A Modern Man Unleashes Poison in Another World (2)
The sales of the Paternity Test Kit showed no sign of slowing down.
A man possessed by money. A man who corrects what is wrong and guides the world down the proper path. A man of unshakable will who refuses to bow even to veiled threats.
That man is me, after all.
And besides, why should I stop when I hadn't done anything wrong in the first place? The very demand was absurd.
Bang.
The front door swung open. It was Muriel, ready to head out.
"It's been a while since we've gone out together, Owen. You've been shut up in your room every day, so I was starting to worry you were turning into a hopeless recluse."
A wide-brimmed straw hat and a white sundress that bared the line of her shoulders—the perfect outfit for a day of cartoon-fluffy clouds drifting across a blazing blue sky.
As she descended the wooden stairs with a neat click-clack of her heels, I gave her a firm thumbs-up.
"It suits you."
Muriel burst into a soft laugh. "Flattery. So what wind blew you out here, anyway? You're the one asking to go out together."
"I felt like going on a date."
Sigh.
Muriel, who had naturally looped her arm through mine, let out a long breath.
"If you want to go on a date, why don't you go find yourself a sweetheart instead of dragging me along? You're old enough for that now, you know."
She was talking as if I were some mama's boy who couldn't cut the apron strings.
Which, of course, I was not. It wasn't even a possibility, given that I'd never once thought of her as my mother.
Unfortunately, the woman who had raised me since I was small apparently saw it differently—and that was how these regrettable misunderstandings kept happening.
If I showed this much, surely anyone would notice. Just how oblivious could one person be?
Or is she pretending not to see it on purpose?
Was she subtly drawing a line between us, and I was simply too dense to catch it?
I studied Muriel's expression.
"What is it?"
When our eyes met, she blinked at me innocently and tilted her head.
No, definitely not. She was genuinely oblivious.
A sigh escaped me too. How could anyone possibly be this unobservant?
* * *
Going out served the purpose of a date, sure—but that wasn't the only reason.
"I wanted to do some market research on what would sell these days."
In Muriel's perception of me—namely, as a shut-in who never left his room—lay a small flaw of mine: because I rarely wandered the outside world, I was, ever so slightly, out of touch with it.
Back then and now, I knew the universal worry that plagued men across East and West, which was why the Paternity Test Kit had sold like hotcakes. But there was no guarantee the next product would follow the same formula.
So if I wanted my cache of modern inventions to succeed on the market, analysis was an absolutely essential step.
"Is that so?"
"I brought you along because you're from the old days, Muriel—you might have trouble keeping up with the times."
Though she looked about my age on the surface, Muriel had lived for at least several hundred years. She looked exactly the same now as she had ten years ago, when she'd picked me up off the street.
"Did I seem like I couldn't keep up? I was quite confident I was doing rather well."
Muriel glanced around the room, then continued, sounding noticeably less sure of herself, as though my words had stung.
"I know where we are, you know. This is a coffee house, isn't it? I hear they're all the rage among the upper classes lately."
"Oh, you do know."
"See? I'm perfectly informed."
The moment the subject came up, she puffed right back up with pride.
Well, regardless. Just as she'd said, coffee houses were indeed the latest craze among high society.
With the sun hanging at its peak, the scene inside the coffee house felt a bit like a café in a modern planned city—women gathering while their husbands were off at work, chattering away about this and that. That was the closest comparison I could find.
I was busy taking the temperature of the place when—
"Your coffee, as ordered."
The waitress set the cups down at our table.
"We didn't order any cookies, though. I think you've got the wrong table."
At my question, the waitress answered with a knowing smile in her eyes. "They're on the house."
Whoa, free stuff! Complimentary!
It wasn't as if I was strapped for cash, but free is always right. There was no reason to refuse, so I nodded immediately and accepted the five cookies, neatly arranged on their plate.
Just as I reached for one, I froze.
I could feel eyes on me from somewhere. I looked around and found the source: the waitress, who had delivered the cookies moments ago and returned to the counter.
Ah, right.
"Ha, this damn face again."
It wasn't as though I'd been trying to flirt, but women tended to be generous with a face like mine, and the perks kept piling up.
Still, I didn't smile back at the waitress whose gaze had met mine. Smiling at a woman purely in exchange for cookies would be no different from a prostitute selling her body for money.
An iron wall for women I wasn't interested in. That's the kind of pure-hearted man I am.
"Heheh."
I was so deep in my solo narcissistic delusion that a stifled giggle snapped me back to my senses. Muriel, nibbling away at the cookies, was snickering at me.
