A Safe Stroll
Yerna hummed as she walked through the forest, Luke's hand held snugly in her own, her thoughts drifting.
Three years. In three years, Luke ought to have adapted to this world well enough.
Finding a spouse within that span would be ideal, of course — but honestly, Yerna had no confidence she could manage it.
Unless the right person just happened to come along…
The trouble was that she had never once in her life felt romantic attraction toward anyone, and so she had no idea how one was supposed to go about falling in love.
She did want to try, of course. Everyone said it was wonderful, and she was curious — curious what it felt like to be loved by someone who wasn't a parent.
Honestly, what am I even thinking about…
Three years was a long stretch even by elven standards. She could figure it out later. For today, she would simply focus on the walk.
She glanced down to check Luke's reaction, and sure enough, the forest seemed to settle him far more than the city ever had. In town his eyes had darted restlessly from one novelty to the next; out here he looked remarkably composed — almost serene.
Lu really does seem happier in the woods.
There was even something about him that looked faintly like a smile.
Luke, for his part, was meditating.
Meditation, for most people, meant sitting still in one place, holding a tranquil mind, and turning one's focus inward — a difficult discipline. For Luke it was no different from breathing. He could do it while walking without the slightest trouble.
A peaceful state of mind. He was an Archmage who had already mastered the laws of mana itself; there was no reason he should fail to master his own composure.
"……"
Even while reading and accumulating knowledge in the forest, Luke had kept up his meditation without pause — enough that localized mana depletion had begun to set in around him.
I absorbed that much mana just from Yerna's house…
That, at least, made the three-million-gil mana bill somewhat understandable. At the time he had been too intoxicated by the way the mana replenished itself as fast as he drank it in to notice — but the amount he had taken then would have more than covered a year of ordinary use for a family of four.
And even after absorbing that much, I still haven't formed a second Circle?
Luke could only marvel anew at how poor his current body's mana receptivity truly was.
He thought again of the densely concentrated mana from that power plant and licked his lips. Mana four hundred times denser than the natural ambient supply — that was exactly what he needed right now. He wanted to reach the second Circle as soon as possible and free himself from the constant stress of fretting over natural mana expenditure.
But after the incident last time, he could hardly just walk back into that place. And now that he understood they put a price on mana, he knew that what he had done amounted to theft. Had he never learned the truth, it might have been different — but knowing what he knew, he had no desire to repeat the act. If anything, he would have to pay it back later.
Which made the forest ideal. Unlike the city, no one charged for the natural mana of the woods. In that respect, the forest was rather excellent.
The only problem was that mana attracted monsters.
Luke's eyes swept the surroundings with calm, measured vigilance. He was still only first Circle, after all.
First Circle. A single Circle inevitably lacked the stability to hold what it gathered, so the carefully accumulated mana continually dispersed. That was why first-Circle mages typically meditated again and again, steadily replenishing their stores, aiming to reach the second Circle as quickly as possible.
Ordinarily, the amount of mana that leaked out posed no real threat. In principle, a second Circle ought to be engraveable with only a modest quantity of mana…
But this body of his was so extraordinary that curiosity had gotten the better of him, and he had grown a little greedy. The result: his first-Circle mana capacity was now ten times what he remembered from his original body. The leakage, accordingly, was ten times that of an ordinary first Circle.
Clutching at the dispersing mana while simultaneously drawing in more to construct a second Circle — no sane mage had ever done such a thing in a forest. Monsters sensitive to the flow of mana would never leave a mage like that alone, and an ordinary first-Circle mage would be utterly defenseless against such an assault.
But… isn't it a little too quiet?
Luke hadn't exactly been hoping for a monster attack, but a complete absence of monsters struck him as slightly unnatural.
He turned to Yerna, who was strolling along the forest path humming without a care in the world.
"Yerna, is the forest always this quiet?"
"Hmm. It's winter right now, so there aren't any insects, and the animals are hibernating — that's probably why you don't see any. Why?"
"That isn't what I meant. I haven't seen a single monster."
A thought crossed Yerna's mind.
Oh — does he want to see a monster?
She looked down at Luke with a bright, sunny smile. Fairy tales were full of scenes where heroes faced off against monsters; perhaps he had developed some romantic notions about them.
