Chapter 444: Orthodox (2)
After Al’shel vanished, making it abundantly clear he was the villain, the room turned upside down.
It was already a total mess, but now it had become a complete disaster.
And for good reason. It was practically common sense that blocking the source of Otherworldly Power prevents the manifestation of magic, esper abilities, or any other special powers.
Naturally, prisons designed to hold Heroes, Mutants, or special ability users who gained power through means outside the Story were built on that very principle. Much of the Management Bureau’s defense system was established upon that same concept.
Yet, Al’shel, a top-tier threat, had shattered that common sense and fled.
Of course, there were those less affected—like me, whose physical body itself was enhanced; or the machine-based Hero who had acted as a guard during the interview with Al’shel; or those who used condensed Otherworldly Power stored within their bodies; or those powered by pure will.
But since he had so openly deployed magic, people were panicking, wondering if something fundamental in current theory was wrong.
A swarm of people poured into the room, seemingly out of nowhere.
Thanks to that, not a single eye was on me. I grabbed Un-ho, who was twitching in a corner, and escaped the room with Thunder God.
Once we were far enough from the commotion that the shouting had faded, I finally spoke.
“…That wasn’t magic, was it?”
I directed the question to Thunder God, who, for some reason, hadn’t vanished with Al’shel but remained by my side.
“Hmm? How did you know?”
Thunder God’s voice sounded genuinely surprised.
“I’ve seen that guy teleport a few times.”
I calmly presented the basis for my conviction.
“Heh. Since his power was suppressed, there’s a chance he used a different spell, isn’t there?”
Thunder God shot back, her voice rising as if she found my answer amusing.
“Al’shel has a pathological hatred for wasting mana. In a situation where there’s no merit other than mocking the Bureau, he would’ve just walked out under their control rather than use an inefficient spell.”
I refuted her, basing my logic on the behavioral patterns I’d observed during my long acquaintance with Al’shel.
Of course, if there was some merit to mocking the Bureau that exceeded my imagination, there was a possibility he’d used magic… but let’s assume that wasn’t the case for now.
“Ah. So that’s what Al’shel is like. I had no idea.”
Thunder God replied with a bright smile, looking pleased to have learned something new.
If only it had ended there.
She continued.
“…If you know Mutants that well, then why…”
She was about to say something chilling and ominous.
“So, what’s the answer?”
I cut her off, shifting the flow of the conversation.
My personal guess was that he’d borrowed a portion of Quilp’s ability, or perhaps Yumil had intervened. Or maybe he’d disguised Elder Li’s spatial leap through some method.
Just as I was letting my imagination run wild, wondering which it was—
“Oh, that? It’s Linshua’s Here-and-There Slime.”
A completely insane sentence that defied all my expectations came back as the answer.
“…Here-and-there what?”
“Here-and-There Slime. It looks like this.”
Here-and-There Slime.
It was such a bizarre term that I asked again reflexively, but Thunder God repeated it calmly as if it were nothing, pulling something small from her pocket.
“Here. Take a look.”
She tossed the object to me.
I caught it in my hand, the object letting out a brief glint as it reflected the overhead lights.
My first thought upon examining the item was this:
An ampoule?
A transparent glass ampoule the size of a pinky finger, filled with a black liquid. That was the true identity of the item she’d handed me.
“…Here-and-There Slime?”
When I muttered the name while blankly holding the ampoule up with my fingers, she replied.
“Here-and-There Slime.”
Thunder God confirmed my words, confusing my mind further by insisting on using that ridiculous name.
Dazed, I shook the ampoule. The black liquid inside sloshed around, but no special change occurred.
“…How do you use this?”
I let the thought in my head slip right out of my mouth.
“Just throw it at your feet. The slime will swallow you up and spit you out a few seconds later at a location where another slime is placed. Simple, right? Oh, don’t try it now.”
Perhaps because my mind had gone blank, I almost threw the ampoule onto the ground as she instructed, but fortunately, Thunder God stopped me and took it back.
“…”
I stood there in silence, still in the posture of someone about to throw something.
My head felt empty.
Until just a moment ago, my mind had been a mess of thoughts about my disciple, those self-proclaimed doctors, Al’shel, and the newly appeared executive.
But thanks to that damn Here-and-There Slime, my brain had been bleached white.
I mean, why on earth is it named that? Is it because Linshua made it and she has the sensibility of a child? And why is the usage like that?
“…What’s the principle behind this?”
In the end, I just blurted out the first thing that came to my bleached mind.
“Linshua told me it’s a creature made by excluding the concept of space. That’s why if you’re swallowed by the slime, you can be spat out in a different location. Or something like that. Oh, she also mentioned she got the idea after watching Yumil move around.”
A portal, then.
While I was thinking that blankly, Thunder God’s explanation continued.
“It looks like it’s been separated and put into ampoules, but in reality, it’s not actually separated. That’s why as soon as you break the ampoule, you’re instantly transmitted to another Here-and-There Slime.”
Wow. That’s an incredible item.
It means those bastards in The Society now have an insurance policy that makes them nearly impossible to kill. It’s absurd that Linshua just whipped this up casually.
“However, because the original slime is small, there’s a limit to the number of ampoules that can be made at once. About twenty? Once used, that portion returns to the Main Body, so you can make it into an ampoule again immediately, but there’s a limit to how many can be carried at the same time.”
