A Modern Man Unleashes His Poison on Another World (1)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
It's one of the famous rules left behind by a science fiction writer.
In my past life, that rule never really resonated with me.
After all, I'd experienced advanced technology firsthand but had never once seen magic, so there was nothing to compare.
Now, however, having been reborn into a fantasy world, the rule struck me as remarkably sound.
Which raised the obvious question: wouldn't sufficiently advanced magic be indistinguishable from technology?
Maybe I could even realize things I'd never managed to build in my old life.
An Iron Man suit, for instance. Or an artificial intelligence indistinguishable from a human being.
"Oh."
By the time that thought crossed my mind, I was already turning imagination into action.
An Iron Man suit.
A super-intelligent secretary that would put ordinary AI to shame.
How was an engineering nerd who'd gone all the way through a PhD dreaming of making sci-fi movies real supposed to resist that?
Absolutely impossible.
Day ten of building the Iron Man suit.
I slammed face-first into the wall of reality.
Suddenly I understood why Marvel had made Tony Stark a billionaire.
In a pitch-dark room, I sat hunched in a chair, clawing at my hair and groaning.
"I don't have enough money……"
Yes. That was the reason. Money. It always came down to that damned money.
Back in my old life, funding shortages had kept me from doing research I could be proud of — and now, in another world entirely, that same damned money was tripping me up all over again.
Looking at it now, it was the fantasy world that was real; the movie was the fantasy.
How on earth could Tony Stark have been born with not just his extraordinary talent, but all the wealth needed to make full use of it?
Did that even make statistical sense?
"If they were going to reincarnate me at all, they could've at least made me the son of a wealthy noble family……"
I had just finished muttering that little soliloquy when—
Fwoosh.
The curtains swept open, and the room flooded with light. My eyes, fully adjusted to the dark, couldn't withstand the sudden brilliance, and I let out a shriek like a vampire caught in morning sun, clapping both hands over my face.
"Graaaaagh…!"
My eyeballs felt like they were boiling. Tears squeezed out despite myself.
"Sorry I wasn't born a rich parent."
Beyond the glaze of welling tears, a blonde beauty stood with her arms crossed, a blur in my watering vision.
Wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, I answered.
"Muriel, you're not my mother."
She was closer to a mentor than a mother. At least, that was how I saw her — but her view of me was apparently a little different.
"If I fed you, housed you, and raised a helpless Owen with nowhere else to go, then that makes me your mother, doesn't it? Hmm? And what is this?"
What she'd snatched up was the suit blueprint I'd left on the desk.
"An alloy with high mana conductivity, and a Dragon Heart for the core. Using these as materials, even the price of a castle wouldn't be enough."
"Well, yeah. Probably."
It wasn't just the cost, either. Any smith capable of producing an alloy with the level of mana conductivity I wanted would have to be counted among the masters even among dwarf artisans. And on top of that, a Dragon Heart was famously the sort of thing you couldn't get no matter how much money you had — so money alone wouldn't solve it.
"That's why I'm trying to raise some funds."
They say opportunity comes to those who are prepared. If I didn't want to miss that opportunity when it eventually arrived, I'd have to start saving up in advance.
"And how exactly do you plan to do that?"
"Oh, I have my ways."
You'd think a fantasy world would be different, but having lived here a while, I'd learned that anywhere humans gather works pretty much the same. Luckily for me, the modern world I came from had inventions perfectly suited to scratching where the people of this world itched. I intended to make them and sell them.
A street the sunlight never touched.
Passing through an alley thick with the stench of stagnant water and crawling with rats, I descended underground — and an unbelievable scene opened up before me.
"Did you hear?"
"Hear what?"
An auction house as spacious and old-fashioned as an opera house. The people seated in the boxes wore half-masks and draped themselves in clothes that looked expensive at a glance, trading gossip in the most cultivated of tones.
"The rumor that Lady Elmwood is, in fact, not of Viscount Elmwood's blood."
"Is that true?!"
"Shh, quiet. This is something only I know — that's no rumor. It's the truth."
Needless to say, this was no refuge for beggars. And just as obviously, those gathered here were no beggars either. As their appearance and manner of speech made clear, this was the so-called "back alley" — a black market for the nobility.
And lately, the black market had been abuzz over a certain controversial item.
"Goodness…… just thinking that I might have lived my whole life never knowing, if it weren't for the Paternity Test Kit, gives me chills."
"Tell me about it. Without that anonymous mage who invented the thing, none of us would ever have known. Though, seeing how the shock has hollowed out Viscount Elmwood, I almost think ignorance would have been kinder."
"I keep hearing stories like that from every direction, and it has me too anxious to live. I ought to get my hands on a kit soon and find out for myself."
That controversial item was the Paternity Test Kit, developed days earlier by an anonymous mage and sold through the black market. Unlike its modern-world counterpart, it could cross-match genetic traits on the spot — a genuinely revolutionary artifact.