"Is that why you've been looking around so carefully?"
"It is. And yet not so much as a whisker of a monster to be found."
Yerna ruffled his hair as she answered the puzzled look on his face.
"That's because your big sister has been deliberately walking us in directions where there aren't any. Monsters are dangerous, you know?"
"Hmm?"
Luke was baffled. He truly hadn't sensed so much as a trace of a monster. To move like that, one's detection magic would have to blanket the entire forest. And yet he could feel no residual signature of detection magic at all.
Even if Yerna's people were elves — the so-called fairies of the forest — that shouldn't have been possible. She had to be using some form of magic he didn't know.
The thought made his eyes light up.
"How do you know where the monsters are? What magic are you using?"
"Ah — the Forest Keepers are issued a tool for that. Have I never shown you?"
Yerna produced a palm-sized rectangular device.
"This is…"
It resembled a phone, but it wasn't one. It was thicker, for one thing, and the mana arrays devoted to communication were far more robust.
Is it communicating with something?
The screen displayed a map of the forest as if viewed from high above. Luke was mildly astonished.
The map is extraordinarily fine-grained. Almost like… a photograph.
It was that precise, that free of gaps. But it was no ordinary map — the blue dots and red dots caught his attention. And what did the red ones mean? Looking closer, they seemed to be moving, little by little.
"The dots appear to be moving."
"Ah, those. The blue ones are Forest Keepers, and the red ones are monsters. As you can see, the other Keepers are hard at work clearing them out."
"What…?"
Luke was profoundly shaken.
In the past, the best reconnaissance one could hope for was a trained hawk — and even that could never be fully trusted, so the cost of preparing against monster raids had always been considerable. In wartime, for more accurate intelligence, one hired mages to share their vision while administrators marked maps by hand and issued real-time commands. The manpower and time wasted in that process were never negligible.
And this skipped every single one of those steps, displaying everything at a glance.
If such a magical tool had existed back then… in the great war against the demonkin, at least a million lives — no, ten million or more — might have been saved.
It was that remarkable a device.
"What is this map called?"
"It's called GPS."
A map that displayed the real-time positions of both monsters and allies. Had something like this existed five thousand years ago, merchants and military commands alike would have paid any sum to acquire it. And yet they issued one to every Forest Keeper…
"Is there no security concern with this? If someone stole one, the potential for abuse would be considerable, would it not?"
"Well, it does have a password…?"
Yerna pressed a button, locking the screen, and showed him the window that appeared.
Please enter password.
"Good heavens."
Built-in security as well… Truly an artifact out of a dream. And yet I cannot begin to understand how it works.
Luke's brow furrowed slightly.
The primary arrays are nothing but communication magic…
No matter how carefully he looked, he could find no magical formula related to detection. That a magical tool whose principles even he — a bearer of Mana Sight — could not grasp existed at all left him distinctly displeased.
In truth, though Luke did not yet know it, a GPS terminal merely received and displayed detection data transmitted from a magical satellite; it did not operate independently. No amount of staring at it with Mana Sight would readily reveal its workings.
Seeing his expression, Yerna decided he must have wanted to see a monster that badly. She spoke to him as if gently scolding a child.
"Lu, if you want to see monsters that much, we can go look at them later somewhere safe — like a zoo. Wild monsters are dangerous."
"Is that so."
Luke had little actual interest in monsters, so he answered vaguely without really processing what she had said. In that moment, all that mattered was unraveling the secret of the GPS.
The feline curiosity of his current body, fused with a mage's scholarly hunger, made him speak as though this were the lifelong ambition of his soul.
"This magical tool — may I keep holding it and examining it?"
The earnestness in his voice was almost painful.
This is exactly how he looked the first time he saw a phone…
Yerna laughed and handed him the terminal.
"Sure. Want to try navigating for us, Luke? Just keep us away from the monsters. If we run into any, the zoo is off the table."
It was a condition she set deliberately — since he seemed so eager to see monsters, she wanted to make sure he wouldn't go looking for danger on purpose.
"Understood. Of course I will."
Luke nodded firmly and accepted the GPS terminal. Encountering a monster in this forest was not something he particularly welcomed either.
Not that he had much interest in the zoo.