"Well, you are handsome, Owen. We get things like this for free thanks to it."
"Ah. Right."
I'd expected an oblivious response—the kind of person who'd ask, "What about your face?"—so the unexpected reply left me with nothing but an awkward answer. Flustered, I took a sip of the coffee, steam curling up white from the cup for no particular reason.
"So. Now that we've walked the streets, do you have any idea what might sell?"
"Before that, there's something I'm curious about."
There was something that had come to mind and refused to leave my head. One thing in particular was bothering me.
"Why is this coffee house so cool?"
The thing was, this coffee house alone was maintaining a refreshingly cool temperature amid this punishing heat.
In a modern café, that would be nothing remarkable. But this was, first and foremost, a medieval coffee house. It made no sense for it to be this cool with no visible means of climate control.
"That's because a Frost-attribute mage is casting a spell to keep it cool, obviously? Their fees go up in the summer, so you only see it at establishments like this one, catering to upper-class clientele."
Ice magic!
The human air conditioner!
"They must be making a fortune off a single season."
I was jealous.
But it wasn't something I could copy. Magic in this world wasn't a matter of choosing which spells to learn—it was closer to a power fixed at birth, or one that awakened naturally as you lived your life.
That didn't mean I had to give up, though. All I couldn't do was replicate what Frost magic did with magic itself. There were other ways to reproduce the effect.
"Judging by how high they keep their prices, Frost mages aren't exactly in oversupply—nothing close to competition-level saturation, I'd wager?"
"That's right. However many mages there are, they'll never outnumber the people who want to buy from them."
"Then if I developed something that could replace Frost magic, I could sweep up all that money, couldn't I?"
"I suppose you could?"
Excellent.
Next moneymaker: decided.
And on this sweltering day, I vowed to drive out the Frost mages who were raking in obscene fees, to strip them of their livelihoods.
Tremble, you corrupt Frost mages, before the revolution of magic engineering!
* * *
Heat approaching forty degrees. The humidity was so thick it felt like being sealed inside a steamer.
Racking my memory, I found myself suddenly reflecting on how remarkable Willis Carrier had been—the man who beat the heat back in the modern world.
Willis Carrier. Much like the song that resurrects like a zombie every spring when the cherry blossoms bloom, he was the American inventor behind the air conditioner, which received its surprise annual worship the moment summer arrived. Thanks to his invention, which harnessed the absorption and release of heat as states changed, the people of the modern world could enjoy comfortable lives.
"What should I use for the refrigerant?"
I tapped the tip of my pen against the paper as I sketched out the design. "Ammonia is still the best option, I suppose. It's simple to make—just apply pressure, and..."
That was when it happened.
Sshhhhh.
The faintest rustle of a curtain, so quiet it was almost inaudible. In a room lit by nothing but candlelight, a single shaft of blue moonlight spilled in—and the instant I lunged out of my chair, a sliver of frigid metal grazed my cheek.
An ambush!
Startled, sure—but there was no time to feel it. The wound scored across my cheek burned like fire, yet I paid it no mind. I seized the wrist of the assassin whose strike had missed, used the full momentum of his own lunge against him, and hurled him into the floor.
CRASH!
One of them was down. His head and neck were bent at an angle no head and neck should ever bend.
Shff!
But the other two assassins executed a graceful midair twist, swept their palms along the ground, and landed on all fours.
"Impressive. We were told you were a mage—I hadn't expected you to react to that."
"If you're nothing without magic, then you shouldn't be allowed to have it."
"Isn't a mage's worth defined by his magic? Without it, you're nothing at all."
"..."
You little bastards...
"Actually, we surrender."
"Why?"
"Our ambush failed, and the man you just took down was the strongest of the three of us."
"I see. So you'd like your lives spared?"
"We would. If we fought you with everything we had, you wouldn't come out of it unscathed either—so it benefits us both."
"Fair reasoning. Accepted."
The assassins placed their purses of coin on the table and climbed back out through the window they'd come in by. Then they gave a slight, masked nod of their heads.
"We are grateful for your mercy."
The instant they were completely off their guard—
I grabbed both of them by the legs and slammed them back down into the ground.
"Guack!"
The air driven from their lungs, they glared up at me with faces full of betrayal.
"You coward! Didn't you say you'd spare us?!"
"I said I'd spare you. I never said I'd spare you intact."
"..."
The two of them, mouths flapping open and shut like suffocating fish, finally managed:
"Damn it! We were played!"
They had no comeback left in them.
Idiots, the both of them.