A maximum of twenty.
It was an ambiguous amount—hard to say if it was a lot or a little. It meant that even after giving one to each of The Society’s executives plus Thunder God, six would still be left over.
Of course, even with such a limitation, it was clearly an exceptional item.
“…Mass production… probably isn’t possible.”
I let out a lament of regret.
“Probably not.”
Thunder God chimed in, agreeing with me.
It was an answer born from the fact that she, too, had come to know that child well.
The creator of this Black Slime.
My daughter, Linshua.
Whether it was a prank of fate or not, she was a child who had possessed numerous transcendent abilities since birth.
To put it simply, the abilities of Linshua that I knew of were incredibly transcendent.
First: Converting anything she holds into materials.
Anything that comes into her hands—be it mud, wire, or paint—can be transformed into materials for her artistic activities. I’ve never seen it happen, but if she were to grab a person, she could likely turn them into clay and pull them apart.
That alone is a terrifying ability.
The problem is that the range of what counts as "in her hands" is absurdly broad.
For example, let’s look at an incident I experienced personally.
Because of her appearance, Linshua had never really experienced life in the outside world. Worried about that, I once took her on a picnic to the deserted Mongolian plains.
As she ran across the vast grasslands under the sky, Linshua smiled and said the sky was pretty. Soon, she said she wanted to use that color and reached up to pull the sky down.
…I’m not joking. She actually grabbed the sky.
And in Linshua’s hands, there was sky-blue clay and blue paint.
Perhaps because the target was the sky, no bizarre side effects like a hole appearing in the heavens occurred. However, the clay, which possessed the concept of the sky, became an impossible object that would show stars or turn the color of sunset as time passed.
Surprised by this, I asked Linshua for a few more things. As a result, she was able to create paper with the properties of marble, wire that flowed like water, and stones that made time feel accelerated while holding them.
Though, regarding the time-accelerating stone, Linshua herself didn’t seem to fully understand the concept of time, so she tilted her head for a long while when making it, and the effect vanished after a short time.
And the second ability:
When Linshua creates a work of art, that work becomes imbued with a specific power based on her belief.
Making a dog doll and having it come to life is a mundane level for her. Once, while playing, Linshua rolled a piece of paper into a cylinder and handed it to me, calling it a telescope. Even though it was clearly just a bundle of ordinary paper, when I put the paper cylinder to my eye, it became a miraculous object that magnified the target.
At first, I thought that if she imitated a certain form, it would be imbued with a power similar to that form. But as Linshua made various things, I realized my assumption was wrong.
It wasn’t that the work possessed properties matching the form because she imitated it. It was that the work possessed such power because Linshua believed that the form moved that way.
A prime example: one day, Linshua brought me a piece of brown cardboard, calling it a credit card. I smiled and accepted it, even though the name and expiration date were written all wrong. Following Linshua’s instructions, I swiped it through a gap.
…Money poured out.
It wasn’t real money, though; it was money with some bizarre drawings on it. It seemed that Linshua had misunderstood something and mistaken a credit card for a card that spits out money.
At least that was a result between similar objects.
As Linshua grew and her horizons expanded, the scope of her power began to broaden beyond imagination, and she became able to manipulate it willfully.
Red and yellow colors resemble the setting sun, so they symbolize the end of something. Therefore, Linshua’s red ink net gained the property of halting the actions of anyone caught in it.
And Yumil, who resembles me, came to share certain parts of me.
This Black Slime was likely made using materials from which space was excluded, making it possible to swallow and spit out subjects while ignoring spatial constraints.
All these objects became things that moved that way because Linshua thought they should act that way.
Those are the two abilities I know of. There seem to be a few more minor ones, but those two are the most representative.
And through the combination of those two abilities, it became possible for impossible results to emerge.
Take Yumil, for example.
She is clearly a person, yet she has the properties of clay, moves as an independent life form, and because she was modeled after me, she even possesses some of my power and memories.
Although the condition of being a "work of art" exists, it is essentially Reality Manipulation that has reached its limit.
However, there are a few weaknesses.
The reason Thunder God and I sighed earlier, saying mass production would be impossible, is because everything ultimately depends on Linshua’s perception and the fact that she considers it an artistic activity.
Even if she uses the same materials to make the same thing, Linshua finds making the exact same thing boring and gives it a different ability. If forced to make the same thing, the ability won’t manifest from the start.
And as an example of how these objects depend on Linshua’s perception, she once gave me a plastic knife that she said could cut anything. That knife could cut almost any object, but it couldn’t cut living beings. When I asked her about it, Linshua replied that fighting is bad.
Despite that, after that knife sliced through a physically immune monster that was hurting people in a single blow, it lost its power and became an ordinary plastic knife—one of many strange phenomena.
Anyway, my thoughts have wandered.
The point is this:
Since Linshua made it, it can’t be mass-produced, and it’s difficult to exploit. And Thunder God knows that well. She probably learned about The Child’s personality while hanging around her.
Recalling that, I spoke to Thunder God.
“By the way, you seem to know an awful lot about that slime.”
I knew what the following words would be. Linshua had been the same with me.
“Oh, that. Linshua brings me whatever she makes and tells me all about it. It was so cute that I just listened to everything.”
So, it will probably be okay.
Even if the power Linshua possesses is that overwhelming.
Because that child is my daughter.