The Climax of Holy Sacrifice (4)
"This is seriously messed up."
"Can't you see why they'd think that way?"
"I mean, it's just a manga…"
"That doesn't change much of anything."
Hearing her put it like that, I had to admit she had a point. When you thought about it, was there really that much difference between this and people cutting their food budget just to pull for a single character and make them their own?
Still, a curse that might last a lifetime was a little different, wasn't it?
"That's how precious Albedo is to everyone."
"I'm grateful for that, but…"
Shouldn't they be taking better care of themselves? Or was I the one at fault for building a system that invited that kind of immersion in the first place?
Then again, looking at the current situation — if I'd gone with a bad ending, they probably would have dragged me out and beaten me to death with a hatchet. Maybe picking a decent ending was what had kept me alive this long.
"Well, if everyone's already in that state of mind, there's no real way to stop them. I'm not some religious order. I'm not in a position to put restrictions on something like this."
Even if I were, clamping down and suppressing things wasn't my style. I'd rather put out a sequel and tell everyone to take better care of their own bodies. Whether they'd listen was another matter.
Either way, people going wild and slapping womb tattoos on themselves left and right was not a problem I could solve. The fastest way to handle this, then, was to find a method of undoing the permanent side effects of the ones already applied. When they eventually wanted to stop, they needed to be able to stop — that was the most important thing.
"Hmm. So you're going to experiment on my body?"
"When you say 'experiment,' it makes it sound like something dangerous."
For that part, I figured I could test things on Yuria whenever an idea came to me. Until then, the priority was gathering information and hunting down anything that might help with a solution.
So I was just about to leave the clubroom to go look for new material when—
"Who is it?"
"Ah, it's me."
"Professor Londo?"
"Cali? I thought I might find you here."
"Huh?"
Professor Londo appeared at the clubroom door out of nowhere and promptly kidnapped me. Honestly, I'd already felt this kind of reaction coming on account of the latest work, so I just quietly let her lead me by the hand to her research office.
"Ah, Elder. It's been a while."
"It has. Hoo. Ever since you entered the Academy, it's gotten a lot harder to see your face."
"Well… I do meet with Professor Londo regularly, at least."
"What good does meeting her do me? I'm the one who needs to see you."
Why did I need to meet with the Elder, exactly?
Incidentally, he almost certainly knew about my relationship with Rosaria by now. Surprisingly, he didn't touch on that at all and went straight to the point.
"That Hwashin's Wedding your master published — no, even before that, those stickers. Are you aware that because of them, people can now actually embed curses into the human body through tattoos?"
"…Yes. I received a report on it recently."
"So you did know. Did your master do that on purpose?"
"I don't think so? He never said a word about it to me."
"Tch. So your master doesn't even trust his own disciple. These days you can learn magic at the Academy, and all he does is pile work on his student."
"Sounds like he and you have similar personalities, Elder."
"When have I ever done that?"
"You've done it plenty of times."
Professor Londo, seizing the chance to unload a backlog of grievances the moment the opportunity presented itself, and Elder Sharon insisting he'd never done any such thing — the whole exchange was oddly warm and familiar. Even after all this time, it was a scene full of easy intimacy, and I liked it.
"Anyway, the Academy — every Academy — is in complete uproar over this. If the professors get their hands on Artist Siwoo, they won't let him off easy."
"Wh-why?"
"What do you mean, why? Because they'll have to bombard him with questions about how any of this is even possible."
"…"
They'd never seen magic implemented in this form before. And they were baffled as to why it had only started activating now — which basically meant they believed I'd orchestrated the whole thing on purpose.
Except I genuinely had no idea either!
"What a ridiculous man. He could have just written up his research findings as a paper and submitted it. Instead he goes and teaches the entire lot of us like we're his students…"
"So you're actually happy about it, aren't you? Finally a topic exciting enough to get your master fired up again."
"Well. Discovering something new in magic is always a joy. Same goes for paintings and manga — that's what makes them interesting."