Hm. Why does this child look like the gardener instead of me? …Could the wife—?
Even if such suspicions took root, consider what era this was. It was no different from the age of Solomon, when two women claiming to be a child's mother faced each other, no way to verify the truth existed, and the child was ordered split in two. In other words, there had been no way to confirm that a child was truly yours.
Then, like a comet, this item appeared — and it went straight for the throats of men who already harbored a small seed of doubt in the corner of their hearts.
At first, many doubted its performance. But after the inventor flooded the market with kits to dispel that doubt, and curious husbands ran experiments comparing their own children against the neighbors', no one doubted anymore. As the saying goes, where there's smoke, there's fire — and a remarkable number of husbands did indeed discover their wives' affairs. That mountain of cases was enough to shake even men who had never doubted a thing in their lives.
Thus the poison a modern man had unleashed upon another world spread like a plague, kindling in every man a desperate desire to be certain his child was truly his own. The supply was then throttled deliberately — and the result was the present. The news that a rare Paternity Test Kit was among the auction items had filled this enormous auction hall to bursting.
"By the way, did you bring enough money?"
"I brought quite a lot. Why do you ask?"
"Because Viscount Elmwood is competing in this auction himself."
"Didn't he already find out? Why bid again?"
"He means to find the culprit and make him pay. He learned the girl isn't his, but he hasn't figured out whose she is."
"Ah, I see."
It was fine, though. I'd brought a purse heavy enough to strain at the seams.
The nobleman who'd tossed and turned all night gripped by the dread that his dearly won son might not be his own — that was how he'd put it, anyway. But honestly, judging by the way Viscount Elmwood's eyes had rolled back into his head, he looked ready to stake his entire fortune on buying a kit.
Well, that just makes him my next customer. More importantly, this fake beard is killing me.
If I'd known it would be this uncomfortable, I'd have skipped that part of the disguise.
"Now, let today's auction begin!"
Before I knew it, the auction was underway.
It was an unbroken stretch of tedium. The item I wanted never came up, only one useless thing after another. Just as a huge yawn was building—
"Do I even need to describe the next item?"
Before the auctioneer could add a word of explanation, the hall stirred. The unnamed noble seated beside me clenched his fist and checked the funds he'd brought.
Finally — the fun part. The round where the money entering my pocket got decided.
"The opening bid is thirty gold!"
— Forty gold!
— Fifty gold!
— One hundred gold!
Fierce competition right out of the gate. The strain burning beneath the mask of the unnamed noble beside me was plain to see — not that it was any of my business.
— One hundred fifty gold!
— Two hundred gold!
Anyway. Just as I'd predicted, it was Viscount Elmwood — his eyes glazed over with rage and betrayal — who drove the bidding. His berserk offers, spitting on the very idea of the future, sent his rivals scattering like autumn leaves.
For the record, the unnamed noble beside me dropped out around three hundred gold. This wasn't the last chance, he told himself — he'd catch the next one, and so on.
— Five hundred gold!
"Five hundred gold! Five hundred gold! Any higher bids?"
Whoever had been dueling Viscount Elmwood must have run dry as well, because no paddle went up after that. Their masked profile looked genuinely furious — though judging by the hair and the curves of that body, it was a woman, which made it a rather unusual case.
"Sold for five hundred gold!"
Well — thanks to that woman pushing Viscount Elmwood so hard, the final price came in well above the usual, so I could only be grateful.
"Who do I use it on first?"
On the way home after the auction, I happened to cross paths with Viscount Elmwood, deep in exactly that dilemma.
Oh dear. He must have an awfully long list of suspects.
"Oh, Owen, you're back!"
The moment I opened the door of our house, set apart from the nearby village, Muriel was there to greet me. She'd apparently been in the middle of preparing dinner — white apron on, long hair tied back.
"Yep. Home safe."
With theatrical flair, I held up the meat and fruit I'd bought on the way home with my auction windfall. Such plump, gleaming produce and such well-marbled meat that you could judge the taste on sight alone — and a small smile bloomed across Muriel's face.
"Business must be going well these days?"
"Oh yes. Absolutely. Naturally."
"By the way, did you hear? Apparently the noblewomen are all desperate to kill you lately."
"Really? How scary."
So there were quite a few adulteresses out there after all. And their way of thinking was genuinely terrifying — scheming to eliminate me to keep their affairs from coming to light? Their minds worked on a fundamentally different frequency from a normal person's.
But it was fine. I'd anticipated this exact situation and operated under a hidden identity because of it.
As though it had nothing to do with me, I sipped my tea and gazed out the window.
Ah. So I've brought a little tension back to the slack medieval honor code.
Across the window, sunflowers bloomed in full glory and butterflies drifted on the summer breeze.
It was summer.