion at once.
There were three ways to break this spell.
"First, erasing the spell itself... we're skipping that one."
"Because it's hard?"
"That too — but removing Consumption damages the item's very essence."
At its core, this item only activated when it was actually used.
The system wasn't so naive that you could simply wipe away its 'consumable' nature.
It had even received a stability update, apparently with contingency measures in place — after several experiments left more than ten passes in mangled ruins.
It wasn't just an item; a fragment of the system itself was woven into it.
'Not that this job is worth donning my ring to brute-force...'
Thinking about it, the whole thing was a little funny, really.
"Besides, the optics are bad, aren't they? In modern terms, it's like rewriting an item's code from the ground up just to keep using it."
"...True. This is Deoen, a game without bugs. We can't have flaws like that."
"Says the one who already bought a discontinued product..."
"Now, now."
That had not been a discontinued purchase.
Anyway — it had not.
Yena nodded along in agreement.
"Right. It was a perfectly legitimate purchase."
"...Hmm. Okay."
"In any case, we're going to find a solution without touching the Consumption spell."
"How?"
"Without touching it?"
The two of them looked thoroughly puzzled.
Tap.
The number 1. appeared on the blackboard, followed by words and a sketch.
Two human figures, with double-headed arrows drawn on either side of them.
"The first method is to change the target that gets severed — by layering a spell on top of the spell."
"That's possible?"
"Yes. If the thing being severed changes, the original connection stays intact."
It was a genuinely workable approach.
I'd already pulled it off, forcibly rewinding time across multiple passes with the breakage factored in.
"Since it's just a spell layered on top, it never touches the original magic. The problem is time."
Every twelve hours, the target had to be swapped out again.
Granted, the swapping spell could have its own trigger built in.
But the Consumption spell had a stubborn tendency to revert to its original target through any workaround.
Unless you gutted the Consumption spell directly, it demanded manual reconfiguration every single time.
As devoted as I was to my people's convenience, I wasn't about to sacrifice my own to do the work for them.
I'd recruited them to help me in the first place — and now my own workload would grow? Please.
"Which is why we're going with the second method."
"...Damage absorption?"
"Ooh, nice."
The blackboard now showed two figures clad in barriers, facing a single figure holding a blade.
"Instead of layering onto Consumption, we layer onto Expansion and Connection."
A sturdy barrier, strong enough to withstand Consumption's ferocious severing force.
Since all it took was wrapping a barrier around the spells, this route was dozens of times easier than the first.
"But that also means we need a fresh, solid barrier every twelve hours... and as it happens, we have exactly the thing for the job."
A barrier that could endure powerful strikes every twelve hours, and a vast wellspring of mana to keep that barrier sustained.
There existed one resource that satisfied both requirements perfectly.
I looked at Redberry.
If it was her, she'd have stared at that stone until her eyes ached just yesterday.
"The Blue-Red Stone, isn't it?"
A mana stone that refilled itself without end.
From this moment on, the Setting Rooms would be unlimited.