In short, they'd called me in to see if I knew anything. Once they confirmed I didn't, the conversation drifted into praise for the works I was familiar with. But the way they kept circling back to the main topic made it clear this was what mattered most.
"If your master tells you anything, pass it along, will you? Or just quietly write it up as a paper yourself and publish it."
"Excuse me!?"
"I'm joking. Joking."
"Please stop saying strange things. In the end, Cali doesn't know anything either. You insisted he must know something, and all you've done is waste a busy student's time."
"Hrm. I still thought he might have dropped some kind of hint."
Apparently most mages were treating this whole incident as a challenge set by the Archmage Siwoo. For fuck's sake — I hadn't even imagined something like this would happen, let alone planned it. I'd just drawn a manga. How had things ended up like this?
"Ah — there is one thing I do know. Those stickers don't have any particularly powerful magical effects built into them."
"Is that so?"
"I only used the designs my master gave me. The sticker materials and everything else, I handled myself. He wasn't involved at all."
"…So the pattern itself is what matters, then."
"For now, why don't we try painting it on the body with pigment instead of using a sticker? If it still activates, that would confirm it."
"Right. Let's try that first."
So a huge number of mages had already started researching why this phenomenon was occurring. And it was strange enough that even Elder Sharon — one of the Empire's greatest mages — had taken a keen interest. That was why everything was in such chaos…
In other words, this definitely isn't ordinary.
If it could be explained through the standard magic system, no one would be reacting like this. Still, at least they were treating it as a new form of magic rather than some genuine curse. These mages really did have remarkably open minds.
"So this really is that unusual?"
"You draw a tattoo and nothing else, and it automatically draws on the body's internal mana to activate itself. You know as well as I do that even Record Magic requires the process of drawing with mana. Does that sound like it makes any sense to you?"
"It doesn't…"
"And the sticker's design has no connection whatsoever to existing magical script. Even if you draw the same image with mana, it has no effect. It's a completely different form of magic from anything we know."
"But what's the actual principle? It only seems to activate if the person with the tattoo has mana — so is it inducing their mana to draw a magic circle? Is that even possible?"
Watching them debate the incident with almost frightening intensity, I started to think the mages would figure it out and explain it on their own without me lifting a finger. In that case, I should focus less on uncovering the cause and more on finding a way to shut it off.
"Do you have any ideas for a way to deactivate an activated tattoo? From what I've seen, once it triggers, it seems to stay permanently."
"That's certainly one of the problems. No one's found a solution yet… Suppressing the host's mana does make it gradually fade and disappear, but the moment the mana returns, it revives. So it's meaningless."
I'd considered that approach myself, and sure enough, it didn't work. Listening to today's conversation only reinforced how differently this whole situation operated from conventional magic. What Elder Sharon found strangest of all was why nothing similar had ever occurred before Hwashin's Wedding was published.
"That part is the hardest, yes. It's not a disease with an incubation period… Or maybe there's some kind of trigger?"
"A trigger. The ordinary assumption would be that reading the manga activates something in the body… But both people who read it and people who didn't got the same results, didn't they?"
"That's right."
I sat wedged between the Elder and the Professor through a long stretch of magical debate before I was finally allowed to leave. It was exhausting, but I'd needed information on the crisis myself, so the time had been more useful than irritating. Just tiring.
The problem is, all the mages are so focused on explaining the cause that they're barely thinking about actually solving it.
So the best thing I could do was ignore the question of why and concentrate purely on fixing the immediate problem. Turning that over in my mind, I searched for anything that felt off — and one thing rose to the surface. This entire incident had been following the manga's lore with uncanny fidelity.
What if it's not just the parts we've already confirmed? What if everything else is following the manga's setting too?
In that case, since what I wanted was a way to remove the tattoos… what if I looked at cases in the manga where the tattoos had been removed…?
An idea struck me — one that just might work. I shot up from my seat on the spot.